Dave Barnett knows that a commanding voice, smooth delivery and thorough preparation aren’t the only keys to longevity in the sports broadcasting business.

Sometimes success requires a healthy dose of old-fashioned luck.

DRC/Al Key

Denton native Dave Barnett is in his first season as part of the radio broadcast team for the Rangers.

View larger More photos Photo store

Such as when the Mavericks needed a radio voice only weeks before the 1981 season, and all of the obvious choices were already locked into contracts with other stations.

Or when ESPN held a college football audition on the only Saturday in which the Southwest Conference didn’t broadcast its game of the week.

Or even when the Rangers had an opening in their radio booth that provided a perfect fit for a veteran hometown voice looking to find a more permanent home with a professional franchise.

Barnett was there for all of them. He might have been in the right place at the right time, but took advantage of each opportunity to become one of the more respected and versatile play-by-play voices working today.

After four days off during the All-Star break, Barnett will be in the radio booth tonight when the Rangers resume their season against the Minnesota Twins.

Barnett is in his first season as a member of the Rangers radio team, working alongside longtime Rangers voice Eric Nadel. It’s a pairing that Barnett would like to see continue well into the future.

“It was well-timed for a lot of reasons,” Barnett said. “I missed being with a team and being there for every bit of their story, from opening day to the last day of the playoffs. It was a real good fit.”

Barnett found out about the opening in December, when Victor Rojas said he was leaving the Rangers radio booth to join the upstart MLB Network. Barnett has a friendship with Nadel that has spanned three decades since his early days working at WBAP-AM, which formerly was the Rangers’ flagship station.

In January, the Rangers signed Barnett, something he credits in part to a push from Nadel, who has worked with several broadcast partners since teaming with Mark Holtz on WBAP for 13 seasons ending in 1995.

“A few times in the past, when the job has come open, he’s called to recommend somebody else,” Nadel said. “I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years, so I really didn’t know.”

Barnett and Nadel each said it didn’t take long to form chemistry together during broadcasts. Both are play-by-play men by trade. They alternate calling a couple of innings during games, with the other providing some analysis and insight in the hopes of creating a conversational style.

“Hopefully that’s come across on the air, that we’re people who have known each other for a while and enjoy each other’s company,” Barnett said. “We need to have descriptive skills. We need to be able to let people form a picture in their mind of what it looks like, and there’s not really time for that and a complete analysis of whether this pitch was thrown exactly correctly. For a radio audience, I think it’s more important for them to have a skillfully described word picture.”

Nadel said Barnett employs a classic style of baseball announcing that focuses on conveying information instead of becoming instantly excitable.

“It’s been very much what I had expected,” Nadel said. “Dave is very professional and well-prepared. He has a sensational voice and a mellow style that’s suitable for baseball.”

The Rangers are 48-39 and just 1 1/2 games behind the Los Angeles Angels for the AL West lead. The team’s surprising degree of success so far has made Barnett’s job easier and “immeasurably” more enjoyable.

“The fact that they’ve been so competitive is a complete bonus. It’s been a pleasant surprise,” Barnett said. “There’s a night-and-day difference in preparing for a game that you know people are going to be into, because there’s something riding on it, as opposed to playing out the string. I’ve worked in seasons where both of those were the case. When a team is doing well, there’s nothing about it that is work.

“When the team is playing well, your audience is built-in just because they’re following the story day-by-day. When that’s not necessarily the case, then you have to hopefully give them other reasons to turn in, and that’s where you earn your money.”

Barnett previously broadcast home games on television for the Rangers during the 1990 season on Home Sports Entertainment, when he shared the booth with Cowboys play-by-play man Brad Sham, former Rangers standout Jim Sundberg and reporter Greg Lucas.

That was the only experience Barnett had in baseball until he started doing major league games for ESPN in 1996. He continued to broadcast baseball through 2008 as part of his ESPN contract.

The big break

After graduating from Denton High School, Barnett completed a degree at North Texas State (now known as the University of North Texas) in 1979. He began working at KRLD-AM during his junior year, when the station converted to an all-news format.

In 1980, the Mavericks franchise launched with Holtz as their radio play-by-play voice. The following year, Holtz left to join the Rangers, leaving the Mavericks without a broadcaster only weeks before the season opener.

“They were limited to people in the area who had done basketball play-by-play and who were not under contract to another station. The people who fit that description amounted to me,” Barnett said. “I’m sure Brad would have gotten the job, but he was already under contract with KRLD. I was far too unimportant to be under contract.”

