Want more excitement from the NBA? Try the Korean broadcast

Straits Times

a day ago

Tyrese Haliburton of the Indiana Pacers defends the shot attempt by Jalen Williams of the Oklahoma City Thunder during Game 3 of the NBA Finals. PHOTO: AFP
Want more excitement from the NBA? Try the Korean broadcast
NEW YORK – Game 1 of this year's NBA Finals had a spectacular finish, with the Indiana Pacers completing a 15-point comeback over the Oklahoma City Thunder to stun the crowd in Oklahoma City.
The victory was punctuated by a near-miraculous buzzer-beater by Tyrese Haliburton of the Pacers, who drained the winning shot with only 0.3 seconds left on the clock.
It was a thrilling moment for any basketball fan. But few reacted with as much fervor as Kim Myung-jung and Park Se-woon.
'Amazing, Indiana, don't call a timeout!' Kim and Park, sportscasters and analysts for South Korea's SPOTV, had exclaimed in Korean just before the shot as Indiana grabbed a rebound and began to move the ball upcourt. 'Indiana, an underdog, faces a familiar situation – WAAAAAAAA! HALIBURTON! WOW!'
Their over-the-top reaction the moment the shot went in, which culminated in full-blown screeching and wailing, was shared widely across social media in the hours after Indiana's win. American fans shared clips of the rhapsodic call, and the NBA posted an excerpt on Instagram.
Commenters were quick to cite the passion and emotion of the South Korean announcers, with several saying the clip gets better with repeated listens.
'After the broadcast I was cleaning up the broadcast booth, and then I started getting calls from people around me and friends kept sending me messages,' Kim said in a phone interview about the response to the video. 'It started to get bigger, and there were threads, fan pages. And then it got out of control.'
Kim, 42, has been a sportscaster with SPOTV, one of South Korea's top sports channels, since 2012.
He also does commentary for Champions League football, Moto GP, and mixed martial arts fighting. But he has a particular affection for the NBA, in part because of his name, Myung-jung, which is often shortened to 'M.J.' as was the name Michael Jordan.
'It's a special initial,' Kim explained. 'I feel a lot of responsibility.'
With their call of the buzzer-beater, Kim and Park have a chance to be remembered alongside the shot itself – an important footnote in sports history.
'Broadcasters are best remembered for how they call iconic moments like Haliburton's shot, which is funny, because it's not representative of the service they provide 99 per cent of the time,' said Jon Bois, the sportswriter and documentarian, who pointed out that most of the time they are doing more mundane tasks like tracking foul trouble and reeling off stats.
'But in the big moments, they don't offer us information, because they know we don't want it,' he added. 'We want communion, and it turns out you don't really need language for that.'
A longtime fan of American sportscasters such as Mike Breen and Kevin Harlan, Kim said that he studies their work carefully as a model for his own.
'I watch and listen to their reaction, their voice tones, their signature lines,' he said.
Over the 12 years he's been calling the NBA Finals, he has developed a signature line of his own, which in English translates to something like 'clean shot' with a pause on the first syllable for effect.
'Like, 'That shot was so fantastic, I can't even describe it',' he said.
As for Kim's manic scream, he said that it is unique to him and not something you would expect to hear in most Korean broadcasting.
'People said my reaction seemed honest,' he said. 'I'm unique. But actually I don't know if it's that unique, because I always scream.' NYTIMES
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