Hero Worship

Jon Teicher has broadcast UTEP football and men's basketball for 37 years, or since I was nine, taking the reins from Gary Gallup. As a UCLA graduate he called around in the early 1980s looking for a broadcasting gig and learned the El Paso Diablos minor league baseball team didn't even air their games. That's how he landed in town. He also called games for New Mexico State, and in Portland, Oregon, and in Wichita, Kansas. But he made it back to the border and stayed.

On Tuesday, December 5th the National Football Foundation awarded him the Chris Schenkel award, given to a sports broadcaster who has had a long and distinguished career broadcasting college football. The award seeks to recognize broadcasters with direct ties to colleges and universities rather than strictly national types. Past winners include Larry Munson at Georgia, Max Falkenstein at Kansas, and Ray Christensen at Minnesota.

Working radio in Athens, Georgia, I can tell you what the locals feel about the late Larry Munson is very similar to what we El Pasoans/Miner fans feel about Jon Teicher. I don't know Miner athletics without him. One of the things I like most is that he an El Pasoan, that he is our guy, and that he is one of us. We don't have to share him with anyone. He is our connection to great years, great teams, and great games. He's a beacon at a time when we could use some positive news from out athletic department.

Jon is the reason I started out in broadcasting. I would listen to the Diablo games in my living room with my engineer's graphing notebook (the straight lines were already drawn) and keep score of the game while listening. When I worked in radio he would air check my Levelland High School broadcasts when I breezed through town. I don't know what possessed me to reach out to him, but he made time for a guy calling class 4A games on a 6,000 watt FM station near Lubbock. Surely I was a little awestruck, but he was as down to earth as could be. I've also stopped in just to say hello in subsequent years. When we lived in Alabama a few years ago I'd stop to say hello after the UAB games. He recognized me and we'd chat for a moment or two.

He's the radio voice in UTEP's win over Kansas in the 1992 NCAA basketball tournament when Johnny Melvin stepped to the line and swished two free throws, and he was as ecstatic as everyone else when time ran out on the win. I've read the accounts on how the MinerTalk post-game call in show ran seven hours until they got kicked out of the arena. He was there in Tucson in the '88 tournament when we had to overcome a ton of adversity to win what amounted to a road game vs. Arizona. There are YouTube clips of those games with his audio that serve as comfort food when I need some.

An old friend took me to the 1988 Air Force football game at the Sun Bowl on a sunny and cool November afternoon. It was one of the first times the good guys wore orange tops and orange britches. I brought my radio and listened and it's how I learned Wake Forest tied their game, opening the door for us to go to the Independence Bowl. Tony Tolbert made a big stop on fourth down late to preserve a 31-24 win. Jon was there for that one too.

He cites the Great Man Don Haskins as one of his mentors. I heard in an interview that Jon lost his father early in life and that Coach became one of his role models in the 18 years they worked together. It's a little wild that Jon has been Voice of the Miners for 37 years and that Haskins was our coach for 39. They both found El Paso and loved it so much they stayed.

Dad and I went to a Diablo game in, I don't know, '84 or '85. We sat in the third-base grandstand and Jon came up to us and asked Dad a few questions as part of a survey. My eyes about popped out of their sockets because I knew exactly who he was since I'd already been listening to him for a while.

Jon also bitched me out once when I was about eight. We'd won a lucky number drawing and scored something like a free car wash or whatever. To claim your prize you had to go up to the press box since there was no guest services booth back then. There was no raised press box, it was more like a high school stadium where the top row of seats is directly in front of the press box. So when Dad went to claim our prize I stopped right in Teicher's sight line as he called the game. He barked at me and said I had to move. I don't blame him-- I'd have gotten in my grill too.

He's the soundtrack of my time as a Miner fan. I don't know him well, but I do know him and he seems like a very nice man. The Chris Schenkel award is a great honor and it is well deserved.

Congratulations Jon. And thank you.

Gimme Some Truth

I live in a very black and white world. There is the truth and there is everything else. It ties into my not being a good liar. I'm horrible at covering my tracks, so telling the truth means I don't have to invent a second story to cover the first one. It makes life a lot simpler.

But now we have 'alternative facts.'

By now you've heard about White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and his statement that President Trump's inauguration crowd on January 20, 2017 was the largest ever. This flies in the face of demonstrable evidence that it wasn't. It seemed like if he was saying it was true, it automatically was.

