No fans? No problem. ‘Big Pat’ is back, making Charlotte Hornets games feel like home

Patrick Doughty is back at the P.A. microphone for the Charlotte Hornets, pouring his soul into starting lineup introductions, in-game chants and 3-point baskets by the home team.

But something is very different.

On Wednesday night, as the Dallas Mavericks set up their half-court offense, the man everyone calls “Big Pat” shouts into the microphone through his NBA-themed mask: “DEE-FENSE! DEE-FENSE!”

This chant is usually picked up by thousands of Hornets fans at every home game. Big Pat will start it, back off and let the fans continue it on their own. For years, the chant has washed over Spectrum Center like a wave. When executed well at a critical time in the fourth quarter, it sounds a lot like a rock star conducting a singalong of a favorite hit.

This time, when Big Pat stops saying “DEE-FENSE!!,” you hear ... Nothing.

The players’ shoes squeak. The ball bounces. That’s it.

There are no chanting fans, because there are no fans, period, in Spectrum Center this year.

That is unless you count Big Pat as a basketball fan, and he certainly would. Back from a series of health problems, Big Pat is full of enthusiasm every night as he rolls to his spot at midcourt in his wheelchair.

At age 51, Big Pat is in his 17th year working for the Hornets as their PA man. He has seen hundreds of games and dozens of Charlotte basketball players come and go, from Emeka Okafor and Jason Kapono (two of his favorite names to pronounce) to Gordon Hayward and LaMelo Ball.

This season, though, is undoubtedly Big Pat’s oddest. It’s not just COVID. It’s not just no fans. He has also missed the team’s first three regular-season home games due to health issues, meaning the Hornets had to find substitute P.A. announcers in his stead.

You think anyone noticed? Oh, yeah.

“When you hear Big Pat’s voice you’re like, ‘All right! It’s game time!’ ” said Cody Zeller, the Hornets center. “The arena just feels different if his voice isn’t coming over the loudspeaker. Something feels off.”

Fighting kidney disease

Big Pat has bigger problems than not having any spectators in the building. He has kidney disease, and it’s serious. He undergoes kidney dialysis three days a week, for about four hours per day. He is on the transplant list for a new kidney and, he says, “can’t wait to rock and roll” when he gets one.

Big Pat also has neuropathy, which means some of the nerves in his body are damaged. The result: Numbness, muscle weakness and pain. Thus, the wheelchair. He has resumed physical therapy with the idea being that he could “walk some” again one day.

“You know, man, it could be a whole lot worse,” Big Pat says. “I’m just excited about being here.”

Big Pat doesn’t want this to be a “woe-is-me” story. He’s dealing with what he’s dealing with, and like many people, he’s been battling some of his health problems for years, and he’s determined to smile his way through it.

In the sports world, Big Pat is what is known as a “gamer.” He’s a Navy veteran. He’s still showing up for his job and playing through pain. And he’s still doing his job well. There is a quiet grace to all of that, but because it’s Big Pat, it’s more like a very loud sort of grace.

Big Pat still owns that amazing bass voice that makes him sound like Barry White in his prime, and he uses his echo machine seamlessly. Everything he says on the PA sounds like it should be typed in capital letters. If you’ve been to a Hornets game in the past 17 years, even though you may not have realized it, you heard him.

His favorite part of every game? Introducing the Hornets’ starting lineup, because during those 60 seconds, everyone stops and listens to him. As Big Pat allows, “Maybe I’ve got a little bit of an ego.”

On Wednesday just before tip-off, as usual, he growls: “GET ON YOUR FEET — AND GREET — YOUR CHARLOTTE HORNETS!!” Then he uses the echo effect, so the name trails off — “HORNETS … Hornets ... hornets …”

But hardly anyone is there to listen to this nightly magic show, just 19,000 empty seats. When Big Pat tells the people to get on their feet Wednesday night, absolutely no one moves. When he exults after a Hornets player hits what he calls a “THREE-Three-three,” no one besides Charlotte teammates cheer.

Due to COVID-19, the Hornets haven’t had a single fan in the building yet in the 2020-21 season, and may not have one all season. There are also no Honeybee cheerleaders performing live. The national anthem is prerecorded. There is no live halftime show. The piped-in crowd noise sounds pretty good on TV, but it’s fake.

Yet Big Pat remains, hyping up an invisible crowd for Hornets’ baskets; announcing all opposing players’ scores in a monotone better-suited for reading a physics textbook; half-rising out of his wheelchair during big moments; and trying to infuse energy into the players, team personnel and media types who are allowed to show up at these games for a surprisingly decent Hornets team.

