Getting the fans riled up: the Voice of the Spectrum
The Spectrum is a unique building. It offers the USU men’s basketball team an unbelievable home-court advantage, and from time to time has given the team a little “Spectrum Magic,” as Head Coach Stew Morrill likes to phrase it.
What goes into making the Spectrum so special? It is a combination of many factors: good teams, good coach, good fans… and a good public address announcer?
Rob Flygare, the PA announcer for the men’s basketball games in the Spectrum, is a part of what makes the Spectrum such a great venue for college basketball. While he works as just a PA announcer, he is much more than that. He is the voice of the Spectrum.
Flygare grew up in Salt Lake City and attended Olympus High School, where he got involved in sports, playing football, basketball and golf. After high school he attended University of Utah, where he graduated in speech communications.
Once he graduated from college, Flygare got a job teaching at a high school as well as being the basketball and football coach. While he taught high school, he attended a master’s program at BYU in journalism and broadcasting, but that was not all. He also started interning at television stations in Salt Lake City.
“I interned a little bit at Channel 5 with Jim Nantz at CBS,” Flygare said. Jim Nantz was the broadcaster for this year’s Super Bowl along with the Masters Golf Tournament and NCAA March Madness on CBS. “He was a great help and a great guy. I’m really envious of him. That would be my ideal job.”
From Salt Lake he moved to Casper, Wyo., where he got a job working with CBS as a news broadcaster, doing both sports and news. He stayed in Wyoming for 10 years before making his way to Cache Valley.
In 1994 Flygare moved to Cache Valley and began working for a local country music radio station. He did radio broadcasting for Bear River High School and Box Elder High School, and in 1997 added Logan High School to his list.
When USU started using KVNU as their affiliate, Al Lewis, the previous PA announcer of the Spectrum, left to do the play-by-play for the radio. It was then that Rob Flygare became the PA announcer for the Spectrum. A couple years later, he added football to his resume.
Having focused more on radio and television, making the switch to PA announcer was a little bit difficult.
“It was hard,” Flygare said. “I’d only done PA one time before. It’s just so different because what happens is, instead of painting a picture like in radio, you just tell a story of what’s going on in the arena that everybody is watching. But you don’t do play by play. You don’t talk over the play, you do it afterwards, and you try to sound as excited as you can.”
In the nine years Rob Flygare has been doing the PA at the Spectrum, the way he is able to announce the game has changed. For fans who have been around for a while, they will know some of Flygare’s catch phrases that he used to use, such as, “Hey! What do you think of your Aggies?” which he usually asked when the opposing team took a timeout after a big USU play. But the rules have changed, and so has Flygare’s style.
“At first I kind of had my own reign and could do whatever I wanted and yell and scream,” Flygare said. “But that has changed. There is a rule in the NCAA rule book that the PA announcer has to be more impartial and not try to incite the crowd so much.”
While the rule exists, Flygare still feels it is also his job to show some emotion for the home crowd.
“My job, as I see it, is that I need to get excited,” Flygare said. ” Ninety-five percent of the people in the stands are rooting for USU. But you also need to be respectful of the other team.”
Sometimes his enthusiasm for USU basketball has earned him a reprimand from the referee, such as he did last year against New Mexico State.
“The foul situation was six for Utah State and none for New Mexico State,” Flygare recounted. “Then finally New Mexico State got a foul, and I kind of emphatically said ‘First team foul for New Mexico State,’ and one of the Utah State officials – and he was right – came over to me and said, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t show up the officials or the other team.'”
Being the PA announcer has allowed Flygare to be involved in many great and memorable moments. One of his top memories, he said, is the victory of New Mexico State and Jaycee Carroll’s 44-point night.
“To be there and to be able to call that game is a night I will never forget,” Flygare said. “It was one of the great historic moments. The most points by an Aggie in the Spectrum. To be able to score 44 points in a big game like that is a thrill. That is why I do it, for games like that. There are some games that are not as exciting, and you have to dig down deep to get excited for them. But it’s the big games, the Utahs, the BYUs, the Nevadas that really get your juices going and get you excited to do it.”
But being the PA announcer is not just about enjoying the game and having a good time. Flygare is aware that it is a job and there are things that he needs to do.
“The thing that is hard for me – and it is never going to change – is that I have got so much to read,” Flygare said. “Every timeout, when there is any moment of time, I am reading all these commercials. And that’s OK, ’cause it’s my job. But sometimes, the stack of papers is pretty thick, and I’m reading and reading and reading.”
Advertising is part of the game and helps pay for everything that keeps the Athletic Department going. Some of the advertisements can be pretty long to read, and sometimes Flygare doesn’t even have a chance to read through them before he’s reading it into the microphone. That can create some funny moments during the timeouts.
“The funniest thing that ever happened to me,” Flygare said, “happened one time when they had this dance group out there called La Chars. I was still pretty new at it at that time, and the guy put the paper in front of me, and I go, ‘Now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome La Chars, rhymes with stars.’ And I went, ‘Oh crap.’ They put the ‘rhymes with stars’ so I would know how to say it.”
Having been the PA announcer at the Spectrum for so many years, it could be said that Flygare has turned into part of the environment that makes that building so special. While he is not out on the court playing the game, he does get recognized around the valley as the ‘Aggie guy,’ but not by looks.
“They don’t recognize my face ’cause they don’t see me down there, but what happens is that I’ll go into a store, and I will say something and the person will say, ‘I know that voice. Where do I know that voice?’ But a lot of people will go, ‘You’re the guy in the Aggie game.'”
It was a long road that brought Flygare to the Spectrum, but he hopes to be able to stay with the Aggies for as long as possible. From the hard parts of reading mounds of papers to the funny moments, such as Stew grabbing his mic from him to yell at the crowd, the job has grown into something Flygare enjoys very much.
“I love it,” he said. “It is really so much fun, and I really hope to be able to do it for a lot more years. Hopefully the university will continue to allow me to do it.”
People have heard the cliche, “If these walls could speak.” The walls at the Spectrum do speak, and it is Rob Flygare that gives them a voice. He is a normal guy with a normal day job, but he is also something more. He is the voice of the Spectrum.
-wwm@cc.usu.edu