It was (roughly) 20 years ago today…I got up at oh dark thirty and drove through the snow 35 miles to the airport to catch the early Delta flight from Bozeman to SLC. From there it was on to Atlanta. Then finally, the coach, his assistant, a trainer, 18 teen hockey players and their play-by-play guy (me) would take a bus into and clear across Alabama before finally ending our day in Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis Aaron Presley and the host city of a three game series between one of the best Junior Hockey squads and one of the worst teams in the history of team sports.

Roughly six months prior I had read on a primitive internet hockey message board that the Tupelo T-Rex would be joining the America West Hockey League for the coming season. I figured we were all being punked…I mean why would Tupelo join a league based in the Rocky Mountain West? The travel was already brutal with bus rides to Bismarck and Fernie, B.C. as well as to closer Montana cities. Not to mention a 2,500 mile flight when the Bozeman IceDogs (one word) traveled to play the Fairbanks Ice Dogs (two words). An insane amount of travel given the 60 game schedule and the fact that these players were almost all high school kids hoping at best for a Division 3 merit scholarship. Turns out the internet rumor was true. Tupelo had lost their professional minor league hockey team and the AWHL had lost a couple of franchises, so voilà, Tupelo became a full member.

I’m not sure anyone really thought this through. I cannot think of any sports league with two “franchises” as insanely far apart as Tupelo and Fairbanks. And the T-Rex were BAD. Bad News Bears bad. Badder than that even. Imagine the Bad News Bears but with no improvement over the season (actually over the two seasons that they somehow managed to tough it out.) This badness was somehow exaggerated by the fact that the T-Rex played in the cavernous, 10,000 seat Bancorp South Arena. Further exaggerated by the fact that their coach, one “Billy Kidd” from Reno was really only coaching the team so his son Billy Jr. could play.

This was my fifth season doing play-by-play for the IceDogs. I started as an employee of a Mom & Pop radio station but now I was the General Manager of a cluster of four stations owned by a huge corporation. I had no business taking five days to travel 5,000 miles to announce the ritual humiliation of a group of teenagers at the hands of a more skilled group of teenagers. I don’t remember much about the long weekend in Tupelo. I can recall our team visit to Elvis’ boyhood home better than the actual contests. I do remember wishing that I had packed my binoculars as my broadcast position was clear at the top of the huge, empty arena. I know that Bozeman won all three games, the first was 8-1 and I’m pretty sure I recall the IceDogs tallying double-digits in at least one of the others. Tupelo would finish the season with a 2-54 record scoring 98 goals and allowing 489. They did lead the league in penalty minutes. The coach’s kid managed no goals, one assist and 90 penalty minutes for the entire season. The following season they improved to 2-53-0-1.

circa 2000

I’m at the point in my life where I spend too much time looking back and evaluating my life choices and how well I used the finite amount of time we’re all granted here. Traveling 5,000 miles to broadcast a teenage hockey mismatch seems a rather inefficient use of resources. So does renting a 10,000 seat arena for 28 nights with full concessions, security, three officials and one sober Zamboni driver while only selling 75 tickets. I guess we all have our dreams and big plans so credit should be given to those who sew the kids’ names on the back of their sweaters and to those who print out the rosters, stats and standings and play Euchre as the bus cruises past Talladega just to be able to describe the action to the 15 billet families back in Bozeman and the players parents listening online in Edina or wherever. My long radio career was a succession of failing upwards; I was a Jack of all Trades and a master of nearly none…although for a brief time I was a damn good sports announcer and I’d like to think I approached it with the same diligence and effort as Vin Scully or Joe Buck.