[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello, this is Paul Solentrop of Wichita State University strategic communications. Thanks for listening to the roundhouse podcast. Today we have a special guest, Gary Bender. Gary is a 1962 University of Wichita graduate. He majored in speech, played football for the Shockers. He is a member of the 2024 Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences hall of Fame induction class. That ceremony is free to the public 02:00 p.m. On February 6 in Whiedeman hall. So Gary got his start at KMUW, called some great shocker basketball games, called football as a student, and then went to Hutchinson in 1964 as a sports director doing Hutchinson high games. He retired in 2011 after 18 years calling the Phoenix Suns on tv. I'm not going to read Mr. Bender's resume, but listeners should understand he's worked almost every important sport from the Olympics to the Final Four, the NFL, plus a little shark tagging wrist wrestling thrown in during his career. So, Gary, I've read the famous story of you broadcasting imaginary games on your tractor. As a youngster in Kansas, did you always score the winning touchdown? Were you the hero of these imaginary games?
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Well, Paul, I had my best broadcasts on the tractor. I really did in all my life. I was really good on that tractor. But what had happened is my dad had been a college coach, and he got out of coaching, and we moved to a farm. And the farm was on the Kansas Colorado border, 40 miles from any town. And all of a sudden my life was turned upside down. I'd been the ball boy, the mascot, how you are as a coach's kid, and all of a sudden I'm going to a one room country school. And I remember crying myself to sleep. I would have run away from the farm, but it was so flat out there and no trees. It would have seen me running for four or five days. But anyway, my days were really laborious. I'd get up in the morning, milk a couple of cows, eat breakfast, gas up the tractor, plow the noon, have a sack lunch, gas up my tractor, plow the sundown, come in and milk the same two cows. So the only way, Paul, I could survive those long days was to make up ball games. So I'd act like I was in Yankee Stadium, the Orange bowl, or the Los Angeles Coliseum, and I would further enhance those broadcasts by singing the national anthem. And I did the commercials. You remember the July commercial, look sharp and the b sharp to use? You're probably not old enough to remember it, but I handled those down. And the interesting thing is, I was in complete control of the time element, if I had an extra round to go, it went into overtime or sudden death.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: And I'm looking at your book. You grew up on a farm near Maxville, is that right?
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Well, my dad was there in Maxville. We actually grew up in Ulysses, Kansas is where I ended up, but we were in the middle of nowhere. There's not even a town there. Buckeye, Colorado, was a little one store that was there on a corner, and that's where I went to the one room country school.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: So you were an Allstate fullback at Ulysses High and came to the University of Wichita to play football in 1958. What was it like being recruited in those days?
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Well, that's interesting.
I played for my dad. He came back into coaching. We had great success as a team. We went undefeated one year, and I was the first all state player ever from Ulysses high school. And so the recruiting started. I had an opportunity, Paul, to go to the Air Force academy. They were looking for people at that time. It just moved from Denver to Colorado Springs, and my grades were good enough, so they thought I could not have to go to prep school and play immediately. And that's what they did. They had freshmen coming in. They were having transfers from other schools that were allowed to come into the air Force academy, but I just didn't think I was tough enough. I saw them in the quadrant down below yelling and screaming at guys, and I thought, that's not me. So I got recruited by several of the old big eight schools. But the University of Wichita had a special thing for us because my dad loved Woody Woodward. He was the coach. He'd been at SMU, and I really connected with him. And I ended up going there on scholarship because we really didn't have the money to get me to college anywhere. And I thought I was really going to be a great player. I was going to the know. Every kid at that age thinks they're going to play in the NFL. And then I ended up two serious shoulder injuries, and that was it. That was the end of it for me. My only claim to fame, I got to tell you, is as a teammate of Bill Parcels, and Bill and I got to be good friends, and we used to have all these sports trivia contests. He'd win them all. And one day Bill turns to me and he says, bender, what the heck do you want to be when you grow up? I said, I don't want to be a sportscaster. He says, that's not good enough. Where do you want to be a sportscaster? And I said, cBS I said, bill, what about you? What do you want to be when you grow up? I'm going to be a head football coach. I said, that's not good enough, Bill. Where do you want to coach? The New York Giants. And he won two Super Bowls. So that's my only claim to fame, Paul, in my football career at Wichita.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: That is a good one. Life lessons with Bill Parcels. That's good.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: When he retired and I retired, he called me one time to suspend her. We've been fooling him for a long time.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: I've got a trivia question for you from your high school football career. You were on the Wichita Eagles allstate honor roll in 1957. You scored ten touchdowns for Ulysses. Can you name anybody else on that honor roll team with you?
