THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Remembering when a legend called your basketball games
Casey Irgens remembers tooling around Coeur d'Alene in the late 1980s and early 1990s in his 1973 Ford XLT, when he was a basketball player at North Idaho College.
The car, he recalled, only had an AM radio, and on fall Saturdays it was often tuned to the broadcast of Washington State football games.
So imagine Irgens' surprise, a couple of years later, when he was a 6-7 center at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., for the final two seasons of his college career.
"I remember, we're going on a road trip to Central Washington or something, and there's Bob Robertson on the bus with us," Irgens said of the legendary WSU broadcaster, who died Sunday at age 91. "I'm like, 'What's going on here?'"
"He's calling our games for us on the radio," replied UPS coach Bob Niehl, who played at WSU from 1972-74.
"I didn't even know we were on the radio, truthfully," Irgens says now.
IRGENS PLAYED at Puget Sound in the 1992-93 and 1993-94 seasons and Robertson, who lived in the Tacoma area, called the Loggers' games both seasons.
BobRob, as he was later known, sat near the front of the bunch, near the coaches. The players might say Hi and make small talk with Bob as they boarded the bus, then filed to the back.
"We would always play hearts on the bus, going to the games," Irgens recalled. "And we tried so hard to get him into a game. Because how cool would that be to have Bob Robertson, sitting down with you, telling a couple of stories and playing hearts with you."
Irgens said his parents somehow got audio recordings of games he played that Robertson called, and sometimes they would show up as part of care packages when Casey was at school.
"I'd listen to them sometimes, and I remember one time I had a lob dunk, and it was just cool to listen to Bob Robertson call that you had a lob dunk," Irgens said.
Years later, after college and Irgens had moved back to this area, Robertson was calling Spokane Indians games. A friend of a friend who knew Irgens and Robertson brought Casey up to the press box. Bob was doing play-by-play when Casey's friend slipped Bob a note that said "Casey Irgens, University of Puget Sound Loggers."
"And he turned around, big smile on his face, and shook my hand," Irgens recalled. "It was one of those cool things — Bob Robertson remembers who I am?"
LOOKING BACK Irgens, who referees high school and college football games in the area, said he kicks himself for not trying to chat more with Robertson during those bus rides with the Puget Sound basketball team in the early 1990s ("I should have sat next to him and talked to him forever," Irgens says now.)
But the recordings from his playing days at UPS are still around, in a container at his mom's house in Cut Bank, Mont., where Casey was born and raised. After playing at Cut Bank High, Irgens played at NIC for two years, then transferred to Montana, where he redshirted a season before transferring to Puget Sound to play for Niehl, who previously was an assistant at Montana.
Now 48, Irgens has worked for a 3PL (third-party logistics) company for more than 20 years.
He said it was a "sad day" when he heard Robertson had passed.
"What a run, what a career, what a great guy," Irgens said. "And man, what a privilege to say that he called a game of yours."
Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter @CdAPressSports.
