Ehlo will be incognito, not incommunicado

Craig Ehlo played in Hoopfest once before in one of those over-the-hill brackets with his brothers-in-law, who were not just over the hill but were over-the-hill baseball players.

“And they shot like it, too,” he laughed.

Hey, intra-family smack. That’s the Hoopfest spirit.

But this year, a buddy has coaxed Ehlo into playing in Hoopfest’s elite division. This year, he’s every basketball dead-ender’s dream opponent – a 14-year NBA veteran, well removed from his prime, vulnerable to age, aches and a quick move to the baseline.

And best of all, he’s not just an ex-player, he’s the new TV voice of the Seattle SuperSonics – so once he’s been schooled by the latest Hoopfest hero, Ehlo can recommend this obviously overlooked talent to Wally Walker and Rick Sund as the final missing piece keeping their Sonics from becoming the next Detroit Pistons.

Right.

And some day, Kevin Calabro will keep his play-by-play under the speed limit, too.

As he does with most endeavors, Ehlo views both his Hoopfest participation this weekend and his Sonics gig next year with equal parts confidence and self-deprecation.

“We’re just going to wear T-shirts,” Ehlo said of his Hoopfest entry, Walking Tall, which will be doing business down on Spokane Falls Boulevard on the Premera Blue Cross No. 1 court. “I’m not going to wear No. 3 or ‘Ehlo’ or anything.”

In other words, no bull’s-eye on the back?

“Exactly,” he said.

Well, good luck. You know just once, some self-styled blacktop superstar is going to lob one in over Ehlo from the curb and then make like Michael while his buddy’s video camera captures the moment for posterity.

Not that Ehlo is a stranger to such indignities.

“When I play ratball with the Gonzaga guys, they go around me and beat me and I get pushed out of the way a lot,” he said. “I sort of came to make peace with it. The two times I played with Adam Morrison, he went around me one time on the baseline and I tried to catch him but couldn’t do it. The next time, I tried to jump in his way and got an elbow in the lip. He’s apologizing, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I’m too old for this.’ “

It is a little hard to believe, but Ehlo is seven years removed from his last NBA game – which makes it even harder to believe he managed to land an NBA broadcasting job after such a spell away from the pro game. Just coaching high school ball at Rogers for three years should have taken him so far off the TV radar that he couldn’t have gotten a tryout on “Dream Job.”

But his work with Fox Sports Northwest on college basketball last season put him to work with an executive producer named Tom Feurer, who let it drop that the cable channel was working on a 70-game package with the Sonics – and would Ehlo be interested?

“Seventy games?” Ehlo said. “I told him my wife wasn’t going to let me get back into the NBA as a coach being away from home that much and broadcasting wasn’t going to be any different.

“But every time I’ve tried to move up the ladder (in broadcasting) I got the same response: Not enough air time, not enough experience. And I wasn’t going to get enough of either doing 10 or 15 games a year. So my wife and I looked at each other and thought, well, maybe this is the time. Erica (their teenage daughter) is going to be driving and maybe she could help get the boys around to their things. If I could spend the a few years doing this, maybe it’s the break I need.”

Or else maybe it’ll break him. Seventy games mean 70 road trips – Ehlo balked at moving to Seattle as Fox requested, and felt good that the network hired him anyway. Actually, 71 – Ehlo started his gig Thursday night with some in-studio analysis of the Sonics’ 2004 draft, and let’s hope he pointed out that Seattle’s bold first-round investment will go to a youngster who is roughly as ready to play in the league as the Ehlo family’s new teenage driver.

Of course, the TV critic might say the same thing about Ehlo – given that his experience is a couple seasons as the third man in on Gonzaga telecasts with Greg Heister and Jeff Brown, and those handful of college games he did for Fox last year.

But he does have those 14 years of playing experience in the league, the last of them in Seattle, and because of that final year he has ongoing relationships with club’s president (Walker), the coach (Nate McMillan) and – probably most important – the play-by-play guy, Calabro, “who is as good as there is and can teach me all the things – timing, what have you – I don’t know about.”

Some of what Ehlo doesn’t know, he already knows he’ll have to find out on his own.

“The biggest challenge I’ve found is understanding the amount of research and information that goes together to make a great broadcast,” he said. “If you want to sound intelligent on the air, you’d better do some homework. GU games weren’t that difficult – it wasn’t hard to tell you something about Blake Stepp because I know Blake Stepp. But if you do an Arizona game and you want to talk about Andre Iguodala, you’d better find out something about him – especially when the producer calls you two days before and says he’s going to spotlight him a lot.”

And, speaking of the spotlight, let’s get back to Hoopfest, since he’ll be in it as the lone resident NBA veteran.

“My friend who helped me at Rogers, Bobby Moore, has asked me a few times to play in this and I just never felt like it,” Ehlo said. “He used to be a pitcher in the Rangers organization and he still has that competitive blood in him – and I like that. I like to feel that way, too.

“That’s why I still like playing against the GU guys, even if I can’t keep up. It never really leaves you. And even if they’re pushing me around, I think it raises their game a little bit because of where I was at.”

For this weekend, at least, that goes for about 23,000 of his fellow players, just by association.