Alexander Wolff of Sports Illustrated, who has covered professional and college basketball since the early 1980s, and Jim Durham, the former voice of the Dallas Mavericks and Chicago Bulls, are the 2011 recipients of the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Sports Illustrated is reporting.
The award is named in honor of the late sports broadcaster and former president of the Hall of Fame board, and is given to both print and electronic media members.
“In his decades of covering college basketball for SI, the depth and breadth of Alex Wolff’s work has been inimitable,” said editor of Time Inc.’s Sports Group, Terry McDonell. “He has written with a lyrical and literary grace in stories on Final Fours and NCAA tournaments, in profiles of the game’s most influential figures, in investigative pieces that protected the very integrity of the game while the vision of his work pushed basketball to become truly international. There is no journalist who better embodies what Curt Gowdy meant to the game.”
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Durham’s most memorable call might be of Michael Jordan’s shot over Craig Ehlo of the Cavaliers in Game 5 of the first round of the 1989 NBA playoffs, among several sports replays that send Cleveland fans to the knife drawer.
Wolff and Durham will be honored during the Hall’s enshrinement ceremony on Aug. 11 in Springfield, Mass.