Cloverleaf fans to hear familiar voice at Saturday's game as Joe Tait takes over PA announcing duties

Legendary former Cavaliers radio announcer Joe Tait has long quipped he'd rather head down the road to Cloverleaf and support local high school athletes than watch an NBA game. The 82-year-old longtime Lafayette Township resident will make good on that one-liner at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, when he'll make the 4½-mile drive from his home, sit at the scorer's table and man the public address microphone as the Colts girls basketball team (13-6) battles Kent Roosevelt (3-16) in non-league play. Regular girls basketball announcer Ron Tisher is vacationing in Florida and boys announcer Mark Brooks also had a scheduling conflict, so Cloverleaf graduate Scott Malarkey, who is Tait's dentist, pitched the idea to athletic director Craig Walkup. A quick phone call sealed the deal. "I guess the fellow that does the PA for the Cloverleaf teams has something that is going to take him away from the scene on Saturday, so they thought, 'Gee, maybe we can go up the road a piece and see if Joe Tait wants to do it?' I said, 'Sure, absolutely,"' Tait said. "I've been a closet Cloverleaf fan in the 30-some years (33) I've been here. I used to go down and watch the football games at the end of the field with the old-timers, and then I got tied up with the Cavs and Indians for a while. Other things popped up and I gravitated away from it, but I've never stopped watching what they are doing in the papers. "Of course, the arrival of (2009 Cloverleaf graduate) Kyle Juszczyk in the Super Bowl, that fired up everybody." Tait manned the airwaves for 3,381 games as Cavs play-by-play man from 1970-2011. He was presented with the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010 and mentored the current voice of the Cavs, former WEOL 930-AM personality Tim Alcorn. Though Tait listens to Indians games on the radio, the only Cavs game he has watched since retiring was Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals, when Cleveland defeated Golden State for its first NBA championship. Tait intends to break that streak Sunday, as he, Malarkey, Walkup and Cloverleaf coaches Jack Banks and John Carmigiano, among others, will attend an athletic leadership seminar at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse before taking in the Cavs-Clippers game at 7:30 p.m. "I had a bet with someone that they'd come back from 3-1 down," Tait said. "I got to see the seventh game because I had some money riding on it. "Even the times that I've been downtown for various functions like the 50th anniversary of the Miracle in Richfield team, they hauled a bunch of us down to stand on floor and wave. I came down, did it and I was gone." Tait spends most of his free time visiting his wife Jean at an assisted living center in Seville. A self-proclaimed railroad nut — "I never grew out of it," he said — he has a Lionel model train layout in his home and gets a kick out of watching related YouTube videos while riding his exercise bike. "I've been all over the world," Tait joked. He's also an avid reader of local sports books, having finished Terry Pluto's "Vintage Cavs" before diving into Gazette columnist Jim Ingraham's "Mike Hargrove and the Cleveland Indians: A Baseball Life." What Tait also has a soft spot for is student-athletes. That's why he announced high school games with Alcorn for fun in retirement and Mount Union football games on TV, and it's why he'll be at the corner of Friendsville Road and U.S. Route 224 on Saturday. "They're still playing it because they want to play it," Tait said. "Maybe they do have thoughts of being in the big time, but they're playing for the game itself. I was at Mount Union for 31 years doing their (football) games on TV, and that's what I loved about D-III football. They were not suiting up for their trip to the NFL. It still was sports for sports sake." Contact Albert Grindle at (330) 721-4043 or agrindle@medina-gazette.com.