The "Pizza Bowl"


Ahhhhhh, the "Pizza Bowl". It was late October, 1988. Grundy had a big home game against SWD rival Tazewell at 8 p.m., while a big intra-county matchup was taking place at 'The Cliff', Hurley vs. BDD rival Garden, which kicked off at 7:30.

Since we couldn't air both games at once and since we didn't have 2 play-by-play teams at our disposal, I came up with a plan... as an FM stereo station, we could do one game on the left channel and the other on the right. But the engineer just gave me this weird look. So, I asked, why not take 'tape delay' one step further and do 'live tape-delay'. Another weird look ... which Gary was good at anyway. But this plan could actually work.

So, on Friday evening, our engineer went to Grundy and set up everything for the live radio broadcast, then drove to Hurley with a videocamera. After the Hurley game ended, he drove back to studios and we turned the production room into a mini-den, so we could broadcast the Hurley game from the videotape at about 10:30 (as soon as the play-by-play team could get back to the studios). We got a local pizza place to be a sponsor on the barter system. As soon as the broadcast started, we ordered our pies and had them in the studios by half-time.

We announced all day and that night that we would be doing the Hurley-Garden game on a 'tape-delayed' basis, but we threw a lot of people for a loop when they heard the same guys covering both games.

(b.t.w., Grundy won 25-0 and Garden won 14-0)


home , back