[00:06:20] Speaker B: John Hadel.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: There you go. We were on the same.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: John and I became good friends, and he was obviously tremendously successful, but he was the most recruited guy at one time. He was going to Oklahoma. I remember him telling me that. And then ended up at KU.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Big name Leroy Leap is the other one on there.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Leroy Leap. And he was a teammate at Wichita. There was others I'd have to go back and look at, but several of them ended up going to Oklahoma State.
Some went to K State. I had a cousin, Daryl Elder, who the next year went to Kansas State. He was an all stater from.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: So was it hard to give up football and move on to the next phase in your life?
[00:07:07] Speaker B: It's a great question.
I was really stunned. I really didn't know exactly what to do next. It's one of those things. All of a sudden your career has been destroyed, and you're trying to figure out, well, how do I adjust? And what really helped me was I was in the liberal arts school, and I had people coming to me encouraging me to do things like take a lot of speech courses, get into the theater, which I did, and to learn to express myself. And so I was able to kind of carve out an idea what I wanted to do. In fact, I'll tell you a funny story. I took an acting course. Acting one. The professor was a red headed woman by the name of Mary Jane Thiel. I don't know if you have any reason to know who she was.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Definitely, yes.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: She was a fireball. And so one time she assigned as Paul to do Hamlet, to be or not to be. And I got up there to perform for her. And I'm starting out, and all of a sudden I hear in the back of this room, sit down. You're not even close to being Hamlet. Get off the stage. You're embarrassing me. You better come back next week and be Hamlet.
Can you imagine the reaction I had at that particular time? So next week I came back and I did Hamlet. But here's the funny part. Later she put me in the, you know, Tennessee Williams play, and I was a gentleman caller. So evidently, somewhere along the line I convention I could do it was, I'm telling you, it was humbling.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: The value of a liberal arts education.
[00:08:55] Speaker B: That'S what I think.
And I was in a lot of speech courses. I loved it. That was where I could get my best grades. I got involved in a lot of things that even though there wasn't a journalism school at Wichita, you knew that there was no LA school of broadcasting. I mean, it wasn't a choice of all of a sudden deciding, that's what I wanted to do, even though I wanted to be a sports broadcaster, I didn't have that advantage. And I've since come back and taught at the Elliott school. And what advantage that would have been had I had that at the time?
[00:09:31] Speaker A: So you would have shown up at the University of Wichita at a boom time for shocker basketball. Missouri Valley Conference was a great basketball conference. Shockers were just about to really get going with coach Ralph Miller and some of those stars of the era. What are your memories of doing games from? I guess then it was the w fieldhouse in those.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: And, you know, the one game I remember, Paul, is when the University of Cincinnati came in with a big O, Oscar Robertson, and I was doing the game on KMUW. Now, I doubt very many people heard this, but Lanny Van Engman, you remember him. He had transferred in. He was from Pennsylvania. I think he transferred from NC State. And he had a shot at the buzzer that beat the Big O in Cincinnati. And the fans, the kids came pouring over the back of me, over my desk. Everybody came running onto the court, and I remember that so well. But we had unbelievable, know, we had the Ohio state defending champions with Jerry Lucas and John Hablick. We had the Bradley teams coming in with great guys that went on to play in the NBA. And then we, of course, had Dave Stalwarth and Bowman, and we found ourselves every week thinking we could beat anybody. It was a great time.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: That would have been an exciting period to be in Wichita and going to those games. So you started the Gary Bender scholarship in broadcast communications at Wichita State. You've taught here. As you mentioned, your book, call of the game, is really directed at aspiring broadcasters. Why is mentoring, helping students. Why is that important to you?
