Chris Berman

Berman married Katherine "Kathy" Alexinski in July 1983. The couple had two children, Meredith and Doug, and later welcomed two grandsons, Kit and Wyatt. The family resided in Berman's native state of Connecticut.

On May 9, 2017, Kathy Berman died in a two-vehicle traffic collision in Woodbury, Connecticut, on the eve of Chris Berman's 62nd birthday. An investigation revealed that she had been driving under the influence at high speed when her car struck another vehicle, resulting in the deaths of both drivers.

Christopher James Berman was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, on May 10, 1955, and was raised in Irvington, New York. His mother, Peggy Shevell, worked as a reporter and researcher for Time magazine, and his father, James Keliner Berman, was a corporate executive vice president. Berman attended the Hackley School before enrolling at Brown University, where he served as the sports director for the student radio station WBRU and called basketball, football, ice hockey, and baseball games. He graduated from Brown in 1977 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.

After college, Berman worked as a disc jockey at WERI in Westerly, Rhode Island, and later moved to WNVR Radio in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he broadcast high school sports and provided traffic reports. In 1979, he broke into television as a weekend sports anchor for NBC affiliate WVIT-TV in Hartford, Connecticut.

In October 1979, one month after ESPN launched, Berman joined the fledgling cable network to host the 2:30 a.m. edition of SportsCenter. He soon became the network's most prominent on-air personality. In 1985, he took over as the studio host of Sunday NFL Countdown, a position he held for 31 consecutive seasons through the 2016 campaign. For 29 of those seasons, he shared the desk with analyst Tom Jackson, forming one of the longest-running studio partnerships in television history.

Beginning in 1987, Berman and Jackson co-hosted NFL PrimeTime, which became the highest-rated sports studio show on cable television. The two also presented "The Fastest Three Minutes in Television," a rapid-fire halftime highlight recap that aired during Sunday Night Football and later moved to Monday Night Football. In 2017, ESPN dedicated its studio in Digital Center 2 as the Chris Berman-Tom Jackson Studio. Berman stepped back from weekly Sunday hosting duties in 2017, but he subsequently reunited with Jackson in 2019 to revive NFL PrimeTime for ESPN+ and later signed an extension to keep him with the network through its 50th anniversary in 2029.

Beyond football, Berman served as a core voice of ESPN's Major League Baseball coverage for decades. He called play-by-play for selected regular-season and playoff games from 1990 to 2006, hosted Baseball Tonight, and served as the play-by-play commentator for the MLB Home Run Derby from 1986 to 2016. On September 6, 1995, Berman called the historic broadcast of Cal Ripken Jr. breaking Lou Gehrig's consecutive games streak, during which he and analyst Buck Martinez drew acclaim for remaining silent for 22 minutes while Ripken took a lap around Camden Yards.

Berman also hosted ESPN's nightly coverage of the U.S. Open golf tournament from 1986 to 2014, adding early-round play-by-play duties in 2003. In hockey, he co-hosted telecasts of the 2003 and 2004 Stanley Cup Finals on ESPN and ABC alongside John Saunders. Over the course of his career, he has served as the master of ceremonies for the Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrinement ceremony beginning in 1999.

Berman developed a distinctive broadcasting delivery characterized by energetic vocal inflections, sound effects, and humorous player nicknames. Among his most famous signature calls are "He could... go... all... the... way!" during long football plays, "Back, back, back, back... Gone!" on home run broadcasts, and an emphatic "Whoop!" when an athlete evades a tackle or makes an opponent miss. Early in his career, he began inserting playful puns into player names, popularizing monikers such as Bert "Be Home" Blyleven, Fred "Crime Dog" McGriff, and Roberto "Remember the" Alomar.

Adopting the alter ego "The Swami," Berman regularly delivered costumed weekly game predictions on ESPN programming. His widespread recognition led to cameo appearances as himself or sports announcers in numerous films, including Necessary Roughness, Little Big League, Kingpin, The Waterboy, The Longest Yard, and Grown Ups 2. Technical director Chuck Pagano gave him his long-standing nickname, "Boomer," early in his ESPN tenure.