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The NBA season is finally drawing to a close, and it’s the time to put a bow on the interminable season behind us.

If you’re a features reporter and you cover the NBA as I did in the late 80’s, this is the time of year when you take stock of the season and put it into some sort of perspective. I was never one for doing things the way everyone else did. In fact, my approach was to think of the most obvious way to do something then do the opposite. So when it came time for my 1988-89 NBA year-in-review, I set aside the stats sheets and the obvious angles (Michael Jordan did this, Larry Bird did that) and brought to our TBS audience the highlights in the form of a bedtime story for my 3 year-old daughter, Lindsay.

Lindsay and I had practiced our lines and were ready to knock it out quickly and charm the audience with the cutest little year-in-review they’d ever see. I ushered the crew—two grown men she’d never seen before—into her bedroom where they set up the camera and lights. And just before Lindsay’s call to the set, I could hear her downstairs, telling my wife, “I don’t wanna do it.”

My career flashed before my eyes as we did everything we could—short of cutting her out of the will—to get her to deliver her lines. We made faces, we plied her with marshmallows, we enlisted the aid of various stuffed animals, until four hours later we had enough to work with. I felt as pushy as Brooke Shields’ mother. If I ever get Lindsay’s permission (she’s 24 now), I’ll show you some of the outtakes.

In the meantime, here’s our NBA bedtime story from 1989. Sweet dreams.

Top Chef Masters crowned a new champion this week, if you hadn’t noticed. The winning chef was from Africa, which starting today, is the continent hosting the World Cup, a celebration of what the world calls football (read: soccer).

South Africa is expecting some 350,000 visitors to their country, all of whom will eat, sleep, and breathe football (soccer). Actually, that’s just a dumb expression because try as one might, you can’t eat, sleep, or breathe anything but food, time, and air. Time and air are not problems, no matter where you are. But where to find the food that best pleases your particular palate, can be problematic for the foreign visitor unaccustomed to the culinary ways of the locals.

My advice after several trips to Africa myself: try the goat but stay away from the ugali. Be daring and do look for local flavors—something you can’t find at home (except the ugali). That’s good advice for any seasoned traveler.

So it was for my TNT crew and I when we roamed the Italian countryside in the run-up to the World Cup in 1990 looking for an authentic Italian meal that didn’t include foil-wrapped mints with our check and the words “Authentic Italian” on the menu.

Fortunately, my Turner colleague, Karen D’Uva, just happened to have family in the mountains of southern Italy and they graciously opened their home—and their kitchen—to three hungry Americans.

Hey, who’s got World Cup Fever? Neither do I. I’m more concerned about how the first-place Braves could drop two out of three to the Arizona Diamondbacks and their putrid bullpen. But that’s just me.

Apparently, all the world loves the World Cup and there’s no escaping the fusillade of stories coming out of South Africa for the next solid month. A sampling of honest-to-goodness, actual headlines so far:

“English Hooligans Arrested in Early Morning Raid” (This is before the event has even begun.)

“Greece Players Have Money Stolen From Hotel” (As if their country doesn’t have enough money problems back home.)

“Referees Learning English Swear Words” (They should hire Joe Biden as a consultant.)

My only brush with the World Cup came in 1990 when it was played in Italy. I was working for Turner Sports at the time and my assignment was to go to Italy a couple months prior to the games and bring back stories about the country. Not the games, just the people, the culture, and so on. You know, quirky stuff.

I was dispatched with my cameraman, Steve Shepard, on an itinerary of my choosing. My marching orders were along the lines of: “Go wherever you want to go, do whatever you want to do, stay as long as you want. Oh, and since Michelin is sponsoring this travelogue, you’ll have use of a Porsche convertible for part of the time.”

Once I got over the draconian restrictions, I went to work. The response was positive, for the most part. Jack Craig of the Boston Globe wrote, “Ryden’s light touch also was a consistent brightener during the World Cup telecasts on TNT. Why can’t the networks get someone like that?”

But as they say, you can’t please everyone. My favorite letter came from a viewer who, commenting on our World Cup coverage, spat, “The only possible drawback was the short travelogue done by a man who typified the very worst in an Ugly American, an image we have all been trying to overcome. He was in such bad taste, spitting out cheese, pretending it was hard to learn the word for cheese, making fun of an Italian family who took him in for dinner, etc. The coverage was more of him in a car making sappy jokes than any coverage of a wonderful country. And to think he was paid to travel all over the country. Very sad indeed, and an image we need to overcome.”

