Catching up: the Columbus trip

Continuing my retroactive posting, we take a look at the next road trip, at Columbus July 23-25.

Friday, July 23
Team flight to Columbus. Use phone's internet to view picture of our third-string goalkeeper, who's not on the trip, trying to stop penalty kicks from an elephant. True story. Players/coaching staff are amused. (Elephant penalty kick cross-promotion with circus as part of pre-All-Star Game promotion). Best wisecrack: "good thing it wasn't a battle of brains."

Stifling heat, just like in Houston! We see an assistant referee at the airport and consider offering him a ride.

At the hotel, I quickly switch gears into baseball fan mode, grab my scorebook, and walk the roughly one mile to the new AAA baseball stadium in Columbus. It will be stadium No. 116. Btw, downtown Columbus is sketchy.

-- begin ballpark recap --

I get there on a great night for minor league baseball, buy myself a cheap-ish reserved seat (figuring I'll move into a better seat), and head on in. I'm like 60 minutes early. I walk into a merchandise shop near my centerfield entrance and notice a baseball game playing on TV. Columbus-Pawtucket. Today's teams. I assume it's a replay from yesterday. After perusing the shop, I saunter back onto the concourse and notice that baseball is being played. Whoops! Turns out they were finishing the last three innings of a suspended game from earlier in the season.

Great, great ballpark. I'll try to spare you all the gory details. They had a Bob Evans concession stand, about which I got very excited. My mom and I fell in love with Bob Evans on a baseball trip in high school because it had cinnamon pancakes and cran-grape juice. Hard to beat that. Sadly, it was not a Bob Evans menu, but a baseball menu. Kind of ruined it for me.

I enjoyed the stadium a lot. I tried to sit in the shade as long as possible, and I must have moved 7-10 times before finally plopping into a front-row seat that forced me to (a) squint into the sun, (b) watch the third-base coach's butt instead of the batter, and (c) listen to the conversation of the three 20-somethings behind me. Which was mildly interesting.

A Rice alumnus was playing in the game, which I hadn't realized in advance, so I cheered for him every time up. He hit a home run, which was great, but also made a throwing error in the field.

At any rate, I enjoyed the place. The structure above the concourse - which included suites, picnic table landings behind home plate a la Bringhurst Field in Alexandria, and an apparently outdoor press box - felt very vertical in an old-time, downtown sort of way. It had standing room in the right-field corner, which seemed like a good touch. All the sections had standing room bars at the top of the sections. Behind the left-field concourse was a building with rooftop views, artificially created but still kind of cool.

Late in the game, I decided to see the park a little and moved over behind the first base dugout, which gave me a different perspective. It also provided a lot more mosquito bites! I fail to make contact with the Rice alumnus and make the long, sweaty sweaty sweaty walk back through darkened, sketchy downtown CLB to the hotel.

-- end ballpark recap --

I stay up til like 4 a.m. ET helping out with our coverage of the league's youth tournament championship, held in Houston the same weekend. Very frustrated I can't be there.

Saturday, July 24
Saturday is a fairly normal day - pregame interview at the team walk, early bus to the stadium, set up broadcast. I always feel like I'm in a cell in Columbus, where the radio broadcast booth is on the opposite side from the TV booth (thus making my calls seem reversed to anybody watching TV and listening to me) and fully enclosed. This means you have to run a really long cord to get any crowd noise before the TV crowd feed kicks in.

The game stinks - a 3-0 loss - and I return to the hotel for another late night (2 a.m. this time?) of youth tournament coverage. Early flight back Sunday morning is a tough one to wake up (6 a.m.?) for, but I'm glad to get back early-ish.

That sets up my crazy, crazy, crazy All-Star Week. Since this is retroactive, it doesn't make sense to include details in this post. At any rate, I don't think I can really begin to describe how stressful and absent of sleep it was. Suffice it to say, when I got home from work Thursday evening (7/29), I dropped the Thai food on the counter and collapsed, face-down, on my bed. Don't think I moved until RBG got home and woke me up.

the long travails of July 2

I'm posting this retroactively, as I only managed to chronicle the day on my phone's notepad function and have been too busy to post it until now (August 10) ... let's just say things did not immediately improve following the broadcast debacle of Thursday, July 1.

my intended plan for Friday, July 2, was to fly from Toronto to Houston (YYZ-IAH) with the team. Then I would go home, change, get some stuff, and fly from a different airport to visit RBG in San Antonio (HOU-SAT) and help her move to Houston.

