Roach has served as the PA announcer for all of Denver’s major professional sports teams except the Denver Nuggets over the years, though he currently only works for the Avalanche and Colorado Rapids. His distinctive booming voice is recognizable to even non-sporty Coloradans as the voice of the Denver International Airport train announcements, too.
Attending bucket-list sporting events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics, for which he has served as a PA announcer in hockey, makes Roach feel truly blessed. Even while preparing for his seventeenth Super Bowl, Roach says the excitement is the same.
“I can't think of a better job,” he says. “I mean, I have the greatest job in the world. People pay me to fly around the world to go to amazing sporting events.”
He also basically gets paid to have people listen to him, and Roach loves to talk. His iconic voice is just as engaging in a regular conversation as it is over a stadium's giant speaker system.
Along with duties for the Avs and Rapids, Roach is the PA announcer for the Minnesota Vikings. He grew up in Minnesota and took that dream of a job in 2016, leaving his PA job with the Broncos to take it. But Roach still calls Denver home, flying to Minnesota and back for Vikings home games.
His first PA job in Colorado was over thirty years ago for the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, a former minor league baseball team in Colorado Springs. When MLB announced Denver would get an expansion team in 1991, Roach remembers being in the Sky Sox press box with the legendary Denver Sports reporter Mike Klis, who reported on the Sky Sox for the Colorado Springs Gazette at the time.
“He's the one that told me, ‘Hey, I just came across the Associated Press story. Colorado is getting the expansion franchise,’” Roach recalls. “I said to him, ‘I'm gonna get that PA job.’”
Roach wasn’t sure how he’d make that happen, but he had two years to figure it out. Shortly after the MLB announcement, Roach was hired by KRFX to host an afternoon music show on the radio station. There, Roach’s boss Jack Evans made him send an audition tape to the Rockies every thirty days so they wouldn’t forget.
Roach included a box of cracker jacks with each tape, and it worked: two days before the Rockies played their first game at Mile High Stadium in 1993, the team called and asked Roach to be the PA announcer, which he did until 2006.
In 2000, Roach joined KOA’s morning show as the “sports guy.” That’s how he connected with the Broncos, becoming the team’s secondary PA announcer by helping with pregame and halftime ceremonies while Alan Cass handled the in-game duties. But in 2006, Cass fell ill, so Roach took over as the main PA announcer for the Broncos, leaving his Rockies job.
From the Rockies to the Avalanche to the Olympics
During that time, Roach also picked up work for the Avalanche beginning in 1999. He’s been the PA announcer since the team moved into Ball Arena and the Kroenke family took over, but before that Roach had a beef with the team.Roach served as the PA announcer for the Denver Grizzlies during the team’s single season as part of the International Hockey League in 1994 and 1995. The team won the league championship that season before folding.
“I didn't feel like they were nice to the Denver Grizzlies,” Roach says of the Avs original owners. “I thought they were, in fact, kind of mean and dismissive of the Denver Grizzlies by making them take down all of their banners during the playoffs and put up banners that said ‘NHL is coming.’"
Roach said he blasted the team every day on his KOA show for being “a bunch of jackasses, essentially” so he understood why they didn’t ask him to be their PA announcer upon moving to Colorado. A few years later, the wounds had healed, however. New owners were in charge, and Roach and the Avs began what would blossom into a now 25-year partnership. He then added the Rapids to his slate in 2015 after leaving KOA as part of a budgetary reshuffle.
In the midst of all this, Roach also served as a hockey PA announcer at the Winter Olympics from 2002 through 2018. He wasn’t interested in the 2022 games in Beijing because his favorite parts of the experience have always been sneaking in time to see other sports and explore the host city. With the COVID restrictions in Beijing, he knew that wouldn’t be possible, but Roach is hoping to return for the 2026 games in Milan, Italy.
Olympic hockey provides one of his favorite challenges. According to Roach, hockey has the most fun names to pronounce of any sport.
“You have hockey players from Latvia and the Czech Republic and Kazakhstan and Russia and Sweden and Finland, and so it's by far the most difficult and nerve-wracking," he says, "but for me, that also makes it the most fun."
Roach has also been the PA announcer at the World Cup, MLB games in London and every NFL game in London and Germany. He estimates he’s probably been the “home” announcer for almost every NFL team because of those international games.
