Game Face

She’s a Jersey girl and a former PC basketball star. Now Doris Burke is calling the shots in the big league world of sports announcing.

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She likes these sessions in the makeup artist’s chair, finds them a last chance to relax before the lights go up and the mike goes live, putting her on the spot to say something interesting about the basketball game quickly unfolding before her.

“Do you have your iron?” Doris Burke says to the makeup artist, Alisha, a young woman with raven hair, blue eyes and confident hands.

“Yes,” Alisha says, she does indeed have her curling iron. “You have hair that’s so fun to do,” she says, sinking her hands into Burke’s blond, shoulder-length hair. “It’s thick, it’s gorgeous.”

Burke, covered in a black smock, closes her eyes and settles deeper into a high director’s chair. “It’s like a spa,” she says,

except this spa is set up in a cement-block locker room beneath the basketball arena’s stands at the Mohegan Sun Casino. Even now, two hours before game time, fans are filtering in from the casino gaming rooms. This game, which Burke will call live for ABC TV, is a Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) match between the Connecticut Sun and the Phoenix Mercury. It’s sold out because Phoenix’s roster includes Diana Taurasi, one of the best women’s basketball players ever to lace on sneakers. Taurasi played for the University of Connecticut before turning pro, and Connecticut fans want to see her even though she now plays for the enemy.

Alisha has a whole arsenal of makeup in her multitiered tool box: concealer to match every conceivable hue of skin, eyeliner and eye creams, lipstick that she daubs on from a palette.

Using a brush as big as a mouse she quickly swabs blush on Burke’s cheeks. “It gives her a little warmth,” Alisha says. There isn’t that much to do on Burke’s face: a little eyeliner, a pencil-thin line of red around the thick lips and it’s on to the curling iron, for the face is already pretty enough for TV.


This scene would have been unimaginable twenty years ago, when Burke played on the Providence College women’s basketball team. She arrived on the campus as a tough New Jersey chick with cropped hair, bad skin, bad clothes and a good game. A very good game. She is second all-time at PC for career assists (602 times she made the pass that led to her team scoring).

There is something of the ugly duckling story in Doris Burke’s emergence as one of the top TV announcers in sports.

There have also been moments of the classic understudy-makes-good story, such as her very first TV appearance in 1991.

The New England Sports Network’s Sherry Levin couldn’t make it to Providence, and NESN needed a fill-in announcer at the last minute. They hauled Burke out of the radio booth (she was then in her second season of broadcasting PC women’s games).

Her husband, Gregg, who has a different memory of this incident, said, “Wear navy blue.’’

She rummaged through her closet and emerged with her one blue dress, a matronly thing with white lace round the neck.

“Is that what you’re wearing?” Gregg said.

“Well,” Burke recalls, “when your husband makes a statement like that, even if you should change you can’t.”

She looks back at a tape of an early game now and laughs. “I wouldn’t even look at the camera!” Yet when that first game was over the producer called Gregg from the truck. “She’s unbelievable!” he said. “She’s unbelievable!”

Beneath that frumpy dress and the face made up for radio was a lifetime’s worth of basketball knowledge. Makeup artists could easily tease out that blond hair, highlight those thick lips and bring warmth to that expressive face. But that obsessive knowledge of the game, there’s few people alive, man or woman, who could bring that to the table.

She is the daughter of George and Mary Sable, he a Golden Gloves boxer and lifelong construction worker, she an Irish immigrant. They took seriously the Genesis commandment to be fruitful and multiply—eight children in ten years. There were four boys and four girls in the family, but they used to joke that Doris was such a tomboy that the boys had a 4.5 to 3.5 edge.

Burke still doesn’t know exactly what her father did on construction sites for forty-five years; she just knows that he habitually left before dawn and arrived home for a late supper. With eight children to feed and clothe and house on a construction worker’s salary, there wasn’t even loose change to be found in the Sable household.



George and Mary tried to do the right thing by moving their family out of a tough New York City borough to Manasquan, a small town on the Jersey Shore. For Burke, who was seven, the move was a good one, but her oldest brothers had reached their teens by then, and they hated it. Two of them moved back close to New York City as soon as they were old enough, and one of them, Danny, was shot to death there by a robber.

Burke’s older brothers and sisters always worked whenever they could—summer jobs as waitresses or line cooks down on the Jersey Shore, so she spent a lot of time alone. The new house abutted a park, Indian Hill Park, and just by straddling a fence she could be over there playing basketball, or softball or tackle football. Whatever sport was going on, she’d join in.

At first she’d hang by the basketball courts waiting for the kid with the ball to show up. Then her father scraped up the cash to buy Doris her very own ball, a small, plastic cheap ball called a Voit.

Her family didn’t see much of her after that, though they always knew where to find her: dribbling, shooting, working on her game. Most of the important parts of her world were out of her control: where she lived, what she wore, the comings and goings of her older siblings; but her basketball, that was a heavenly body that she could bend to her will.

On weekends she liked to watch the college games on TV, all men’s games then, and then she’d hop the fence to Indian Hill Park and emulate the moves she’d just seen. Maurice “Mo” Cheeks of West Texas State was a favorite. She’d watch him dribble the ball between his legs and think: I want to do that.

In fourth grade she beat the boys in a foul shooting contest, winning a coveted purple jacket. She’d put that on and run between the hedges of her yard, fantasizing that she was leading a team from locker room to basketball court in a crowded arena.