So Barnett became the voice of the Mavericks at age 23, making him the youngest broadcaster in the NBA. He worked that job for seven seasons before leaving for San Antonio in 1988, when he wanted to get into television broadcasting.

“When I first started with the Mavericks, there were 15 games a year televised over the air,” Barnett said. “It was still a radio sport, but just in the seven years I was there, it had flip-flopped to where all games were televised. That was clearly the direction where all sports were going.”

He remained in San Antonio as the Spurs’ television play-by-play man for eight seasons, the first of which was a simulcast broadcast on both TV and radio.

During that same time, Barnett was the lead broadcaster for Southwest Conference football games on the Raycom network on Saturday afternoons, which would sometimes involve driving to Austin, College Station, Houston or Waco for a football game in the afternoon, then back to San Antonio for a Spurs home game in the evening.

“I had a lot of energy back then,” Barnett said.

Hitting the road

His seven-year tenure with the SWC allowed Barnett only one regular-season Saturday off. That came in November 1995, around the same time ESPN was launching a college game-of-the-week broadcast on its new ESPN2 channel.

The audition window for the ESPN2 job happened to coincide with his idle football Saturday. So Barnett traveled to Minneapolis to audition by calling a Minne-sota-Ohio State game.

“I look back, and that seems like more than just a coincidence. There’s another higher agenda at work there, to make that happen,” Barnett said. “I think there’s much more at work than what I put into it.”

Barnett was hired a short time later, and began calling games for ESPN in 1996, where he has been a regular on college football and basketball broadcasts, in addition to baseball.

His family moved back to Denton in 1997, but Barnett hardly had the time off to notice. His year-round schedule kept him traveling for about one out of every three nights for 6-8 years, by his estimate, meaning time away from his wife and two children, a 21-year-old son who currently attends the University of Texas and an 18-year-old daughter who just graduated from Liberty Christian and will enroll at the University of Hawaii next month.

“It takes a lot of understanding,” Barnett said. “I look for opportunities to give them little things that they wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity to have. I don’t know if that comes close to making up for the amount of time that I haven’t been here. It’s nothing close to a normal existence.”

He said the extensive travel is the biggest negative to his career, although Barnett has been able to take his family with him to selected assignments, including two trips to the Maui Invitational basketball tournament.

Memories aplenty

Barnett always has juggled multiple assignments for most of his career, which spans thousands of games. Even during the past 13 years at ESPN, Barnett has broadcast preseason NFL games for several teams, including the Cowboys. He also returned to the Spurs for the end of the 2006-07 season, which culminated in an NBA title.

He credits his broadcasting versatility to his mentor, local sports broadcasting legend Bill Mercer, who was working at North Texas State while Barnett was a student doing games on KNTU.

“The reason that I have any versatility is because of what Bill Mercer taught me and what KNTU provided at that time,” Barnett said. “It’s a shame because KNTU does not allow students on the air as much as they used to, and that is a travesty. Kids go to that school because people like me have come out of it, but they’re not being given the same opportunities that people of my era got.”

Barnett has broadcast his share of memorable games over the years. He was doing play-by-play for Arkansas’ 58-56 win over Mississippi in 2001 and for Arkansas’ 71-68 victory over Kentucky in 2003. Both games went seven overtimes, tied for the longest game in college football history along with UNT’s 25-22 win over Florida International in 2006.

During his Mavericks days, Barnett called the famed “Moody Madness” playoff game between the Mavericks and Seattle SuperSonics in 1984, a game featuring a wild finish on the SMU campus that resulted in the Mavericks’ first playoff series win.

Barnett also called the final game of an American League Division Series matchup between the Twins and New York Yankees in 2003, and was the national radio voice for the 1986 NBA All-Star game at Reunion Arena.

“That was probably the highest level at which basketball had ever been performed to that point,” Barnett said. “As I was looking out on the floor for the opening tip, of the 10 people on the floor, probably every one of them will eventually be in the Hall of Fame.”

Since he’s now working full-time for the Rangers during the season, Barnett isn’t broadcasting any baseball for ESPN this year. He plans to continue his work on college football and basketball games after the baseball season, however.

Either way, Barnett is happy to be back in his hometown, broadcasting for a team that plays 81 games within driving distance of his own bed.

“Half the games, I’m home at night. It’s a 45-minute drive,” Barnett said. “I would like to add anything I do from a network basis around this. I think that’s the best combination.”

TODD JORGENSON can be reached at 940-566-6871. His e-mail address is tjorgenson@dentonrc.com .