Tuesday, 9th January. London has a quiet chill in the air, as the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers touch down ahead of their encounter at the O2 Arena two days later.Marc Zumoff, for 24 years and counting the television voice of the Sixers, is well-versed in being prepared for different scenarios and correctly predicted the conditions on arrival. He is wrapped up in a thick grey scarf, matching bobble hat and long black coat. Jet-lagged but always on the job, he posts a video to his Twitter account in front of the Grosvenor Hotel, happily reacquainted with his neighbour Hyde Park.Zumoff has visited the city before, but not as a social media tour guide and spearhead of the Sixers broadcast.London is about to host its eighth regular season game and the abundance of star power, coupled with the Celtics sitting atop the Eastern Conference, means anticipation has never been higher. Between now and the game, both teams will practice twice, and for Zumoff, his work has just begun.

Before venturing out properly, he double-checks that he has his headset with him, the same one he’s used on television his entire career and always the one possession he checks twice for before any departure.

With it safely stowed, he steps out into the grim day. His second video post, adeptly shot using a selfie stick, sees the Philadelphia native strolling through what he calls ‘a rather fancy neighbourhood’ - it’s Mayfair, so he’d be right - before stopping at an “intersection” at South Audley Street and Mount Street. Between them is a pub called The Audley, a ten minute walk from the US Embassy and the location for our meeting that same evening.

NBA broadcasters are interesting characters. They are friends of the fans, solid company for living rooms across the United States and other parts of the world. They are almost always travelling, hanging out in four-star hotels and the first to have access to players and coaches at practices. They prepare for the high volume of broadcasts in their own unique way, a stage which is to them a television show, not just a game. It is in these circumstances that Zumoff has flown across the Atlantic to spend three days in a different country, and intends to get the most out of it, for himself and those who will be tuning in.

After an afternoon in the city, he has been to Buckingham Palace, St James’s Park and Big Ben, shocked to discover that the latter was surrounded by scaffolding. He got talking to a woman nearby who told him the batteries were being changed and it would look like that for four more years. Maybe the Sixers will return.

By evening time, the coat and scarf have been ditched as he strolls through The Audley, where he has kindly laid on a food spread and opened a bar tab for his three British guests - all diehard Sixer fans - his videographer Christina, and myself.

The first thing to note is, when greeting Zumoff, don’t hold out a hand. This friendly guy leads with a hug.

“Give me some love”, he says.

Having known him for just five seconds, it already feels like we are old friends who haven’t caught up for years.

Zumoff is part working, part networking, part relaxing. As part of his contract with NBC Sports Philadelphia, he hosts a podcast called ‘Zoo’s Views’. A month ago, his guest was David Simmons, the father of Ben, but today the aforementioned Sixers fans step in - Frankie Ody, a primary school teacher; her father Rob, a PE teacher; and Robert Covell, a freelance photographer. They all live in London and find themselves in a rare spot, sharing a space with fellow Sixers fans who don’t have an American accent.

The trio are all here to be interviewed by Zumoff about how they discovered the team. Frankie tells me, in short, that Allen Iverson is to thank for that. Most of Philadelphia’s games tip off at midnight in the UK, but that doesn’t prevent these mad locals listening to Zumoff’s call before sneaking in a brief five hours of kip before work.

Right now they are in the same room - and time zone - as the man himself.

With nachos and wings covering the table, their conversation flows naturally, as Zumoff glommed to Sixers basketball as much as anyone.

“As far back as I can remember, I was a Sixers fan”, he says.

“I go back to the first year of the team when the franchise moved from Syracuse in 1963. My father took me to a game the first year the team was in Philadelphia; it was a dark old dingy arena, there would have been three or four thousand fans, the players wore short satin shorts. I don’t think there was any TV, maybe some radio.”

Just imagine - Zumoff’s industry didn’t exist when he was cheering his one and only team on all those years ago.

Zumoff attended Temple University, located in the Cecil B. Moore neighbourhood of Philadelphia, where he announced the school’s American football and basketball games. Sitting at a corner table, surrounded by locals digesting another work day, Zumoff reveals his broadcasting debut.

“It’s hard to imagine today, but when I was much younger there weren’t as many television channels as there are now”, he says.

“You could turn the sound down and do play-by-play into your tape recorder, but there might only be one or two games a week. To get around this I would come home and literally make games up in my head, spicing it up by going to my television, finding a channel where there was no broadcast signal and just static, and that static sounded like the crowd. I would regulate it in the background and when the Sixers would score a basket, I would crank it up and it would sound like fans cheering.

“Even stuff like that, which sounds kind of silly and childish, helps you to build upon your career to the point where you can eventually become a professional.”