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Well, because I got that. I think I touched on know. I was told to go for it, and that's what happened here at Wichita. So what I have to tell you, Paul, is I was struggling. I was trying to do something in theater. I was trying to do something in speech. I was a fraternity, and I was in hippodrome. I was one of the three Musketeers, and we won Hippodrome. So all those little things kind of encouraged me, but I wasn't sure. And then I finally went to a couple of men, a couple of professors, Dave Fleming. I remember him saying, gary, you ought to go for this. And so I went to graduate school and then eventually worked my way up from the very bottom.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: Who is the current broadcaster you listen to? And you think, boy, that's how it's done?
[00:12:04] Speaker B: That's a tough question.
When I came up in the business, when I got to the network in 1975, there were a lot of great broadcasters, Dick Enberg and Keith Jackson. Kurt Gowdy was in the twilight of his career. I mean, they were legendary guys who I just absorbed everything they had to tell me and tried to, in some ways, I guess, imitate them. And as the business has changed, I'm seeing on air people change. See, when I went to the network with CBS, there were only three networks, CBS, ABC, and NBC. We didn't have an ESPN, and so it was really isolated. There weren't very many jobs available, and we had, like, the game of the week. We weren't showing every game as we have today. And what I think has happened is it's diluted the talent a little bit. They're trying to cover every game, trying to reach out and not miss anything. And as an end result, it's hard for them to keep the quality out. But those people I mentioned, Enberg and Keith Jackson and Kurt Gowdy. And then today, my favorite is Jim Nance. I love his work. I think Al Michaels was one of the most accurate broadcasters I've ever been around. There were so many good ones, and I was just. I guess this sounds a little corny, but I was honored to work with a lot of those guys. I had the ability to work with the giants of the business, and I used to have this theory, Paul, that I would be on their coattails. They dragged me through. If they were good, I was good.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: I'm a big fan of Greg Olson, who's been in the news a lot.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Do you see what happened, though? They're replacing him and moving on. It's a crazy business.
I went through some of that and you never know the politics. I got involved and I was not political. That was one of my biggest issues. I could not be political and I was taken advantage of. And I wonder how Greg is handling that. I think probably he'll move on to the number two team and do very well, but that was kind of surprising.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: He seems like the kind of broadcaster you would appreciate, cut from kind of your cloth, in my opinion. Did you have a favorite arena, a favorite stadium that you enjoyed broadcasting from?
[00:14:27] Speaker B: Well, that's a good question.
In football, it was all predicated on how close to the field was a press box because you can get in some venues, you're up in the sky. I mean, you're looking at these people running around and having to go to your binoculars, which is not very advantageous when you're trying to do play by play. I think probably the games that I remember most are the ones with the coaches, like going to Alabama with Bear Bryant, being with Bo Shambucker at the big stadium in Michigan, Woody Hayes at Ohio State. Those are ones that just come back time and time again, stories that come out of that. And I was privileged to call the Ohio State Michigan game. I was privileged to get to meet the bear in the twilight of his career, even though I was half scared to death when I met him. So those are how I would do it in basketball.
I think the final fours that I did were probably the ones I remember the most, but I love being in the roundhouse in Wichita. I did a lot of games at Allen Field House and Lawrence. I guess if you look at it, I've done so many different places, it's hard to narrow down two or three of the best.
