Mike Joy Biography

Mike Joy (Michael Joy)  (born November 25, 1949) is an American TV sports announcer and former politician who currently serves as the lap-by-lap voice of Fox Sports’ coverage of NASCAR.

His color analysts are Darrell Waltrip and Jeff Gordon. Counting 2019, Joy has been part of the live broadcast of 40 Daytona 500s, (7 for MRN Radio, 17 for CBS and 16 for FOX.) He also serves as Velocity/Discovery Channel’s expert analyst for their coverage of collector car auctions.

Mike Joy Age

Joy was born on November 25, 1949, in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. She is 69 years old as of 2018.

Mike Joy Family

Joy was born in Chicago, Illinois to Vern Joy and Jean Peters Joy, the oldest of their four children. He was raised in Windsor, Connecticut.

Mike Joy Education

Joy graduated from West Hartford, Connecticut’s Conard High School.

Mike Joy Relationship | Marriage | Children

Joy currently resides near Winston-Salem, North Carolina with his wife Gaye. They have two children in college. He restores vintage MGs and retains his New England roots as CEO and equity partner in New England Racing Fuel Inc., distributor of Sunoco Race Fuels.

Mike Joy Career

His career began as a public address announcer at Riverside Park Speedway in Agawam, Mass., in 1970 while attending the University of Hartford and then Emerson College.

He added Thompson Speedway in 1972 and in 1975 began working at Stafford Motor Speedway in Connecticut, joining Jack Arute, Jr., the son of the track owner, establishing the track as a hotbed for announcers.

Announcing five nights per week, he was noticed by Motor Racing Network (MRN) co-founder Ken Squier. MRN hired him as a freelancer in 1975, then full-time in late 1978, working weekdays in marketing for Daytona International Speedway.

He rose to co-anchor, general manager and executive producer of MRN in January 1980. In 1981, he was the lead broadcaster for ESPN’s first live NASCAR telecast in that November’s Atlanta Journal 500 at Atlanta International Raceway.

CBS Sports and The Nashville Network (1983–2000)

In June 1983, Joy became a pit reporter for CBS’ coverage, working with Ken Squier and Ned Jarrett. Since CBS didn’t broadcast many races, he also continued to broadcast for MRN.

Joy also launched The Nashville Network’s NASCAR coverage in 1991, as a lap-by-lap announcer, continuing through 1995, and also participated in live NASCAR coverage on TBS. When NASCAR went to Indy, Joy anchored the IMS Radio Network live coverage from the first Brickyard 400 in 1994 through 1998.

Joy was one of the first announcers to embrace the Internet. In 1997, he encouraged Usenet and Jayski readers to e-mail TV coverage suggestions that he could present in a CBS seminar. A member of many Usenet newsgroups, he read them for preparation for broadcasts.

In 1998, after 15 years on pit road, CBS Sports made Joy their lap-by-lap announcer with Ken Squier becoming the studio host, where the pair worked until the end of 2000 when CBS lost the rights to televise NASCAR racing.

Joy’s CBS career included most major forms of American motorsports for television: Formula One, CART, IRL, and drag racing, as well as coverage of college football, the Winter Olympics, the Sun Bowl, harness racing’s Hambletonian, Pro Beach Volleyball and World Cup Skiing, plus NCAA championship events in soccer, gymnastics, swimming and diving, track and field, lacrosse and wrestling.

Fox Sports (1998–present)

Mike joined Fox Sports in 1998 to become the lead announcer of Formula One coverage on Fox Sports Net, with Derek Bell as expert analyst. For the 2001 season, he moved full-time to Fox with the NASCAR TV package. Joy has teamed with Hall of Fame driver Darrell Waltrip, former crew chief Larry McReynolds and (since 2016) NASCAR champion driver Jeff Gordon to form the network’s broadcast team.

The 2019 Daytona 500 will mark his 19th as lead TV race announcer, and the 41st Daytona Speedweeks in which he has been part of live broadcast coverage. He is a charter member of the prestigious NASCAR Hall of Fame Voting Panel, and in December 2013, was named sole media representative to the Hall’s exclusive Nominating Committee.

