Wasps, bears and basketball: Mercer announcer Rick Cameron celebrates his 1,000th game on the mic

Rick Cameron always wanted to be a play-by-play man. He only had to wait a couple decades.

The longtime radio commentator for Mercer football, basketball and plenty of other sports grew up idolizing the likes of Vin Scully and John Madden on a 13-inch, black-and-white TV screen.

“Then as I got older, of course, I started going to the University of Georgia. I was a huge Larry Munson fan,” Cameron said. “I followed him until his last game he called. There were others I loved. I really enjoyed listening to those early college football guys. But if I had to pick one, it would be Larry Munson.”

That’s what Cameron wanted to do when he arrived at UGA to study journalism in the 1970s. But, after doing play-by-play on the side during school and a post-grad job, Cameron had to drop commentating to fully focus on work.

Now, after a journey consisting of years spent off the mic, a chance reunion with play-by-play and some iconic moments, Cameron has hit a milestone. The Mercer broadcaster called his 1,000th game last weekend, a 2 p.m. tilt between Mercer women’s basketball and Furman.

Mercer athletics legends called to congratulate Cameron — all-time basketball coaches Bob Hoffman and Suzie Gardner, inaugural Bears football coach Bobby Lamb, you name it — on the milestone. Gold balloons depicting the number 1,000 adorned the banister behind Cameron’s radio setup. The university awarded him with a golden microphone trophy at halftime.

“But the biggest surprise was my youngest daughter. My wife arranged for her to fly here all the way from her home in Wyoming. I did my pregame interview with (women’s basketball coach Michelle Clark-Heard), and something didn’t quite feel right,” Cameron said. “I get ready to go into the arena, the doors open, and there she is… she had not been back home in something like a year and a half.”

Cameron’s other daughter was there too, along with a cavalry of other family and friends — Cameron estimated about 50 folks made the trip to be there for his milestone moment on the mic.

After college, a long hiatus

Cameron called games for a local high school in Athens while in school at Georgia. Then he called high school games in his hometown on the side of his full-time job.

But, before long, Cameron had to stop doing commentary on the side.

“I did commentary work for my hometown Lafayette Ramblers while I worked in news, but then after four or five years I was married, I had children. I thought, ‘I might need to do something that gets me more income for my family,’” Cameron said. “So I switched over and became a newspaper publisher and worked on my hometown newspaper, the Walker County Messenger, for about eight years.”

More jobs in journalism came and went — taking the Georgia native to Alabama, then back to his home state but in Blue Ridge this time — until Cameron ended up at Mercer as the Assistant Vice President of Marketing and Communications in 1997, where he stayed until his retirement from that job about two years ago.

The years rolled by again, Cameron’s dream still unrealized, but the former commentator was content nonetheless in a job he said he felt lucky to have.

Then fate — or maybe it was just the spirit of Christmas — intervened.

“In 2005, the athletic director at the time, Bobby Pope called me. The commentator who was calling the basketball games on Christmas that year against Oklahoma State and Colorado couldn’t travel, and he wanted me to do it,” Cameron said.

He was nervous. He hadn’t touched the mic in more than 20 years. But, in an effort to help out Pope and his coworkers at Mercer, Cameron took over and called a game for the first time in a long time.

It must have gone okay, Cameron said, because they gave him the gig for good the next year.

From there, it only grew: Cameron called men’s basketball, added women’s after a few years, called a lot of baseball and went to the NCAA Tournament with all three of those teams, including four trips for women’s basketball and three for the baseball team.

“But of course, any Mercer fan knows the high point is going to be the Duke game,” Cameron said.

He was on the mic in-person when the Bears defeated the Blue Devils in the 2014 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, an all-time upset that Mercer has used in its marketing as a high point of athletics for a decade now. But Cameron was also there for the journey that led to it.

“I will say, Mercer made the College Insider Tournament in 2012. That tournament run, where we won games on the road and then beat Utah State for the championship, was where it all started,” he said. “In that arena, it was so loud I couldn’t hear myself talk. I had to look at my needles on the mic system to make sure I was still on air.

“I tell people, I think that’s the loudest arena I’ve ever been in. Winning there, that team took the first step. Then they beat Tennessee in the NIT the next year, then it was the same group that ended up beating Duke.”

Other highlights included Mercer’s last-second win in their first football game in a century and all the school’s trips to the NCAA Tournament in baseball and basketball. When you call games for about 20 years, though, there’s bound to be some snafus to contrast with the high points.

“Weather always ends up being a factor that can really be hard to deal with. I mean, even last week with the winter storm, we were stuck in North Carolina calling after calling a basketball game,” Cameron said. “We made it up there, but the Georgia roads were so bad that we couldn’t drive back for a bit.”

Nature’s wrath typically impacts football the most, though, and Cameron has been particularly unlucky with regards to an unusual inconvenience: insects.

“One year I’m doing a game, and Bryce Koon is doing the color commentary. Right in the middle of the play, he grabs his program and just swatted it right in my face. I thought, ‘what on earth?’” Cameron said. “I said to folks listening, ‘Bryce just slapped me with his program.’ It turns out I had a yellow jacket on my mouthpiece. I never knew it.”

On another occasion, Cameron and his crew were about to get settled in for a football game in North Carolina when they discovered a wasp nest that was “bigger than a basketball” in the window of the press box.

“You never know what you’re going to deal with, but that’s part of the fun.”

And Cameron has enjoyed every minute of it, he said, wasps and all. He’s now at 1,001 games after Saturday’s double-header, the second leg of which was a loss for the men’s team. 

At Mercer’s athletics press conference Monday — an event that’s supposed to be focused on coaches and players — every coach took a beat to congratulate the voice of the Bears.

“I hope I’m here for 1,000 more,” Cameron responded to one coach, “and that we win 999 of them.”