The above Facebook post sets the stage for what was indeed a very strange evening at Radio City. (Full disclosure: It was actually only a 16-year broadcasting career at this point. I was engaging in a little bombast.)
Here, as I tried to explain it to some of my Facebook friends, is what happened that strange, strange evening.
It’s a long bizarre story. Gles had a basketball doubleheader tonight at Red Cloud School (on the Pine Ridge reservation)…when he got to the school, the phone line they promised to have ready for him was disconnected. And there was no other landline for him to use. And he had no bars so he couldn’t do the game via cell.
By halftime of the girls game I was able to track down a South Dakota station, KILI, and take a phone feed of THEIR broadcast of the game. That worked out okay…until the girls game ended. The play-by-play guy said, “We’ll be back in 18 minutes with the boys game”……….aaaaaaaand he never came back. The board op there started playing music and never stopped. Every few minutes the board op would go on air with increased tension in his voice and ask the play-by-play guy to PLEASE call the station so they could get the boys game on.
They never did get it on. I don’t know exactly why, but I have a guess: KILI is a non-commercial station with all-volunteer staff, so there may have been some lack of training or something. I have a feeling the play-by-play guy did the whole second game for nobody because he forgot to call and get reconnected. And of course I couldn’t call Gles to have him go help the play-by-play guy cause, you know…..no bars.
The part of the girls game we DID get on was kind of a trip. The play-by-play guy used time outs to shout at strangers about tomorrow’s NFL games. “Bulldogs call time out…HEY JOE! WHO’S GONNA WIN TOMORROW?!?! BR-BRONCOS? YEAH, WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER GAME?? NO, NOT THIS GAME!!” So, yeah…just a very, very strange evening. And try explaining any of this to the listeners! LOL….
I’ve been involved in some genuine radio catastrophes in my day. There was the time one of our high school engineers broke into a live remote to telll us a tornado was coming. (It wasn’t.) And the time a high-up executive with our parent company unplugged a rack of equipment, thereby disconnecting our signal in the middle of a live broadcast we were doing. And the time I was frustrated with new equipment and said something decidedly not radio friendly with my mic still on.
But these all pale in comparison with Basketball Night At Red Cloud.