That he did. From static crowds to humans in the flesh, Zumoff is at this point 48 hours from announcing an international game, and it’s this country’s national sport that, ironically, gave him his start.

“My first exposure to television sportscasting was doing indoor soccer, but of course I also loved the outdoor game. Currently, even as I do the Sixers, our league, the MLS, operates in the summer and I will fill in on occasion if the Philadelphia Union announcer can’t make the game.”

So who does he support?

“I’m a Spurs fan, because of the Jewish connection.”

Zumoff speaks happily about their recent FA Cup victory over AFC Wimbledon, and when three locals overhear the conversation they begin singing Wimbledon songs. One might say he is now firmly in the middle of British culture. That leads the Sixers fans present to tell Zumoff the story of Wimbledon’s fall and now rise back into the Football League, and all of a sudden, British traditions stemming from relegation to cockney rhyming slang are top of the menu.

“What did you say? Loaf of bread?”

That’s Zumoff, reacting to Rob’s ‘use your loaf’ line as he describes - in an east London accent no less - that it means to ‘use your brain’. Networking suddenly switches to working, the multi-award winning broadcaster now mentally stowing the local phrases so that he can float them into the game on Thursday if he so chooses.

“Will Ben Simmons use his loaf with a pass? Who knows!”, he laughs.

Zumoff, who says he is absolutely a bigger basketball fan because of his job, never stops preparing for games. He is constantly ingesting information, from trawling websites and attending practices to chatting with coaches. When he gets back to his monitor, he will input all of this onto a colour-coded Excel spreadsheet.

“It has different blocks with spaces for the players and the coaches and what not”, he says.

“The object of putting all that information on the sheet is so it goes into your head and then when the camera comes on, you have so much information, it’s kind of rolling around in your head so to speak and you can talk glibly about it as you’re describing the action. The preparation itself is constant, but on a gameday it’s anywhere from three to four hours specifically.”

If he forgets anything, there’s still plenty left over in the reserve tank.

“82 games can be a grind, so you almost have to entertain yourself sometimes. So, the Sixers aren’t trying to ‘stop a basket’, they’re trying to ‘lock all windows and doors’. Or, it’s not an ‘offensive rebound and a put back’, it’s ‘turning garbage into gold’.”

The Sixers didn’t do much of that in the second half of their defeat to the Celtics on this occasion, ultimately blowing a 22-point lead to lose 114-103 and return home under .500. The team is clearly improving under the leadership of Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons and J.J. Redick, but it hasn’t always been that way for Zumoff.

“Certainly the last three or four years have been trying because the team hasn’t been good. My boss always says that ‘you’re not doing a game, you’re doing a television show’, so if you think about it that way you’re taking a two-and-a-half hour time block and doing what you can to entertain and inform people no matter what the team may be doing. You figure out different angles, you figure out ways to observe the opponent and you try to come up with smaller stories about players as individuals, about some incremental improvements they’re making.

“Now of course the team are very hot, they’re very popular and starting to win, so my job is a lot easier.”

As the evening continues, Zumoff finally orders himself his first pint of beer. It might be the only chance he gets, so he cherishes it well. We get onto discussing his colour analyst, Alaa Abdelnaby, a retired Egyptian-American basketball player who represented five NBA teams including the Sixers in 1995.

“We’ve built a sense of trust. We like each other, I know what he likes to speak about, he knows what I like to speak about. My job is almost like a point guard in basketball where I’m passing, I’m setting him up, and the objective is to make him look good.

“After a while you develop chemistry, where it becomes almost like two guys sitting in a pub watching a game, and you’re talking about it. That’s the illusion we strive to achieve on television.”

That illusion is now a reality in The Audley. If you shut your eyes, you may as well be watching League Pass. He speaks with a thoughtfulness and calm, every answer a well-considered sentence for fear of selling the question short. He admits that the 2001 Sixers, who lost to the Lakers 4-1 in the Finals, are the best team he has covered, and that Phoenix, Los Angeles and Chicago currently offer the best press food.

“There are some cities you know you are going to skip the meal and that popcorn is going to be your dinner that night”, he quips.

_

All nights must end, of course, as Zumoff well knows. If you are listening to one of the Sixers’ broadcasts and the contest ends dramatically in Philadelphia’s favour, you’ll no doubt hear the great Zumoff cry ‘Yes!’

“I won’t say that I stole it, but Marv Albert is very famous for his ‘yes!’”, he says.

It’s a natural reaction, no other exclamation coming to mind. Zumoff is, after all, a fan first, and he loves basketball as much as anybody.

Professional yet passionate, that might be the best way to describe him.

“Coming over to Britain, interviewing Sixer fans who live here in London, it makes me love the game even more and feel that much better about it.

“Basketball is, was and shall remain my first and most important love.”