Blue White Illustrated

ed on the first day of the invasion. Af- ter spending months recovering from his wounds, he was discharged and eventually settled in State College in- stead of returning to his western Pennsylvania hometown of Monessen. Radio was natural for Mickey, with his warm, garrulous and amiable person- ality. WMAJ hired him as an an- nouncer, and by the early 1950s he was the general manager, too. In 1953, WMAJ reorganized its broadcast team – with the Pittsburgh Pirates' then-No. 2 announcer, Bob Prince, doing the play-by-play and Mickey serving as color man and pro- ducer. Mickey was a marketing guru, and in his spare time he taught an un- dergraduate marketing course at Penn State. He encouraged the people who ran the athletic department to set up a new statewide radio network, and by the 1955 season the network was in place. The next season, Mickey took over the play-by-play job after Prince became the Pirates' No. 1 announcer. That meant he had to give up his Penn State job. By this time, Mickey also was broad- casting basketball games as well as wrestling and gymnastic meets and boxing matches on WMAJ – primari- ly the events at home. There are two revealing photographs in the Penn State All-Sports Museum that show Mickey practicing his craft. One is a large mural-type photo in the center of the wrestling exhibit. It shows him broadcasting from the first row of seats on the lower balcony overlooking a wrestling match at Rec Hall, with a WMAJ banner draped over the balcony railing. The other photo is a much smaller one from 1950 featuring Mickey with a microphone in his right hand and his left arm around the neck and shoul- ders of Chuck Drazenovich. Mickey is seen asking Drazenovich questions just after the Penn State boxer's victory in the NCAA heavyweight championship bout at Rec Hall. Aside from the pho- tos in the media exhibit in the lobby, there is only one other photo in the main exhibit area featuring a Penn State broadcaster – a photo of Fran Fisher with Joe Paterno hosting the old "TV Quarterbacks" show in the late 1970s. That should tell you how sig- FIELD DAY Berg- stein, far right, con- tinued to be part of Penn State's broad- cast team into the early 1970s. He's shown here at Beaver Stadium in 1966 with play-by- play announcer Tom Bender, Fran Fisher and Jim Tarman. Photo courtesy of Fran Fisher nificant Mickey Bergstein was to Penn State's sports history. Mickey continued as the football play-by-play announcer until 1959 when KDKA in Pittsburgh began car- rying the games. KDKA wanted its own sportscaster, Tom Bender, to do the play-by-play. Mickey understood the vagaries of broadcasting and agreed to continue on the broadcasts as the col- or man. But that was the beginning of the end for Mickey as part of the broad- casting team. The next year, he was off the broadcasts, but he returned as col- or man in 1964 and remained in the booth as an analyst until 1971 when he was dropped entirely. Mickey was deeply hurt by what had happened but he didn't pout. Fran Fisher was becoming the voice of Penn State sports, but Mickey re- mained involved as the emcee of the weekly Quarterback Club luncheons until 2002. He also had left the radio station in the 1970s, but he continued to teach marketing at Penn State and became nationally popular as a moti- vational speaker. Mickey remained active in the State College communi- ty through the early 2000s, including co-hosting a weekly hour-long call-in radio show with Pat Boland from the first booth at the Corner Room restau- rant. I have three favorite stories of Mick- ey, and two occurred before I met him. Penn State was playing Syracuse at Beaver Field in 1953 when Prince had to leave at the end of the third quar- ter to get back to Pittsburgh for a Pi- rates game. That forced Mickey to do the play-by-play for the first time. Since Rip Engle had become the head coach in 1950, the Syracuse rivalry had heated up. Penn State was leading late in the fourth quarter, 20-14, but Syracuse was driving. Then Penn State's great sophomore Lenny Moore intercepted a pass at the Lions' 11-yard line, running the ball back to the 36 before being shoved into the Syracuse bench. "Something happened to Moore in the crowd, and [Jesse] Arnelle went to protect him, and other teammates fol- lowed," Mickey recalled years later when I was researching my first sports book, "The Penn State Football Ency- clopedia." "The next thing you know, they were swinging all over the place." He went on to describe a free-for-all, telling me in the same excited voice how he couldn't believe what he was seeing that afternoon as he yelled into the microphone while leaning out of the press box. "That was my baptism into play-by-play, and I doubt anyone else in college football history had a de- but like mine." The second situation occurred a few months later, in March 1954, when Penn State shocked the college basketball world by finishing third at the NCAA Final Four. The tournament was drastically different then. Only 16 teams competed in the playoffs, with just the winners of the two Eastern and two Western regions playing for the na- tional championship. With a 15-6 record, Penn State reached one Eastern Regional semifi- nal at Iowa and was matched with Southeastern Conference champion Louisiana State, ranked 14th in the country. The other game featured fourth-ranked Indiana, the defending NCAA champion, against unbeaten No. 6 Notre Dame, which had won 17 con- secutive games. WMAJ could not afford to pay for live broadcasts from the regional site, and so Mickey decided to recreate the action from the WMAJ studio in State 34 Historian Lou Prato is the author of many books about Penn State sports. His latest book is "Game Changers: The Greatest Plays in Penn State Football History." A P R I L 1 1 , 2 0 1 2 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M

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