Our TV and internet connection at our German Village house is on the fritz, so yesterday I needed to find an alternative way to follow the Browns game against the Houston Texans yesterday. I decided to try catching the game on radio by tapping into the Browns radio network on the internet and listening through my phone. The feed was pretty good, and the Browns won, so I’d call the whole experiment a success.
Listening to a football game on the radio is a different experience, and in this case it brought back some memories, too. When UJ and I were kids growing up in Akron, the Browns home games were routinely blacked out, so we would listen to them on the radio. We listened to Indians games on the radio, too, because they were never on TV, either. And every kid of the pre-ESPN era remembers coming up with ways to illicitly listen to the radio and follow the World Series games, which were always played during in-school hours. The radio was how Americans got most of their sports in those days.
Sports on the radio requires some imagination, and you’ve really got to pay attention, because there are no replays. Unfortunately, my radio imagination is pretty rusty, so I couldn’t really quickly picture the guys going in motion, or the formations being described. But the crowd seems like much more active participant in the game on radio, where you can tell by the surge in noise, or the sudden silence, whether a play went well for the hometown boys. And the excitement in Jim Donovan’s voice as he describes a Nick Chubb TD burst definitely adds something to the game experience. Doug Dieken, the long-time color analyst, is pretty entertaining, too.
I’m hoping to get our bundled internet and TV fixed this week, so I can watch the Browns on TV from here on out. But if they aren’t on—Columbus stations often have to choose between showing the Browns and the Bengals—it’s nice to know that old reliable radio remains an option.
Webner House 