ZestVlog

On a spring day in 1990, a Colorado Springs, Colo., radio DJ headed to a local sports bar after work, naive to the fact that his career trajectory was about to change.

Alan Roach and a coworker had tickets to the Triple-A Colorado Springs Sky Sox game that evening, and they left Dublin House for the stadium after a couple of beers. During the game, Roach’s friend mentioned he knew Dwight Hall, one of Sky Sox’s assistant general managers. He wanted to say hello, so the pair headed to the press box. As they chatted, Roach noticed the man in the corner announcing each batter.

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“You know, I would love to do that,” he said to Hall. “If he ever goes on vacation, let me know.”

It turns out the public address announcer was, in fact, going to be out of town in the near future. Hall asked if Roach — who back then went by his given name, Kelly Burnham, not his current professional moniker — wanted to fill in. He jumped on the chance.

That decision started him on a path that has taken him across the globe to countless sporting events. Now 56, Roach and his deep, booming voice have worked 15 Super Bowls, six Olympics and a FIFA World Cup. He can be heard regularly at Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rapids and Minnesota Vikings games, and he’s announced everything from boxing to basketball to softball in his career.

“Now every big event isn’t stamped as big unless Roach is doing the PA duties,” says 9News Broncos reporter Mike Klis, who has known him for more than three decades.

Even the Denver International Airport uses his voice. He recorded the announcements played on the trains traveling between terminals.

As a high schooler in Brainerd, Minn., Roach took a trip to the local radio station with his student council class. While there, each student recorded 15 seconds of a John F. Kennedy speech. The station manager heard Roach reading and pulled him aside.

“Dude, you’ve got a voice,” he said.

“Baritone doesn’t even begin to describe it,” Klis says now.

The Brainerd station manager offered Roach a job working Minnesota Twins games from the studio. The high schooler used sliders to switch the broadcast from commercials to the game. Then, during a rain delay one day, the station manager had him play music on reel-to-reel tape. For the first time, Roach dipped his toe into DJing.

When Roach left for college, he took all radio and TV classes when he enrolled at Southwest Minnesota State. But after his freshman year, the Brainerd radio station reached out, offering him a job as sports director. He dropped out of school and took the job. From then, he was off. DJing took him from Garden City, Kansas, to Fort Dodge, Iowa, to Des Moines, to Colorado Springs, where he moved in 1990. At 24 years old, he’d reached the state that would become his permanent home.

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Roach loved his time filling in as Sky Sox PA announcer. He had fun with the players’ names and, when players hit foul balls, he’d press a button that made window crashing sound effects. At the end of the weekend, another one of the team’s assistant GMs approached him.

“You’re really good,” he said. “If you want this job, it’s yours.”

With that, the old Sky Sox PA announcer became the Wally Pipp to Roach’s Lou Gehrig.

Then a beat writer covering the Sky Sox, a Cleveland affiliate, Klis remembers having great camaraderie with Roach and the others working in the press box’s tight quarters. They celebrated when the team served Chick-fil-A as the press meal and watched as future MLB stars like Jim Thome and Albert Belle passed through town.

“It was just us watching nine innings of Triple-A baseball at sky-high altitude, which was always an adventure,” Klis says.

While Klis recognizes Roach’s voice is what has propelled his career forward, he also praises his feel for the games he announces. He makes players bigger than life, adding flair at the right moments. You can see that during Avalanche games. Leading goal scorer Mikko Rantanen, for example, becomes “Miiiiiiiko Rantanen!” The calls draw added cheers and chants from the Ball Arena crowd.

“He’s one of the best if he’s taken to the Super Bowl every year,” Rantanen says.

Back in 1991, Roach remembers being in the Sky Sox press box when he heard word that MLB was granting Colorado a Major League team. He immediately realized the new team would need a PA announcer and turned to Klis.

“I’m going to get that job,” he said.

With some hustle, he did. He accepted a position hosting shows at The Fox radio station in Denver, where he adopted the name Alan Roach. (He went by Kelly O’Shea in Colorado Springs, but there were different people named Kelley and an O’Shea working in the Denver media market, so the station had him pick a new name. His wife still calls him Kelly, but almost everyone else he knows calls him Roach.)

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Roach’s boss at The Fox pushed him to go all-in for the Rockies job. Once a month, he had Roach mail the Rockies an item, sometimes announcing related, sometimes not.

“I sent a baseball glove with my autograph. I sent a mock lineup. I sent a baseball with my autograph. I sent a box of Cracker Jacks with a tape inside of a lineup,” Roach says. “I sent 16 things to them in 16 months.”

Roach still hadn’t heard from the Rockies when they started their inaugural season with a pair of games in New York. But, he remembers, with 40 hours remaining before the home opener, the team reached out. He’d gotten the job — just as he told Klis he would.

He worked the next 14 seasons for the Rockies and missed only one home game. His reason for skipping was a valid one: He started working Avalanche games in 1999, and Game 7 of the 2001 Stanley Cup Final conflicted with a Rockies home game against St. Louis.

