Hair was used to sweep out booth after each game.
I just finished reading Pete Van Wieren’s engaging page-turner, Of Mikes and Men, his memoirs of 30-plus years as the voice of the Atlanta Braves. It reminded me, with every page, how much I had wanted to be a play-by-play announcer when I was a kid. I wanted to do play-by-play in the worst way. And that’s pretty much how I did it.
Well, maybe I’m being a little hard on myself. I wasn’t that bad. The station let me keep calling football and baseball games, after all, but then they may have never heard me on air. That, in itself, was a challenge since KSJS-FM was not a 50,000 watt blowtorch but an 85 watt sparkler, the signal dribbling off the transmitter which was located—no exaggeration—170 feet below sea level.
But we prepared as if play-by-play were our true calling. (For one of my broadcasting partners, it was. Pat Hughes went on to replace Harry Caray as the voice of the Chicago Cubs.) We learned how to connect phone lines and run a remote board. We kept stats and did interviews. We put together production manuals and read disclaimers and public service announcements. And occasionally we called the action for whomever was listening—sometimes with the colorful turning of a phrase a la Vin Scully, sometimes, not so much.
“Next pitch. Lined into right center, left center field, that may fall in there for a base hit, it doesn’t! Center fielder’s there to grab it for the out.” That call sounded as if the game were being played during a tornado. Yet, that was my call—verbatim—of a routine fly out in the Santa Clara-San Jose State game thirty-six years ago.
But there was always football, a very linear sport with action moving from left to right and right to left. Taskmasters that they were, station management expected us to keep track of everything, even game situations.
Our big game every year was the match with Stanford, a team of glandular student-athletes that annually used San Jose State as pre-conference fodder before starting their regular season schedule. But in 1974, the Spartans brought their A game to Stanford and had the Pacific-8 powerhouse on the ropes from the outset. I was behind the mike as the Spartans drove toward their goal, chewing up yardage against the mighty Stanford defense. They drew within striking distance and a possible first down in a game where every score could mean the difference in the outcome. Breathless, I leaned forward for a better look.
“They’re going to measure to see if they got the first down,” I shouted .
The officials indicated that the Spartans were inches shy of a first down and the team retreated to its huddle. As they broke out and headed to the line of scrimmage, it was clear there would be no punt, no field goal attempt.
“They’re going for it! They’re going for the first down!” I gushed, fairly falling all over myself. That is, until I glanced up at the scoreboard and saw that it was second down.
“I guess they would go for it,” I sheepishly reported.
By late in the fourth quarter Pat Hughes and I had settled in for the big finish for a game that remained surprisingly close. With the game tied at 21, KSJS listeners heard, “Cordova with Ostrum and Laidlaw the backs split behind him. The give to Ostrum, can’t find—”
Then the sound of a telephone hanging up.
Then a dial tone.
The phone in the our booth—the phone that was connected to the board sending the signal to the station twenty miles away—had somehow gotten disconnected. I was in the midst of the most exciting moment of my nascent broadcasting career, and back at home base the program was being euthanized.
Twenty seconds into the crashing and burning, the disc jockey back at the station broke the silence with the astute observation that, “I don’t know what has happened.” So in his best California-laid-back, mellowed-out, 70’s FM disc jockey voice, he said, “I’ll put on some Brian Auger for you as we try to find out what happened.” Appropriate, since in aviation terms, to “auger in” means to crash nose first.
So it was Brian Auger who finished the game for KSJS “listeners,” and neither Pat nor myself were heard from again till school the following Monday morning.
Twenty-one months later, I began my television career.
Note hand-written graphics and embellished résumé.