His longtime relationship with the NFL began at an NHL All-Star Game held in Denver in 2001, when he served as the PA announcer for the weekend and met with Frank Supovitz, who was then the vice president of special events for the NHL.
Originally, Roach just asked Supovitz about the 2002 Olympics and if Supovitz would write him a letter of recommendation for that gig after seeing his work firsthand at the All-Star game. Supovitz did him one better.
“He said, ‘I want you to go home and put together your audition tape and put together your resume and make three or four copies and leave it sitting by the phone,’” Roach remembers, adding that the longtime sports executive told him to keep those copies ready to ship at a moment's notice when Supovitz called.
“I want you to put them in FedEx packages and send them out that day,” he told Roach.
A few weeks later, Roach got the call from Supovitz, and his Olympics gig was born. When Supovitz became vice president of special events for the NFL in 2005, Supovitz made Roach the Super Bowl announcer.
He did his first Super Bowl in 2006 in Detroit and has only missed three since: the two the Broncos played in during the 2014 and 2016 seasons, and the 2015 game because the NFL had expected the Broncos to make the game and found someone else to take on PA duties in anticipation.
“Because I was the PA announcer for the Broncos at that time, people in the NFL were under the impression that it would be unfair for me to be the PA announcer of a Super Bowl if the team I regularly announced for is in it,” Roach says. “I've been told since then that sentiment has changed; maybe I have proved myself to be professional enough.”
He still managed to attend the Super Bowl in 2014 as an employee for KOA, but sitting home during the action in 2015 and 2016 was a painful experience, he says.
“That was just as fun as any of the others, and, actually, a new experience for me,” Roach says of 2014. “But Super Bowl 49 and Super Bowl 50, I was miserable on Super Bowl Sunday knowing that someone else was doing the greatest job in the world and I might not ever get it back.”
Although there is no guarantee, Roach thinks he’d be allowed to announce a Super Bowl now even if the Vikings were playing in the game.
Roach's Best Super Bowl Memories as He Returns to New Orleans
Getting the call telling him he was back for 2017 felt nearly as good as getting the call to head to Detroit over a decade earlier, Roach says. That first Super Bowl is still among his top memories, especially because the Rolling Stones played the halftime show and he got to announce their appearance.The infamous helmet catch in the 2008 matchup between the New England Patriots and New York Giants also stands out to Roach. As does another Patriots moment: when the team came back from the 28-3 deficit against the Atlanta Falcons in 2017.
“There's been really amazing Super Bowl moments, and it's hard to pick favorites,” he says. “The Prince halftime show was in the second Super Bowl that I did, and, to this day, I think that's the best Super Bowl halftime show ever. Prince singing Purple Rain, in the rain, was just mesmerizing.”
This year, Roach has been in New Orleans since February 1 and began his announcing duties on February 3 as part of Super Bowl Opening Night. He says he and all the other workers who put on the show of the Super Bowl have ten-hour rehearsal days leading up to Sunday’s game to ensure the pre- and post-game ceremonies are perfect.
Though Roach is part of the biggest American sporting event each year, he estimates many more people know him for his voice on the Denver airport train announcements. In 2018, Roach almost lost the gig before Westword reported that the airport was looking to replace him, and he was able to fight to keep it.
“I think that period of time probably taught a lot of people, or made a lot more people realize, that that was actually my voice on the trains,” Roach says. “I'm sure sports fans, many of them recognized it, but I think a lot of people probably had no idea.”
He loves the anonymity of the airport train and thinks it’s great that most people still probably don’t know it’s him making the announcements. Sometimes when he’s riding the train to a flight he hears people react to his low voice or wonder aloud who he is, but he never reveals himself.
“It's crazy to think for all the events I've announced — Olympics and Super Bowls and whatever — and how many people go to those events: I think you add up all the people that have heard my voice at a sporting event, that's probably a fraction of the number of people that have heard my voice on the airport train,” he estimates.
Heading to his seventeenth Super Bowl in New Orleans, Roach still isn’t jaded. His career has reached heights he never thought possible while working for the Sky Sox in the '90s.
“I know that one day, every one of the jobs I have is going to go away,” he says. “Every single job I have is going to end the same way: ‘Roach, it's been really good having you for five years, ten years, twenty years. You've been really good, but we're going to go in a different direction.’ And until that call comes, I will continue to have all of these greatest jobs on the planet and love every minute of it.”
And we love hearing every minute of it.