[00:15:44] Speaker A: So you did a three year run at the Final Four that might be the best three years of NCAA championship games, 82 84. I wanted to ask you about the 83 game North Carolina State, famous for them winning on the last second dunk. So you are silent for about 90 seconds after Lorenzo Charles puts in the follow shot to win the game. How did you do that?
[00:16:10] Speaker B: Well, I've always been told that in the great moments, let it play. I mean, unless you have something really astute to say. Ben Scully talked to me about that one time. He says, gary, I write down four or five things I might say if a certain thing happened, but I didn't do that. And I felt at the time it was just incredible moment. It was so interesting about that. Paul, we thought we were going to have a blowout. We thought Houston was going to kill North Carolina state. They were prohibited favorites. They're like 25 and one ranked. Number one. It was the year of Jim Valbano and the Cinderella Wolf pack. And they got there and we thought we better be prepared for a bad game. Well, obviously the shot heard around the world with Lorenzo Charles proved differently. But I want to tell you, I went down in the locker room after the game to meet with Jim Balbona, the coach of the wolf pack. One of my favorite people, maybe in my way of thinking, a genius.
I mean, I don't call a lot of coaches geniuses. And he was. And I went in, he'd been thrown in the shower, he had a cigar in his mouth. And I came in, I said, hey, coach. I said, what a game. I said, this is one of the greatest games in history. Yeah. He says, gary, God must love ordinary people. I said, what are you talking about? God must love ordinary people because he makes so many of them. But you know something, Gary? God allows ordinary people to experience extraordinary things. I'll never forget it. And I was on my way to Augusta for the master, and I stood there and I looked at him and he's just smiling from ear to ear. And I just walked out of the room. There was nothing I could say.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: What sport do you think you were the best at? Broadcasting.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: I think football, maybe a close second. Basketball. My biggest problem was I tried to do 29 different sports, and that is in a lot of ways foolish. But what was happening at CBS at the time? We had the CBS sports spectacular and we were trying to create new material. So I did a shark tagging, I did a wrist wrestling show. I did the battle of the NFL cheerleaders. You know who I did that with? John Madden. And to this day I remember him telling me time and again, we're going to burn that tape. If anybody sees that, our careers are over. But I found myself being flexible, being able to overcome the fact I didn't know much about the sport. So that was a challenge. But I love football, basketball. Those were my. Probably my two best.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: So you did the Phoenix Suns on tv for 18 years. They had some great seasons in that time. What's your favorite Steve Nash story?
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Steve Nash is my favorite player with the Suns.
I got talked into doing this by Jerry Calangelo, the owner of the Suns. He came to me and says, we're going to start originating our own broadcast. Would you do it? And I said, I'll do it for a year. And I did it for 18 years. But we were coming off that 93 team that got into the finals against the Bulls and lost, and that was a Charles Barkley era. But Steve Nash came on the scene, and he became a good friend. I'd spent a lot of time with him, and I watched him, how hard he worked out, how he was able to work with. He had a lot of physical problems. He had a bad back that bothered him all the time. And I said to him one time, you got to explain to me how you can pass the ball the way you pass it. You see angles. You see openings. I've never seen any other. And he says, gary, he says, the game slows down for me. I come across that ten second line, and everybody's in slow motion, and it gives me time to distribute the ball. And I saw him do things that were just incredible. So Steve Nash, to me, was my favorite player. I love Barkley. Barkley is a good friend of mine. He's crazy sometimes, but I love him.
One time, I brought a kid into the locker room to meet Charles Barkley, and, ten years old, brought him in. I said, charles, would you say hello to this guy? And he brought him over and put him on his knee, gave him a pair of shoes, gave him a jersey, and then he says, would you like to go help me shave my head? And they went in the bathroom, and this ten year old kid who was absolutely paralyzed, helped him shave his head.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: There is no shortage of good Charles Barkley stories, that's for sure. So in your book, you write about the challenges of athletes, coaches moving into the broadcast booth. Who was the best at adjusting to that grind, really preparing. Who did the best job as a former coach or an athlete making that transition?
