Yabba—dabba—doo!

"Complete chaos!" says Jim.

"You couldn't find a thing in that mess!" adds Peggy.

"Chaos is probably a mild word!"

"Chris has wanted to be a sportscaster since he was eight," says Peggy.

"I thought it was 11, Peggy."

"Eight. He was eight years old."

Chris, who is not related to NBC sportscaster Len Berman, grew up in Rye, N.Y., 10 miles northeast of Manhattan. All the neighborhood kids played ball on his front lawn. Berman Stadium, they called it. Young Chris played first base and provided a running commentary. "Chris was always imitating Red Barber," recalls Jim. He still is. Berman lifted his back-back-back bit from Barber's call of Dodger leftfielder Al Gionfriddo's legendary catch of Joe DiMaggio's drive in the 1947 World Series.

When he got to Brown, Berman's audience expanded. He announced sports for the campus radio station and honed his wisecracking technique as a toll collector in the summer on the Connecticut Turnpike. Later, he gave traffic reports on radio from a red station wagon. "Traffic was always light to moderate," he says, "except when it was moderate to light."

Sometimes he did more than shadow the traffic. One day in 1979, he tracked a silver Firebird down Interstate 84. When it pulled into the parking lot of an elementary school, so did he. Berman got out of his station wagon and nonchalantly kicked its tires. When the driver of the Firebird walked past him, he asked her to go to breakfast with him the next day. She accepted, and four years later they were married. "It's embarrassing," says Kathy Berman. "He probably did this every day, and I was the one who fell for it."

He heard about a new all-sports cable network in Bristol, Conn., that needed announcers. The job didn't pay much. "But that was O.K.," he says, "because the hours weren't any good, either." His duties included the delivery of a five-minute wrap-up show at 2:30 a.m. His fan mail came from fathers feeding their infants. "Back then, I was being used as a nightlight," he says.