Blue White Illustrated

College, just like the Pittsburgh Pirates were doing for away games in that era. Mickey worked out a code with Bill Meredith of Western Union, father of Penn State's current director of tick- et operations, Bud Meredith. State's sports publicity director, Jim Coogan, fed Meredith the code from Iowa City. With an audio tape of crowd noise playing in the background, Mickey de- scribed the action. The code told him who was shooting, whether it was a long shot and who got the rebound if it was a miss. There were other signals for fouls, turnovers and timeouts. "As I broadcast the game, I would have the team moving the ball around," Mickey wrote in his memoir, "Penn State Sports Stories and More." "I would have someone dribbling from left to right. I would have him almost lose the dribble – all of this I was making up, of course – and then I would say, 'Sherry from the sideline in front of the Penn State bench… good. … Rebound in the corner captured by Brewer. … He feeds Blocker further outside… to Weidenhammer at the top of the key… to Arnelle right of the lane… to Brew- er on the sideline. … Brewer puts it up… good! Penn State now leads, 14- 12.' I made up all the action." The fans loved it, and so did the play- ers when they heard about it after they returned from Iowa. "There were 4,000 people waiting for us in front of the Corner Room when we returned to State College at 2 in the morning, and we were shocked," remembered Jack Sherry, the team's captain. "What we didn't know was everyone on campus was listening to the games being broadcast on radio by Mickey Berg- stein, who wasn't even there." Penn State upset LSU, 78-70, and then defeated Notre Dame, which had upset Indiana, 71-63, to send the Lions to the Final Four in Kansas City. Because of NCAA contractual rights, WMAJ could not duplicate its broad- cast of those games. Penn State lost the first game to eventual champion LaSalle, 69-54, and then erased a 44- 26 halftime deficit to defeat USC, 70- 61, for third place. A few years ago, Mickey made me an audio tape of part of those regional games, and every so often I listen to it just to remind myself how much tech- nology has changed with the arrival of cable TV, satellites and the Internet. When I would occasionally see Mick- ey in the last few years, we often would talk about that historic recreation. Mickey would never miss a beat, re- peating his descriptive oratory, laugh- ing as he enthusiastically talked about it. I saw Mickey a lot in the late 1950s when I was writing for The Daily Col- legian, and in the 1960s when I was working out of Pittsburgh as a free- lance writer and television reporter- producer. In the fall of 1966, I joined Mickey, Fran Fisher and Tom Bender in the Beaver Stadium radio booth for home games as the spotter for Tom. That arrangement continued through the 1969 season. We didn't know it at the time, but we were making broad- casting history as the conduit to the public at the birth of a future legend and icon – Joe Paterno. Paterno's back-to-back undefeated seasons in 1968 and '69 and the school-record 33-game unbeaten streak from 1967 to '70 catapulted Penn State into the elite of college foot- ball. And it was midway through this period that my third favorite memory of Mickey occurred. It was the evening after Penn State's thrilling 15-14 victory over Kansas in the 1969 Orange Bowl. The bowl's awards banquet was taking place at the exclusive Indian Creek Country Club on an island in Biscayne Bay near Bal Harbour, and Penn State's athletic administrators had invited the small contingent of Pennsylvania news media who had covered the game to at- tend the event. I had been in Miami for a week reporting for WIIC-TV (now WPXI), and my cameraman and I were the only television people among the half dozen or so newspapermen who were there. No one from the Kansas or Miami media had been in- vited to the postgame banquet. To say we were impressed by the country club would be an under- statement. I remember being with Mickey and my cameraman, Tom An- gel – an African American – and a few others as we strolled through the locker room. It was like being in a posh library or the boardroom of a Fortune 500 company. The floors were covered in thick carpet, the lockers were cus- tom-made from dark wood, and there were matching dark-wood chairs in front of the lockers that had deep SEE MICKEY PAGE 37 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M A P R I L 1 1 , 2 0 1 2 35

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