MSN's Caridi: Time Flies
August 05, 2003 12:56 PM | General
August 8, 2003
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Tony Caridi maneuvered his 1979 robin blue Ford Granada off the Sabraton exit of I-68 and headed down a narrow stretch of two-lane road toward the Greer Building, which houses the studios for WAJR.
Tony had gotten another call from news director Hoppy Kercheval. Hoppy was looking for a news guy and it was Tony’s chance to make a second impression. His first wasn’t a good one.
“When he first called, I told him I wasn’t interested and that I was a sports guy,” remembered Caridi. “I was doing overnight news at WHEN in Syracuse and I thought I had another job in York, Pa., doing sports. When the York thing didn’t work out I called Hoppy back and I said, ‘You know, I really am a news guy.’”
Nineteen years later Tony Caridi is still here, though he no longer has to do the news. In addition to being the host of the widely popular MetroNews Statewide Sportline, Caridi has also become entrenched as West Virginia University’s football and basketball play-by-play announcer. He is beginning his seventh football season this fall.
It’s a job he says is one of the very best in the country.
“It’s the tiffany of college radio networks,” he said. “No stone is left unturned from any aspect – whether it’s from production, travel or whatever.”
Back in 1984, Caridi had absolutely no idea Morgantown’s tractor beam would pull him in for good.
“I planned to stay here for six months and basically at the end of each season you kind of sniff around to see what’s out there,” he admitted. “But after each season there was another reason for me to stay.”
First it was the talk show that began in 1986 and that led to his involvement with the Mountaineer Sports Network. As each season wore on, Caridi began getting more responsibility and more interesting things to do. He soon began doing color analysis on football replays and features for the television show.
Later, he was able to land some television work for both the Atlantic 10 and Big East networks, as well doing the college football game of the week for Mutual Radio.
“(Station manager) Dale Miller was always good about that,” said Caridi. “You’ve got to have a base job if you’re going to freelance and there was always that opportunity for me here.”
It became tougher to leave once he got married in 1988 to his wife Joan, and together they had their first son in 1991 and later twins in 1995.
“I’ve lived in Morgantown, W.Va., longer than anywhere else in my life,” he says.
Tony Caridi grew up in Lockport, N.Y., a small, blue-collar city of 30,000 located in western New York not far from Buffalo.
Lockport got its name because of its proximity to the Erie Barge Canal. However, it was the Harrison Radiator Division that fueled its economy. Virtually everyone in Lockport either worked at Harrison or had a relative who did.
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| MSN's Tony Caridi's six-month stay in Morgantown has now turned into 19 years. (All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks) |
It was a subsidiary of General Motors and when the car business was going well, Lockport did well. When GM ran into trouble in the early 1980s, Lockport felt the sting.
Perhaps Lockport’s most famous citizen is William Miller, a 1950s lawyer and congressman who made an astonishingly rapid rise in the Republican Party. In 1964, he became a surprise running mate of ultra conservative Barry Goldwater in his bid to defeat democratic candidate Lyndon Johnson for the presidency.
Miller was picked mainly because better-known guys like Gerald Ford and William Scranton wouldn’t answer Goldwater’s phone calls. Goldwater wasn’t shy about his desire to lob a few nukes into the Kremlin if the Soviets didn’t behave themselves, and Miller was the one guy in the party who could out-Goldwater Barry Goldwater.
Republicans called him a “gut fighter.” Former president Harry Truman had a different opinion: “He was a hatchet man.”
Caridi points out, too, that the inventor of volleyball, William Morgan, was from Lockport along with famous author Brock Yates, who was responsible for giving us Smokey and the Bandit. And just one town over was the birthplace of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
More locally, another well-known Lockport native is popular West Virginia basketball coach John Beilein.
Tony spent his summers working in his father’s Grocery/Sub/Pizza shop called Joe’s Locust Market. It was open seven days a week, from nine in the morning until 10 at night.
“We were literally raised in that store,” said Tony. “My brother, my sister and I would go directly from school to the store. In the summers we spent the entire day there.”