[00:21:14] Speaker B: John Madden.
He had retired from the Oakland Raiders, and he was sitting in the backyard with his two Bulldogs. We went to visit him a couple of times out in Pleasanton, California. Those bulldogs were a riot. And he was sitting out there drinking a tab. He loved tabs. Remember the tab Cola? And he was sitting out there, and his wife, Virginia, came into the backyard. She says, john, what are you going to do with your life now that you've retired? You just going to sit out here in a backyard with your two bulldogs? And so she got him a job at CBS, and they called me and said, we want you to coach the coach. And so I took it off, and quite honestly, it wasn't going well. We were struggling, both of us. I was struggling with him. He was struggling with me.
He couldn't handle people talking to him in the headset. We have three people talking to you. A director, producer and associate producer. And also he had the problem of what we call a ten second world. In other words, an analyst is supposed to describe a replay in 10 seconds or thereabouts, so the play by play guy can take the next snap on football. But one day, Paul, and I don't know why, it started to click. It was almost like a light switch went on and he became John Madden and he became, obviously, a legend. Maybe one of the greatest analysts of all time, one of my best friends I've ever had. We had wonderful relationship.
And so that is the guy I saw come the farthest. My first guy worked with is Johnny Unitis. And Unitis was probably as fine a person as I've ever met, but he wasn't really that interested in being a play by player analyst guy. And I worked with him two years.
I saw him as so recognizable. He'd walk through any restaurant, any bar, any lobby, and police would just come to a grinding halt and look at mean. That's how big he was at that time. But he handled it well. He was maybe one of the toughest guys Paul, I've ever been around my life. And if you go back and document his career, you'll know what I mean. Then I had others that I worked with. As I told you, the best. I had the best.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: What's your advice for a college student looking to get into sports broadcasting?
[00:23:52] Speaker B: Oh, my.
It's a tough business. I wrote the book because I wanted people to differentiate their desire to be in the business. A lot of people want to be a sports broadcaster for all the wrong reasons, think they're going to make a lot of money.
Their names are going to be in the marquee somewhere. People are going to recognize them when they come into a room. But all those motivations won't sustain you, because if you're like me, you start in a little 1000 watt radio station making no money, and nobody knows who you are. And you have to understand, you probably can make more money selling shoes. But what I would tell anyone that wants to go in this business is, do you have total tunnel vision? That's kind of what I had, Paul. Even though I was hurting football, didn't know where to go. I still, in the back of my mind, thought, you know, I was pretty good on that tractor. And so I kept working towards that. And I had opportunities. You remember Pizza Hut? Pizza Hut started Wichita. It was my fraternity. And I was asked to go and work with Pizza Hut. Seven of us, six of us took the job. Six of us took the job. And I said, no, I want to be a sportscaster. So, you know, I'm not the smartest guy in the fraternity, but my point is I had that total tunnel vision, and we have one guy who, you know, well, Denning Garrig, who was in one of my classes at Wichita State, and I saw it. It's not easy.
All the time I taught there, I would tell you he might have been the only one that I would have said, go for it. He's going for it. And, I understand, doing very well.
[00:25:38] Speaker A: He is doing well. I'm glad you brought up Denning. He credits your class. You went to a game, shockers, played New Mexico State early in the 2014 season, and he did the game on the radio, and you had him stay after class and told him he had a future in the business. And he said that was the first time he really believed that he could go for it. What are you listening for with a young broadcaster? What attributes are you trying to hear when you evaluate that kind of work?
[00:26:07] Speaker B: Well, that's a very interesting question.