Usually, you let those kinds of letters roll off your back. But I just felt, in this case, that I had to respond. So I started, “Dear Mom…”

Actually, the letter was—wait for it—unsigned. The source of his seething rage? I can only assume it was the piece I used to wrap up my two and a half weeks in Italy. Watch the video and you be the judge:

For more insults to Italy and everything World Cup, I’ll show you a few more samples of what we did over there in upcoming posts. Please try not to hate me.

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.

The recent controversy over the perfect game in Detroit that wasn’t and the umpire’s missed call that caused it brought to mind just how hard it is to be an umpire. I know this because in 1988, while working for a show on TBS called “The Coors Sports Page,” I did a feature story on an umpire school in Florida.

The place was run by Harry Wendelstedt, the veteran umpire. The same Harry W. who incurred the wrath of a 15 year-old (me) by making what I, in my teenage wisdom, deemed a hideously bad call against my favorite team. I mean, I was watching it on a 19-inch TV and it was obviously a flawed call. Harry was three feet away. How could he possibly have missed it? Now, twenty years later, I was riding around Ormond Beach, Florida with Harry and explaining why he was wrong in 1968. He explained that he wasn’t and, since he was the umpire, he had the final word.

Besides, when I got the gear on and took the field to see what’s so hard about being an umpire, I found out. And I’m guessing Harry really did make the right call in 1968. Probably.

I didn’t get an umpiring job out of this piece, of course, but it did win me a Georgia Emmy. The funny thing is, it beat out a feature about some reporter who documented his own heart surgery. Was that the right call? What am I, an umpire?

I’ve been connected in some form or fashion to the television and video industry since 1975 so I was bound to pick up an award or two along the way. Seems like we all do. (If, after a certain number of years you haven’t won anything, I think they give you a lifetime achievement award.) My awards are sitting on my bookcase in case you ever want to come over and check them out. (Believe it or not, the folks who award the Emmys say that the statuette must be displayed facing right. Or is it left? Mine are pointing—well, I’m not saying. Wouldn’t want to violate an academy rule.)

My trophy-harvesting pretty much drew to a close in the early 90’s when I won the Cable Ace Award for “Sports Host.” It was actually the second time I’d been nominated. The first time, the awards were televised from a theater in Hollywood. Someone (I believe it was boxer Sugar Ray Leonard) read the names of the nominees and we got a camera focused on us as we sat there trying to look calm. I didn’t stand a chance, but I prepared a speech anyway. I lost to Roy Firestone of ESPN, and the world was deprived of a terribly witty speech, none of which I can remember.

The following year, the Sports Host category was part of the ceremonies at a ballroom in Beverly Hills two nights before the televised event. Instead of broadcasting the whole thing, they were going to tape just the acceptance speeches and play portions of them during the main event two nights later.

Against all odds and some pretty tough competition, I won for “Best Sports Host,” and made my way backstage to deliver my acceptance speech. I hit all the right notes including an amusing anecdote about my early days in the business and shout-outs to God and my wife.

Two days later, I was watching the Ace Awards show on TV when they came to the portion of the show they called “The Great Friday Celebration.” (Not great enough to be live, apparently, but still pretty great. I certainly wasn’t complaining.) There was a two-minute montage of the winners getting their awards. The speeches must not have been all that riveting since all they used was an occasional, “This is terrific,” or “This is great.” The little segment wrapped up with me, of all people. And what did they use? A shot of me holding my award and saying, “Don’t worry, folks. I never heard of me either.”

A pretty good line, I think, that I stole from my dear friend and colleague, Gerald Bryant. Actually, if you watched enough TV back in the 80’s and 90’s, there’s a chance you may have seen me and might have even known my name. But you certainly saw only a tiny fraction of what I experienced along this circuitous career path.

That’s why I’m starting this blog. It’s not my take on current events or random thoughts about what I believe and why you should too. It’s just amusing stories in no particular order from the life of a guy who always wanted to be on TV, got there, and had some amusing experiences along the way.
So stay tuned.