For fans of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, Gary Gerould is the play-by-play voice on the radio. For racing fans, Gary Gerould is a pit reporter on ESPN2’s coverage of the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series. Two very different sports, one guy.

Gerould has with the Kings since they came to California in 1985 and has called nearly 2,000 games. He’s been on ESPN since 1990, covering NASCAR, IndyCar, CART and other forms of racing in addition to his current role.  Since the NHRA and NBA seasons overlap in both the spring and fall, Gerould sometimes finds himself travelling from court to track and back again.  How does he keep it straight?

“I tell myself ‘engage the racing brain,’ and ‘engage the basketball brain,’” he said. ”Over a period of time you find shortcuts that help. But by the same token, doing three games in a week, then suddenly you’re at a racetrack, then you’ve got to shift gears a little bit.  I work very hard to stay up to speed on what’s going on with rule changes, driver changes, crew chief changes, so that when I get on site, the seed has been planted.  Having done 80-plus basketball games for 25 years, it’s more a discipline of getting your homework done and updating stats.  You’re with these guys, you travel with them on the plane, and so you have opportunities to ask them about things.”

If Gerould has to miss a Kings game to work a drag racing event, he keeps up by watching ESPN and checking box scores online. And while he’s with the Kings, he reads racing websites on a daily basis. He may miss eight or so games during the regular season, but has the full support of the Kings organization.

“I’ve been so fortunate because right from when I first started with the Kings, I was involved with NBC and I had to have certain latitude because of previous commitments, and they allowed it,” he said. “Over 25 years, they’ve continued to give me that. I greatly appreciate it.”

Naturally, Gerould is often asked if he prefers basketball or racing. “My answer is that I like everything that I do,” he said. “I’m that kind of a person. I want to find enjoyment in what I do and have a passion for it.  Also, when you start to get ground down by an 82-game basketball season, or a 23-weekend race season, you go to the other one, and it recharges you, and gives you a fresh outlook.”

When fans watch NASCAR on the ESPN networks, they see pit reporters wearing firesuits as they roam the loud, busy and sometimes dangerous pit area. But few know it was an incident at Atlanta Motor Speedway on March 19, 1989, that led to the reporters wearing that apparel.

Dr. Jerry Punch, now ESPN’s lap-by-lap announcer for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, was a pit reporter, wearing a blue blazer and tie as he performed his duties on ABC.

Richard Petty’s car was in for pit stop when it backfired, igniting fuel that had spilled on the car’s left rear during refueling. The fire quickly spread.

“Suddenly you could hear this big ‘whoomph’ and you could feel the air just being sucked to the fire as it erupted,” said Punch, who was about 10 feet away when the fire started. “The gas man’s wearing an apron, and it’s on fire – he drops the gas can on the ground and there’s fire all over the can and on the ground. He realized it could ignite the whole car, so he then picks it up and throws it over the wall, and then there’s gas behind the wall and it’s on fire where we’re standing.”

Punch, an emergency room physician, and his pit spotter, Nelson Crozier, quickly sprung into action. Crozier grabbed a rubber mat and he and Punch wrapped the gas man to extinguish the fire. Meanwhile, Petty sped away from the pits, and fireman and crew members from other teams grabbed extinguishers and took care of the rest of the fire.

Dr. Punch attended to the injured crew member until paramedics arrived, then attempted to do a report for the telecast. But he quickly learned that the blaze had impacted him as well.

“As I’m doing a report on camera, my moustache that I had back then is all singed, the hair on the back of my hand is gone, my microphone windscreen is melted – it’s just dripping down across the microphone,” he said. “And the sleeve on my polyester blazer is all basically melted into a goo.  All you can see is these brass buttons hanging there.

“They had had high cameras on all of this and I don’t realize as I’m giving a report that people in the (TV) truck and people watching back at ABC in New York are just aghast that I was in the middle of this. ABC Sports executive producer Geoff Mason was watching and he immediately called the truck and asked why in the world are our people not in fire-protective gear? He made the call right then that we’d wear it from then on.”

Punch said that not only did the incident lead to safety gear for ESPN and ABC’s reporters, it also led to improvements in pit stop safety.

“We dodged a big bullet on pit road that day and so did I,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much so until later. And to this day, I’m so appreciative of Geoff Mason just stepping in and absolutely making a great call for safety first.”

Jerry Punch as a pit reporter in the 1980s, before firesuits became standard apparel.

Almost 40 years ago, fans at minor league hockey games in Hershey, Pa., got something extra for their $1.50 admission – live play-by-play by a future ESPN announcer.

On the top row of Hershey Arena, where Wilt Chamberlain had his famous 100-point game, 15-year-old Marty Reid was watching the Hershey Bears of the American Hockey League and doing play-by-play into a tape recorder he had received for his birthday. His best friend was his color analyst. Reid was practicing for what he hoped would be his future career, and the fans sitting nearby enjoyed the show.

“A couple of times my mother would go with us and she’d say ‘oh Marty, stop this, you’re bothering the people around you,’” said Reid, who joined ESPN in 1982 and now calls NASCAR Nationwide Series and IndyCar Series telecasts for the network. “Luckily the people around didn’t mind and would say ‘no, no, let him go.’

“I’ve got to believe that knowing what I sounded like back then, some of them were just being kind,” he said. “They were cutting me some slack because I was just a kid and maybe they were thinking ‘he’s not out somewhere getting in trouble.’”

Like many kids growing up in Pennsylvania, Reid played ice hockey and loved the sport. But he recognized that he did not have the talent to go pro, so he turned his attention to broadcasting after his older brother, a disc jockey, had 13-year-old Marty cut a radio commercial with him.

