A note before we start: this is a personal tribute, not reporting and not medical advice. Where I talk about how a fall can turn deadly, I’m speaking generally about midlife health — not making any claim about what happened to Stacey King. As of this writing, his cause of death has not been officially determined.
I was not ready for the news when I heard it
I saw it on my phone yesterday and I actually said “no” out loud. Ronald Stacey King – gone at 59 years old. The Bulls announced on Sunday that he had died, and early reports said he had been found at his home after a fall.
The shock came first, the way it does. Then about a minute later, the sadness landed and it was heavier than I was ready for — because 59 is not old.
59 is a guy who should have had another twenty years of yelling “Gimme the hot sauce” into a microphone. 59 is close enough to where a lot of us are sitting right now that it stops feeling like sports news and starts feeling personal.
If you’re a Bulls fan of a certain age, you already know exactly what I mean. Stacey King wasn’t just an announcer. For about two decades — through some genuinely bad, occasionally unwatchable basketball — he was the reason a lot of us kept the TV on anyway.
First, the player nobody quite remembers right
Here’s the thing younger fans miss: before the catchphrases, Stacey could actually play. The Bulls drafted him sixth overall in the 1989 NBA Draft, a big man out of Oklahoma who’d been an absolute monster in college. At OU under Billy Tubbs, Stacey averaged 26.0 points, 10.1 rebounds and 2.3 blocks his senior year, was a consensus First-Team All-American, Big Eight Player of the Year, and the Sporting News College Player of the Year in 1989. He finished as one of the Sooners’ all-time leading scorers and took the 1988 team all the way to the national title game. They retired his No. 33 in Norman in 2008.
In the pros, he was a role player — and that’s not an insult, that was his job especially coming onto a team with championship aspirations. He came off the bench for three straight championship teams in Chicago (1991, 1992, 1993), playing next to Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, doing the unglamorous work that title teams need. As a rookie he played all 82 games.
Later, he bounced around Minnesota, Miami, Dallas and Boston before his playing days wound down. Three rings is three rings. Most Hall of Famers never get one.
But the broadcaster is who we’ll actually miss
Stacey took over as the Bulls’ full-time TV analyst in 2006, stepping into the chair left by the late Johnny “Red” Kerr — no small thing in the city of Chicago. And he turned it into something all his own. He won an Emmy. He stayed nearly twenty years, all the way through last season.
What made him work is that he sounded like us. Not a polished broadcaster reading the room — a fan who happened to have the best seat in the house and a hot mic. When something good happened, he lost it the same way you did on your couch.
The calls became their own language. “Gimme the hot sauce.” “Too big, too strong, too fast, too good,” which became Derrick Rose’s personal theme music. “Let me step back and kiss myself.” He handed out nicknames like candy — the Windy City Assassin, Lieutenant Deng, the White Mamba. A whole generation grew up repeating them.
My favorite, though — the one I’d put in a time capsule — is the Derrick Rose dunk on Goran Dragic. January 2010, out in Phoenix, Rose came flying down the lane and put Dragic on a poster that still gets passed around fifteen years later.
Maybe as a Bulls fan, I thought this was the open window of a potential championship run. We had an MVP-caliber superstar and an announcer to go along with it.
That call was pure, unhinged joy: Stacey basically demanded to know whether the rest of the league had gotten the memo that D-Rose could go up there, and then yelled at someone to go check on Dragic. It’s all over the internet. Go watch it. You’ll smile and then you’ll feel a little worse, in that order.
And before all of that, there was the banter. I still remember Stacey and Bill Cartwright during the championship parades — two enormous men needling each other in front of the whole city, that easy chemistry that only comes from guys who actually liked each other. He was woven into the good years and then he carried us through the lean ones.
The part that’s been sitting with me
He was a beacon during some of the darkest, most pointless Bulls seasons of the last two decades. On nights when the basketball gave you nothing, Stacey King gave you a reason to laugh. That’s a real gift, and I don’t think we appreciated it enough while we had it.
Which brings me to the thing I can’t shake. A fall. Fifty-nine.
I’m not going to pretend to know what happened to him, because nobody publicly does yet. But here’s what’s true for all of us in our 40s and 50s, and it’s worth saying plainly: a fall at this age is not the cartoonish wipeout it was at twenty-five.
Around midlife, the dominoes can run in any direction. Sometimes something happens first — a cardiac event, an aneurysm, a syncopal event — and the fall is the result. Sometimes the fall comes first, the head hits, and a bleed starts that you can’t see and don’t feel until it’s serious. A
nd the medications a lot of us are quietly on by this age — blood thinners are the obvious one — can turn what should’ve been a bad bruise into something far worse, because the body can’t shut the bleeding down on its own.
None of that is a diagnosis of Stacey King. It’s just the uncomfortable math of being the age we are. The margin for error gets thinner whether we acknowledge it or not.
The numbers, if you want them
His NBA career: 8 seasons, 438 games, 6.4 points and 3.3 rebounds a night, shooting 47.8% from the field — and three championships. Full line at Basketball-Reference.
His college career at Oklahoma: 114 games, 17.6 points and 7.2 rebounds a game on 51.6% shooting, with that monster senior season on top. The full record is at Sports-Reference (College Basketball).
Do the thing he’d probably tell you to do
I don’t have a clean ending for this one, because there isn’t one. A guy who made losing seasons fun is gone at fifty-nine, and that’s just sad.
So, I’ll say the useful thing instead. If you’re somewhere in the midlife window like me, go book the annual physical you keep pushing. Get the bloodwork. Do the screenings your doctor keeps mentioning — blood pressure, cholesterol, colonoscopy, and the other age-appropriate ones you’ve been “getting to.” If you’re on a medication like a blood thinner, ask your doctor specifically about fall risks and what to do if you hit your head. None of it is exciting. All of it buys you margin.
Rest in Peace, Stacey King. Thanks for staying after the games. Thanks for the hot sauce.
Health disclaimer: This article is a personal tribute and a general reminder about preventive care. It is not medical advice and does not describe Stacey King’s actual cause of death, which had not been officially determined at the time of writing. Nothing here should replace a conversation with a qualified healthcare provider. If you have concerns about your own health, medications, or fall risk, talk to your doctor.
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