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Syndicated |
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March madness: Low Tech Version
The flurry of what is now called March Madness among college and high school basketball nuts brings a flood of memories of what tournament basketball was like for me more than 50 years ago. When
I was a teenage pup, I handled the remote broadcasts for district
tournament games of the lowest classification of high school
basketball in north central Idaho. The games were played inside a
concrete barn of a gymnasium at the local teachers' college in Lewiston.
These adventures in play-by-play announcing were carried over radio
station KRLC in Lewiston -- seven games non-stop from 9 a.m. in the
morning until 11 at night. Early
in the day, I might have considered myself a terrific play-by-play
guy in the mold of ancient Bob Robertson....but by the time
the sixth or seventh game of the day came up and the commercials were
all sounding the same, it was a struggle to make it through that final
broadcast. I had virtually no voice by the start of the 9 p.m. game as
the station was too cheap to employ a second announcer or send someone
to spell me, even for a single game. The main studio downtown would give
me 30-second station-identification breaks on the hour and half hour
(FCC regulations) at which time I could try to catch the eye of someone
to bring me a Coke to help me stay awake. I had to keep the cramped
broadcast booth locked from pesky intruders and it often took all of 15
to 20 seconds of that short break just to work the lock open. I didn't
dare let anyone in; there was enough chaos without that. All
of the schools came en masse to the “big city” from small towns with
population in the hundreds, but with high school enrollment barely
enough to field 10 players and the mandatory manager to carry the towels
and extra sneakers. The pep squads were something else. Not much to rave
about as far as looks go, but the girls made up for that with spirit and
intensity. The cheerleaders outdid themselves when each hoopster on
their team’s starting lineup was introduced over the scratchy public
address system. The girls would suggestively leap about, flashing their
colorful pom poms much to the delight of the players left warming the
bench. Seemed like the entire town had come out of the woods or off the
prairie in bellicose support of their schools. We
had such matchups as the Orofino Maniacs vs. the Kamiah Kubs....the
Weippe Gorillas facing off against the Lapwai Wildcats (the boys from
the Nez Perce Indian reservation)....Cottonwood Prairie Dogs vs. the
Grangeville Bulldogs...Greencreek Coyotes vs. the Winchester
Colts....Pierce Spartans vs. the Nezperce (town) Indians and
the Kooskia Rams vs. the Kendrick Tigers. There
was the ongoing feud evident at tournament time when Nezperce townsfolk
refused to stop calling their team the Indians, ignoring the
protestations of leaders of the Nez Perce Indian Tribal Council in
nearby Lapwai. No one thought much about the irony of it, but the Lapwai
Wildcats put an all-Indian lineup on the floor while the Nezperce
Indians were all Anglos. An unconcerned Orofino apparently could care
less about any political correctness linking the team's unfortunate
nickname with a state mental hospital being located in town. You
can imagine how blurred the mascots had become by the end of each
day....the tourney dragging on for four days...all double
eliminations morning-to-night from Wednesday through Friday with the
consolation and championship games on Saturday night. After
Wednesday’s opening round, losers were playing losers and winners
playing winners and then winning losers were playing losing winners. By
the final night, who could tell Genesee from Ferdinand? The
numbers on the jerseys and the names of the players listed in the
program seldom matched. Frequently someone would come storming row over
row up to my allegedly soundproof broadcasting booth at the top of the
gym rafters and pound on the window trying to correct me. The stomping
on the wooden benches below reverberated through my microphone and into
my headset. My head hurt enough just wearing such tight-fitting, sweaty,
humongous and ugly earphones worn to make sure I was still on the air.
This was not cool. Anybody
who stood up in the row below the booth would block my view and I'd
frequently have to guess who committed the foul or who scored the
basket. Imagine my surprise when a Billy or a Rocky were still in the
game after seven fouls (according to my score sheet, at least). School
chums would come up and make faces and display interesting body
contortions. It
became increasingly important to beat the crowd to the men’s room
between games after hurriedly sending the action back to the engineer in
the studios in the basement of the Hotel Lewis-Clark. He would ramble
through the mid-day livestock market report and then drone through
the local news during halftime of the 5 p.m. game. I brought two sack
lunches each day and a thermos of something cold. Any thermos liquid was
tepid by noon. I got to read the commercials, provide the color, and
fill the stale minutes of each game’s halftime. Don, the station
owner, would drop by daily. I thought this was to spell me for five
minutes or so. Instead he would proceed to blither on over the air
about what a public service it was for his station to carry all the
games live each year for our vast listening audience. Otherwise, he
reminded, the few townies who had been left at home, unable to see the
games, would have to rely on the next day’s edition of the Tribune
newspaper. Can
you imagine what it was like trying to keep the stats for each game? At
11:05 p.m. they expected me to do a complete wrap-up of the day's
action, give highlights from each game, recap who the top scorers were,
etc. They wanted lots of names since the AM radio broadcast reception
during night hours was much better, good enough to reach the hometowns
of all the teams. It was an interesting chapter in my life, from my junior year in high school through my four years in college. This experience may have had something to do with my eventually shifting career gears toward the world of newspapers.
The Normal School (North Idaho College of Education) gym has been replaced by a new "activities center" opened in February of 2005. The school is now the Lewis-Clark State College. |
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The Previous Columns March
2, 2005 February
16, 2005 February
2, 2005 January
19, 2005 January
5, 2005 December
15, 2004 December
1, 2004 Nov.
17, 2004 November
3, 2004 October
20, 2004 October
6, 2004 Sept
15, 2004 Sept.
1, 2004 August
18, 2004 August
4, 2004 July
21, 2004 July
7, 2004 |
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John
B. Hughes |
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Hughes
serves
as grand marshal |
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Hugo
and (425) 482-4076 |
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