A hockey announcing career lost in the five-hole

My radio career began like many do – I walked into my college’s radio station asking about sports announcing possibilities and they said “Sure, wanna cover tonight’s hockey game?”

Thus, like most things in my life, my career as a sports announce started quickly with me having almost no grasp of what I was actually doing.

I mean, I know hockey the way the average American sports fan knows hockey. I can keep up with what’s happening on the ice. I know who’s winning and basically why. But I don’t know the lingo for the life of me. And let me tell you, from personal experience, you need to learn the lingo before you go on the air.

Now here’s something they don’t tell you – hockey’s a really fast game. Really, really fast. And here’s something they didn’t tell me – the team the fearsome University of Alaska Anchorage team would be playing a tea, made up from guys from Vick’s Vertigo Recovery Institute.

Adding up all the factors, and you see I had fallen into a dream assignment – Announcing a really fast sport I really didn’t know that well for my first time on the radio, in which one of the teams ends up scoring 18 goals.

That’s right, the final score was 18-1. You try and make that interesting. So my first experience on the radio consisted of me desperately trying to keep up with the game while finding different ways to describe the un-holy amount of goals.

Sadly, the one bit of lingo that stuck in my mind was “the five-hole.” Thus, about 11 of those goals were made through the five goal. the Vertigian goalie had a HUGE five-hole, and I filled it up with pucks, real or perceived. And honestly, I still don’t know where the five-hole actually is.

The final indignation? The fact that the engineer cut me off for the entire third-quarter. Meaning I was announcing the game (terribly) while no one was listening and no one was recording. It was totally the right thing to do.

My radio announcing career continued and got reasonably better (I was never again asked to cover hockey, and instead covered a lot of girls’ volleyball, which is a lot more fun). For the most part, I’d say that my desire to be a sportscaster was filled, much like that poor, overburdened five-hole so many years ago on that fateful night.

–WKW

Chronicles: Ambitiously Adapting in Europe, Part 1

Ambition. To have more. To have any. That’s my resolution for 2010. Just like it was for 2009. But in 2009, it wasn’t to be. Too much wound licking. Too little interest. Wanting only praise, regardless of my oft-lackluster performance. But 2009 is over and it ended well. Time to be ambitious again. Perhaps for the first time.

1.

And an hour before we leave we have a new dog. He’s a slightly sick and quite hungry puppy made up of countless other breeds of countless other dogs. Born on the street, he finds me pulling away from my house on a last-minute errand. I give him a little food and a little attention and he cries for more of both. And so now we have five dogs. We get to know him long enough for Emilia to name him – Zé Aparecido.

So, knowing little hungry Zé for just an hour or so, we leave Brazil on a family trip to Italy. My wife, her parents, her two sisters, her brother, my Dad and myself. Three weeks that will somehow be simultaneously an eternity and a flash. We’re off to Europe, leaving little Zé with four other dogs and a house sitter. We wonder if he’ll remember us when we finally return.

2.

My father meets us in Rome. He travels all the way from his home in California to spend the holidays with my Brazilian family, at the bequest of my Father-in-Law. It’s my Dad’s first Christmas since his wife, my mother, died. It’s also the year anniversary since her death. Is that what it’s called? An anniversary? Seems wrong. I feel rather disinterested in the time line, however. One day, fifty days, or three-hundred-and-sixty-five days. It’s all the same to me. I still miss my Mom. And so does my Dad.

At 70, it’s his first trip to Europe and I’m happy he’s coming. I’m happy to help do something for him during what should be a difficult time. My opportunities to help subside his grief are limited from Brazil, and even more limited due to my general disdain for the telephone and his lack of e-mail skills. So extravagant gestures are my only recourse. And this promises to be just that – aside from Italy, my father and I will make a side trip to Naila, Germany, where my grandfather was born 99 years ago. Going with my father to see his father’s fatherland. But that’s another story.
[Read more]

Chronicles: The Kindness of German Strangers

Note: This is the first effort in what I will be calling the “Chronicles” which will be essays that will hopefully create a running theme over time. There is no order for these and I have a lot of different subjects to write about, and will be delving more into myself personally, as well. This series will continue, once or twice per week, here at William K. Wolfrum Chronicles.

