CALLING THE SHOTS : Bob Miller Gets More Milestones Than the Kings

This is not an ad for the Columbia School of Broadcasting.

Tired of your job? Want to make more money? Like the glamour and excitement of sports? Think that voice on the radio could be YOURS? Sure, you could be the next Vin Scully or Chick Hearn, broadcasting World Series and NBA championships to millions of listeners. But we offer more, in our thrilling course, Broadcasting the Bob Miller Way, in which you learn these valuable lessons: --How to describe hockey in Southern California, a perfect primer for the aspiring announcer yearning to cover hang gliding in Vladivostok. --How to make losing sound exciting night after night in such exotic places as Winnipeg and East Rutherford, N.J. --How to work for radio stations so powerful that their signals can be heard on every other Thursday as long as Jupiter is aligned with Mars, the Lakers have the night off and your car windows are rolled down. Yes, someday YOU, too, could be the voice of the Los Angeles Kings. Call now for details! That ad should also have carried a warning: Anyone aiming to succeed Miller as the Kings’ play-by-play man may be in for a long wait.

Tonight, when the Kings take the ice against the New York Islanders in the Forum, Miller will be broadcasting his 1,000th regular-season game. Only team trainer Pete Demers, who arrived in 1972, a year ahead of Miller, has been with the team longer.

Miller has outlasted one owner, Jack Kent Cooke, who used to call in the middle of broadcasts to complain, and now works for another, Jerry Buss, who left the greatest game in the history of the franchise early.

Miller also has survived 4 general managers, 7 coaches, 5 broadcasting partners, and 160 players, not to forget nearly 600 winless games without so much as a division title to show for them.

In a town that has elevated Scully and Hearn to the status of cult figures, as well as very wealthy men, Miller may go relatively unrecognized and unrewarded. But to L.A. hockey fans, only Marcel Dionne, and perhaps Dave Taylor, rival Miller in popularity.

“If Chick Hearn is the Lakers’ franchise, then the No. 1 thing the Kings have is Bob Miller,” said Ira Fistel, the KABC radio talk-show host and longtime hockey enthusiast. “If there’s one thing that has given the franchise continuity, it’s Bob Miller.”

Fistel was with Miller in the beginning, back in Madison, Wis., where Miller was sports director of a radio and TV station until the day he was told that the station would be broadcasting University of Wisconsin hockey games and that Miller would be the man behind the mike.

Now Miller had seen plenty of hockey. As a boy in Chicago, he had ridden the streetcar from the South Side to Madison Street to watch the Black Hawks. But broadcast a game? Never.

Fistel, another native Chicagoan and Black Hawk fan, offered to help.

“The first game was against the University of North Dakota, which was nationally ranked at the time, and Wisconsin won, 11-7,” Fistel said. “It was so exciting, I knocked over about five Cokes.”

Miller, however, stayed in his seat. He had to. For many of the games, Fistel said, they broadcast from two cocktail tables set on top of a scaffold.

Wisconsin, under Coach Bob Johnson, became a national collegiate power, and hockey became not only the hottest thing on ice but also on the air waves.

“Sponsors would call and say, ‘We want to be on the broadcast, send me a contract, I’ll sign it and you fill in a figure,’ ” Miller said.

Johnson later went on to coach the Calgary Flames, but Miller preceded him to the National Hockey League by nearly 10 years, although it took him a year longer than he anticipated to get the Kings’ job.

Hearn, after listening to some of Miller’s tapes, had recommended Miller when Jiggs McDonald left after the 1971-72 season. McDonald is now the New York Islanders’ broadcaster. But while Hearn was away, vacationing in Hawaii, Cooke hired another announcer. It wasn’t until a year later that Miller re-applied and was hired.

The delay probably worked to Miller’s advantage. That winter, Wisconsin won the national championship. He hasn’t worked for a winner since.

At first, Miller wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to work for Cooke, who used to sit in his Forum box, a radio plugged into his ear and binoculars focused on his new broadcaster.

