If you broadcast long enough, you will invariably encounter some situations that are less than ideal.  Every one of us has a horror story or two to tell.  While they may seem devastating at the time, chances are pretty good that they will someday serve as nothing more than a good laugh.

Whether it’s an on-air gaffe or forgetting your equipment in the previous town, stuff happens, and after the initial feeling of angst subsides, you’ll realize that you just have to roll with the punches.

I’ve had a few horror stories in my career.  Back in 1987, my first year broadcasting professional baseball in the Midwest League, our team bus pulled into the hotel in Appleton, WI.  As we unloaded the bus, I was engulfed by a feeling of sheer terror when I realized that my equipment was not on the bus.  I soon realized that I had left it at the hotel in Wausau, WI., our previous stop on the road trip.  I immediately felt sick.  We had a broadcast in six hours and I had no equipment.

I quickly pulled myself together and called a local radio station and explained my predicament.  They agreed to help me out by providing me with  a mixer board and a couple of mics.   It would be a rudimentary setup, but I was in no position to be picky.

That night I broadcasted the game with a roll of toilet paper serving as my mic stand (the station didn’t provide one, so I had to improvise) and a memory was born.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but that incident would eventually become one of my best memories of broadcasting in the minor leagues.  At the time, I thought my world was ending.

Every broadcaster most likely will also deal with equipment failures every now and then.  I’ve had to call games over the phone several times in my career, including during a game at Fenway Park in Boston.  It happens.  All you can do is laugh, because in the end, it happens to all of us.

I recall having broadcast lines drop out minutes before tipoff of a college basketball game I was calling.  I was engineering the broadcast myself, and It took the whole first half for me to get the issue resolved.  When we finally got on the air, it was halftime.  My heartbeat didn’t return back to normal until well after the game was over.

What I learned as time passed, is that even the most harrowing experiences are never really that bad.  When you call thousands of games in your career, you realize that these “horror stories” were merely blips on the radar.