Arbogast Always Had His Sights on USC Radio Job

The USC Trojans are on top of the college football world, and the team’s radio play-by-play announcer, Pete Arbogast, feels like he is too. He has the job he always dreamed of having.

“I’ve never wanted to do anything else,” he said.

This is Arbogast’s second stint with the Trojans. He was their voice from 1989 to 1994, then returned in 2001 when 1540 became the flagship station.

His route to his dream job took him through such places as Twin Falls, Idaho; Victorville; Porterville; and Riverside, but he never lost sight of where he wanted to be.

He thinks back to some advice he got as a student at Los Angeles City College. He was in a radio broadcasting class with such other future notable sports broadcasters as former Angel announcer Paul Olden and 980 reporter Ted Sobel. The instructor was Chuck Edwards.

“Chuck told us that when we got out into the broadcast world it would take us nine years to land a job in a major market,” Arbogast said. “Anything less than that, you’re some kind of wunderkind. Anything longer than that, maybe you better find another line of work.”

Arbogast, 50, graduated from Marshall High School in 1972, transferred from LACC to USC, and graduated from there in 1978.

“I was a slow learner,” he quipped. “It took me 6 1/2 years to get through college. Then I stuck around USC for another year just to see that 1979 team, with Paul McDonald at quarterback, never thinking that I’d someday be working alongside Paul.”

McDonald has been USC’s radio commentator for eight years.

Arbogast’s first job after college was in Twin Falls, where, he says, “I played country and western music in the middle of the night.”

He said the best training ground was at KTIP in Porterville, in Tulare County about 75 miles south of Fresno. For one thing, Arbogast got a lot of play-by-play experience there because KTIP covered so many high school sports in Porterville and surrounding communities such as Lindsay and Strathmore.

“Nothing quite like a Lindsay-Strathmore game,” Arbogast said.

Another plus about KTIP was the fact it was owned by Monte Moore, who was the Oakland Athletics’ lead announcer in the 1970s.

“Monte was my mentor,” Arbogast said, “not only a great announcer but a great man too.”

By 1984, Arbogast was working at KNX, then USC’s flagship station.

“I took part-time work doing sports reports on the weekends and at night just to get my foot in the door,” Arbogast said. “I had my eye on the Trojan play-by-play job, but Tom Kelly was pretty well entrenched. I figured he would probably be around until at least 1999.”

But in 1989, 11 years after graduating from USC, Arbogast got the USC job when Kelly moved from radio to television to call Trojan games for Prime Ticket.

However, Arbogast lost the job after the 1994 season when KNX and the school couldn’t agree on a new rights deal. A company formed by Larry Kahn and Mike Lamb won the rights, and they became the announcers through 1997. After that, San Diego’s 690 took over for three years, with Lee Hamilton and McDonald calling the games.

Then Arbogast, who spent three seasons as the radio voice of the Cincinnati Bengals, returned the year Pete Carroll arrived at USC, and now Arbogast’s dream job is better than ever.