by Tom Perry
Sports Editor
Norwich Bulletin
BOSTON — The public address microphone at Fenway Park is in the same cozy roof box room as the keyboard that controls the electronic scoreboard in center field.
Most good Red Sox fans know it is in this loft that Sherm Feller perches himself and introduces the lineups and the major league players when the Red Sox are home.
The Sox weren’t around on Tuesday and neither was Sherm Feller when the best college baseball players from around New England took over Boston’s lyric little bandbox. But Wayne Norman was up there, sitting behind the microphone, doing all the introductions.
It marked the second straight year that Norman, the sports director at WILI radio in Willimantic, had been asked to handle the PA chores for the New England College All-Star game. And while last year was a thrill, Norman might have appreciated it a whole lot more this time around.
A few months ago he was the welder with broken hands. He was the model with a bad case of hives. He was the bartender with no clean glasses or mugs.
A few months ago, Wayne Norman was a broadcaster with no voice. A few months ago he didn’t know if hed ever be able to go back on the air again. Willimantic’s voice of sports was silent.
For nearly 30 days, a man who made his living by talking to thousands of people he couldn’t see, had to write notes to communicate with those he could see. And all during this time, doctors from as far away as Boston and California couldn’t tell him what was going wrong.
It began back in December. His silk-smooth voice grew raspy. Instead of flowing like a sweet syrup from a jar, words spilled from his mouth like the last bit of gravel from the bottom of a dump truck.
One day before he was scheduled to leave for vacation, Wayne Norman woke up and found his voice sounded so awful, he couldn’t do his morning show. It didn’t hurt to talk and he actually was able to speak, it’s just that his voice lacked what he calls “good broadcast quality.”
He went on vacation, hoping it was just a temporary thing and that everything would be as it had been for the previous 11 years.
Doctors at the Lahey Clinic in Boston diagnosed Norman’s ailment as something called “functional dysphonia.”
“What that means,” says Norman, “is that physically there is nothing wrong with the speaking apparatus, but the voice sounds do not sound right.”
It was all quite alarming for Norman. After all, he was 32 and going through a voice change. And to make things even worse, he had earlier accepted a part-time job as color analyst for the Connecticut Radio Network’s University of Connecticut basketball productions.
“One of the hardest things I’ve ever done was write that letter to Barry (Berman, director of CRN) telling him I couldn’t take the job,” said Norman, a former UConn student, who was a natural for the job.
Early in March, after therapy and special exercises, Norman went back on the air. Because he doesn’t work at a major metropolitan radio station, Norman has several hats to wear at WILI aside from the one as sports director.
“If I have four minutes to do sports,” says Norman, “I think people around here would rather hear about something happening at Eastern, UConn, Windham High or something else in the area more than they want to hear something ripped off the wire about a game between San Diego and Houston.” One of the things Wayne Norman is best at is doing play-by-play. A few weeks ago, for the 10th straight season, WILI covered the Eastern Connecticut State College baseball team in a post-season tournament. Because of the therapy, his voice had returned from its siesta and he was able to work the games.He remembers the first game he did. It was 1973 and Eastern was in an NAIA tournament in Virginia.“There had been a lot of rain and at the last minute they changed the site of the game to a place where there was no hookup,” he recalls. “We didn’t have time to get the phone company to put in a line, so we ended up dropping a dime in a pay phone behind the backstop and doing the whole game from a pay station.”While Norman is a professional, he states without equivocation that his heart sank a few weeks ago when Ithaca’s Mark Fagan clouted a dramatic two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth to prevent Eastern from going to its first NCAA Division III Nationals.“I guess in my mind,” says Norman, “I had figured that going with Eastern to the nationals would have been a nice touch for my comeback. I was crushed.”
He bounced back quickly. His voice is back in his custody. And he’s still going to therapy sessions and doing all his execises.
And Tuesday afternoon, chances are not a half-dozen people among the 300 or so at Fenway knew or cared about the man sitting behind Sherm Feller’s microphone.
In fact, he did such a professional job that no one probably even thought about the voice on the public address system.
No one but Wayne Norman, that is. After all, it’s a voice he almost lost.
To read a Willimantic Chronicle story on Wayne’s recovery, click here.
To read a Hartford Courant story on Wayne’s recovery, click here.
