page_title: Mike Rice (basketball)
section_title: Broadcasting career
hierarchical_section_title: Mike Rice (basketball) / Biography / Broadcasting career
caption_attribution_description: Mike Barrett (L) and Mike Rice, television broadcasters for the Portland Trail Blazers NBA basketball team. Pre-game January 5, 2015.
context_page_description: Michael Thomas Rice Sr. is a former National Basketball Association color commentator, one half of the Portland Trail Blazers' television broadcasting team. A former player and coach, he is the only broadcaster ejected from an NBA game.
context_section_description: Rice moved from coaching to broadcasting for the 1987–88 season when he took a job working for ESPN as a college basketball analyst. Rice worked games as primary analyst for the Western Athletic Conference. From 1989 he also worked with SportsChannel America as its primary analyst for World Basketball League broadcasts.
  Rice moved to the team-owned broadcasting operations of the Portland Trail Blazers in 1991. Rice was chosen by longtime voice of the Blazers Bill Schonely following a four-person tryout at the Blazers' 1991 Slam 'n' Jam held at Civic Stadium, organized by Blazer team president Marshall Glickman. Rice bested former Oregon State University guard Mark Radford, ex-Blazers assistant coach Jack McKinney, and retired NBA referee Earl Strom in the tryout, which gave each a quarter of the game to work alongside Schonely.
  While Rice started as part of the radio team, since the 2006–07 season he has worked with play-by-play announcer Mike Barrett providing color commentary for the television broadcast.
  Known affectionately as "The Wild One", Rice has been referred to by journalist Kerry Eggers as "part basketball expert, part entertainer, 100 percent character." Echoing these sentiments, Blazer television producer Scott Zachary has likened him to a "favorite uncle" and publicly pronounced him "a goofy dude."
  Rice himself acknowledges a propensity for blurting out sentiments that more circumspect announcers would tend to internally filter. "I don’t give a damn about a lot of things. Later on, I think back, 'Now why’d I do that?'" he has said. This tendency to be what former broadcast partner Eddie Doucette has characterized as a "loose cannon," combined with his unabashed "homerism", has made Rice a figure of some controversy.
  Rice's outspoken demeanor resulted in one of the events for which he is best known, his 1994 ejection from an NBA game while working a radio broadcast. As Rice tells the story:
  
  "At the time, Steve Javie, the official, was a young official.  That previous week he had kicked out a mascot, a fan, and kicked somebody else out, a trainer or something like that.  He was on a roll that week, he had made a call, and I looked on the monitor and saw it was a bad call on Cliff Robinson. I kind of put my hands like that [two hands waved at the official] and he ran over. Cliff thought he was going to call a technical on him, because Cliff was standing there doing the same thing. He ran by Cliff and that's when he kicked me out of the game — the rest is history."
  Rice added that he subsequently wrote an article for Rip City magazine charging Javie with an abuse of power. "I think he...read that and we have not talked since", he noted in a 2009 interview.
caption: Mike Rice (R) with his longtime television broadcast partner with the Portland Trail Blazers, Mike Barrett.
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