Football
and infidelity along the Rio Grande
A story from
long ago and far away by SAM•U•L
As football season
is under way, a story comes to mind.
I announced my first football game on the radio at Uvalde in 19 and 66: It was the Del Rio High School Bobcats versus the Uvalde High Coyotes. I was working at the radio station in Del Rio. We were block programmed, which meant we played country in the morning, easy listening late morning and early afternoon, news at noon, rock in the afternoon, Mexican at night.
I announced my first football game on the radio at Uvalde in 19 and 66: It was the Del Rio High School Bobcats versus the Uvalde High Coyotes. I was working at the radio station in Del Rio. We were block programmed, which meant we played country in the morning, easy listening late morning and early afternoon, news at noon, rock in the afternoon, Mexican at night.
Weekdays,
I did a country show in the morning and a rock show in the afternoon. Ball
games and special events, like a Grand ol’ Opry type show I did live from a beer
joint on Saturdays, fell into the schedule whenever they occurred. Those were
some of the last days of radio’s Golden Era, where the station was involved in
the community on many levels, as opposed to the satellite fed mechanical programming we hear
on most small-town radio stations, today.
I was just starting out in radio in ’66 and wanted to get into sports announcing but we had a guy who did Del Rio’s games. Finally, with one game left in the season, he was going to be away so I finagled my way into the job of announcing the game. I lied big time when I told the program director that I had plenty of play-by-play experience. If he’d thought about it, he could have figured out that six months prior to the season I was still in the Navy. I had never actually announced a football game. But I got to do this one.
We drove up to Uvalde, two of us, me and a guy who was to be my color commentator. Another guy who was our engineer joined us at the stadium. The color guy just read commercials live during the game, like they used to do on the old Southwest Conference Radio Network. He didn’t know anything about football. The engineer wired an old control board into a phone jack, plugged a mic into that, said, “Mic check, mic check, one, two, three,” saw that a little needle was jumping on the control board meter and said to me, “At 7:49 do a countdown for the guy back at the station. Say, ‘One minute to air,’ then give a cue every ten seconds until 7:50, then start your pre-game show. Kickoff is at 8:00. You’re live from pre-game until the game ends.” The engineer’s wife was with him and hung out in the booth with us during the game.
The color guy was an S.M.U. dropout who still dressed fraternity boy: button down shirts, slacks, loafers, got regular haircuts. That set him apart in border town Del Rio in 1966. That and the fact that he lived in a hotel. Living in a hotel in those days in that town labeled you transient and a little suspicious. There was always a lot of smuggling going on along the border. Everything from stolen hooch to cattle was going back and forth across the river without benefit of customs inspection and folks involved in those activities usually kept rooms in hotels for longer periods of time.
I always felt sorry for S.M.U. dropouts. In their world, becoming anything less than a high-paid, fast-track career professional—banker, doctor, lawyer—at an early age was considered inadequate. And in those circles radio was regarded as an electronic carnival without the Ferris wheels and cotton candy. We were just carneys and barkers to the Southern Methodist crowd.
We did a credible job on our Del Rio/Uvalde game, considering that it was my first time in the booth and that my broadcast partner didn’t know jack shit about football. Then we packed up, scored a six pack, started back for Del Rio.
The engineer rode back with us but for some reason his wife didn’t join us. On the way up to the game my color guy had been telling me about some of his escapades around town, tales of romance and adventure. He was a bit of a tomcat and had told me about this one chick he’d been having an affair with which, as it turned out, was the gal who had been in the booth with us—the engineer’s wife.
He didn’t know she was going to be there that night or that the engineer was going to be riding back to Del Rio with us and when he was telling me the story about this gal he hadn’t mentioned who she was married to. All of a sudden, it dawned on him what he’d told me earlier and that I might not make the connection, since I didn’t know who her husband was when I heard the story, and if we got to talking about women—beer talk sometimes gravitates to women—that I might let it slip out about some married gal he’d bragged he’d been screwing around with. And now here her husband was riding with us.
As first beers were church-keyed, and I opened up my ‘62 Impala on the highway, my man, ol’ S.M.U., goes out of his way to say, “And, Sam, you knew that (what’s-his-face, our engineer) here and (what’s-her-face, his wife), the lady who joined us in the booth, are married? Right? Married!”
I looked at him with a wink that said, “Got it.” He was pretty nervous all the way home and whenever the topic of conversation drifted anywhere near women he changed the subject as fast as he could. I would laugh because I could see what he was doing. The engineer thought I was weird. “What are you laughing about, Sam? Did somebody say something funny?”
That was the only football game I got to announce that year. The next year I covered Texas City High, then moved to Austin from where I roamed Central Texas doing high school games at Burnet, Georgetown, Round Rock and Pflugerville for several stations. Doing those high school games during the years when I was attending the University of Texas were some of the best times in my play-by-play career, which later evolved to the Southwest Conference where I announced college games for many seasons and culminated 22 years later with the 1988 Cotton Bowl.
I don’t know what happened to my man from S.M.U. Not too long after football season, we both got fired from the station at the same time when a new owner came in and canned all the single guys and doubled the hours of the married guys (with no raise in pay in the latter case) as a cost cutting measure—a common practice in the fast-gun business of radio. I moved on to Texas City and ol’ S.M.U. disappeared. The engineer and his moonlighting wife, who were in the Air Force at Laughlin AFB, moved on, too.
