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 was struggling to find someone who could do the play-by-play announcing of these US mainland matches back to Hawaii. I should also note that as early at the 1990’s KFVE-TV in Honolulu also carried a majority (if not all) home Volleyball matches from the Stan Sherriff Arena; the 10,000 seat on-campus facility at the university but none from the US Mainland due to the substantial satellite broadcast costs of sending the TV feedback to Hawaii.
So radio in Hawaii has and will always be the predominant form of sports radio coverage of the Hawaii teams on the US Mainland. By the tens of thousands, Hawaiians will listen to every call of every play the Rainbow Volleyball teams face, be it from UC San Diego, UCLA or Long Beach State. The more prominent the opponent – like the UCLA Bruins or USC Trojans – of course the greater the audience. Everywhere you go in Honolulu when the Rainbow Volleyball team is on the air live from more than 2,500 miles away on the US Mainland, be it in a Oahu shopping mall, drug store or driving across the H1 Interstate Highway.
In Hawaii …radio is king!
So it was that my first introduction to the University of Hawaii sport community came at the WIVA Championships with Alan Rosehill coaching the Rainbows in the first round of tournament competition. Since all of the broadcast equipment that I was familiar with for the BYU home Volleyball broadcasts belonged to Bob McGregor, and he was in 700 miles away in Salt Lake City, I connected with Iverson who was finishing a broadcast of University of Hawaii Basketball in San Diego and he lent me his broadcast set-up, including sound mixer board ad headsets. We had a good first meeting. The next night was the WIVA championship broadcast and Iverson’s Honolulu office faxed the radio log to me that I was to follow meticulously. The Rainbow Sports Radio Network had dozens of paid advertisers and voice-over drop in that was to be read, verbatim, during each game and throughout the match. This also included the pre- and post-match shows.
Everything was programed in.
***
One of the very cool things I liked about broadcasting sports for the University of Hawaii was that I could wear an Aloha shirt to the game - one of the most outlandish garments ever known to man - but one that looks great on you, be it on one of the Hawaiian islands or anywhere in the world. It is a statement about “your Aloha” and spiritual connection to everything Hawaiian and when you step into an area full of sports fans, they instantly know who you are rooting for. Being paid to broadcast an NCAA competition live back to Hawaii, the natural tendency is to favor the Hawaii team. Not necessarily to be a “homer”; that is someone who is unabashedly favoring one team over another, but clearly the spin put on the broadcast is one that has an affinity to the Rainbows.
On the main table used by official scorekeeper and statisticians, Newcomb set aside space not only for me, but for the broadcast equipment I was using. He was keen to put be on the left side of the table as I could sit about one meter to my left from the Hawaii head coach. Journalists were rarely in attendance at NCAA Men’s Volleyball matches and Newcomb did everything possible to accommodate me. He understood the power of radio. He understood that media coverage of this tournament was critically important for a sport that forever languishes at the bottom of any Athletic Director’s agenda and that in Hawaii, this non-televised event meant that radio ruled the roost and that tens of thousands of people would be listening to the match in Honolulu.
Like all Hawaii coaches, Alan Rosehill was very accommodating to a live radio format and allowed me to do my pre-game interview from my seated position. Hawaii coaches also know all their family and friends are intently listening to every single word. Of key importance to all coaches from Hawaii is the jet lag that every athlete faces. With the Hawaiian islands more than 2,500 miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, all University of Hawaii teams spend a considerable amount of time in flying to the US Mainland for their competition. With the case of this WIVA Volleyball Tournament, the Rainbows arrived in Los Angeles and then were bused south to the Irvine campus the day before competition. Rosehill wanted the fans back home to know that his players were well rested and ready for a fight.
I took this broadcast like a duck to water - utilizing all of the linguistical talents that Bob brought out in me during the previous three months. Radio is a fabulous medium, only if you have the “gift of gab”. I made this my broadcast and created my own call sign. As I would go to each commercial, I said the following, “Throughout the Hawaiian Islands, this is the Rainbow Sports Radio Network”. And that ended up being my call sign for every Hawaii broadcast that came afterward for the next eight years.
The Rainbows lost the match but Iverson liked what he heard and I was hired that week for the entire 1992 Rainbow Men’s and Wahine Volleyball season.
***
Broadcasting sports on radio is all about passion. Passion for athletics and passion for sport and in my case, the passion I had for the sport of Volleyball. And it was that passion