AI Summary
5 min readOn September 11, 1999, a 14-year-old boy in Shawnee, Oklahoma, climbed into a radio booth for the first time to call a high school football game, launching a broadcasting career that would eventually land him in the Dodgers' booth alongside Vin Scully. That boy was Ross Porter, and 25 years later, at 87 years old, he still remembers the score.
From Shawnee to Scully
Porter's path to the major leagues began in his hometown, which happened to be the Class D farm club of the Brooklyn Dodgers. A local sportscaster let him do a half-inning of play-by-play at 14, and within months, the station manager called to say the sports director had quit — the next Friday night belonged to Porter. He went on to the University of Oklahoma, then to WKY Radio and TV in Oklahoma City, where he did news before transitioning to sports. An audition tape got him to Los Angeles, where he started doing weekend sports on Channel 4. When his colleague Ramford Johnson — the man who took the gun from Sirhan Sirhan after Robert Kennedy's assassination — never returned to the station, Porter moved up to the 11 o'clock news with Tom Brokaw, then to the 6 o'clock with Tom Snyder. After a decade in local news, he was handpicked by the Dodgers for the broadcasting job, spending 28 seasons alongside Vin Scully.
The Blue Book and the 22-Inning Marathon
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What you'll learn
- 1 The Fifth Hour: "HEY PORTER" - Timestamped Outline
- 2 (03:10) **Ben Maller's 9/11 Personal Story** - Maller shares his memories of being at the World Trade Center two weeks before the attacks, his experience working at Fox Sports Radio that morning, and the unsettling discovery that he later stayed in the same hotel floor as the hijackers in Boston
- 3 (08:07) **Introducing Ross Porter: Mentor and Legend** - Maller welcomes his friend and mentor Ross Porter, who began calling professional baseball at age 14 and spent 28 years alongside Vin Scully broadcasting Dodgers games
- 4 (11:41) **The Oklahoma Work Ethic and Early Career** - Porter describes his path from a 14-year-old broadcaster to network television, including his audition tape that landed him weekend sports at Channel 4 in LA
- 5 (18:40) **The Jim Thorpe Connection** - Porter recalls meeting the legendary athlete Jim Thorpe as a 12-year-old at a high school football game and later representing Oklahoma when Thorpe's Olympic medals were returned
- 6 (20:10) **Inside Jerry Tarkanian's UNLV Dynasty** - Porter shares stories from 15 years calling UNLV basketball, including the 1990 national championship team and Tarkanian's psychological tactics
- 7 (24:00) **The Unbreakable Record: 22-Inning Solo Broadcast** - Porter details the legendary August 1989 game in Montreal where he called all 22 innings alone, a record that can never be broken under current rules
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
On this edition of The Fifth Hour, Ben shares his memories of September 11th, including a visit to the World Trade Center just weeks before the attacks and, years later, the world’s most unfortunate hotel stay in Boston. What are the odds? Apparently much better than you’d like.
But the star of the show is the great Ross Porter. The legendary Dodgers broadcaster, friend, and mentor joins Ben for baseball, broadcasting, and never-before-told stories from an amazing career—including the MLB broadcasting record Ross owns that will almost certainly never be broken.
It’s a must-listen for Dodgers fans, broadcasting nerds and anyone curious about Ben’s early years, back before he became the overnight gasbag on Fox Sports Radio.
Ross Porter, baseball stories, Maller archaeology—and absolutely no resort fee. Enjoy.
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