Q: How did Dan Borne become LSU’s Tiger Stadium announcer?
A: He asked.
At age 65, Dan Borne has a dream job. “I’m the PA Guy,” says Borne, who is entering his 26th season calling games in Tiger Stadium and his 24th year announcing basketball in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. “My job description is simple: Call the plays after they run them. Or, put another way, ‘The less said, the better.’”
Long before his voice boomed over Death Valley, Borne did the play-by-play for Nicholls State University baseball from 1964 to 1968 while he was a student at the Thibodaux school. In fact, the Colonels had the only broadcast of college baseball on a commercial station in the United States at the time, Borne says.
He moved to Baton Rouge for graduate school at LSU and got a job anchoring sports and news for WAFB-Channel 9. Sid Crocker worked at Channel 9 and also did Tiger Stadium PA work. On Borne’s first visit to the press box, covering the first game of the 1968 season, Crocker invited Borne to his booth and said, “Take a good look. You might be doing this one day.”
“We both laughed!” Borne recalls.
He left WAFB two years later and got out of journalism completely. When Crocker retired from the Tiger Stadium mic after the 1985 season, Borne called him and asked who was going to take his place. Crocker said he didn’t know. So Borne wrote LSU a letter introducing himself and conveyed how much he would appreciate being considered to replace Sid.
Borne heard nothing for several months, but in August 1986 he got a call from Jamie Kimbrough, sports information director, inviting Borne to meet with him and several colleagues.
When Borne arrived, they were very courteous and said, “Ok, you can have the job.”
Shocked, Borne answered, “Thanks, but why?”
Kimbrough said, “Because nobody else asked.”
“And that is how I got the job,” Borne says. “No auditions. Nothing.”
Borne’s day job is president of the Louisiana Chemical Association, and he receives a nominal fee for his PA work. But that job is not about the money. “I do it because I love it.”