“When you’re 13 years old and you say you want to get into sports play by play, people say, ‘oh, that’s nice, next week he’ll want to be a something else,’” he said.

But Reid took it seriously. “I’d do the game and take it back and listen to it over and over and over and literally practiced over and over,” he said.

Though the Bears never knew what he was doing, others did, including his high school guidance counselor. The counselor contacted Marietta (Ohio) College, which led to Reid being recruited to attend the broadcasting school. His experience gave him a leg up on other students and as a freshman he immediately started doing radio and TV play-by-play for all Marietta sports. He moved on to do local TV sports in Columbus, Ohio, and then ESPN, where he has worked on a variety of sports over the years, including calling one NHL game.

“By the time I was 15, people who really knew me knew I loved sports,” he said. “Back then there was no ESPN, and little motorsports coverage, so I was practicing to do stick and ball sports, just like everybody else, but it all sort of worked out.”

On Wednesday’s edition of SportsNation (weekdays, 4-5 p.m. ET, ESPN2), co-host Colin Cowherd was surprisingly passionate in his argument that newly annointed Minnesota Vikings QB Brett Favre has lost the luster that formerly made him synonymous with Wrangler Jeans.

SportsNation debated who is the better pitchman for Wrangler: Favre or NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt Jr.

So passionate was Cowherd’s case (and impersonation of a whining celebrity), he went so far as to say that Favre is a former everyman and now more like Lindsay Lohan, unable to pick a side.

“Dale’s tough. Dale’s a guy’s guy,” he said. “Dale’s not a flippy, floppy guy. Brett Favre used to be everyman — he has literally turned off football fans.”

To Colin’s dismay, sports fans do not agree. SportsNation (and co-host Michelle Beadle) voted for Favre as the better Wrangler pitchman, 64% to Dale Jr.’s 36%. In the end, Colin attempted to show off his own appeal as a Wrangler man. View the segment of the show here.

When Dave Burns grew up in Kalamazoo, Mich., his father was a racing fan who instilled a love for the sport in his son. That included a family outing in 1971 to Michigan International Speedway, site of this weekend’s NASCAR Sprint Cup and Nationwide Series races. Burns will be a pit reporter on ESPN’s live coverage of the two races.

The race that day was a doubleheader featuring Indy cars and stock cars, and the Burns famil, including 8-year old Dave, loaded into its station wagon before dawn for the cross-state journey to MIS. “We brought a big picnic lunch and between the races we went back to the car and ate,” he recalls. “I think that was the first time I ever tailgated. It was a significant day in my racing upbringing.”

Though he relocated to the Charlotte area years ago for his job in racing, Burns always looks forward to returning to his home state to cover races at the 2-mile superspeedway.

“It’s just very comfortable to me to be in Michigan,” he states. “No matter what happens, I’m somewhere I know very well.”

And that includes the local delicacies – especially sweet corn.  

One of the traditions of the August NASCAR race weekend at MIS is a corn roast in the garage area for the race teams. Freshly-harvested Michigan sweet corn is served, complete with plenty of butter.  Drivers, crew members and others can be seen walking around eating a roasted ear of corn or wiping the butter from their fingers.

“I remember many meals growing up that consisted of just sweet corn,” he says. “And to see all of the people in the garage area excited to have some good Michigan sweet corn, well, it’s just something else that makes me proud to be where I’m from.”

As ESPN revs up for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series with Sunday’s Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, ESPN NASCAR analyst Rusty Wallace has been thinking back to a day in 1992 when he recorded a very historic “first” at the famed speedway.

In the days when IMS hosted only the annual Indianapolis 500, which remains the world’s largest single-day sporting event, NASCAR was growing but was still considered by many as a regional sport. In June of 1992, NASCAR gathered 12 of its top drivers/teams and conducted what was billed as a “tire test.” In fact, it was a feasibility test for a possible stock car race at the Brickyard, an idea considered sacrilegious by many in the racing community.

Wallace, who was at the top of his career as a driver, wanted to be the first stock car driver on the track when NASCAR first sent out the cars for the test. He persuaded NASCAR officials that the cars should go out in numeric order - he was driving car No. 2. So Wallace got his wish and went out on the track first, a moment recorded on site by video and still photographers.

But his moment didn’t last long. He was about to have a confrontation with the Intimidator, multi-time NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt, who had rolled off second in car No. 3.

“I was driving down the backstretch, just warming up and looking around because it was so cool to be on that track,” Wallace said. “Then suddenly I heard a huge noise, and it was Earnhardt passing me. I figured out quickly that he was trying to get back to the line first so he could be the first to lead a lap.

“I gunned it and we raced through the third and fourth turns, but darn if he didn’t beat me to the line. We got back to the pits and he just laughed at me. But all of us were excited. It was the first time for NASCAR on the hallowed ground and we were proud to be there.”

The first Brickyard 400 was held two years later.

• Teen singing sensation The Jonas Brothers working behind the scenes at ESPN’s new Los Angeles production facility
• Recording star John Legend visited ESPN to fill in for Mike Golic on ESPN Radio and ESPN2’s Mike & Mike in the Morning
• Shots of new Monday Night Football analyst Jon Gruden
• Photos of ESPN’s new weekday SportsNation with Colin Cowherd and Michelle Beadle
• Game action from ESPN2’s WNBA season opener — defending champion Detroit Shock at Los Angeles Sparks with Candace Parker and Lisa Leslie
• NASCAR driver Carl Edwards kept his ESPN visitor’s badge on during his SportsCenter interview with Jay Harris
• U.S. men’s soccer team victory over Hondurus
• & more…