By the time Caridi reached Lockport Senior High School, he became interested in dee-jaying. It wasn’t until a friend asked him to help out on a high school basketball broadcast that he had any interest in anything else.
“The game happened to be Geneseo High School and they were playing Lyons High School, which was (Syracuse coach) Jim Boeheim’s alma mater,” said Tony. “That was the first time I’d done play-by-play and I fell in love with it.”
Tony didn’t just fall in love with it; he was hooked. “Play-by-play is the crack cocaine of broadcasting,” he joked.
Rick Dees' job was safe. Tony Caridi decided he was going to be a sportscaster.
The State University of New York at Geneseo is one of the finest academic institutions in the Northeast.
“Many refer to it as the hidden Harvard,” Caridi jokes. “It’s considered one of the top Division III liberal arts colleges in the country.”
Caridi went there in the fall of 1980 with the idea of becoming a broadcaster. He soon realized that while the English department was superb, the communications department wasn’t. That cold splash of water on his face came during an internship he was able to land at the ABC television affiliate in Buffalo after his freshman year.
“I saw what broadcasting was really like,” he said. “(At Geneseo) they had two wires and they were rubbing them together trying to make a radio broadcast. It was like Michael Landon on the Little House on the Prairie. By the time I went back for my sophomore year I knew I was going to transfer.”
Caridi’s destination was the highly competitive and expensive Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University.
You don’t enroll at Newhouse unless you’re serious about a career in journalism. The late Will McDonough, a nationally known columnist from the Boston Globe, sent his son Sean to Syracuse. Those were the type of students Syracuse attracted.
Tony’s classmates include a virtual Who’s Who in broadcasting today. There’s McDonough, the Voice of the Boston Red Sox and a regular on ABC football telecasts; Greg Papa (Voice of the Oakland Raiders and syndicated talk show host); Dan Hoard (Voice of the Cincinnati Bearcats); Jim Jackson (Voice of the Philadelphia Flyers); Craig Minervini (Florida Marlins studio host); and Pete Haskell (reporter at WCBS Radio in New York).
“In the broadcast business those who aren’t Syracuse graduates call us the ‘Syracuse Mafia,’” he said.
According to Caridi, journalism school at Syracuse proved to be a highly demanding experience.
“It was cut-throat. I remember kids would do a project and they would show it on the big screen and 200 others in there would critique it for about two and a half hours,” he said. “There were about 50 kids at the student radio station that signed up for sports. These kids were paying big, big money and they felt like it was their right that they should be on the air at that station.”
Tony was good enough to get on air, but that didn’t necessarily mean he’d made it. In fact, broadcasting games at Syracuse could be a rather humiliating experience.
“I sat in the stands,” he laughed. “You had to do the game into a tape recorder with your charts and everything right in the middle of everybody – you looked like a real sweetheart up there, let me tell you.”
Tony was working the eleven-at-night-to-seven-in-the-morning graveyard shift at WHEN in Syracuse and was looking for any reason to get out of there. Seven weeks of midnight news was more than enough for him.
Hoppy Kercheval turned out to be Caridi’s beacon.
“When I arrived in Morgantown, I came through Sabraton and I thought that was downtown Morgantown,” he said. “Remember, this is 1984. I eventually found my way to downtown and it was about the third week of July. Nothing was going on; it was a Sunday afternoon and three guys at Massullo’s were standing with their shirts off next to their Novas with the hoods popped up showing off their engines.
“I have to admit they were sparkling clean,” Tony added. “I’m driving past them and I’m thinking to myself, ‘My God, I think I’ve just driven onto the set of Happy Days.’”
Soon football season began and Tony’s outlook on Morgantown changed dramatically.
“I actually became a fan of West Virginia that season,” he said. “I was around when they beat Boston College and Penn State back-to-back. That atmosphere at the stadium and the way those crowds were back then … I became an instant West Virginia fan.”
He laughs today when people jokingly accuse him of being an undercover agent for Syracuse – a.k.a. Agent Orange.