Fox broadcasts the Daytona 500 and the first 16 NASCAR Cup races each season, plus two all-star events. Joy also anchors NASCAR Cup coverage on Fox-owned cable networks Fox Sports 1 (FS1), formerly Speed. Four weeks every year, Joy brought extensive knowledge of collector cars to the Barrett-Jackson auction block as lead analyst for Fox Sports’ live auction coverage.

His unscripted commentary mixes detailed knowledge of the cars and their specs with a first-hand recall of how cars of the 1950s to 1970s were viewed back in their day. When the TV rights moved to Velocity/Discovery beginning in 2015, Joy was the first talent Discovery hired to lead their broadcast team, continuing in the same role on loan from Fox.

In September 2008, Fox sent Joy to call a Minnesota Twins/Tampa Bay Rays Major League Baseball game, in which the Rays clinched their first-ever playoff appearance. Joy was voted the 2011 recipient of the Henry T McLemore Award. Presented since 1969, this award celebrates career excellence in motorsports journalism and is voted on by past winners.

The International Motorsports Hall of Fame presents the Award at its annual induction ceremony, and the hall displays a wall of plaques honoring the winners. He is a member and past vice-president of the National Motorsports Press Association.

In March 2014, a Sporting News poll named Joy first among network television’s 15 NASCAR announcers and analysts with a 93% approval rating. In 2015, Joy, Waltrip, and McReynolds completed 15 years together, the longest tenure of any three-man announcing booth in US network sports television history.

Beginning 2016, four-time NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon joined Joy and Waltrip in the FOX-TV booth, with McReynolds moving to a new role as race strategist and rules analyst. Joy is very active on social media; his twitter handle is @mikejoy500. He engages in many automotive web forums, from El Camino to MG to Ford GT, usually using the screen name “200mph”.

Mike Joy Net Worth

Joy is an American TV sports announcer who has a net worth of $14 million.

Mike Joyce Tvg

Get to Know TVG Analyst Mike Joyce

Mike Joyce works as a host, handicapper, and reporter for horse racing TV network TVG. The Southern California resident grew up in the Chicago area and graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder. Get to know him and his thoughts on horse racing, sports, and life in the fun Q&A below.

What I do for a living: I wear makeup and talk about horses running in circles. What I like about Thoroughbred racing: When I was in college my roommate was an avid mountaineer. He had a framed poster of K2, the world’s most difficult climb and a more sought-after trophy in the Karakoram range than Mount Everest. The caption beneath stated quite matter-of-factly: “If you have to ask why then you’ll never understand.”

That’s horse racing to its dedicated fans. Its draw is inimitable to the point of being impossible to describe. Going to the track every day could never be replaced. If I wasn’t in my current job, I would be a: Stooper. Best advice to someone considering becoming a Thoroughbred owner: Partner up and take advantage of state-bred programs. California particularly has great incentives for Cal-breeds.

Should the Breeders’ Cup rotate from coast to coast or have a permanent home? Rotate. The Super Bowl doesn’t sit still and I’d love to see it at Belmont again. My top three favorite racetracks in order: Ruidoso Downs, Del Mar, Hollywood Park Most influential person in my career: My dad. My out-of-the-box idea for Thoroughbred racing: Fire everyone in charge and replace them with Jim Miller.

Other sports/teams I follow: Cubs would be No. 1, Bears, Blackhawks and Bulls all vying for No. 2. My favorite athletes of all time: Michael Jordan, Walter Payton, Steve Rothblum What book(s) I am reading or have recently read: “The Gathering Storm” by Winston Churchill

Favorite magazines: Vanity Fair

Hobbies away from Thoroughbred racing: Smoking cigars, downing martinis, tasting wine, and chauffeuring my children around the LBC (not all at once). Favorite movies: There are dozens … the original “Star Wars” and everything it spawned. “The Producers,” the original version with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. “It’s A Wonderful Life.” I could go on.

