Talk Isn’t Cheap at This Camp

The Huntington Beach Holiday Inn has been transformed into the House of Pancake Makeup, its first-floor ballroom teeming with young men in sports coats, wide ties and short pants who wander the halls, mouthing the words to the script in their hands, bracing for their moment in the strobe lights.

Another name is called.

Another body disappears into the makeshift television studio.

Another career in broadcasting is about to take a step forward, or backward.

“Before I get to the Dodgers’ game,” our candidate intones, following the Teleprompter’s scroll, “this story just breaking--The Los Angeles Lakers have called a press conference for 10 a.m. tomorrow morning. Speculation is that a monster trade will be announced. Listen to this:

“The Orlando Magic will trade Shaquille O’Neal to the Lakers for Vlade Divac, Byron Scott and their first and second draft choices in 1993.

“Wow! ‘The Shack,’ coming to L.A.”

You heard it here first. Just don’t believe a word of it. It’s a pretend sportscast for a pretend sportscaster, and there are 128 of them in town this week, bidding to become the next Chris Bermans and the next Van Earl Wrights, as if the world didn’t have enough suffering.

Behind closed doors a few feet away, four teams of play-by-play men and color analysts are yelling at a big screen. They are trying to keep up with a tape of the 1990 USC-UCLA football game--final score: 46-44, Trojans--and by the middle of the fourth quarter, all of them have the touchdown call down cold.

Hop in a van and drive to Ocean View High School, where two all-star high school basketball teams are engaged in the Great Western Shootout. Alongside the court is the Great Western Shoutout--10 more teams of talking heads, headsets bobbing, tongues wagging and spot charts fluttering.

Break for lunch, wait a couple hours and it’s off to Anaheim Stadium to broadcast a big league baseball game. The Angels are in town. They will have to do.

Welcome to the one sports camp where the goal isn’t to Be Like Mike.

Here, the objective is to Be Close to the Mike, someday, or go down in flames of faulty inflection trying.

Bob Miller, play-by-play man for the Los Angeles Kings and co-director of Sportscaster Camps of America, sits in the stands inside the Ocean View gymnasium and laughs at the monster he and Roy Englebrecht created eight years ago.

“We’re teaching people to take our jobs,” Miller says as he surveys press row. Laugh, yes, but it’s no joke. One camper, 16-year-old Tony Luftman, has already notified counselor and UCLA broadcaster John Rebenstorf of his intentions.

“I want your job,” Luftman told Rebenstorf. Luftman is a big UCLA fan; he’s a Bruin ballboy when he’s not attending classes at Van Nuys Grant High School or creating mock telecasts at home. Luftman insists Rebenstorf took the news reasonably well. “He laughed a lot. He knows by the time I’m ready, he’ll be doing something much bigger.”

Time is on Luftman’s side, but at the moment, it occasionally works against him. Take his stint at courtside, when Luftman’s voice cracked “about 12 times in one sentence.” A camp counselor graded him down for that, but noted, encouragingly, “That will improve with time.”

Luftman, and 127 others like him, have plunked down $945 to spend the week in Huntington Beach and learn from Miller, former UC Irvine broadcaster Englebrecht and their staff of professionals-in-the-field, including Philadelphia 76ers play-by-play man Jim Kozimor, a graduate of the 1986 and ’87 Sportscaster Camps.

A decent chunk of change, but worth the price, camper Mike McClure figures. McClure is 30 and a resident of Monett, Mo. (population 7,000), where he has been broadcasting high school games for the last seven years.

“I came here to get heard, make some contacts,” McClure says. “I’m here to get my work critiqued and, if they like it, maybe they’ll pass my name along.”

Kozimor listened to McClure’s call of a basketball game Thursday and handed back a grading sheet dotted with 8s and 9s, excellent scores. “He did nit-pick me a little bit,” McClure points out with a smile. “I used the expression ‘yo-yo dribble’ and he said, ‘Don’t do that--you’re borrowing from Chick Hearn.’

“Chick Hearn? I told him I’m from Monett, Missouri. He said, ‘Hmm, you must have picked up on that one on your own.’ ”

Sportscasters do speak a universal language, even aspiring ones. Over lunch, they compare notes and gaffes.

The toughest portion of the camp? The studio telecast, it was agreed upon, especially when the Teleprompter jams or the mouth moves faster than the videotape.

The most difficult sport to call? Baseball, hands down. Too much dead time. But who needs to spend $945 to discover that?

“This is what I want to do, “ says Jeff Martindale, 20, of Huntingburg, Ind. “I’m a telecom major at IU. I tell people back there that and it’s, ‘Ha ha, why don’t you give it up?’ But I don’t want a life as an engineer or something like that.

“I come here and it’s like an explosion. Everybody has the same aspirations as me.”

The way out of Huntingburg (population 4,000) could begin in Huntington Beach, Martindale hopes. And if not the actual ticket, the least this camp can provide is the proper phrasing.

Going . . . going . . . gone.