Sports: Cards' return to Air Force brings back blue memories

Aug. 2—Thursday's visit to Southwest Junior College Media Day got me excited about the Trinity Valley season to come.

Before the conference season, the Cards have a couple of non-league games in a pair of unusual settings. The first is the home opener, on Thursday, Aug 24, in Malakoff. Then, after an open date they'll travel to Colorado Springs to meet Air Force Prep, the Academy's JV.

Seeing that on the calendar reminded me of a visit to the Academy in Sept. 1995, which turned out to be one of my biggest nightmares in 40 years of doing radio play-by-play.

At first glance, it looked like an exciting opportunity for the defending national champion Cards to show their stuff up in the Rockies. The game was scheduled for Falcon's Stadium, where the USAFA Falcons battle on Saturdays.

Unfortunately, the game lost a bit of its luster when Georgia Military beat TVCC 13-3 to open the season on a not night in Bruce Field. Still, I was pretty excited to head back to Colorado, one of my favorite vacation spots. My wife Debra and I made reservations to fly up and make a weekend of it.

So, we packed up and flew into Denver, only to find the weather forecast was calling for thundershowers all weekend.

Come game day, Air Force Coach Fisher DeBerry took a look at the rain coming down and decided, with a nationally televised game the next weekend, he'd rather not have his natural grass field chewed up by a JUCO game.

The alternative was to send the game to the Prep field, which was a lot of grass, but not much in the form of press facilities. To make matters worse, the radio line we had payed for was in the press box at the major college field.

So, I had to go the alternate route, which was broadcast over cell phone. Remember, this was 1995 and cell service was a lot different then than now and for some reason, I never could get a signal out of the press box. With the sky dumping water on the great outdoors, I came up with an idea. I would broadcast from the car I had rented.

This was possible because, the end zone was not enclosed and I could see the field from the parking lot. It wasn't the best view, but these were desperate times. Sure enough, I got the game on the air and called play-by-play as Air Force jumped out to an early lead.

But, in the second quarter the storm took out the cell service and I was helpless to get the rest of the game on the air. Naturally, TVCC came from behind to win and it would have been a thrilling contest to call. Instead its one of about three games I wasn't able to broadcast to the end, out of probably 600, from Antlers, Oklahoma to the Astrodome.

The next day, the weather cleared enough for Debra and I to actually see a mountain or two. Then, when we returned to Denver to fly home, a bigger storm hit. I sat in my seat watching lightening strike all around the wing wondering what else can go wrong.

That trip to California was one of those that was so deflating at the time, but we can look back and laugh at later. I'm still waiting.