“People always kid me and say I root for Syracuse. I was there for two years and I never grew up a Syracuse fan,” he said. “When you grow up near Buffalo you rooted for the Bills, the Sabres and the Buffalo Braves. College was never a big deal. People didn’t follow it like they do here in West Virginia.”
Having never gone through a season like West Virginia’s in 1988, Tony admits he got caught up in the euphoria of following a team in the midst of its first undefeated season in school history.
Having a fairly active mind, Tony came up with what he thought was a great idea.
He got Major Harris, Rico Tyler and Alvoid Mays into a recording studio and had them record a rap song about the season similar to what the Chicago Bears did in 1985. It was West Virginia’s version of the “Super Bowl Shuffle” and the players and fans loved it.
West Virginia coach Don Nehlen didn’t.
“When Coach found out about it he chased me from one end of the Puskar Center to the other,” laughed West Virginia sports information director Shelly Poe. “Beforehand, I asked Tony if he had OK’d it with Coach and he said he did.”
Nehlen finally cornered Caridi at a Fiesta Bowl press conference before West Virginia’s national championship game against Notre Dame.
“Do you know what Notre Dame plays every day before practice?” Nehlen asked.
Before Caridi could answer, Nehlen snapped back, “That damned rap tape you made with my players!”
Although he took considerable grief over it, Tony laughs about it now.
“I guess I’m also the one responsible for Major’s shoulder injury on the third play of the game, too,” he says.
Even today Caridi hasn’t lost his P.T. Barnum promotional flare. He’s organized a series of events around the state called “Pigstock,” where he takes his talk show on the road and helps drum up support for the upcoming football season.
Alongside is his trusty sidekick Greg Hunter whom he affectionately calls “coach,” even though Hunter’s coaching experience amounted to only middle school pee-wee football.
Caridi is also beginning to carve his own niche on football and basketball broadcasts. His colleagues say he is a vociferous preparer who spends as much as 20 hours a week getting ready for a broadcast.
“I might be talking to an assistant coach and he might say something and then, boom, I’ll use that in the broadcast in some form,” said Caridi. “I’m constantly in the gathering mode.”
Tony has an uncanny knack for remembering names, numbers, hometowns and other trivial information. He says he learned that by reading Jerry Lucas’ The Memory Book.
“It’s memory by association,” he says. “It teaches you how to memorize numbers among other things. Every number to me from zero to 99 is a word. I take that word and then I use a person’s name and I make a visual image of that person.”
Caridi has also mastered the art of speaking on the fly.
“Other than the scene-setter to open the broadcast, nothing else is scripted,” said Caridi. “I think a big thing that’s helped me is the talk show. Getting on every single night basically without a script for 16 years … that experience has been invaluable to me.”
Caridi admits there are times when his mind goes blank on the air. However, he says the most difficult thing is trying to describe that killer play that costs West Virginia the game.
“There are some plays that just hurt so bad that you don’t want to say anything at all,” he admits. “When Tremain Mack blocked that punt in ’96 you just want to sit there and say, ‘Awww.’ I still haven’t mastered that and I probably won’t.”
According to Caridi, probably the most meaningful thing in the broadcasting business is the relationships he’s developed over the years with his broadcast partners, athletic staff, coaches and athletes.
“When I was in college Dick Stockton wrote me a letter about all of the wonderful opportunities broadcasting provides. He said I would see and experience things that you would never be able to normally experience. That’s so true,” said Caridi.
“Being associated with the great people in the WVU athletic department and being a part of a top-quality broadcast are the most pleasing things to me,” he added. “There are a lot of networks where it’s just a throw-together thing where they pick up an engineer on Saturday. At MSN, it’s a week-long process with the goal being excellence.”
What he thought was going to be a six-month job at WAJR has turned into a 19-year love affair with the state of West Virginia. For Tony Caridi, having the opportunity to describe major college sports is a dream come true.
“I looked down at my watch and looked back up and the next thing you know it is 19 years later,” he says. “Time flies.”
It sure does, Tony. It sure does.
