Life Behind the Mike

LIFE BEHIND THE MIKE


Four seasons ago my son-in-law, Josh Jones, was in what was to be his final year as head football coach at J. D. Leftwich High School in Magazine. Magazine is a town of just less than 1000 people in west-central Arkansas. The school had just constructed a new basketball arena to replace the outdated gym they had had. The new facility had a public address system, and evidently someone had asked Josh to find someone to do the PA duties, so he asked me if I would be interested. It seemed like it might be fun, so I accepted, and have been doing it since.

One of the real advantages of the PA man is that he is where the action is. He hears the coaches muttering to their assistants and their complaints to the officials. He gets to hear the exchanges between the coaches and the refs – things the typical fan often cannot hear. (Some of the coaches are quite creative in their complaints.) After a few years he even gets casually acquainted with the visiting coaches and the regular officials, at least enough for cordial exchanges with them before games. (He even gets invited to be the announcer for special events like homecoming and senior night.) In all honesty, it has been great fun, even though at times it can be a little stressful.

Sometimes the opposing coaches have a printed lineup, but most of the time the announcer has to spend a few hurried minutes jotting down the numbers and names of the opposing teams on a sheet of paper. If he happened to be a little late arriving, he may have to hustle. Then he has to try to get the pronunciations correct. In my youth, if you could pronounce Smith and Jones you usually were home free; but even rural schools abound with ethnic names these days, and since I do want to try to say them right, I have to spend a minute or two quizzing someone from the other team so I can jot down a phonetic pronunciation. Then there are the variant spellings of given names. It seems to be the trend these days to change a letter or two in your child’s name to make it unique. That may be fun for the family, but it can make life quite “interesting” for the PA guy. (Do you have any idea how many ways there are to spell Katelyn?) A couple of years ago Magazine had an exchange student who was a senior, and so I had to announce his parents on Senior Night. My eyes got wide when he told me his mother’s name. I gave it my best shot, but I doubt I got it right. Fortunately she was not there to hear it.

I have learned that there is a rhythm to announcing the games, and it is a game or two into the season before I get back into the swing of things. Look at the play, look down at the sheet to get the name, make the call, watch to see who the foul is called on, wait for your colleague running the clock to put up how many fouls there have been on that player and how many team fouls – then TRY to squeeze in all that before the free throw is shot, because you obviously do not want to make any noise to disturb the shooter. If the basket is by the home team, you want to put a little pizzazz on the name, but often the nearside ref will be standing between you and the play, so it is several seconds before you can inquire of the others at the scorer’s table to find out who it was, and by then the teams are headed toward the other end of the court. One thing I have learned is that it is better to say nothing than to get it wrong. Nothing the announcer does is official: you are just window dressing, and the crowd is better off wondering than mislead. Even at that I make mistakes. At one game this year I was announcing the starting lineup for the opposing team and looked too far down on the list for the last player – past the players to the coach. I had their coach twenty years younger and back on the court before he knew it. Thankfully, he had a sense of humor. And obviously, the announcer has to be very careful that he does not inadvertently comment on anything that could be picked up by the mike. The crowd is not interested in your opinion of the officiating or the play.

The schools with new facilities in the district and region are usually given “first dibs” on hosting the year-end tournament, and we handled both of them in the same year. For the uninitiated, that means 16 games in four nights – and they do not piddle around between games. The advantage is that the rosters are all pre-printed, which saves the announcer some time. The disadvantage is that the breaks between games are shorter and you have only a limited amount of time to take care of whatever has to be done. Also, the announcer cannot show favoritism in the tournaments, so the names of the players have to be called with equal emphasis, and it is a little hard to remember not to put extra zip on the home team names.

I have to say that Athletic Director Randy Loyd and the other coaches and staff at Magazine have been exceptionally helpful and patient. It had been a good many years since I had been an active part of a school system, even in an unofficial auxiliary capacity, and it has been enjoyable to be a part of the team again.