Randy Smith
Believe it or not, it's been 35 years since I joined the Vol Network and started one of the truly gratifying and rewarding parts of my broadcast career. In the spring of 1984, John Ward drove to Chattanooga to offer me the position of scoreboard host and host of the newly planned Kickoff Call In Show for Tennessee football broadcasts in the fall. Something like that had never been done before in college sports......putting live callers on the air to talk about the Tennessee football game that day, about an hour and a half before kickoff.
There were a lot of kinks to be worked out, but when the Vols opened their 1984 season at home on Saturday night, Sept.
1, against Washington State, things worked as smoothly as could be. Since there was no delay for the callers a few found their way on the air with John, Bill Anderson and me to offer a few off-color comments. Within a couple of weeks a delay system was installed to keep those comments off the air. My co-host on the Kickoff Call In Show that year was Mary Glenn Lassiter, then an announcer from Atlanta who now works in Nashville. She was the ultimate pro and I thoroughly enjoyed our time together on the Vol Network.
Tennessee scored a 34-27 win over the Cougars that night and went on to finish 7-4-1 on the year in Coach Johnny Majors eighth season. I remember very little about that season, only Tony Robinson was the quarterback and his season and career came to an abrupt halt when he suffered a knee injury in the Vols loss to Florida. The great Reggie White graduated the year before and was drafted by the USFL Memphis Showboats. I do remember that.
More than any one game that year, I remember the weekly critiques written and mailed by John Ward to all members of the Vol Network staff. For instance, if you carried a tape recorder with you to do interviews, John wanted the batteries changed weekly. That way you could never use the excuse, "My batteries died and I wasn't able to get that interview you wanted." He was a stickler for preparation. He always stressed professionalism when you represented the Vol Network, and when you interviewed a coach you never called that coach by his first name. You called him Coach Majors not John or Johnny. Those weekly critiques were always several pages long and usually they were in our mailbox on Monday or Tuesday at the latest.
I held that particular position for 17 years and that period was truly one of the highlights of my career. Even though I left the position of Kickoff Call in Show host in 2001, I remained as a member of the Vol Network staff for 13 more years, handling television play by play, as well as many other announcing chores, until my retirement in 2014. The friends and acquaintances I made during that time are priceless. It was as good as radio has ever been.
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Randy Smith can be reached at rsmithsports@epbfi.com