Chronicles: The Kindness of German Strangers

1.

My Father and I arrived in Germany 85 years after my grandfather had left. Stuck in a depressed, post-WWI Germany, my great-grandfather had left for the United State three years earlier and brought them over in 1924. After years of dallying with a related amount of dillying, my Father and I finally made the trip to see Naila, Germany, the small town (less than 9,000 residents) where my grandfather played and lived as a child. They call Naila and the surrounding area the “Bavarian Siberia,” and it didn’t disappoint. Snow to your knees, a chill in the air. Sausages lining the streets. Yes, this was Germany. We had made it back to our ancestoral homelands, and we were going to meet some long-lost family members.

Prior to our trip, we had been in contact with Hans Wolfrum, a teacher and amateur genealogist, who confirmed that many in the area were related to us one way or another. This was of particular interest to me, because in my 42 years, I’ve met very few relatives from the Wolfrum side of the family. And now here I was in Naila, the city my wife called the “Wolfrum Mecca.” Just walking down the street in Naila, I’d see Wolfrum Autohaus and Wolfrum Granite. After years of being the only Wolfrum around, I was finally surrounded by them.
[Read more]

For-profit medicine is a national sickness

When my Mom was diagnosed with leukemia, the one thing I didn’t need to worry about was the cost. My parents have long had good health insurance, and have long saved as much money as they could to prepare for the eventuality of illness. Prior to her death, my Mom received as good of treatment as she could have gotten to fight the insidious cancer that finally took her life.

Still, even though my parents had a golden parachute of health insurance and savings, there were times they even had to scrimp – especially with some of the medicines prescribed to her running in the range of $2,000 per prescription. Then they’d either purchase half a prescription, or look for a cheaper alternative.

I rest comfortably knowing that my Mom fought as hard as she could and received good medical care. At the cost of several hundred thousand dollars out of their pockets, of course. This is what keeps me up at nights. Through my Mom’s entire ordeal, one line stuck in my mind – For-profit health care is a national illness.

As health care has taken center stage in the national dialogue, that line continues to reverberate in my mind. My parents worked their whole lives, almost solely for the purpose to afford dying. And make no mistake about it, my parents are most definitely “haves” in a nation rapidly becoming easily defined as “haves” and “have nots.”

While my Mom was living and I’d spend time with her at various hospitals, I got to hear many stories of people struggling with health care bills. Because everyone is in the same boat as my parents, but not so many have the financial wherewithal to come out of a massive medical situation without finding themselves in financial turmoil.

As President Barack Obama’s health care plan has been revised, rewritten and demonized, it has become increasingly clear that the status quo will remain. Insurance companies will be repaid for their investments in trying to kill the bill, and will continue to profit wildly. Millions and millions of Americans will continue to either be uninsured or be under-insured.

A health care reform bill will eventually be passed – Obama will make sure of that. But with insurance companies still in the mix, Americans will continue to work their entire lives to give away their nest eggs to them.

Health care in the United States is still something that angers me. Is the U.S. so determined to be a pure capitalist society that the idea of taking away ill-gotten profits from insurance companies means we’ve become socialist? Why is Universal Health care considered such a crime against humanity in the U.S.? Are we all that proud of living in a nation where the health of an American citizen solely depends on profit margin?

All I can say is that I know there is someone driving a new car, paid for by my Mom’s suffering. And that others are living in big houses with obscene bank accounts, all paid for by the sick and dying. It is obscene and inhuman.

For-Profit medicine is a national sickness in the United States. And for this, there is only one cure – single-payer. And thanks to politicians on both sides of the aisle doing their masters’ bidding, that’s not something you’ll see come out of Obama’s health care reform.

Single-payer. It is the only cure for this health care sickness. But it will never come to the U.S. as long as the few that are in charge – with pockets adequately lined – would rather the nation stays sick.

–WKW