There are three things that are needed for good PR to happen. Transparency, trust, and truth. When we aren't dealing with the truth, everything else just flies right out the window. I've felt that the White House press secretary's job is all about PR-- presenting the administration's side of the story within the parameters of the truth.

Now that the truth was handled somewhat loosely, for whatever reason, trust is lost. What are we supposed to believe? We've been lied to before, so why should we accept what's being said as truth?

Nine years ago, Dr. Mohammed A.S. El-Astal wrote an article asking whether honesty is an absolute PR value. In my mind, it is. But it's a fascinating question. From the synopsis on the IPRA website:

"IPRA members were discussing recently, via yahoo-groups.com, a UK debate among PR practitioners where a motion that ‘PR has a duty to tell the truth’ was defeated by 138 votes to 124."

On the surface, that seems a little disturbing. However, Dr. El-Astal did a little research (synopsis here) and found that honesty is not as scarce as it may seem. He found that respondents’ ethical judgments on four hypothetical practices tested in the study, regardless of their cultures and religions, were consistent with the IPRA Codes of Conduct as well as the literature written on honesty. The four practices were: 

1. Telling the public a lie on a matter of no real importance to protect the reputation of the institution you are working for; 
2. Telling the public a lie on a matter of real importance to protect the reputation of the institution you are working for; 
3. Telling the public a lie on a matter of no real importance to protect the reputation of and employee working in the institution you are working for; and 
4. Telling the public a lie on a matter of real importance to protect the reputation of and employee working in the institution you are working for. 

Dr. El-Astal's work found that, "...respondents’ ethical judgments on the four hypothetical practices tested in the study, regardless of their cultures and religions, came consistent with the IPRA Codes of Conduct as well as the literature written on honesty. Briefly, honesty outweighed all other considerations." 

So it's helpful and reassuring to know that honesty and truth were still held in high regard nine years ago when this research was done. Judging by what has been said since last Saturday, that's still true even when people are playing fast and loose with facts. 

It makes me hopeful that the truth is still out there. Hopefully the trust can be rebuilt because it's currently in shambles.

Blue Bell

At the end of 2016 the wife and I took a trip to Houston to see Kansas State play Texas A&M in the Texas Bowl. We're both big KSU fans, and we had a great time hanging out in the team hotel.

One gentleman we met was a cousin of a friend of ours. He is a member of the bowl committee and also an executive with Blue Bell Ice Cream. Our friend asked him how the recall was going, and he said they were just getting their product back out on store shelves at 100%. My thought was that this was in reference to the listeria outbreak of 2015 in which three people died. I didn't need any real clarification.

I've seen a couple of things since then. Blue Bell's largest plant, in Brenham, Texas reopened in November of 2016. It was a pretty rough time for the company, as they laid off over 1,400 full-time and part-time workers, or about 37% of the workforce. Another 1,400 were furloughed. A second thing is that there was a second though smaller recall in late summer 2016. They're just now getting things back up to speed and getting their product back into store freezers.

I've also seen a writeup from the Arthur Page Society that indicates the lack of a clear crisis communications plan as well as the lack of a Chief Communication Officer. This gets into Excellence Theory, specifically where they talk about the lack of a communications professional in the C-Suite. It seems simple to a PR type such as myself, but many times a company's crisis situation is made worse by executives with no PR backgrounds.

The Arthur Page report says Blue Bell hired a PR firm after the listeria outbreak, and seemed to have very little in the way of active PR at the time of the outbreak. Blue Bell chose to make their website the primary point of contact. Their Facebook account suddenly saw more activity once the outbreak was common knowledge and they created a Twitter account to help communicate during the time of crisis.

The more points of contact you have, the better, though it sounds to me that their concern had more to do with company protocols and not public relations, though the PR activity/response needed help.

Dr. Grunig, originator of Excellence Theory, has a good point in that if a PR pro has a respected voice in the boardroom, this may have gone differently. But Blue Bell is a Texas thing, and Texans have a heaping dose of state pride. That is, they really like being Texan. That and Blue Bell has been around for over 100 years, so they had a bit of a reputation. So statewide the damage might not have been so bad from an image restoration perspective. It might be a slightly different matter nationally.

Blue Bell's real work is in progress-- gaining back their reputation after the three deaths, personnel layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts, lost revenue, as well as suppliers further down the food chain that needed Blue Bell's business. Lots of people were adversely affected by this, and it'll take time.