Wes Durham
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Wes Durham, known as "The Voice of the Yellow Jackets", has been the radio play-by-play announcer for Georgia Tech football, basketball and baseball teams since the start of the 1995-1996 season. In 1997, he was also named Director of Broadcasting at Georgia Tech. Beginning with the 2004 NFL season, Durham also took on the radio play-by-play duties for the Atlanta Falcons.
Prior to moving to Atlanta in the summer of 1995, Durham had previous stints as the radio announcer for the athletic teams at Radford University, Marshall University, and Vanderbilt University.
A 1988 graduate of Elon University, Durham began his broadcasting career as an undergraduate assistant on the Elon Sports Network. In 1992, Durham was honored by his alma mater by being selected as its "Outstanding Young Alumnus".
Durham has been named Georgia Sportscaster of the Year three times, most recently in 2006.
Durham's father, Woody Durham, is the legendary and long-time "Voice of the Tar Heels" for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Durham has many fans, but also many detractors. The latter cite his tendency to tell jokes that are only marginally related to the event at hand, his digressions into anecdotes about meals and golf games with game officials and other peripheral personnel, and a general focus on personalities rather than the narrative of the contest. Basketball listeners are often particularly frustrated by long intervals that pass without mention of the score or the time remaining and his overall absence of knowledge about defense and the subtleties of the sport. His tendency to announce which referee has whistled a foul on Georgia Tech is grating to many, who see it as an attempt to portray the home team as a victim of poor officiating. (This is not minimized by his unusual practice of reporting the official’s hometown, which many in the sport find unprofessional and superfluous.) Most fans agree that he is much more comfortable broadcasting football, though even there a chronic tendency to fail to report the spot of the ball after a play frustrates some attentive listeners.
Some fans find his folksy narratives – “We still got the crease in our pants and Tech has already lit up the scoreboard” - charming; those who cannot abide them are forced to find alternative broadcasts, because they are unrelenting. Durham's interview style with coaches and players is fairly conventional; he typically offers two or three sentences of his own observations and then invites his guest to agree. Less experienced players often do, but veterans of the process like Georgia Tech basketball coach Paul Hewitt usually move on rapidly to more cogent topics.
Durham is normally paired with ex-Falcon Jeff Van Note in football and Atlanta TV sports reporter Randy Waters on basketball. Both are genial and deferential – not that there is much dead air space when Durham is the lead announcer – to a degree that approaches sycophancy. Van Note knows his sport and often focuses on the events at hand, but in basketball, a sport where most agree that Durham could use help, Waters tends to reinforce his partner’s worst tendencies. Both frequently fixate on showy plays; spectacular dunks often send them into paroxysms of folksy whooping that continue while the next several possessions are barely mentioned.
Durham is reportedly gracious and comfortable with the big advertisers of Tech games – he sometimes mentions them by name during broadcasts – and that may partially account for his having survived many alumni complaints that his presentation and style are inconsistent with the image of a modern technologically advanced university.
