GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Shaq and Penny. Nick Anderson and Tracy McGrady. If you know anything about the NBA, the link between those four is quickly established.
All starred for the Orlando Magic and are now in the team's Hall of Fame.
The man who called the peaks and valleys of their careers, Magic play-by-play voice David Steele, will soon join them. The Voice of the Magic since the franchise's first game in 1989, first on radio and now in his 21st season as the TV play-by-play announcer, Steele is to be enshrined as the eighth member of the Magic's Hall of Fame on Feb. 22.
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Steele is to the Magic what
Mick Hubert is to the Gators. Both are in their 30th seasons and last month when Hubert was
inducted into the Florida Sports Hall of Fame, Steele provided the voice in Hubert's induction video.
Longtime Florida fans remember Steele as Hubert's predecessor as the Voice of the Gators. They probably remember this, too: Steele is a University of Georgia graduate.
"That was tricky for some people,"Â Steele said recently.
Steele arrived at UF in 1982 to replace legendary Gators announcer Otis Boggs, who served as the school's play-by-play voice first as a student in 1939, and following graduation, a stint in the military and a one-year stint in Dallas, continually from 1948 through the 1981 football season.
Steele spent seven years as the radio voice of the Gators after getting hired from a pool of more than 300 applicants. He came to Florida from Asheville, N.C., where he was sports director of WLOS-TV and the radio play-by-play announcer for Western Carolina University.
"It was a pretty big job back then,'' Steele said. "They were looking for somebody to do radio play-by-play and host the coaches shows on TV. It was more than just the play-by-play on radio."
Steele's career at Florida overlapped the coaching transition from Charley Pell to Galen Hall, the exploits of future NFL Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith, quarterback Kerwin Bell's rise from walk-on to folk hero, and the UF men's basketball team's first trip to the NCAA Tournament in 1987, a run that included wins over North Carolina State and Purdue to advance to the Sweet 16.
His success at UF helped Steele land the Magic job and he's been there ever since. Congrats to Steele for a job well done.
