Ah, the real reason to keep a blog.
A chance to speak out about injustice so that the world, or the three or four people who get on the site, can know the real truth!
I was perusing the internet last night when I came across a story on my alma mater’s school newspaper website. The Lantern is read daily by Ohio State students, faculty and staff.
The story I stumbled upon was written last November and it referenced me, a graduate of the school in 2001, as being one of the pioneers of OSU student radio. That part is true, but the disturbing “left me holding the bag” part wasn’t.
I guess to tell the whole story I should give a little bit of the back story.
I joined the student radio station in the winter months of my freshman year, 1998. At the time The Underground, as it is known, broadcast OSU football, men’s basketball and had just begun calling hockey games. We also had a Monday night show called Bux on Bux, in which we basically just ranted about sports for an hour.
In those first few months I was brought along slowly while a few seniors and a junior ran the show.
In the fall of 1998 I, along with another sophomore, we’ll call him Bro Mro, took over the sports department and began a three-year odyssey that would take the department from its one-microphone beginnings to what it’s become today, a staff that broadcasts almost every OSU sport and has a three-hour talk show instead of the one-hour we filled.
Bro Mro and I worked together, had some tedious times, but mostly got along because we both wanted to continue our work as future journalists. Possibly the one story I can tell affected our lives as much as it did the fate of the station, sports-wise.
It was the fall of 1999. We were suffering through the worst football season of the decade and we were there for nearly all the games. We went to New Jersey for the first game against Miami, Fla. but we had to tape the broadcast and air it when we got home.
We called all the home games live, as we had the season before, and we got to some road games to call them on tape delay. The station had next to no money and we were mostly traveling at our own expense at that point — some monetary help would come later, and after we left it wasn’t an issue at all as even the athletic department pitched in, but at that time we were mostly self-supported — but we scheduled a trip to Ann Arbor to attend our first OSU/Michigan contest on the road.
Bro Mro and I called the action, while James, track star from Philly and Richard both came along to help on the pregame and keep stats.
This is where the story begins, and where I was wronged in the aforementioned Lantern article!
Richard and I drove across campus to Riverwatch Tower, where Bro Mro and James, track star from Philly lived, in my car to pick them up. We pulled around the parking lot to Bro Mro’s car, where the radio equipment was. Bro Mro and James brought their personal bags out to the car and put them in my trunk, while Richard and I grabbed various pieces of equipment from his trunk.
One of us had the crate with microphones and cables while the other had the phone interface which also allowed us to use two microphones on the broadcast. James grabbed something, too and we were on our way.
We stay in a hotel in Ann Arbor and as we’re settling down for a short night’s sleep — we were to get to the stadium by 9 a.m. to prepare for the noon kick — I shot straight up in bed, “(Bro Mro), did we get the tape recorder?” I asked. Bro Mro’s reaction was immediate, basically saying that no, we hadn’t.
It instantly, and apparently to this day, turned into an argument about how I was supposed to take the recorder from his car and put it in mine. Never mind the fact I had grabbed a piece of equipment myself, and each of us except him had done the same! In the Lantern story Bro Mro is quoted as saying that, “about 1 a.m. early Saturday, Seth Shaner, who I did games back with at the time says to me, ‘We have the tape recorder right?’ I said, ‘Well, you packed it Seth. Well he didn’t, and I don’t think we would have been able to drive through the night and back and still do the game, so we thought at that point, we better try to find a phone line in the Michigan press box to do the game live or we won’t be able to do the game at all,”
Amazing!
That’s not the end of the story, however.
We went to the stadium, minus the recorder, with no real hope of getting on the air. We wanted to try to broadcast the game over the phone live, but hadn’t ordered a phone line and didn’t know how our “friends” up north would handle our situation.
Bro Mro made the worst of it by accosting the Michigan Sports Information Director, almost demanding that we be given a line. He was one of these guys who certainly meant well, but couldn’t control himself in pressure situations. I was able to get Bro Mro away from the SID and calmly set up the deal for the phone line.
It turned out, as is usually the case in these situations, there was already a phone line set up atop the press box where we’d be calling the game. We had simply not ordered it ahead of time, which you have to do so the phone companies can gouge media outlets for phone line rentals. But the SID assured me that if we promised not to make a long distance call he’d give us the phone number and our producer back at the station could call us from home and get us on the air.
In the Lantern story, Bro Mro left this part out saying that “we” got them to give us the phone line and our first road broadcast was born.
I emailed Richard and even some of the other guys we lived with, or worked with, at the time just to gain confirmation.
Here was part of Richard’s response: “Brian forgot the tape recorder. I cant believe his pompous #$% blamed Seth. I was there, did stats that game on top of the press box. Seth set up the phone with UM Athletics.”
The point of the story is that we were able to get the game on the air and from that point we came up with ways to set up live broadcasts from the road. We went on to call several football, hockey and basketball games live that we never would’ve before.
I had a lot of good experiences with the student radio station. Some were great, some were interesting and some were just hillarious, sometimes in a bad way!
Either way they’re stories that’ll last a lifetime, even if they’re told in different ways by some of us!