Is it an experimental test of the equipment? Do we want to pull off something cool? Or are we just fucking around? Often in my scoreboard career, it has been all three.
Take the night we worked a Colorado Avalanche game, circa 2003.
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My wife was living in Honolulu, pursuing her PhD at the University of Hawaii. I was living and working in Colorado. I did not own a cellphone then so a phone call to Hawaii was considered long-distance. For you kids out there, that means it cost money to make that call. Of course, there are ways around that.
My way around that was a long-distance code that, when dialed before a long-distance number, would just add that call to the arena's phone bill. Since multiple national sports teams were owned by the company, its employees in upper management at the arena all had long-distance codes so they could freely make calls across the country to conduct business. I was considered a part-time employee at the time and even though I often worked 70-hour work weeks, I did not qualify for my own long-distance code.
However, I had a good friend in upper management, and he gave me his code to make a phone call. I memorized the code and used it whenever I wanted to make a long-distance phone call until, well, until I bought my first cellphone and long-distance was no longer a term. But there was a catch: The code only worked from an arena telephone.
While she was teaching and writing her dissertation, my wife had a side gig as a DJ at KTUH, the local, independent Honolulu radio station run from the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. That's where my wife met Terri, one of her best friends to this day. The two of them did a live radio show called "Midwest Rocks," heavy on the Classic Rock, and on this particular night that I was driving into the arena to work an Avs game, they were doing a show.
Since I could call her for free from the control room, we planned a phone call that would coincide with their radio show. When they answered, I would say hi, and then request a song. They would play it on air and dedicate it to "the crew back in Colorado working the Avs game." Since KTUH also streamed across the internet, we could listen to it from the control room before the game started.
It was all just for fun; it would bring folks together; and it would be more interesting than talking about the weather.
It was tricky because there was a four-hour time difference between Honolulu and Denver. Their show ran from noon to 3:00 PM Hawaii Time which was 4:00 to 7:00 PM Denver Time. We had one shared computer in the control room next to the ones that controlled the scoreboards. We used it for email and general office work. It also had a decent little external speaker plugged into it, so that's the computer we would use to hear "Midwest Rocks." (KTUH still streams to this day.)
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The mission was set: Once I arrived at the arena and consulted with the crew, we would pick a song that fit the theme of their radio show, and then I would make a free long-distance phone call to their studio in Hawaii from the scoreboard/audio control room at the arena in Denver, and they would play the song for us.
The song we picked was "Slow Ride," by Foghat, and I'm afraid I don't care what you say, it's a badass song. And for the love of god, you only ever listen to the long version. The short radio edit is for suckers.
That was where this little idea ended. But as I reached for the phone to call it in, I realized we could take the mission to the next level. I forgot that the computer in question was actually connected to the arena's mixing console. It had its own fader.
What if we played Foghat—live, from Hawaii, into the arena bowl?
That would be badass. And the crowd wouldn't even know it if we did it right. I posed the idea to my fellow crew, mostly the A1 (the audio engineer who runs the faders on the arena's audio mixing console). We all agreed that it would be a cool thing to try and everyone was in.
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From the open control room at the top of the arena, I dialed the company's long-distance code and Terri answered in the KTUH studio. I told her about our plan to stream them live into the arena while Avs fans were finding their seats, and she relayed word to my wife running the soundboard there. Puck drop for the Avs game was 7:05 PM and it was about 6:10 PM our time. We would begin rolling our cavalcade of commercials at 6:30 so we've got to quit playing music before then. There was plenty of time, and they were cool with the plan on the Hawaii side. Since we'd be playing their feed live into the arena, they would save the dedication announcement until after the following song to give us a clean feed of music.
With a telephone on one ear and my headset on the other, I became the interlocutor between my wife in the KTUH studio and our A1. Once the current song at KTUH was finished playing, they would have the "Foghat" fader already up, since it begins hard with a kick drum, and hit [Play].
On our end, we were playing an instrumental song. There were no lyrics to cut off so we could fade it out at any time.
"How much time remaining?" I ask.
"A minute thirty," Terri tells me.
"A minute thirty," I say into my headset.
The A1, also on headsets, makes eye contact with me and gives me a thumbs up. Our instrumental had over 2 minutes remaining so we were covered; all we had to do was fade it out on cue.
"Thirty seconds..."
"Ten, nine, eight," I count it down over headsets in sync with Terri counting it down for me.
With three seconds left, the A1 begins fading down our instrumental, and with 1 second left, he pushes our control room computer's fader up.
I almost forgot the best part: Back at KTUH, they were playing Foghat's song from a vinyl record album on a turntable.
With a perfectly timed Bam, the first kick drum begins playing in the arena. Once the seductively twangy guitars come in, you know it's "Slow Ride."
It's one of those songs that only has about a dozen words that just they sing over and over, but who cares about that because it's the guitars and drums and vocals that kick ass, for 8 minutes and 15 seconds. About two-thirds of the way through, the tempo gradually increases. Fuck yeah. I'm listening to the song right now as I write this. We're 6:46 into the song and it's going nuts. The tempo gradually increases until your mind is blown.
And that's what was heard inside of the arena during walk-in before a Colorado Avalanche home game. The crowd dug it. (We can tell from the control room when you like a song.) The crew dug it. After the final note, our DJ ran the next song right one cue and we were back to normal with a few minutes to spare before the ad block began and we had to start working for real.
It was satisfying to be able to pull it off. It was a cool test of the extracurricular capabilities of a complex system—you never know when that will come in handy or solve a problem for a future event.
And yeah, we were also just fucking around.
THE END_