No fun.
This is typical of most university sports programs that I’ve seen over the decades. Creating an exciting, thrilling sporting event does not necessarily take a lot of time but it does take a focused effort and I was an army of one. Just give me a staff of motivated people and I could be dangerous!
As the months passed by, I would get an occasional telephone call from Bob, asking me what I thought about his ideas of putting Volleyball at BYU on commercial radio. The he went further, asking me come to Provo and help him negotiate the radio contract with a Utah Valley radio station, KSRR Radio and then to return to Provo in mid-January 1991 as his color commentator for all of the home matches that he intended to broadcast.
Generally radio stations are categorized by the power it has approved to send out its signal. In America, its listed in watts. Radio stations may be in the 1,000 watt range; 5,000 watt or 50,000 powerhouse stations that can be heard in nearly ¼ of the USA. In the case of KSRR, it was a small 1,000 watt station but it had a clean and clear signal throughout Utah Valley. When your targeted market lives within a 40 mile radius from the BYU Campus, you really didn’t need much more.
Cutting the deal with the radio station was right up my alley – but what did I know about broadcasting Volleyball? In fact, what did anyone know about broadcasting this sport on radio? No one in the world had broadcast it, unless it was during the Summer Olympic Games.
In America, there are only four sports that get any attention by either TV or radio and they are in this order:
•Football
•Men’s Basketball
•Baseball
•Ice Hockey
You may be a fan of Women’s Basketball or Rugby, but you are totally out of luck to hear any of these sports or your favorite Volleyball team on the radio. It simply doesn’t happen because there is no sponsor/advertising money attached to it. If there was millions of dollars flowing into radio stations to do live play-by-play radio of NCAA Men’s or Women’s Volleyball, you know everything would be different. But the simple fact is that no one cares about these sports in the media and since the dozen or so US West Coast universities that field a NCAA Division I men’s Volleyball teams do so more out of tradition more than as a revenue source, the sport is regulated to minor or “Olympic Sport” status. But then, there was Bob McGregor, who used his own personal money to fund this live radio programming at Brigham Young University. Bob personally paid KSRR Radio 1400 AM in Utah Valley to broadcast all of the 1991 BYU Men’s Volleyball home matches and paid for my airline tickets (round trip) from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. Bob just didn’t dream about something, he brought it to life. A lot of people talk a good “game” in this world but Bob put his money on the table. He showed me the possibilities of a sport like Volleyball that everyone had overlooked. I mean, look, Volleyball is an Olympic sport and the United States of America crushed all opponents to win back to back Olympic Gold Medals in 1984 and 1988, yet on the Men’s NCAA level it was about as popular as competitive chess.
And I like chess.
Bob’s plan to broadcast all of the BYU home matches in 1991 and if by virtue of putting the matches on live commercial radio station in Utah Valley, he believed that he could generate enough corporate support from the local business community and pay himself back from his initial investment.
***
The first NCAA Men’s Volleyball match ever broadcast on commercial radio was Brigham Young University hosting the USC Trojans on January 16, 1991.
Bob was going to call the action and I was his color man, which basically is someone who goes on the air to garble a few words that sounds fairly intelligent. Bob McGregor was 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