Once upon a time, Tim Sinclair studied architecture at the University of Illinois, but today, he’s the voice of the Chicago Bulls at the House that Michael Jordan built, and it’s all because he needed to make a few bucks.
“I never dreamed of using my voice for a living, until I needed a part time job – needed to make some money, in college – and I went, ‘Who do I know who would be stupid enough to hire me for 5 or 6 hours a week’,” Sinclair remembers. “I happened to know a guy who ran a radio station and just said, ‘Can I help?’”
That was in 1997, and the answer was yes. Then a decade later, Sinclair said yes when someone asked if he’d do public address announcing for Illini Baseball. Soon, he was on the mic for multiple Illini Sports, and the would-be architect had constructed a career as an announcer.
“When someone said, ‘Want to do public address for Illinois,' I could have said 'Eehh, that’s not my thing, eehh I don’t know that I’m going to be good at it,'" he says. “Instead, I was like, ‘Sure, sounds like fun, let’s try it’. And I tried it. And I wasn’t very good, but I got better, and it opened-up a career path that I never could have seen.”
Feeling out of the loop? We'll catch you up on the Chicago news you need to know. Sign up for the weekly Chicago Catch-Up newsletter here.
Two and-a-half decades later, Sinclair makes a living doing PA work. He’s under contract with four teams; the Bulls, Bears, Fire and Illini Men’s Basketball. Add in NBA All-Star festivities and IHSA Championships, and he works more than 100 events each year. That’s a lot of games, and a lot of names. His favorite that he regularly says?
“It’s Ayo (Dosunmu) or DeMar (DeRozan),” says Sinclair. “Ayo because of our longevity, because I’ve known him for so long and gotten to call his name for so long and it’s become a thing, and DeMar because most people repeat that back to me. If they do a call back to me, they’re always like, ‘DeMar DeRozan!’”
Sure, the Central Illinois-native has gigs with a handful of teams, but it’s his gig with the Bulls that’s made him the most recognizable. You can hear his booming voice at a game, or through the TV when you’re watching a game, or even when you’re playing a game. Sinclair is the voice of all games played at the United Center on the video game series NBA2K.
Sports
On top of that, the 45 year-old recently appeared in a national commercial for State Farm Insurance, so if fans only knew his voice, now they know his face, too. And they also know singing isn’t his forte!
“I went, and the director was talking to me right before we went on set, and he said, ‘You’re going to do this, you’re going to do this, then you kind of look here, and then you sing the jingle’. I went, ‘Excuse me, what?’” Sinclair says with a smile. “Every time it airs somewhere, I’ll get texts or social media messages from someone going, ‘What, question mark, exclamation point? What in the world?’. And that is fun to know that people are seeing it.”
Sinclair says when he’s doing PA work, his goal is to reflect what the crowd is feeling, and that’s easy to do because he’s just like everyone sitting in the seats.
“I don’t want to be an actor,” he says. “I don’t want to be a guy playing a part. I’m a fan, and I think people can tell if I’m giving some sort of fake performance or fake excitement over something that’s happening.”
It seems to be working. Sinclair is busier than ever, fans tell him they love his work, and after he missed a recent Bulls game, center Nikola Vucevic told him the energy at the United Center just wasn’t the same without him.
Once upon a time, life’s blueprint was to build, but clearly, Sinclair made the right choice to use his voice.
