That was how Fordham graduate Dan D’Uva, FCRH ’09, described the celebratory moment in Las Vegas on June 13, when the Golden Knights defeated the Florida Panthers to earn their first National Hockey League title.
“The Silver State is home to the greatest silver trophy in all of sports,” he quipped.
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D’Uva, who has been the radio voice of the Golden Knights since the team was founded in 2017, pursued broadcasting as a high school student and at Syracuse University before transferring to Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2006.
At Fordham, he majored in communication and media studies while working in the sports department at WFUV, the University’s public media station, which has been launching the careers of sports broadcasters since the late 1940s. For D’Uva, the experience led to his first job in hockey.
Here are five other things to know about the voice of the Golden Knights.
1. He’s living out his childhood dream.
D’Uva broadcast his first hockey game in 2000, when he was just a 14-year-old student at Ridgewood High School in New Jersey. In 2018, when the Golden Knights reached the Stanley Cup Final, he told The Record that he listened to a recording of that first game.
“I popped in that micro-cassette tape—it still works—and thought, ‘Gee, if you could have told this 14-year-old kid that he would be broadcasting the Stanley Cup Final for a team in Las Vegas, he’d be pretty pumped,’” D’Uva said. “He might not believe you, but he’d be pretty pumped.”
2. One of his mentors is Hall of Fame hockey broadcaster Mike “Doc” Emrick.
D’Uva was in high school when he first met Emrick, who was then the voice of the New Jersey Devils. In an interview with Off the Air, a WFUV Sports podcast, D’Uva said he and a friend, both aspiring broadcasters, would station themselves near the TV and radio broadcast booths at Devils games “to see who was off the air, who could we bother right now.”
That led to a relationship where “you pass along a tape and exchange some emails,” D’Uva said, noting that Emrick listened to a recording of D’Uva’s high school broadcast and generously offered some advice and encouragement.
Fast forward a few years, and their paths crossed again, this time at Fordham, where Emrick was the featured guest at a WFUV Sports workshop.
“I remember walking with Doc from Keating Hall to the Metro-North station … and I’m not sure what questions I asked Doc in that 10-minute walk, but I guess there was something in there that piqued his interest to the point where he recognized I wasn’t just doing this as a hobby and I was expecting to pursue this as a career,” D’Uva recalled on the Off the Air podcast. “And then we continued to see each other.”
D’Uva covered the Devils for WFUV Sports, including the opening night of their Newark arena in 2007. Two years later, when he applied for a job calling games for the Trenton Devils, the team’s minor league affiliate, he wrote to Emrick, who “called me right after he received the email and gave me a little bit of a pep talk.”
D’Uva got the job in 2009, the same year he graduated from Fordham.
“Doc’s just been a great person to learn from, a great friend, and I’m blessed to recognize him as a friend,” D’Uva said.
3. A Fordham alumni connection helped him gain hockey broadcasting experience.
When he was at Fordham, D’Uva got in touch with Phil Giubileo, GABELLI ’95, who at the time was the play-by-play announcer for the Bridgeport Sound Tigers, a minor league hockey team.
“He would invite me to go out there, and I could see how he was doing his thing and I could sit in what was Webster Bank Arena at the time and do practice tapes,” D’Uva told the Off the Air podcast. It gave him a chance to “get a feel for the professional game,” he said, “and that was thanks to Phil.”
One of the tapes he recorded in Bridgeport helped him get the job with the Trenton Devils, D’Uva said.
4. He carries forward the legacy of Marty Glickman.
In the late 1980s, Marty Glickman—the legendary New York Knicks, Giants, and Jets broadcaster—began working as an advisor to students at WFUV, coaching them while laying the foundation for the station’s current training program.
While D’Uva himself wasn’t trained by Glickman, who died in 2001, he listened to him on the radio growing up as a Jets fan in New Jersey and was inspired by his “tremendous admonition” to “have empathy” and always “consider the listener,” he told the Off the Air podcast.
D’Uva also feels a deeper connection to Glickman given their ties to both Syracuse University, where Glickman earned a bachelor’s degree and where D’Uva studied and has served as an adjunct professor, and Fordham.
“It’s great for me to have a connection to two great universities with so much history in sports broadcasting and so many alumni involved in this field,” D’Uva said. “I’m very proud of both of those places—I’ve got a section of the closet that’s dedicated to [Syracuse] orange and a section of the closet that’s dedicated to [Fordham] maroon.”
5. He supports the next generation of sports broadcasters.
D’Uva not only supports the students at WFUV through his appearances on shows, including One on One, the longest-running sports call-in show in New York City, but he also serves as media consultant for the Chatham Anglers of the Cape Cod Baseball League.
D’Uva, who previously called games in the Cape Cod league himself, helped the team create what Bryan Curtis of The Ringer has called “The Cape Cod Finishing School for Broadcasters.” Each summer, two aspiring broadcasters call games for the team and receive coaching from D’Uva. Curtis described him as “a gentle but exacting mentor, as if [Vin] Scully were crossbred with Yoda.”
D’Uva’s message to aspiring broadcasters is simple: “Don’t be a pretender. You’re not acting the part of a broadcaster. You are a broadcaster.”
