Titan Radio Loses Its Versatile Voice

At long last, on June 6, John Rebenstorf graduated from Cal State Fullerton.

He was on the 10-year plan.

Rebenstorf leaves with a well-rounded, if somewhat sprawling, education, his field of expertise encompassing radio communications, electrical engineering, advertising, accounting, contract negotiation, finance, business administration, public relations and self-preservation.

He leaves without having paid one cent in tuition. Dues, yes--by the truckload--but tuition, no.

For the past decade, Rebenstorf has broadcast football, basketball and baseball games for Cal State Fullerton. That was the easy part. In order to broadcast them, Rebenstorf first had to buy the rights to them . . . and sell the advertising for them . . . and set up the equipment for them . . . and find a signal for them . . . and find a way to get to them.

It wasn’t a job, it was 10 of them. “I was a one-man operation,” Rebenstorf says. The amazing thing is that he stayed in operation. Pay was low, hours were long, security was nil. He called play-by-play and lived day-by-day.

Now, those day-by-days are over. On June 6, much to his surprise, Rebenstorf was offered a multi-year contract by KMPC to broadcast UCLA football and basketball. This, supposedly, was the front end of the Bill Shumard deal--Fullerton trades an announcer to the Pac-10 for an athletic director to be named later.

“It was like I won the lottery,” Rebenstorf says of that blessed Thursday morning. “I was standing up when they told me, so I had to sit down. If I was sitting down, I’d have had to stand up.”

Who could know what to do? Rebenstorf was swapping the Santa Ana Bowl for the Rose Bowl, Tuffy Titan for Pauley Pavilion, the McQuarn Years for the Wooden Years, in-the-red for in-the-NCAAs.

“Obviously, there’s going to be more pressure to be very good and to be right all the time,” Rebenstorf says. “On the other side, they told me I’ll have an engineer at all the games.”

Rebenstorf The Voice may be made for radio, but Rebenstorf The Story is made for TV, right down to an intro copped straight from Ted Baxter: It all began at a 1,000-watt radio station in Danville, Ill.

“I was 19 years old in December of 1969 and I started out doing the news for the princely sum of $35 a week,” Rebenstorf says. “I did eight nightly newscasts between three in the afternoon and midnight. By the time I left the station to attend Southern Illinois nine months later, I was making $40 a week.”

Rebenstorf branched into sports because of the pay. Danville had a Class-A baseball team and the local station needed somebody to broadcast the games. “If you volunteered, they paid you nothing,” Rebenstorf says. “But if they needed you, you could get $10 to $15 a game.”

College days done in the summer of ‘71, Rebenstorf followed the script line all the way to California. You know: fame, fortune, the seat next to Vin Scully. “I couldn’t get by the receptionist’s desk,” Rebenstorf says. “I was 20 years old and they probably saw 10 of those a day. In the Midwest, you were lucky to see 10 warm bodies a day. They said, ‘Come back when you have some experience.’ ”

Rebenstorf got his at Cal Poly Pomona and Redlands, calling the action for small colleges on smaller radio stations. Every broadcast was a John Rebenstorf production, from buying the time to filling it. Then, the brainstorm leading to the step up: “If I can get Pomona on the air, I should be able to get a Division I school like Fullerton on the air.”

In 1981, Fullerton hired Rebenstorf--”As big a break for me then as going from Fullerton to UCLA now.” Finally, the quasi-big time. Rebenstorf poured his heart and soul into the job, which was half the problem. By 1985, a stressed-out Rebenstorf had already suffered two heart attacks and was scheduled for triple-bypass surgery.

“I was 35,” Rebenstorf says. “At 35, nobody likes to be told by a doctor that you need an operation and that you have a 10% chance of not making it.”

Rebenstorf had the surgery in November, 1985, and, excluding a few days of follow-up observation in 1986, he has not been hospitalized since. Such is life for a sports broadcaster: The biggest victory of his career, and he has to sleep through it.

In the six years that have followed, Rebenstorf’s heart has been a problem only in job interviews. “I remember interviewing for the UCLA job in 1989 and the third question I got was, ‘How’s your health? What’s the deal with the heart?’ ” Rebenstorf says. “This time, they didn’t ask. I worked for them last year (doing football color commentary) and I made every game. I haven’t missed a game since the operation.”

That’s a lot of trips to Logan and Las Cruces, as well as Radio Shack, but Rebenstorf insists he didn’t mind, at least not too much.

“I’ll take mostly good memories,” he says. “Anybody who spends 10 years in one place is going to have ups and downs. You come across people you like, people you’re indifferent about and people you don’t like. All of that happened at Fullerton. However it turns out for me, without Fullerton, there would be no UCLA.”

Good memories? Rebenstorf cites the final game of the 1984 College World Series, Fullerton over Texas: “Eddie Delzer, this little 5-6 guy, beats Greg Swindell for the championship.” He cites the Fullerton-UNLV football game in 1984: “Randall Cunningham versus Damon Allen in Las Vegas and it ends up with Allen throwing in the end zone and the receiver falling down. If the guy doesn’t fall, he probably catches it and Fullerton probably goes undefeated.” He cites the Wayne Williams jump shot that beat UNLV in overtime in 1989: “A miracle game.”

But if you’re looking for the quintessential Rebenstorf-Fullerton moment, look no further than Glover Stadium, mid-November, 1983. Fullerton’s football team was forced to play UNLV there because Anaheim Stadium kicked the Titans out--it had rained, the Rams were playing the next day and a “rain clause” gave the Rams sole rights to the field for the entire weekend. Rebenstorf was forced to call the game without a press box phone line.

“The city was going to send out an electrician,” Rebenstorf says, “but it was a Saturday and you know Cal State Fullerton--’He’ll be there on Monday.’ So we wound up tapping into a private phone line. It was a house with a couple of kids. I told them, ‘Fullerton and Vegas are playing for the conference championship. Can you please stay off the phone for the next 3 1/2 hours?’

“They were real stars. They waited for 3 1/2 hours but the game ran long and with two minutes left, I hear in my headset, ‘What’s going on here? Isn’t the game over yet? How come we can’t use our phone?’ ”

The line is free now. Rebenstorf, too. Once and for all, the one-man act has been retired.

Blending in with the scenery never sounded so good.