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IT’S 9 A.M. ON SATURDAY, THREE HOURS BEFORE THE XAVIER-
Marquette game, and Joe Sunderman and Byron Larkin barely speak to each other in the Cintas Center media room. After 17 seasons on radio—traveling to Xavier games from San Juan to San Francisco, Alabama to Alaska—they don’t spend much time comparing notes before 700 WLW-AM’s Dave “Yiddy” Armbruster cues them for their courtside pregame show. “We’re like an old married couple,” says Larkin, 49. “We’ve been together 17 years. We eat every meal together on the road. We finish each other’s sentences.” “Byron knows basketball so well. We’re just talking basketball,” says Sunderman, 59, starting his 36th season as a Xavier broadcaster. Players and coaches come and go, but Byron and Joe remain on the radio—a career neither envisioned while playing for Xavier. Larkin, XU’s all-time leading scorer, says his “dream was playing in the NBA. This just kind of happened.” He earned a marketing degree in 1988 while scoring 2,696 points. He finished a master’s in finance in 1992—around playing pro ball in Venezuela, Germany, and Hong Kong—and opened Lifetime Financial Planning. Sunderman, a freshman starter in 1974 from LaSalle High School, grew up in his dad’s grocery stores in Westwood, South Fairmount, and Mohawk. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business in 1979, figuring he’d “work for a company.” Sunderman did for a while, then became an independent contractor selling building products to architects around his radio schedule. So how did he get this gig? He taps on the table. That’s how former WCIN-AM sportscaster Bill Meredith taught him to be a high school basketball analyst when Sunderman sat out Xavier’s 1976–1977 season with a knee injury. “I really didn’t want to do it, but Bill was kind of insistent,” Sunderman says. “I said: ‘What do I do?’ And he said: ‘When I tap on the table, you talk. And when I tap again, you shut up.’ Ten minutes into it, I was enjoying it a lot more than I ever thought I would.” Did he do that when Larkin joined him in 1997? “No! No!” he says with a laugh. “Byron and I got along right from the start. He’s a terrific partner.” Sunderman started on Xavier radio in 1980 in Larkin’s role as analyst. Coach Bob Staak wanted a former player on radio, so Sunderman did color with Bill Sorrell, Red Pitcher, Dale McMillen, and Andy MacWilliams. When Andy Mac was
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