“I remember saying to myself, ‘There’s no way I can do a game like this if every time I open my mouth I’m going to worry about saying something that won’t please the owner or somebody else,’ ” Miller said. “I figured, ‘If it doesn’t please him, fine. I’ll get another job or he can get rid of me.’ ”

Eventually, the calls came less frequently, although Miller chuckled recalling the night in Montreal when Rich Marotta, his broadcast partner, discovered that his mike was dead for a between-periods interview. For nearly five minutes, Miller filled the air time until the problem was resolved, then switched to Marotta.

“Less than 30 seconds later the phone rang in the booth,” Miller said. “ ‘It’s for you,’ the engineer said. ‘Somebody in L.A.’

“It was somebody at the Forum with a message: ‘Mr. Cooke just called from Las Vegas. He said tell Miller to stop hogging the mike so much and let Rich talk once in a while.’ ”

Cooke’s successor, Buss, “has never, ever, once told me what to say or not to say,” Miller said.

But there was the night that former General Manager George Maguire summoned Miller and his partner, Pete Weber, after a one-sided defeat by the Rangers.

“That game was so awful I couldn’t stand to watch it, so I came down to my office,” said Maguire, who could listen to games there on a speaker. “Which one of you said it looks like the Kings have quit and have given up?”

“Neither of us said it,” Miller replied.

“Well, I better not hear it again,” Maguire said.

On his way home that night, Miller realized that Maguire had heard the broadcast by the visiting announcers. A check of the tape confirmed it, and Miller took it to Maguire.

“Yup, that’s what I heard,” Maguire said.

“But that’s not Pete and I, that’s the Ranger announcers,” Miller said. “And I think you owe Pete and I an apology for that childish outburst last night.”

For a moment, Miller said, he wasn’t sure how Maguire would respond. “He had that little cigar stub and he was getting all red in the face and he looked at me,” said Miller, who can parody Maguire right down to his clipped Canadian accent.

“ ‘Well,’ George said, ‘I apologize. What do you think I am, a Canadian diplomat?’ ”

Management types weren’t the only ones who attempted to interfere with broadcasts. Sometimes a fan would get in the act.

That happened in Kansas City when Miller criticized fans for throwing debris on the ice during a rare King rout. The problem was, Miller and his partner, Dan Avey, were sitting in the midst of those fans, with only a flimsy glass shield separating them.

“A guy sitting six rows in front of us got up from his seat, he’s got to be 6-foot-6, and he yells, ‘Did you hear what he said?’ ” Miller said. “He doesn’t take the aisle up, he comes walking over the chairs, leans on the glass and stares at us, about two feet away.

“Dan Avey had a hand-held microphone and he was ready to hit the guy on the head with it. We told an usherette to find the police. We never saw her again.”

Play, of course, was proceeding, and Miller was leaning around the guy, trying to watch the action. When the Kings scored again, Miller gloated even more.

“I knew the guy was boiling,” Miller said. “He took his ticket stubs out of his pocket, ripped them up and threw them at us. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he yelled.

“The next 10 minutes I spent looking over my shoulder.”

Miller’s ability to laugh at the drop of a puck has sustained him through years of losing teams. And the Kings have had no shortage of characters, like Maguire and the late Jake Milford, the former general manager who once convinced Marotta that Cooke wanted the broadcasters to sell advertising on the traffic pylons in the Forum parking lot. Schmoos, they called them, after the character in the L’il Abner comic strip.

“Twenty-five dollars for a whole schmoo, a half-schmoo it’s $15,” said Miller, who was in on the joke and naturally didn’t inform Marotta until after he’d sent his partner out with a 12-inch ruler to measure one.

But the Kings haven’t always played it for laughs.

Although the highlights may be few, Miller will never forget the spring of 1982, when the Kings--who had the worst record of any of the playoff qualifiers--rallied from five goals down to beat Edmonton in overtime in the greatest comeback in Stanley Cup history, then three nights later eliminated the Oilers on their home ice.