Here's what actually happened:

1 flight to private airport in College Station (note: NOT our intended destination. bad weather intervened after some circling)
2 arrived in Houston after 5+ hours (note: NOT supposed to take that long YYZ-IAH)
3 last one off The Parking Spot shuttle
4 self-serve lane closed
5 guy in front of me in check-out line must have tried three different credit cards before one worked
6 Will Clayton Parkway (main road to highway) flooded and closed
7 Detour onto winding, two-lane Old Lee Road, which was bumper-to-bumper
8 Decide to go directly to other airport in hopes of making flight to SAT
9 Finally got out of bumper-to-bumper traffic, stopped to get gas, which was running low
10 First ramp to Highway 59 closed (of course)
11 Traffic on Highway 59, I-45 actually not bad (rare bit of GOOD news)
12 Traffic at Hobby Airport, on the other hand, not so good, filled with people trying to pick up visitors on delayed flights
13 Park in expensive lot, rush inside shortly after flight scheduled to take off; therefore no boarding pass provided
14 Get behind ponderous guy in security line
15 Once I get to the machine, security officer decides to re-run my shoe, because it has a cell phone in it (note: I do this on EVERY flight)
16 As if that's not bad enough, other security officer doesn't get the memo and re-runs it with phone inside AGAIN (note: I may have been extremely rude to these security officers.)
17 Speed-walk to gate in time to hear gate change announcement
18 Speed-walk to new gate, beating people who had been in line, and get boarding pass B-53 (B-60 is last)
19 Quick flight to SAT to find huge backup of cars in arrivals lane at 11:30 p.m.
20 Finally meet RBG at drop-off level
21 Go for Mexican food
22 Go to bed

Getting connected in Canadia

Spectacular view, right? Not a spectacular night.

If you're a bottom line person, you might want to skip all the way down to the end ... this is how NOT to do a soccer radio broadcast.

I remember having problems with setting up my connection in Toronto last year – and the connection giving out shortly after each half, apparently on the hour – but not too much about how I resolved them. But having dealt with that last year, I was definitely on the early bus to the stadium today, even though my broadcast was not scheduled to go until eight minutes before kickoff.

Upon arriving, I found my booth even smaller than I remembered it; I could probably stand in the middle of the room and touch both walls at the same time, or come pretty close. There’s only one window, and it opens like 80 degrees upward, so it obstructs your vision a little. And there’s no good place to run a crowd mic. In short, I hate this booth.

To make matters worse, the SPIDs listed on the wall appeared bizarre to me. Usually SPIDs (numbers used for an ISDN connection) have a four digit binary extension, usually 0101 or 0000 or 1111. Here, the numbers were listed with oo after them. oo? WTF? I didn’t know if it was supposed to be an inifinity symbol, two zeroes, two letter ‘O’s, or some Canadian number I had never heard of!

Continuing the trend of things getting worse, I was having trouble with my XPort. That’s the machine we use to connect to the radio station back home, and the one we have is temperamental. You have to choose ISDN or POTS (plain old telephone service) line when you first boot up, or nothing will work.

Unfortunately, my machine has a tendency of not giving you the options at the beginning. It just goes straight to a screen that could theoretically be used for a telephone-line connection but in practicality never works, period. I can seriously turn the machine on 10 times and only get the option to choose between ISDN and POTS maybe once. If that. So pregame can be a frustrating cycle of turning the machine on and off, waiting for the menu.

It also seems to matter whether there’s a cord plugged into the ISDN line or not. I seem to have my best success when I turn it on with no cord, get no menu, then turn it off, plug in the cord, wait 60 seconds, and turn it on again. But even that doesn’t work every time.

So I finally got the machine on and into ISDN mode, figured out which of the six phone jacks was the ISDN line (they’re not labeled; thanks, Toronto!), and was trying various SPID combinations with absolutely 0 luck. I tried ’00,’ ‘0000,’ ‘0101,’ ‘1111,’ no extension at all, and so on, and each time I got ‘SPID error.’ That’s bad. Then I remembered that this thing usually does best when it’s been reset, so I instructed it to reset (which you can only do from ISDN mode – in all other modes, you have to turn it off and turn it on again) and figured that might give me a chance.