So instead of taking his normal spot at Coors Field, Roach was between the penalty boxes at ice level, watching the Avalanche take down the New Jersey Devils. From his perch, he had a perfect view of one of the most iconic moments in hockey history: Joe Sakic handing Ray Bourque the Stanley Cup.

“I get asked all the time, ‘What’s the greatest moment you’ve ever been a part of?’” Roach says. “Love the question, understand the question. But it’s impossible to answer because I’ve been so blessed and so lucky to be a part of so many ridiculous moments in sports. But that one is always one that comes out when someone asks.”

But it’s far from the only historic moment he’s been part of. After announcing the 2001 NHL All-Star Game in Denver, he waited outside the NHL bosses tent for Frank Supovitz, then the league’s vice president of events. He wanted to not only thank Supovitz for the chance to announce the game, but also to ask him to write a letter of recommendation for the 2002 Olympics.

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Supovitz complimented Roach on his job announcing the All-Star Game, and he did even more than write a letter of recommendation for the Olympics. He told Roach to put together a resume and a tape of his announcing work and, a few weeks later, reached out and told him where to send it. Sure enough, Roach got the job.

Supovitz also brought Roach on to work every NHL All-Star Game, liking the idea of using his voice, not the announcer of the hosting arena. That remained the case until the NHL lockout, when Supovitz left the league to become the NFL vice president of events.

After making the decision, he called Roach.

“The bad news is you’re no longer the announcer of the NHL All-Star Game,” he told him. “The good news is, you’re now the announcer of the Super Bowl.”

Supovitz believes Roach has the ability to bring personality to his announcing without neglecting his responsibilities of saying what happened. Plus he liked the gravitas Roach’s voice brought to events. The NFL started using him for other functions, including its draft and Hall of Fame induction.

“Alan is not just somebody you hear with your ears,” Supovitz says. “You hear Alan with your chest and with the rest of your body. He just has this delivery and this tone that says, ‘This is really important.’”

Roach worked his first Super Bowl in 2006, when the Steelers beat the Seahawks in Detroit. Stevie Wonder performed pregame, and he took note of Roach’s voice at rehearsal earlier in the week.

“I didn’t know we were going to have God announcing us today!” he said.

Roach is a lifelong Vikings fan, and the NFL is his favorite league to watch. When he took the mic for the first time on Super Bowl Sunday, the magnitude of the event struck him. So did the nerves.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the crowd, “and welcome to Super Bowl 40.”

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He recalls a feeling of electricity running through his body. Now a Super Bowl veteran, his nerves have faded, but the jolt he feels at the event is still there every year. Only one person gets to do this, he thinks to himself. And he’s that person.

Roach’s voice has welcomed the likes of the Rolling Stones and Beyoncé on stage for halftime shows. He was at the mic when David Tyree made the famous helmet catch, and he was there in February when Patrick Mahomes and Kansas City came back to beat Philadelphia. In 2018, he even got to announce a Super Bowl in his home state of Minnesota, though he calls it “the Super Bowl I hated the most” because his beloved Vikings were one win away from playing in the game.

“I was tormented the entire time of, ‘What if?’” he said. “But still, doing it in Minnesota and being in front of my home crowd of the Vikings and having that kind of honor in my home state was pretty cool.”

As Roach ascended in the world of public address announcing, he remained a large part of the Denver sports radio scene. He was the Broncos’ sideline reporter for KOA from 2000 to 2015, and the Broncos brought him on as public address announcer during that stretch, too. His role with the team prevented him from working the Super Bowls in 2014, 2015 and 2016; the league didn’t want him as an announcer when Denver was either playing in the Super Bowl or among the favorites to make it.

KOA laid Roach off in 2015, abruptly closing the door on one chapter of his career but opening another. The announcer spoke to one of his connections with his hometown Vikings and expressed interest in becoming their PA man. The team hired him, and he started in 2016. On Vikings home game weekends, he flies from Denver to Minnesota to announce for the team he grew up loving.

Roach says working for the Vikings has been “a great thing” for him the past seven years, and he jokes that he might retire if he ever gets to announce them win a Super Bowl. Nothing could top that. But working changes the way he experiences the game. It’s a job above all else.

“You have to focus so much,” he said. “When I’m watching the (away games) on TV, I’m into the game and I’m enjoying the game and I’m screaming at the game and I’m a fan of the game. When I’m doing PA, I can’t do that. I have to focus so closely.”

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Roach’s job is something he takes seriously, and he’s developed a few principles he lives by. He doesn’t try to mingle with players — “stay in your lane,” he says — and he never changes a script on the fly, though he’s not opposed to making suggestions to writers.

Perhaps most importantly, he tries to be himself.

“I’ve learned in my job, the less nervous you are, the less worried you are, the less freaked out you are, the way better you’re going to do,” he says. “But I don’t lose the excitement. I don’t lose the pride. I don’t lose the moment. It’s unbelievable to be a part of that stuff.”

(Lead photo of Alan Roach at the Pro Bowl Games: Courtesy of Alan Roach)

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