running the show. I just sat back and ran with it.
I did the pre-game show that lasted for a half an hour before the match began. If you think eight seconds to have an arena go dark is an eternity, let me tell you, 30 minutes, minus two, two-minute commercial breaks, is a very long time. I took my portable cassette tape recorder and sat down to interview Carl McGown about one hour before the pre-game show was about to begin … and like every man or women who have ever been a head coach, McGown just loved talking about his team and the sport of Volleyball. He was glowing and loved the fact that his sport was going out over the local airways. Everything about college sports is local, local, local. Every coach wants his/her match to be available to his/her local community first and foremost. In the case of Carl McGown, this meant that his Athletic Director could be in his car driving to the local grocery store for a loaf of bread and a carton of milk and could listen to the BYU Volleyball match - live. It meant the entire BYU and Utah Valley community could listen to the match live. The radio medium, although clearly dwarfed by television, is still a powerful media tool.
And the fact that this was the first time NCAA Men’s Volleyball had ever been broadcast in America, Carl McGown simply loved the fact that he was a test rabbit.
He kept calling me “Ruffie” during the pre-game interview. I just let that go. I’ve always been a good interviewer and tapped into those skills to really hone in on McGown’s players. Mostly I just wanted to keep McGown talking to fill in the time. He was gushing praise for his players as every coach will. Lots of positive feelings. In Carl McGown, a man that I have always respected and held deep admiration for, I held a great swelling of pride to be associated with his program. With the interview over and with cassette tape in hand, I walked back to press row where Bob was reading through his notes. I handed him the tape and he listened to the opening that I just cut. He liked it and put it in his cassette tape machine that was hooked up to his audio board. Bob’s older brother, Dan, was over at the KSRR station and was producing the show with Bob and myself locked in place at Smith Fieldhouse. With the McGown interview, the 25 minutes or so that I had to fill was cut by a good 13 minutes. Thank God. So by the time I reached the end of the show, I passed the microphone over to Bob who began his opening remarks.
Me?
I made a beeline for the nearest bathroom.
Then I threw up in the sink.
***
Like everyone else in America who has never heard play-by-play of Volleyball on radio, I was in awe of Bob McGregor. Words like “Stuff Block”, “Ace Serve” and “Deuce” now became common-place and stuck in my lexicon forever. Bob was riveted to the action on the court and I kept feeding him with statistics. For this first NCAA Volleyball radio broadcast we worked pretty well together. Actually we were great. We started to gel on the air and even though the USC Trojans crushed the BYU Cougars, I still got in a 30-minute post-game show in, including a live interview with Carl McGown. I went home the next morning to Los Angeles and it was another two weeks before I flew back to Salt Lake City, rented a car and made the one hour drive south to the BYU Campus. I didn’t mind the commute from California as I was earning a ton of frequent flyer mileage from the airline tickets that Bob was buying for me on Delta Air Lines. It was quickly beginning to become a routine: flying up to Provo on a Thursday morning for a broadcast that night and then another on Saturday night before going back to California on Sunday morning.
And to be honest, I was starting to get better on the air and started to enjoy the communication medium of radio. You have to think of radio like speaking into a box to someone far away. You have no idea who is on the other end of the line listening to you. It could be 10 people or it could be 1,000. You have to lose your fear of that. Fear has no place in your world when you are broadcasting sports. If I did, I would be sitting on the toilet during the entire match. By my third trip to Provo, I started to push Bob to split the play-by-play duties with me. I wanted a crack at it and he didn’t seem to mind. He took over the pre-game and post-game shows duties and with Volleyball played the best three of five games. I took the play-by-play of games one and three and Bob did game two which gave me a chance to run to the bathroom and pee. It was probably that first broadcast that I found … joy. Let me be honest to say that I was really into the groove of it and Bob and I were playing off each other very well. Whenever he would want to add something and I was riveted to calling the action on the court, he would put his hand on my shoulder which was his cue that he wanted to chime in. Immediately, I would finish my thought and motion with a pen or a hand cue back to Bob for him to make his comments.
We were really in sync.
Our duo lasted until the end of the regular season and that was it as the Cougars didn’t qualify for the WIVA Championship Tournament hosted that year at University of California at Irvine.
With the 5,000 seat Bren Events Center located about 10 minutes from my Irvine apartment in Orange County, I called the league commissioner, Bob Newcomb, to see if I could get a complimentary ticket to see the finals. Bob had been at BYU’s opening night’s men’s Volleyball match with Pepperdine the previous year and I made a contact with him. You know when life is in sync when you call someone who then says, “I was just thinking about you. Well, Newcomb said the same to me as he had, that very same morning, received a telephone call from the Rainbow Sports Radio Network in Honolulu. The Rainbow Warrior Men’s Volleyball team of the University of Hawaii had qualified for the WIVA Final Four and the Hawaii radio network was looking for someone to broadcast the Rainbow Men’s Volleyball match at UC Irvine on live radio back to Honolulu. Newcomb gave me the telephone number of David Iverson, owner of the network that had its corporate office in Seattle.
Iverson’s radio production company not only handled all of the Hawaii radio broadcasts but also that of Washington State where he himself served as the radio play-by-play voice for the Cougar football program.
Throughout the previous BYU Volleyball radio season and being a journalist by trade and a PR man by design, I hammered out press releases to not only the local Utah media about the Cougar Volleyball radio broadcasts but to the entire American print media marketplace. I’m pretty crazy about this. This press release, e-mail blitz also included all of the US-based Volleyball media and each of the media markets in the WIVA such as Los Angeles, San Diego and Honolulu. Because of the novelty of play-by-play Volleyball on radio, many newspapers wrote stories about Bob and myself, including the Honolulu Star Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser - which both of Bob and I had a local connection with – mine originating in Laie and Bob’s in Hilo.
Iverson was well aware of my broadcasting activities of the BYU Men’s Volleyball program and immediately, I was hired to broadcast, live back to Honolulu, the Rainbows’ competition in the WIVA finals.
Okay, now I need to explain what attending a NCAA Men’s Volleyball match is like in Hawaii.
Take a mixing bowl and add these ingredients:
•The showmanship of the Rolling Stones in concert
•The power of Elvis Presley singing “Suspicious Minds” live in Honolulu in 1973, and
•Sprinkle in the most passionate sports fans in America - and mix liberally!
This doesn't even come close to what the fanatical Volleyball fans the Hawaiians are. By the thousands, fans will flock to Honolulu International Airport and welcome home the Men’s and Wahine (Women’s) teams from key mainland or NCAA National Championship victories. In the islands, Volleyball players are treated and feted like royalty, even more so than football or basketball players. All of the University of Hawaii home Volleyball matches are carried live on the multi-station Rainbow Sports Radio Network with affiliate stations on each of the four neighbor islands; Kauai, Maui, Molokai and the Big Island of Hawaii. But in 1991, Iverson’s radio network
