The idea was so revolutionary that Bob Berger, owner of radio station KHVH, repeated it slowly and with emphasis to make sure he’d heard it correctly.
“College baseball? On the radio?” Berger recalled, the incredulity still tinged in his voice years later.
These days University of Hawaii is a staple on the radio dial, where it returns next week, but in 1977 it took some persistent and determined lobbying before Berger would consent to what was then viewed as an outlandish “experiment.”
It was Don Robbs who did the convincing, and vindication was long ago his in what this month marks the start of his 40th season behind the microphone as the play-by-play voice of UH baseball.
Robbs, 79, says it will be his last season in a role that was originally supposed to last just the weekend of the 1977 NCAA Regionals at Rainbow Stadium. Instead, when he walks away at season’s end, it will be with the memory bank of more than 2,300 games and a place in its history.
“Don is an institution in college baseball,” said Lou Pavlovich Jr., publisher of Collegiate Baseball Newspaper. “I don’t know of anybody who has been at it longer. He’s done so much for the sport, especially in Hawaii”
“To tell you the truth,” Robbs recalls, “I wasn’t sure it (UH baseball on the radio) would work either, but I thought it was worth a try.”
The timing, it turned out, was prophetic. The rise of a young left-hander from Aiea, Derek Tatsuno, who was a freshman in 1977, and the ’Bows’ subsequent march to the College World Series in 1980 made UH baseball a hot ticket on campus and a money-maker for KHVH.
Though Robbs did baseball as a sidelight to his other media jobs, taking vacation days for road trips, UH baseball forever became his calling card, to the point where he was recently elected to UH’s Circle of Honor. UH coach Mike Trapasso has announced plans to name an annual award for Robbs.
“He’s given a lot to UH and baseball in particular,” Trapasso said.
“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure it would work either, but I thought it was worth a try.”
– Don Robbs Hawaii baseball announcer on his proposal in 1977 to broadcast UH baseball on the radio
Until recent seasons, when his health put a halt to travel beyond Les Murakami Stadium, Robbs was the ’Bows’ constant companion on the road. In some years, until the NCAA put a ceiling on the number of games teams could play, that meant as many as 84 games in a season and hopscotching six states, equipment trunk in hand.
It also meant becoming a master of improvisation since college baseball radio broadcasts were so rare that few schools had facilities. Once he had to fast-talk women’s dormitory officials at the University of San Francisco into allowing him to run a telephone line from one of the rooms through a laundry facility and out onto a lanai overlooking the campus diamond, where he broadcast from a card table.
At Santa Clara, he broadcast from the student section during a keg party, turning down the students’ repeated urgings to hoist a few with them between innings. On other occasions he broadcast from shared picnic tables, mobile homes and amid fertilizer bags in an equipment shed.
Out in the open in Provo, Utah, when a surprise snowstorm dusted campus, Brigham Young officials took pity and brought Robbs a garbage bag and blankets.
Along the way his games have aired on four stations and he has partnered with 11 analysts, including son Scott. An angioplasty was one of the few things to keep him away from the ballpark for any length of time.
A stroke two summers ago not only failed to deter him, it provided a goal that helped drive him through an arduous rehabilitation process.
“It is becoming a struggle, so this year will be it for me,” Robbs said. “It is becoming time to step aside and let somebody younger have all the fun.”
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