Favorite TV shows I watch: “Trackside Live,” “PTI” and the Cubs game. Favorite foods: I clearly don’t discriminate. Favorite vacation spot: Tough one here, I love Bermuda but have only been there once. I love the mountains and miss my ski towns. Jackson Hole, Wyo., would have to be No. 1. Favorite musician/band: Primus Favorite actor: George Sanders

Five websites I visit daily: TVG.com, ThoroGraph, DRF, and TVG.com and Thorograph and lather, rinse, repeat. I’d like to have dinner with the following three people inside racing: Sam the Bugler, Emeritus, Frank Lyons, Her Majesty the Queen I’d like to have dinner with the following three people outside of racing: Theo Epstein, the late Christopher Hitchens (Can we go dead here?), Dave Attell

Mike Joy Nascar

Fox’s Mike Joy: NASCAR races would disappear if TV coverage didn’t have advertisers

Is NASCAR team sponsors paying television broadcasts for ad space the key to NASCAR’s continued existence? Fox’s Mike Joy certainly thinks so. Wednesday, Joy curiously tweeted that companies who sponsor NASCAR teams and cars but don’t pay for advertising on Fox were getting “free exposure” from the network.

The concept of “free exposure” for a paying sponsor is laughably untrue given that companies like M&Ms, Ally, Smithfield and others pay what they do to sponsor teams in the Cup Series because the races are televised. Independent of any additional television advertising purchases, companies would be paying far, far less to sponsor a NASCAR team if races were not on TV. Joy then doubled-down when a user pointed out that a team paying to sponsor a car in a televised race is, in fact, not getting free exposure.

Fox and NBC paying NASCAR over $2B

While some teams are scraping together sponsorship wherever they can, NASCAR and tracks are still relatively healthy because of the financial commitment Fox and NBC have made to the series. The two networks are in the middle of a $2.4 billion deal with NASCAR that runs through 2024.

Fox and NBC obviously have to make money through advertising to make that deal worth it for them, especially in the face of the Cup Series’ declining television ratings. Most, if not all, NASCAR fans understand that sponsor revenue is important to teams, tracks, and television networks.

But — possibly because of that deal’s daunting commitment — Joy has the order of importance incredibly backward. Sponsors are far more important to the product itself and its participants, not the product’s broadcasters. Fox and NBC are paying what they are to sponsor NASCAR because of the product, a product that’s enhanced by multi-million dollar team sponsors. If teams are forced to scale back or shut down because of a lack of sponsorship, the on-track product suffers. And so does Fox’s broadcast.

In the crazy world where there is no production because of a lack of team and car sponsors, there is no race for Fox to broadcast. It’s that simple. While Joy (and potentially others at Fox) would argue that a sponsor should spend significantly on both a team sponsorship and a television ad buy with the network, it’s better for the product itself if a sponsor instead spends all of that money with the team in the goal of running up front more often and, in turn, getting more TV time. There’s a reason why Fox’s strongarm attempt to get team sponsors to pony up for network advertising in 2001 hilariously failed.

If, as Joy contends, Fox had to get out of the racing broadcast business because companies chose not to invest in in-race commercials and sponsor plugs, NASCAR would survive. The television deal would be assuredly be reworked at a lower rate with a different television network or streaming service because there’s still a relatively sizeable weekly audience that watches the product.

That lower rate would impact teams as well as tracks and NASCAR itself. But NASCAR teams get just 25 percent of the series’ TV revenue through the race and end-of-season purse money. Direct sponsorship is and would still be the primary source of income for teams in a slimmed-down series.

And besides, there are hundreds of auto races held every summer weekend across North America that aren’t televised. Believe it or not, racing can and does exist without television coverage. And NASCAR has — and still would — exist if there was no television coverage of its top levels.

While TV has played a pivotal role in the growth of NASCAR from a regional to national series, that coverage only exists because of the demand that NASCAR generated in the first place. The platform was provided for the product. The product was not provided for the platform. Everyone should realize that.

Mike Joy Photo

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