Of course it took me another 8-10 times of turning the thing on/off before I got a menu again. Freaking brutal. I was starting to get that angry/nervous feeling when it finally gave me a menu, I chose ISDN, and it came up with the magic word ‘Ready.’ Thank God!

With that out of the way, I found a way to arrange my stick microphone on top of the window, angled toward the field, so I thought it would pick up good crowd noise (but couldn’t prove it with no crowd) and moved on with the rest of my setup. And my life. Oh, the trials of a broadcaster.

...

Great post, right? A little technical, perhaps. The irony is that I left it unpublished to post after the game ... and then I couldn't connect to the radio station! They tried to dial and got a message that the line was not in service. Toronto technicians assured me the line was working. Maybe it was an international thing? We tried a normal phone line but couldn't get a good enough connection, and I failed to make it on the air at all for the second time in my soccer career. Terrible, terrible night.

North of the Border

It really has been a while since we've had an away game, but here I am in Toronto on Canada Day! Great weather - blue skies and highs in the 70s - and what should be a great atmosphere for our nationally televised game tonight.

I made up my mind to take advantage of Toronto today in a way I never before have: going to the Hockey Hall of Fame. When I was a kid, my family took a vacation here and I somehow decided the Hockey Hall of Fame was not worth my time and told my parents not to worry about it. I definitely have regretted it since. I didn't get a chance to go last year, either, but I made up my mind I would see it this year.

It was about a 15-minute walk away, but a straight shot down Front St. (we stay at the Rogers Centre, nee Skydome, which makes it easy to find your way back if you ever get lost). The museum is not really what I pictured, because the only part visible from the street is this older house which contains the 'Grand Hall' where the Stanley Cup is kept. You enter on the lower level of a mall, basically, which feels awkward and much less grand than, say, the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The museum itself is a little smaller than I expected, but pretty impressive in the amount and variety of artifacts and mementos stored in that small space. There are sticks and jerseys and pucks from all sorts of events - fastest to 50 goals, first player to do this, first American player to do this, yada yada yada. It's not organized all that well, in my opinion, in terms of signage, so I wandered around a fair amount.

They had a traveling exhibition on loan with Olympic medals from every Olympics going back to the 19th century. It underwhelmed me a little, to be honest, but was pretty cool - I couldn't believe they had medals from 1896! The medals were super small back then, and even now they seem smaller than I thought they would be. They didn't start getting really ornate until about 1994 or so.

Another room had a little display for each NHL team, so I paid homage to the Devils display, and the coolest part of the museum: the interactive areas. It was definitely the most interactive Hall of Fame I've been to, although I haven't been to Cooperstown since high school. There were four virtual reality games - two shooting and two goaltending - that were neat to watch. I felt a little too old to wait in line to take part, but I enjoyed watching a father of three make five saves out of five on what looked like foam pucks fired at a decent speed out of a video screen, then wave to his kids and wife videotaping it up above. Pretty neat.

They also have a fairly extensive setup for broadcasting - even some behind-the-scenes stuff like producing and directing - that I enjoyed. One of the most popular parts is a set of booths where you can call play-by-play for great hockey moments, then hear your call played back to you. They even will let you download a .wmv file of your clips! Think how much I would have loved that as a kid, especially for baseball.

Again, I felt a little weird doing it since I'm a professional and all, but I went ahead and called a couple of plays. They didn't have a lot of ones that were memorable for me, so I just called a series of Martin Brodeur saves and Wayne Gretzky's NHL record-breaking goal. It's impossible to really put a lot of emotion into it, but I did kind of enjoy it. They had them in French as well, although I certainly didn't try my hand at that!

I went up to see the Stanley Cup itself, briefly, and picked out the name of George Parros, with whom I went to high school, on it. Pretty darn cool. They also had a 30-minute movie called The Stanley Cup Odyssey, but frankly it was a bit underwhelming. The gift shop was pretty cool, too, especially since I'm not used to so much hockey stuff in terms of books and DVDs. That might be normal for most Canadians, though.

Anyway, I enjoyed my two-hour visit and definitely feel it was worthy of Canada Day! I'm at the stadium setting up now, but that's another story ...