I Can Get Paid To Do That?
Kids have been heading to college this month, and it brought me back 40 years to the summer before my own freshman year.
I was a 17-year-old who cared a lot about sports and headed to Lehigh University, a small engineering school equidistant from New York City and Philadelphia.
I attended the Lehigh Freshman Send-Off on Long Island, a mixer of sorts for freshmen in the area who were headed to Lehigh to begin their college experience. I remember very clearly the conversation that altered the course of my life.
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Up until then, I knew about sports broadcasters on TV and radio, and sportswriters that I read each day in the Post, the Daily News and Newsday, and each week in Sports Illustrated. I knew those people watched the game from the press box, that section in Shea Stadium between two decks of seats behind home plate. Good work if you can get it.
What I didn’t know, and to my recollection never even thought about, was who turned on the lights in the press box.
At the Send-Off, I struck up a conversation with a guy named Dave Best. He was a year ahead of me at my high school and was about to be a year ahead of me at Lehigh.
He told me about something called the Lehigh Sports Information Office. This office sent people out to all the Lehigh athletic events to keep statistics and report scores. At the bigger events, like football, basketball, and wrestling, the SID office (Sports Information Director) would staff a press box or press row, prepare what I learned were called Game Notes for the media, and coordinate interviews for the players and coaches.
My first and only thought was, “I can get paid to do that?”
I qualified as a work-study, which meant I needed a job on campus as part of my aid package. So between orientation weekend keg parties, I sprinted to the SID office, which then was located off campus in a row house on the side of a hill on Brodhead Avenue, to sign up to work with the Lehigh SID office.
Dave became a mentor of sorts, along with Roger Clow, the Lehigh Sports Information Director who has been mentioned in this column before. I went to soccer matches and wrote up summaries, double dipping for the school newspaper, the Brown and White. I worked in the press box at football games in the fall, and then in the winter at basketball games. Not a bad way to make a living.
Throughout my career at Lehigh, working in the office led to great opportunities. I became the official scorer at men’s and women’s basketball games, where I wore a referee jersey and may have been warned more than once about my reaction to a call that went against the home team. I wrote stories for the Bethlehem Globe Times, covering high school football and soccer, generating my first professional writing clips.
I interned at WFMZ, the Lehigh Valley’s local television station, working for its sports anchor, Rich Lerner. If that name sounds familiar, you are a golf fan, because Rich has been a golf broadcaster for the Golf Channel for almost 30 years and also does the Olympics for NBC/Peacock. I remember my final project for my Public Speaking class, when I recorded an interview with Rich. I asked him what his dream call would be. He answered by simulating play-by-play of a winning putt on the 18th green of a golf tournament. Rich checked that box a long time ago.
The internship was a blast. I learned how to edit highlights on video machines that are now in the Smithsonian. Once, I went with a cameraman to the home of future NFL Hall of Fame wide receiver Andre Reed’s family. Reed was from Allentown and went to a small school then called Kutztown State before being drafted by the Buffalo Bills. The Bills, on their way to four straight Super Bowl appearances in that era, were on ABC’s Monday Night Football versus the Rams. We spoke to the family on the night they watched Reed grab eight catches for over 100 yards, including the go-ahead touchdown.
The summer before my senior year, when I decided to retire as a camp counselor, I applied for, interviewed for, and somehow was chosen to be an intern for the then-fledgling sports radio station in New York, WFAN. I worked there three days a week over that summer, cutting highlights on reel-to-reel audio tape, learning how to operate the control room board, screening phone calls, and breathing in a job that allowed you to talk about sports in exchange for money.
That same summer was historic in the timeline of sports radio. Pete Franklin, a legend from an even earlier era, was winding down his afternoon sports talk show in New York on the FAN. Mark Mason, the guy in charge of programming at WFAN, had a wacky idea. Let’s take this big, gruff, maybe a little arrogant, know-it-all sports guy with an unmistakable New York accent who had been working behind the scenes for Brent Musburger at CBS and stealing the show during his radio call-ins with other hosts, and pair him with this thin, likeable kid who also knows everything about sports, lives to scream into the microphone to the point where he earned his nickname, Mad Dog, and whose accent and speech patterns are unique and indescribable.
Well, shortly after I went back to school for my senior year, Mike Francesa and Christopher Russo began their run as the most successful and most entertaining sports talk show duo in the history of the medium. On September 5, 1989, Mike and the Mad Dog debuted on WFAN.
It was during that same summer that I got a call from Ron Ticho, who had taken over as the Lehigh SID. He had a thought to bring back Lehigh football and basketball games to WLVR, and asked me to be the sports director. Yes, please.
With archaic equipment and a thin budget, we somehow got the games on the air. I worked with Aaron Young, a former football player. I did some barely adequate, over-modulated football play-by-play with Aaron as the analyst, while on basketball, Aaron took the reins, and I did the color.
The Lehigh men’s team scheduled a trip to Florida to play in the Palm Beach Classic in late December during college break. Back then, schools would host two-night, four-team tournaments, and the host school (soon-to-be Big East Miami) would pick a “patsy” (non-scholarship Lehigh) to play while inviting two evenly matched teams (Boston College and West Virginia) to play in the other game. This set up a competitive championship game for Miami, which had won the first three Palm Beach Classic titles.
Two things happened on the night of Dec. 27, 1989, that have stayed with me for over 36 years. The first is that Lehigh blew Miami out of the gym in the second half, winning the game, 83-59. I did the play-by-play with my fraternity brother Steve Rothenberg, who was a basketball junkie, since Aaron went home to California during the break.
Second, the tournament had a guest speaker, who, lucky for us, was seated next to our location on press row. At some point during the game, when Lehigh was cooking, the guest speaker looked at me, looked at the microphone on the table that was our crowd mic, and gestured to me as if he was going to pick it up. I quickly nodded.
I can’t tell you if there were 10 or 100 listeners, but whoever had their radio tuned to 91.3 that evening heard peak 1989 Dick Vitale being Dick Vitale. “Look at these Lehigh Engineers!” he shouted. “This Mike O’Hara is tickling the twine!” And on he went for the next few minutes praising Lehigh basketball effusively. I was in awe.
These experiences, which jump-started my career in sports, don’t happen without that first conversation with Dave Best just days before I left for school. Dave passed away earlier this year. While Dave didn’t go into sports, he spent the last 20 or so years of his life as a college consultant, helping high school seniors navigate the decision process. I’m sure he impacted their lives as much as he impacted mine.