I wrote a freewheeling blog last week (https://www.ceciltaylorministries.com/post/freewheeling-blog-my-most-stressful-interview-guest) about my most stressful time when interviewing a guest. It reminded me of meltdown moments during my extensive sportscasting career. So today, I'm sharing the ten most challenging moments that I experienced on air.
In no particular order, here are one through ten, with ten being a pressure-packed calamity that became one of my true triumphs in radio or even in life.
During a football broadcast, my partner passed out on air in the middle of a sentence.
I broadcast a dirt track race card from the top of the stands. It was so loud, I literally could not hear myself speak during any race, which is one of the weirdest sensations I've ever had.
I caused an accident while driving to the football stadium for the season's first game. Once there, I found our team wasn't assigned a booth, so we had to broadcast from an outdoor platform atop the stands without proper lighting. Not a fun night.
Another time when we weren't properly assigned a private radio booth, I had to broadcast from the writers' area. All night I had a newspaper writer leaning over and telling me I said something wrong, when he was wrong every single time, but all I could do was keep talking and ignore him.
For a football broadcast, all of our commercials ran on a tablet in the booth. We somehow lost all of our commercials and had to continuously talk on a live microphone for three and a half hours.
I got nauseous in the middle of a baseball game when I was the only announcer, but there was a wanna-be sportscaster in the booth with me. I suddenly had to throw up, so I tossed control to him, ran down the stairs, and made it to the bathroom just in time.
Because our microwave unit didn't work for a high school basketball game, I had to string a phone line from the coaches office. But it didn't reach the gym. So I sat outside the gym, sitting in a school desk and looking through an open door, and did play-by-play even though I couldn't see a portion of the court.
Another time when we had enough phone cord to string from the coaches office to the gym, someone wandered through and hung up the phone in the office during the broadcast. It took a quarter to realize what had happened. (Fun fact: My broadcast partner that night was a young guy named Mark Followill, now the Dallas Mavericks TV play-by-play voice).
I got called in to sub on a football broadcast on the day of the game. As someone who likes to prepare well for the broadcast, it was quite challenging to prepare for two teams I had never seen.
My partner Paula and I hosted a talk show called The Women's Sports Hour on a Dallas station. We asked for a chance to move the show to a new national radio network, so the general manager allowed us a four-show audition. Halfway through the first show, we were interviewing an Olympic gymnast by phone, but the connection was poor and kept dropping. I finally cut off the call, but we had twenty minutes to fill. We recovered and did such a professional job that the GM hired us immediately after the show.
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