I never saw any of them again.
Remembering James Street:
I've always said that the two most visible people in the state of Texas at any given time are, one, the governor of the state, and, two, the quarterback of the University of Texas football team. Makes no difference how either one is doing, everybody knows who they are.
James Street was one of Texas’ most memorable quarterbacks, and, along with Bobby Layne, will never be forgotten as a player who put his stamp on that position. And James won a national championship in 1969.
Rest in peace, James Street. Thanks for everything.
(Pictured here with Coach Darrell Royal in the 1970 Cotton Bowl game in which Texas beat Notre Dame.)
I was just starting out in radio in ’66 and wanted to get into sports announcing but we had a guy who did Del Rio’s games. Finally, with one game left in the season, he was going to be away so I finagled my way into the job of announcing the game. I lied big time when I told the program director that I had plenty of play-by-play experience. If he’d thought about it, he could have figured out that six months prior to the season I was still in the Navy. I had never actually announced a football game. But I got to do this one.
We drove up to Uvalde, two of us, me and a guy who was to be my color commentator. Another guy who was our engineer joined us at the stadium. The color guy just read commercials live during the game, like they used to do on the old Southwest Conference Radio Network. He didn’t know anything about football. The engineer wired an old control board into a phone jack, plugged a mic into that, said, “Mic check, mic check, one, two, three,” saw that a little needle was jumping on the control board meter and said to me, “At 7:49 do a countdown for the guy back at the station. Say, ‘One minute to air,’ then give a cue every ten seconds until 7:50, then start your pre-game show. Kickoff is at 8:00. You’re live from pre-game until the game ends.” The engineer’s wife was with him and hung out in the booth with us during the game.
The color guy was an S.M.U. dropout who still dressed fraternity boy: button down shirts, slacks, loafers, got regular haircuts. That set him apart in border town Del Rio in 1966. That and the fact that he lived in a hotel. Living in a hotel in those days in that town labeled you transient and a little suspicious. There was always a lot of smuggling going on along the border. Everything from stolen hooch to cattle was going back and forth across the river without benefit of customs inspection and folks involved in those activities usually kept rooms in hotels for longer periods of time.
I always felt sorry for S.M.U. dropouts. In their world, becoming anything less than a high-paid, fast-track career professional—banker, doctor, lawyer—at an early age was considered inadequate. And in those circles radio was regarded as an electronic carnival without the Ferris wheels and cotton candy. We were just carneys and barkers to the Southern Methodist crowd.
We did a credible job on our Del Rio/Uvalde game, considering that it was my first time in the booth and that my broadcast partner didn’t know jack shit about football. Then we packed up, scored a six pack, started back for Del Rio.
The engineer rode back with us but for some reason his wife didn’t join us. On the way up to the game my color guy had been telling me about some of his escapades around town, tales of romance and adventure. He was a bit of a tomcat and had told me about this one chick he’d been having an affair with which, as it turned out, was the gal who had been in the booth with us—the engineer’s wife.
He didn’t know she was going to be there that night or that the engineer was going to be riding back to Del Rio with us and when he was telling me the story about this gal he hadn’t mentioned who she was married to. All of a sudden, it dawned on him what he’d told me earlier and that I might not make the connection, since I didn’t know who her husband was when I heard the story, and if we got to talking about women—beer talk sometimes gravitates to women—that I might let it slip out about some married gal he’d bragged he’d been screwing around with. And now here her husband was riding with us.
As first beers were church-keyed, and I opened up my ‘62 Impala on the highway, my man, ol’ S.M.U., goes out of his way to say, “And, Sam, you knew that (what’s-his-face, our engineer) here and (what’s-her-face, his wife), the lady who joined us in the booth, are married? Right? Married!”
I looked at him with a wink that said, “Got it.” He was pretty nervous all the way home and whenever the topic of conversation drifted anywhere near women he changed the subject as fast as he could. I would laugh because I could see what he was doing. The engineer thought I was weird. “What are you laughing about, Sam? Did somebody say something funny?”
That was the only football game I got to announce that year. The next year I covered Texas City High, then moved to Austin from where I roamed Central Texas doing high school games at Burnet, Georgetown, Round Rock and Pflugerville for several stations. Doing those high school games during the years when I was attending the University of Texas were some of the best times in my play-by-play career, which later evolved to the Southwest Conference where I announced college games for many seasons and culminated 22 years later with the 1988 Cotton Bowl.
I don’t know what happened to my man from S.M.U. Not too long after football season, we both got fired from the station at the same time when a new owner came in and canned all the single guys and doubled the hours of the married guys (with no raise in pay in the latter case) as a cost cutting measure—a common practice in the fast-gun business of radio. I moved on to Texas City and ol’ S.M.U. disappeared. The engineer and his moonlighting wife, who were in the Air Force at Laughlin AFB, moved on, too.
I never saw any of them again.
Remembering James Street:
I've always said that the two most visible people in the state of Texas at any given time are, one, the governor of the state, and, two, the quarterback of the University of Texas football team. Makes no difference how either one is doing, everybody knows who they are.
James Street was one of Texas’ most memorable quarterbacks, and, along with Bobby Layne, will never be forgotten as a player who put his stamp on that position. And James won a national championship in 1969.
Rest in peace, James Street. Thanks for everything.
(Pictured here with Coach Darrell Royal in the 1970 Cotton Bowl game in which Texas beat Notre Dame.)
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