VOICES FROM THE PAST: Former broadcasters stumble into 'crazy weird' Goldeyes reunion

Former Winnipeg broadcasters Peter Young (left) and Les Lazaruk, at the Winnipeg Goldeyes game yesterday at Shaw Park. 

When former Winnipeg broadcasters Peter Young and Les Lazaruk decided to get together for a Goldeyes game on Wednesday, they had no idea their meeting held any historical significance.

As far as they were concerned, it was just a nice afternoon at the ball park for two old colleagues who hadn’t seen each other in some 15 years.

Sure, the fact one of them is battling cancer for the second time added some feelings to the afternoon.

Aggressive chemotherapy treatments may weaken Young’s voice occasionally, but he’s still plenty sharp. Sharp enough to realize the date somehow seemed significant.

“It wasn’t until I got there, for some reason the date stuck in my head,” Young told the Winnipeg Sun . “And so I Googled it, and sure as sh–, the exact same day. It blew me away.”

June 7, 1994, was the date of the first Winnipeg Goldeyes game.

Then an expansion franchise in the Northern League, the Goldeyes played those early years at Winnipeg Stadium, the less-than-ideal home of the Blue Bombers.

Nearly 15,000 fans filled the north end zone and west-side stands that first night.

The radio broadcast crew was comprised of Young, a veteran CKY-TV broadcaster who’d been working video production for the Toronto Blue Jays, and Lazaruk, recently with CJOB.

Celebrating their 30th season this year, the Goldeyes hadn’t planned any kind of broadcaster reunion.

Fate took care of it for them.

“Crazy weird,” Lazaruk said. “This was the last thing I did on air in Winnipeg. We were on KY-58.”

The occasion demanded a photo-op from the press box. It also called for an exchange of stories only independent baseball could produce.

The biggest difference from that first game to Wednesday’s: the location.

“That first season was just bizarre,” Young recalled. “The broadcast location was in the football press box at about the 30-yard line. So you had no idea, no clue what’s being thrown. So Les and I sort of had a signal. If he thought it was a fastball, he’d put his fist up or something.

“All I can say is there were a lot of Bob Uecker calls: ‘Just a bit outside.’ We had no idea.”

Peter Young (left) and Les Lazaruk in the broadcast booth at Winnipeg Stadium 29 years earlier.

The pair had no idea what they were getting into, either.

The ball parks weren’t properly set up for a visiting radio broadcast.

Lazaruk, with experience filling in on Winnipeg Jets games on CJOB, recalls lugging all the equipment on road trips – they’d drive everywhere – and looking for different places to hang a microphone to pick up the sounds of the game.

“I remember we climbed the netting on the backstop with some step ladders in one park,” he said. “It might have been Duluth. In Thunder Bay, we crawled up through the press box to the roof and hung a mic off the roof.”

Young remembers drilling a hole through a softball, attaching a 30 to 40-foot string through it, tying the microphone cable to the string and heaving it over backstops to the field side, where he’d attach the mic and stuff it into the padding behind home plate.

“So you couldn’t see it,” he said. “And we were the only broadcast team in the league that had the umpire sound, the crack of the bat, the ambient sound. By the end of the year, other broadcast crews were doing the same thing.”

The league was full of characters back then, including former major leaguers like pitcher Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd in Sioux City, with 207 MLB starts under his belt, and career .300 hitter Pedro Guerrero in Sioux Falls.

The Goldeyes had catcher Dann Bilardello, who’d spent parts of eight seasons in the Majors.

Then there was outfielder Darryl Brinkley, who showed up in Winnipeg as a 25-year-old rookie.Or was he?

“A rookie with a fudged birth certificate,” is how Young remembers it. “His real birthday was ’65, and he changed the five to an eight. So that’s how he qualified as a rookie. He was spectacular.”

More than a decade later, in 2007, Young, running the Calgary Vipers, would sign Brinkley again and watch him bat .399 – still with a fudged certificate.

“I call him Old Man,” Young said, laughing. “We’re still great friends.”

There was no greater character, though, than Goldeyes manager Doug Simunic, who never quite made the big leagues as a player and who sure as hell wasn’t going to with his irascible personality in the dugout.

“Never a dull moment,” is how Lazaruk put it. “He was animated, he was bombastic, he did a lot of things. Some of it was for show.”

Young got along fine with Simunic that first year. By the second, the two weren’t on speaking terms. Young wouldn’t even mention his name on the radio, referring to him simply as “the manager.”

Finally, Goldeyes owner Sam Katz told them to go to a bar and order drinks until they’d worked it out.

Young and Lazaruk could have gone on and on with their stories.

There was the time their Jeep gave up the ghost on the drive back from Thunder Bay, and they had to jam into a car with the late, great Free Press writer Randy Turner and two Goldeyes employees to make it home.

“Like anything new, you’re pioneering,” Lazaruk said. “But you’re also kind of worrying about the unknowns. What pitfalls are going to be hitting you?”

Lazaruk, 64, called just that one season before moving to Saskatoon, where he’s still the voice of the Western Hockey League Blades.

He still calls the summer of ’94 the best he’s ever had.

Young turns 76 on Thursday, the lymphoma that had been in remission for seven years back to challenge him again.

The loss of people like Turner and former CJOB and Winnipeg Sun colleague Bob Holliday, not to mention just the passing of time, causes one to cherish moments like Wednesday’s.

“We had so much fun,” Young said. “A lot of years between. And a lot of laughs.”

“He gave me a hug,” Lazaruk said. “And I said, ‘Hey, let’s make sure we keep in touch.

And the next time I’m in town we’ll be sure to visit again.’”

The Goldeyes beat Duluth, 9-1, in that inaugural game in ’94.

On Wednesday, they rolled over Chicago, 6-1.

The big winners, though, were the two former radio guys, happy just to be there.

[email protected]

Twitter: @friesensunmedia