He does have the team DJ and team mascot Hugo the Hornet to help. Hugo roams around the middle section of the arena, banging a drum and waving a flag but barred by league rules, like all mascots, from getting onto the floor right now. Otherwise, it’s quiet in the arena. Big Pat has to create the buzz.

“First of all, it’s cold,” Big Pat laughs when I ask how it feels to be doing his normally interactive PA show into dead air. “Really cold. But once the ball goes up the game is the game. ... It’s for that particular reason it’s easy to get excited about what’s going on because I love basketball. So I just try to keep the same energy, whether there’s 18,000 (people), or 18.”

‘Pat is our silver bullet’

So why do the Hornets even employ Big Pat right now to call the games? It’s not like his P.A. call goes on TV or radio, except as ambient background noise. He’s classified as in-game entertainment, primarily for the fans who are actually in the arena.

Jason Simon is the vice president of fan experience for the Hornets, which is a tricky job given there are no fans except for the ones watching on TV or online. He’s also Big Pat’s boss.

In an average season, for fans who show up, the Hornets have in-game arena hosts, and Hugo the Hornet doing dunks during timeouts, and the Honeybees dancing, and live halftime shows and funny sketches starring the players on the big screen. And, towering over it all, is 5-foot-8 Patrick Doughty.

“Pat is our silver bullet,” Simon says, “the one we pull out when we really need to go to that extra level. He can come over the top and bring that extra energy, especially when we get into a close game in the fourth quarter.”

This year, the Hornets have kept Big Pat working, even without the fans. NBA rules mandate you have some sort of P.A. announcer for games, at the very least to announce fouls and timeouts.

But Big Pat is more than that. In the arena, he lends a sense of normalcy in an abnormal world. The players largely like to interact with him, and they aren’t too old or too jaded to get a kick out of the way he says their names. Former Hornet Nic Batum (BAH-TUUUUUM) once asked Big Pat to do his introduction in French, which Big Pat didn’t do entirely. But he did throw in a couple of French phrases here and there as a compromise.

Big Pat still teases Zeller, an eight-year NBA veteran, about something that happened when Zeller was a rookie.

“I had spent only a handful of weeks in Charlotte,” Zeller recalls, “so I’m essentially still a college kid. I didn’t know any restaurants, so I went to go pick up a pizza at Little Caesars. I saw Pat in the parking lot. I don’t think I’ve even been to a Little Caesars since then. But every time he sees me, he’s still like: ‘Oh, getting some Little Caesars for dinner tonight?’”

Working on his LaMelo Ball

Big Pat grew up in Maryland and cut his teeth as an announcer doing University of Maryland Eastern Shores college games. The then-Bobcats plucked him out of relative obscurity — he won an audition over hundreds of applicants — to make him one of the NBA’s 30 P.A. announcers in 2004. Those guys, once they get the job, tend to stick around. Zeller says “I still have nightmares” about the P.A. guy in Miami and the way he said “Dwyane Wade!” every time Wade did something extraordinary against the Hornets, which was a whole lot of times.

Previously, besides Big Pat’s stint with the Navy as a master helmsman, he had also worked for years as a gravedigger. He has two grown children and two grandchildren. He’s had an interesting life.

Where he feels most at home, though, is behind that microphone, utilizing that deep voice that changed so early in his life. That made for some interesting phone calls in middle school, when concerned parents would try to figure out who this grown man was on the phone asking for their daughter.

“But I’m 11 years old!” Not-So-Big Pat would protest.

A natural extrovert, Big Pat loves both being at the arena and trying to get better at his craft. He’s working on his “Laaaaa-MELO…… BALL!!” routine after the rookie scores, saying he’s on the “‘rough draft” of Ball’s name right now. The idea is to drag out the “La-a-a-a-a” part, he says, so the fans will shout “MELO!” along with him.

That’s when there are fans to say it with him, of course.

COVID-19 restrictions have grown worse, not improved, since Christmas in the Carolinas, even though some adults have now been vaccinated. Schools in the Charlotte area have committed to remote learning through at least mid-February. High school sports in Mecklenburg County have, for the most part, been paused. Around 400,000 people across America have died from the coronavirus. There’s no telling when NBA games in Charlotte will be allowed to have spectators again.

“I miss the fans,” Big Pat says. “I love the fans. That’s the part that excites me the most, when they come back.”

In the meantime, it’s cleared-out arenas and full-on energy for Big Pat.

“When I was about 8 or 9 years old,” Big Pat says, “my father was trying to watch ‘Bonanza’ or ‘Gunsmoke’ or something like that and I was running around, talking loud. And he said, ‘Boy, I hope you make some money by running your mouth one day. Because if you’ve got to use your hands, you may starve to death.’”

For 17 years with the Hornets, Big Pat has made a living with that voice. He hopes one day soon that a few more people will hear him.