Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 25, 1993 TAG: 9311250305
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
After another week as Jim Colston, general/regional sales manager at WROV Radio, he's heading home for dinner and trying to prepare for another game as Jim Carroll, sports director of the Roanoke station.
As he drives, Carroll repeats the names and numbers of players he'll call that night as the play-by-play voice on WROV (1240 AM). It's become a familiar voice, because Carroll is now naming grandsons of players he called when he started what has become a tradition in Roanoke Valley radio.
Earlier this football season, at halftime of a game at Victory Stadium, Roanoke surprised Carroll by presenting him the key to the city for his years of broadcasting and supporting high school sports. He'd locked up listeners' ears long ago.
With the local schools eliminated from the state playoffs in the first round, Carroll has just finished his 30th season of high school football broadcasts. A play-by-play job that began in September 1964 with a Cave Spring-Northside football game is closing in on 1,000 games - and preparing for basketball season.
"I haven't put a timetable on how much longer I'm going to do the games," said Carroll. "I guess probably it would get down to when I consider doing it a chore. Then I'll say that's enough."
There are days in August when Carroll feels it's a chore. There are days when he's making arrangements for phone lines and broadcast space that he wonders how much longer he wants to spend Friday nights holed up in a pressbox.
Then, the games begin.
"The competitive nature in me comes out," Carroll said. "I'm a sports fan. I love seeing the competition, the matchups. One thing I always say, and my wife, Jo, will verify this, is that I just want to see overtime or a sudden-death playoff, unless it's my beloved Iowa Hawkeyes. I want them to kill everybody."
Since Carroll, 64, doesn't call his alma mater's games, he doesn't play favorites. That's why the athletic directors and coaches at the local high schools respect him. For instance, this season, 11 different high schools have been featured in his broadcasts. When you include 1992, the number grows to 14.
"I don't do a game for the sake of getting a team on," he said. "I'm looking for the good matchup, the important district game, the attraction."
Carroll shrugs on whether high school sports is as big now as it was in the first two decades he called games. He recalls crowds of 10,000 for Patrick Henry-Cave Spring games at Victory Stadium. But then he still sees high schools gyms packed with hysteria on occasion.
"There were fewer diversions for entertainment in the past," he said. "I don't know if the games were bigger then or if I've just been around so long, but high school sports have always had a pretty strong interest in this area.
"I guess even today, it's kind of like `Field of Dreams.' If you build it, they will come. If you have an attraction, they will come."
And when they don't, they often listen to Carroll describe it. Some listeners who have heard him over three decades are shocked when they meet Carroll, because he's not who they think he is.
On the business side, selling advertising, he's Jim Colston. On the sports side, he's Jim Carroll - an air name he took when he came to Roanoke in December 1961 from a Rome, N.Y., station he managed.
Then, he's still using his own name, because he's really Carroll James Colston.
"It's kind of a dilemma at times," he said, smiling about the name game. "It means half of the time I don't know how to introduce myself."
The familiar voice gives him away. Carroll gets excited on the air, but he doesn't scream. Maybe that's because Colston gets as much gratification - not to mention his paycheck - from his sales management as Carroll does from a good game broadcast.
The games aren't his only competitive outlet, away from his golf at Hidden Valley Country Club. And he admits they're getting tougher to do. Although Carroll rebounded well from double-bypass surgery 2 1/2 years ago, he has a recurring vision problem that has baffled him and doctors to date.
He recalls championship games and star players with fervor, but then, even a lopsided contest is enjoyed by the Iowa native and Army veteran who was with Armed Forces Radio in Korea in the '50s.
"Before I went to Rome, N.Y., I was an all-night disc jockey in Phoenix for about a year," Carroll said of KOOL, with its signal that blankets much of Arizona. "I was on the air from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., and then they played back the same show from 2-6 a.m. I couldn't stand that show.
"Everything was in the abstract.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB