Matt Cord has been announcing the Philadelphia starting five for twenty-eight seasons, which means since Allen Iverson’s first years, in the second half of the nineties. After the Sixers went out against the Knicks, he had decided to leave. He is staying.
What happened in between comes down to three things, and he has said them. The fans got in touch, and the way they did it got to him. In the month before the announcement he ran into the club’s owners, David Blitzer and Josh Harris, who asked him: “When are you coming back?”. And Allen Iverson sent him a text.
“He wrote to tell me I still had a chapter to write, that he’d understand if I didn’t want to, and that he’d always have my back. It was crazy. I didn’t even know he had my number,” Matt Cord told Basket USA.
Dimitri, announcer at a Brussels club in the second Flemish regional division (Belgium’s amateur tiers), watched twice the video in which several Sixers players react to the comeback. Joel Embiid says in it that Matt Cord “should never have left” and that “it’s good to see him back”.
An announcer stopping means a PA system going quiet, and a PA system going quiet doesn’t get replaced by a mobile phone left on a chair. So that comeback, me, I announce it properly: full blackout, the caretaker switches everything off for once, two seconds of nothing, [jingle], and then: Matt… Cord! At our place that’s a hundred and fifty people on their feet and the president’s nephew in a dinosaur suit. Over there they made a video with the players. That was already good. Just saying.
There is the context too, and Matt Cord admitted it: the arrivals of Jaylen Brown and LeBron James in Philadelphia, and the excitement they generate, weighed on his thinking. Two more names to announce, basically. Dimitri calls that reason enough.
A twenty-ninth season, then, with the same mic and the same five to announce.
It’s true, we checked: Basket USA.