I guess it's the instincts that you have. You know, what the pitfalls are. You know, what has to come out. I mean, it's not always the voice. It's not always how somebody looks. It's a sense of timing, a sense of understanding, a sense of seeing things, Paul, that no one else sees. In my book, I think I write about that, that if you're one of these guys driving down the street in a car, do you mention or do you see the billboards? Do you see other things alongside the road that most people are just oblivious to? In other words, your antennae are out. You feel things, you see things, and you're able to describe those. And I found that with Denny, I found that with a couple other guys I'm mentoring now, and it's so obvious. It's not that I'm that smart. It's not that I'm that astute. It's just there. And you can know in your deepest, regular recesses of your life that that will work for them. You're not leading them down a path that would in some way be very disappointing.
I guess it's like a coach sees an athlete, and he knows instantly that guy can make a difference.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: Denning works in media relations for the Wichita State athletic department, does baseball, and volleyball fans would be familiar with him for baseball, doing play by play alongside Mike Kennedy at times. So you've mentioned some of the fascinating people you have worked with Johnny Unitis, Dick Vermeal, many others, Bill Russell, who told the best stories, who was the most fun to go out with after the game and have dinner with or have a beer?
[00:28:01] Speaker B: You know, what you become as a sportscaster, and I've told this to Denning and all the others, that you become a storyteller. That is what a sportscaster has to do. He has to be a storyteller. He can't just do the down distance, time and score. You got to be able to also enhance it with stories. And so I'm teaching a lot now, and I'm using some of the same stories that I used when I was in the broadcasting business. What I would say is that basically where I start to understand.
What was your question? I've forgotten now who told the best stories after the best stories, I think were maybe Dick Vermeal. Dick is one of my closest friends. I went back to his induction in the hall of Fame, what, two years ago now, and we became what I would call foxhole buddies.
If I were in trouble the day Paul, I'd want him my foxhole because he was so loyal, he was so able to support you and make you feel you really were good at what you did. And that's how he coached as well. But I have stories from Dick that just go back. I don't know how much time you have, I could tell you, but he was a good storyteller also. I think maybe Madden had that ability. I also saw that a lot in Hank Stram when I was working with him at that time, Sonny Juergensen. I mean, they all came from a different time, place and time, different venues, different experiences, but they remembered it. And what I have said to kids who come into the business, you're not going to have a lot of stories when you first start, but when you start to get some, write them down, keep them, use them, because I found they're timeless. I can go into a classroom and teach today as old as I am, and I can overcome the age difference because stories themselves are timeless. I mean, if I tell them I did a game in 1983, they weren't even around. So how do they identify with that? Well, I tell the Jim Valbano story, which is then able to shorten that age difference and make you creditable.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: Yes. If you are not familiar with some of this, I would encourage you go to YouTube, look up Lorenzo Charles, and then look up the Michael Jordan 1982 North Carolina game in the NCAA championship. Gary Bender was on the call for both of those. And those would be, I think, on anybody's top ten top five list of NCAA championship games. So Gary Bender, a 1962 University of Wichita graduate, he is a member of the 2024 induction class for the Fairmont College of Liberal Arts and Sciences hall of Fame. He will be inducted on February 6. 02:00 p.m. Whiedeman hall on campus. That is free to the public. Gary, thank you so much for your time. You told some great stories. It was very interesting getting caught up.
[00:31:06] Speaker B: Oh, it's good to meet you. Thank you. I look forward to getting to see you and come out at the athletic department and spend some time.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you very much for your time.
[00:31:32] Speaker B: Hi, this is Rick Muma, president at Wichita State University. Check out the latest episode of the Forward together podcast. Each episode, I sit down with different guests from Shocker nation to celebrate the vision and mission of Wichita State University. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Roundhouse podcast, courtesy of Wichita State University strategic communications. We encourage you to rate, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can find more roundhouse
[email protected] it's over. It is over, ladies and gentlemen. Say it slowly and savor it. Wichita State is going to the final four for the first time in 48 years.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: Unbelievable. What a scene, folks. The shocker fans are just going crazy in the sand.
[00:32:38] Speaker A: Just maybe the greatest win in the history of Wichita State basketball.
