• Columnists

'Breck' the constant voice for area sports

• Tom Rife: Livin' the Team
• December 28, 2019
• 1337

Romanced by radio at childhood, the love affair was just getting started.

Meet the kid who hid his cheap transistor under the pillow so he could tune into Cincinnati Royals basketball games when he was supposed to be asleep. How else was he to keep up with the wizardry of Oscar Robertson, the silky smooth guard everyone called “The Big O.”

“Solid state” was the high-tech buzzphrase, but the oblong nine-volt battery never seemed to last long enough. Did the term alkaline even exist?

Some 15 years later this same pup would attend a National Association of Broadcasters convention at the Firestone Country Club in Akron. During dinner he longingly peered out a window to see in the distance a broadcast tower with its bright red lights flashing on and off in a rhythmic — even hypnotic — pattern. The intrigue, the magic of the science, took root in a wandering mind.

And before morphing into a hard-core newspaper guy, he was lucky enough to dabble among airwaves that traveled far and wide. The rewarding part was that, thanks to the powerful signal of Ohio University’s WOUB-FM out of Athens, Pop took joy in listening to his son’s daily morning sportscasts from 90 miles away.

Skip ahead 50 years. These days the kid-at-heart takes joy in listening to the sportscaster he always wanted to be: Mike Breckenridge, the voice — the Gibraltar — of local sports in Wooster for the last 30 years.

While technology has developed at an astounding pace, even “Breck” remains bewildered by the miracle of over-the-air audio.

“There are no wires connected,” he joked. “It is amazing. It’s far beyond my knowledge of it. I’m just glad it’s something that I got into when I was a freshman in high school. I had a broken ankle, and I couldn’t play basketball. So I did my first game into a boombox with a cassette tape. I thought, ‘That’s pretty cool.’”

Breckenridge attended the Connecticut School of Broadcasting before starting his storied tenure at WQKT/WKVX in 1989. He started at the station part time as a weekend announcer and moved to full-time program director. In 2002 he became sports director and then assistant general manager in 2008. He has made a name for himself in the community for his play-by-play announcing skills and his vast knowledge of all things sports.

Breckenridge’s style is old-school, straight to the point, always respectful and genuine. His trademarks include meticulous preparation and the ability to leave his personal opinions out of the broadcast.

“I liked certain people, but I didn’t want to imitate them,” he said of his professional growth through the years. “You take certain mannerisms, but you’ve gotta have your own style, for good or bad. Otherwise, you’re just a copycat, and I never wanted to be a copycat."

"Once you get on the air, it’s all you. As long as you’re prepared, that helps you get going,” the 52-year-old said while tending to the many details of the recent WQKT Steve Smith Holiday Hoops Classic at the College of Wooster’s Timken Gymnasium. Breckenridge and the college’s Doug Cline founded the local high school basketball showcase in 2004.

Those who are brash and cocky don’t dare enter Breck’s ballpark. He feels such attitudes belong in an altogether different format, an approach that has resulted in the erosion of sound sports journalism, print or electronic.

“The problem is talk radio anymore is the same people asking the same questions. You can hear that elsewhere,” Breckenridge said. “We don’t want to be one of those people. When we say sports, we’re games. We’re not sports talk. And with social media on top of sports talk radio, it’s turned entirely negative. There’s not much positive at all. It’s not nice to listen to. There are a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacks out there.”

In other words the romance isn’t what it once was.

“Anymore, you can get any guy with a laptop and a microphone and he can get on the air someplace,” Breckenridge lamented. “It’s lost a little bit (of the romance) because of that. It doesn’t mean you’re any good. It just means you can easily get on the air. We still deal in professional things, and we’re always gonna do that. You’ve gotta have a little pride in what you do.”

In addition to the countless high school football and basketball games he has aired over the past three decades, Breckenridge has delighted in broadcasting Fighting Scots men’s basketball as well. This is his 19th season in the chair. He does the vast majority of games, home and away, solo.

“I’m very fortunate that it’s one of the best programs in the country,” he said of coach Steve Moore’s organization. “It makes it easy knowing you’re going to cover a winning product. I don’t think I could do it for 19 straight years if it was bad basketball. They’re professional, they’re good, and it’s just a lot of fun.”

Breckenridge has been on the air long enough to be reporting on “second generation” athletes parented by those he covered in his early years.

“I can guarantee you there won’t be a third generation,” he said.