Covering Games Past and Present - The Future is an Open Door

Growing up I can remember watching WGN and having Harry Carrey call the Chicago Cubs games. As a Cubs fan, I'd always wait to hear..."Here's a hard hit ball to right, it could be, it might be, IT IS, Holy Cow, Homerun..." or "CUBS WIN, CUBS WIN, CUBS WIN"
Now, these are two of his "signature" calls that I could remember by hearing from others, but I do remember watching and hearing. As funny as this may sound, I can even remember where I was when I heard of his death. I remember being in the living room and hearing something late one night in February 1998 that he had died, just weeks before spring training and joining his grandson Chip on the air for the Cubs games that season. I'm sure at some point I had thought about broadcasting.

I remember joking with a fellow Cubs fan and classmate later that spring, the same spring I began writing sports, that one day I would have the job at Wrigley Field not him. He was older than I, so he would say that he'd be there before I had the chance.

Two years later I took a stab at writing for the Birmingham News, covering the Clay-Chalkville at Hueytown baseball game in the first round of the Class 6A playoffs in the spring of 2000. Justin Jones took the mound for the Cougars, topping out at 86 mph (Coach didn't believe me when I told him that is what HHS had on their speed gun). The Cougars lost, but when I told Jeff Mauldin about Jones' velocity, he felt better about getting his first pitcher into college ball. He did. Jones was the first pitcher I professionally covered in a newspaper, and little did I know then, that three years later, he would be one of the first I'd cover on the radio.

I went on take over as the co-editor for the school newspaper the following year as a senior, having the chance to cover Birmingham's XFL opener, which produced four memorable moments: catching an incomplete pass with my camera on the side line, almost being run over the next half by James Bostic, feeling like I was in the midst of the Vince McMahon mafia, and also getting to interview Jay Barker, Gerry Dinardo and others (which at the time as a semi-big deal to me).

From there it was off to Montevallo, where I half way abandoned sports, with the exception of small write ups here and there. But my junior year, I decieded to try my hand in the sports information world. The summer before the fall semester of my junior year, I was taking summer classes and ended up having a television production with the Falcons' back-up third baseman Jim Cavale who was in town taking classes and rehabbing his shoulder.

I learned quickly that Jim strives for the best, and he learned quickly that I am a perfectionist in media. We teamed up to produce our project, "Motown Live" - a spin off of Saturday Night Live with pre-recorded and edited commercials and show intros (something that the class was supposed to not know how to do yet -- something we were actually supposed to be learning in the next two classes). Yet, Jim and I spent extra time in the editing labs teaching ourselves the basics.

That fall, he and I partnered together to debut the Montevallo Internet Radio broadcasts, an "experiment" with "student broadcasters" according to my friend and at that time boss, Alfred Kojima, the Sports Information Director for UM.

My comeback was, "well this is going to be one heck of an experiment," implying that I, nor Jim, considered it an experiment. We took experiment or student broadcasters to mean that it was going to be choppy, that there we were going to just get by on the air. We didn't want that. We didn't want to settle on getting by.

Before radio began with basketball in November, Jim and I began a “radio” show on campus via the Campus Channel 13, our version of “Mike and Mike in the Morning” or as Jim wanted it to be, Motown’s “Pardon the Interuption.” The show lasted through the fall semester, then we decided to take it to a new height, all while using the name of our project from the summer “Motown Live”.

Once basketball got started we decided to make the “Montevallo Coaches Show”. We aired about four episodes before the Gulf South Conference preview show, our best show of the year, which was filmed on the court during practice in Myrick Hall.

We were off to Tupelo just days later and had our first real introductions with the Gulf South Conference staff…more me than Jim. Montevallo played Cinderella that year, as we went from calling Danny Young’s first UM victory on November 15 over No. 16 Rollins College in the season opener, to calling the school’s first-ever GSC Championship of any sport with a victory over the State University of West Georgia.

That summer, Jim went home and spent hundreds of hours editing on his new Apple computer to produce the “Montevallo March to Glory” documentary on the team’s success, something he began filming on Nov. 15 all the way to the Sweet 16.

What a season! And what luck for Jim and I to be in the right place and have the right ideas at the right time.

The next year we were considered “seasoned veterans” by some as broadcastors, and we took our show and radio to a new height. This time we put out a sports highlights show “Motown Sports” every other week from Thanksgiving week to the end of March, airing it on UM Mass Comm Channel 13, and also on the Birmingham area Charter Cable channel WOTM.

I’ll have to admit that Cavale’s drive to be the best is what helped push us to get the work done. That is why it is no surprise that by the end of the spring, after we hosted the NCAA Regional at Montevallo, we were both talking with the Gulf South Conference about the possibility of working somewhere in the conference.

While positions didn’t open in the GSC for myself, I was luck enough to find the right spot at Martin Methodist as an SID, while Cavale continued to improve and impress by kicking off the GSC Sports Network and debuting the GSC Football Game of the Week on Fox Sports South, serving as host of the halftime show and sideline reporter. In addition to that, making a weekly internet streaming highlights cast. Now he is getting ready to broadcast the GSC Championship Basketball games on CSS next week, and there is talk of he and/or I having the shot at broadcasting an NCAA D-II Sweet 16 game in mid-March.

These are things that never could have been imagined eight years ago watching Cubs baseball. I know Cavale, who recently spent the day with the Duke basketball team in Atlanta after the Georgia Tech game and has Final Four plans with the Blue Devils in Miami if they make it, will one day be with NBC or ESPN as a broadcaster, editor or something.

Where I will be, who knows, but I also know that as long as Cavale and Megginson remain friends, we will work together from time to time on special broadcasts and films – which will be exciting. Maybe Cavale will one day be the next Bob Costas, traveling to sign off after the closing ceremonies of the Olympics.

I started writing this, just to have a post about “Covering the Game” but now, I think I must re-title it, because it has become more.

I hope we don’t lose focus of the most important things in life, the things beyond sports and media, the true purposes in life, but at the same time, I think that with Jim’s encouragement and faith in myself, and mine in him, my broadcasting and film days are far from being over.

I hope that in the future, maybe not so distant, that there will be a blog posting the launch of a new partnership of Cavale/Megginson Media – But with a better name.

We have great ideas related to sports and life, that if we can find the time and dedicate the time, we can make the kind of films we enjoy watching so much. The kind of films that we sit there and think, man this is what I used to want to do…except take the words “used to” out of the statement.

Venting Frustrations

I jsut thought I'd vent some frustrations of how much I really don't like our friend the internet some days...and that has been most of the days this week. For starters the server has had issues that hosts my website at work, which means I couldn't really update it over the weekend and a couple of days this week. That's not too bad, but then when you think it's working...it's not...there's still issues with some pages. So, when I'm asked, hey is this up, or is that up? I don't really have an answer becasue my hands are tied. It's ok though, I guess. The other frustration was I went to post a "Welcome to Pulaski" post on here yesterday and typed a long semi-funny month-by-month account of my "Welcome to Pulaski" moments since I got here, and well, when I went to post it, it was deleted and lost. Grrr! (Did I really jsut growl!?) So, there's my vent! Imagine you read my "Welcome to Pulaski" moments and that you were highly entertained...maybe one day I'll sit down and write them again, then you can find out why the chicken crossed the road (US Hwy 64 to be exact).