Another hockey night in Pittsburgh, another night of over-the-air traffic control. The producer constantly rolls his chair between the studio's panels and boards and reel-to-reel tapes and consoles, constantly keeps this broadcast rolling from Industry to the Internet, hither and Uniontown. He is known as Dan Dillon, network producer. He is the man in the middle of rush-hour radio that lasts five rushed hours.
The producer's WWSW-AM/FM hockey night begins at 5:30 with a flagship-station radio check. Around these Penguins, it's tempting to call it a radio Czech. Around all Penguins and Pirates games the past few Pittsburgh generations, it's more like a radio Check -- containing the father-son engineer team of either Mel or Doran.
"Keep talking," Doran Check tells the producer from the Mellon Arena broadcast booth. Back in the studio, Dillon talks into the microphone so they can fully test the quality of the sound: "This is Dan in the station with my head up my wazoo. Same as always."
The most important tools for this producer are senses of humor and urgency, behavior learned over 20 years: former KQV-AM news writer and program director, Penguins network producer at that station and then-WTAE-AM, producer for both the current Steelers network on WDVE-FM and for the Penguins on 3WS. He goes so far back -- "it's the Wayback Machine," he jokes -- Dillon was the game-night guy who, all by himself, turned up Mike Lange's television sound and put it over the KQV airwaves, a prehistoric way of simulcasting.
At 6:10, Lange's former sidekick commences his pregame feed of sound bytes. "Hello, Danny, Danny, Danny boy," Paul Steigerwald croons into the arena-booth mike, talking to the producer miles away. Dillon uses the reel-to-reel tapes to re-record Steigerwald's earlier interviews with Tyler Wright, Rob Brown and Coach Herb Brooks, then he splices them by hand and transfers them to cartridges. Some prehistoric behaviors are hard to break, indeed.
By 2001, the station plans to go digital. "They told me next year," he says, "my cart machines are going to be doorstops."
Arena public-address music wafts through the studio while Dillon arranges piles of 30 cartridges atop his control panel -- carts consisting of commercials to air during specified breaks. The producer has a commercial list that looks like one of Bill Walsh's old 49ers play sheets, something only a genius could understand.
"Everybody says, 'Producing the hockey game, what is it?' " Dillon explains. "I look at myself as a cook. I put a bunch of things in a pot and stir it up. The cake is what people hear on the air."
Once in a while, the broadcast gets burned, because of a satellite malfunction, a sick engineer bailing out of a road booth, or a station unwisely interrupting Mario Lemieux's 600th goal for an O.J. Simpson civil-trial verdict. Yet for 82 games in a regular season, more in the playoffs, the producer keeps juggling the pucks and the commercials on the radio air. He has attended 500 games in his life, has worked even more.
At 7:20 p.m. on this recent Senators-Penguins night, Dillon plays the pregame intro that he and Steigerwald taped at 6:41, and the radio game begins. The announcer is easy to work with, having come to radio and the Penguins' employ after a decade and a half in TV. Steigerwald is used to hearing a producer chirp into his earpiece, used to outcues and music and cutting to a break. Such breaks come whenever the on-ice action pauses around the 14-, 10- and 6-minute marks of a period, although this particular game skates right past the first before Matthew Barnaby saves the next one with a goal seconds prior to the 10-minute mark.
Soon after, Dillon whispers, "I need a [station] ID." Barely 10 seconds pass before a shot whistles into the crowd and the producer gets that much-needed break. He takes a timeout himself to telephone home to his wife, Lucy, so he can bid good night to his 4-year-old son, Sean.
The commercial carts keep flowing, the chair keeps rolling, the broadcast keeps flying. Sure, the action on the ice is stultifying, as Steigerwald underscores with his second-period close: "It comes to a merciful end, let me tell you." Yet the radio audience gets the game broadcast it wants -- although overtime to the producer means more commercials, more carts.
Dillion pronounces "Standby ... go" to Steigerwald roughly 30 times over the course of this hockey night in Pittsburgh. He reminds the announcer about contests and about beating himself up too much over a minor on-air mistake. It is just another game of many for a radio crew that talks regularly without seeing one another. This broadcast signs off at 10:39.
"I've been a substitute English teacher. I've been a news writer," Dillon says. "But it wasn't until I began producing hockey games that a light went on. This is what I was meant to do."
Dillon calls highlights into an NHL electronic switchboard from where TV and radio stations can pick up the audio. The clock on the studio wall reads 10:46 p.m. The producer arises from the chair with the well-worn wheels: "Put a fork in me."
Program notes
The new Fox sports radio network, which will carry shows by former ESPN morning dude Tony Bruno and Fox football analyst Cris Collinsworth, also contains some local windows which make for dandy local synergy. Could you imagine Stan Savran or Guy Junker or some new cable-channel hire double-shifting from Fox Sports Net Pittsburgh television to radio? Better yet, could you imagine it on, say, WWSW-AM?
The station currently airs Steelers and Penguins games when it isn't simulcasting oldies from its FM side. But sports talk and even news talk would be a much better segue to games than the Spinners. And the station is constructing a talk-radio studio in its new digs inside WDVE-FM headquarters. Sounds like a good fit to me.
"Sportsweek" on WPCB-TV 40 airs its baseball previews over the next fortnight, starting with the American League at 9 p.m. tomorrow. Boston Manager Jimy Williams, noted for his "Jimywocky" vocabulary, is among the AL interviewees.
Even though it's only an exhibition, you want to see the Pirates drub the Yankees at 7 tonight on Fox Sports Net Pittsburgh, don't you?
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