“I look at the videotape now and I still don’t believe we’re going to do it,” said Miller, who noticed that Buss’ box was unoccupied during the third period but said he didn’t realize that the owner had slipped out with actress Cathy Lee Crosby.

“I remember thinking, ‘It’s 5-0 after two periods and we do this every time: We get everybody excited, sell out the building and we go right into the tank.’ If anybody had said, ‘Did you think they’d come back,’ I’d say no. If everybody was honest, there was no way anybody thought they would come back.”

When Mark Hardy cut the score to 5-4 with four minutes left, the place was bedlam, Miller said, adding, “I’ve never seen the Forum that wild in the 13 years I’ve been there.”

But even in the madness of the final minutes, when Steve Bozek scored with five seconds left to send the game into overtime, Miller never lost his keen eye for detail, spotting Jim Fox stealing the puck away from Wayne Gretzky to set up the tying goal, and noting that it was an all-rookie line (Doug Smith, Daryl Evans and Bozek) that went out for the faceoff just before Evans’ game-winning goal in overtime.

The Kings lost the next game, and when the teams returned to Edmonton after an all-night flight, Miller recalled the scene at the hotel at 5 a.m.

“There was a little old lady there, about 75 years old,” he said, “and she’s shaking her fist. ‘We’re going to get you guys,’ she said. ‘You didn’t treat our boys very nice in L.A.’ The players can’t believe it. It’s 5 in the morning.”

That night, the Kings blew out the Oilers on their home ice. “It was 3-0 early and I remember saying to Nick (Nickson), I’m not even going to smile,’ ” Miller said. “But after the game, I called my wife from a little room where the Oilers’ wives and girlfriends were crying, and I’m on the phone, laughing. I loved it.”

The Oilers have gone on to win two Stanley Cups. The Kings haven’t even won another playoff series.

Of course, that gnaws at Miller. “It’s been tough,” he said. “I’ve looked at the Edmonton broadcasters and thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if every night when you walked into an arena you knew that you could win that night and that you’re going to win 40 or 50 games?’

“There are some nights when I begin my preparation that everything is a negative. I think, what can we talk about that’s positive.

“I’d be so happy for so many people--all those fans, all our listeners, myself, other people in the organization--to finally win that championship.”

That, however, has not dimmed his love for the job. The Kings may have been bounced around from station to station (they’re on KLAC now, KGIL when the Lakers are playing at the same time), and have had broadcasts delayed for hours or preempted, but Miller says he’s content to be where he is. Recently, he signed a contract that will take him through the 1987-88 season.

“There may be times I’m not excited about a game but I’ve always had the intent of doing the best broadcast I can, whether it was a million people listening or just my wife,” he said. “I never wanted anyone to come up to me and say, ‘What was wrong with you last night? You weren’t very good.’

“People tell me, ‘Nobody listens, nobody knows who you are,’ but I’ll go somewhere and out of the blue somebody will come up when I least expect it and tell me, ‘Hey, I really like the Kings broadcasts, I really like the games.’ ”

Miller has had feelers to go elsewhere and has talked to the cable networks about doing some work. What about being third banana to Scully and Hearn?

“It’s not a tough thing to accept,” he said. “I like to think I do a pretty good job on a very tough sport to broadcast. I like the personal challenge of broadcasting a game with that much speed and unlimited substitutions on the fly, the fact that you’re on your own, with no spotter, no statistician. To do a game, you either prepare or it’s very noticeable that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

No one has ever accused Miller of that.

“He’s so smooth, so flawless,” Fistel said. “He almost never goes back to correct himself.”

Miller admits that there have been times when, from his angle, it appeared that a goal had been scored, only to discover otherwise.

“I can just see the guy at home in his living room jumping off his couch when I yell, ‘Score,’ and swearing at me when he hits the floor,” Miller said.

Tonight, in a ceremony between periods, those fans will have the chance to cheer him.