Joe Tutino’s soccer broadcasting career has run more than three decades, during which time he’s become an LA Galaxy institution, the voice of the team on television and/or radio broadcasts since their early years.
It all started, however, with some old-fashioned free labor: schlepping old-style tube TVs up and down the stairs at the San Diego Sports Arena.
Tutino decided he wanted to become a sportscaster as a sophomore in high school, and when he started broadcasting school a couple of years later, he approached Jim Moorhouse, the PR guy at his local pro team, the San Diego Sockers, who’d moved indoors as the old NASL crumbled a few years prior.
“I started interning,” he recounted in a recent conversation with MLSsoccer.com, “and part of my internship was setting up the press box. And back then you had to carry these 19-inch TVs, that were probably 100 pounds each, all the way up to the top of the arena, because that's where the press box was.
“[In return] I could announce the game into a tape deck, and I could bring it back to school and have it critiqued and so forth. And I did that, interning for the Sockers and the NBC affiliate in San Diego, and at that time there was a news talk station here in San Diego [where] I eventually got hired. I was interning for them as well. So those three internships were going on. And so I did Sockers play-by-play into a tape deck for probably three years, maybe even more than that.”
Whatever it takes
If juggling multiple jobs and dictating your own calls onto cassette tapes for three years sounds like a tough place to start, bear in mind that it’s not all that far from the norm for aspiring soccer broadcasters over the years.
Many started in radio or as beat journalists; others worked across multiple sports or moonlighted in different fields entirely to make ends meet. Though it’s a dream job for most of them — just as it is for many of the fans watching at home — it’s a decidedly narrow and arduous path to the top, especially for those who got started in the dark old days before MLS’s birth.
Veteran soccer broadcasters JP Dellacamera (right) and Tommy Smyth (left) in the booth for a Philadelphia Union match. | USA Today Sports Images
Today he’s a living legend in the industry whose voice is associated with some of the American game’s most iconic moments. But back when he started in the 1980s, JP Dellacamera had to hustle just to keep the bills paid, first as an aspiring hockey announcer, then as a jack of all trades before he finally began to build a reputation in the beautiful game. It started with indoor side Pittsburgh Spirit, the closest pro team to Erie, Pennsylvania, his home base at the time.
“Back in those days, unlike today, you did it all. So I was a radio broadcaster, public relations director, marketing director, and if there was television, I was doing that as well,” recalled Dellacamera, who initially aimed to reach the National Hockey League. “You kind of did it all for very little money, mostly for the love of the game and to try to advance.
“At some point, I just thought I might get back to hockey – years later, I actually did realize my NHL dream, though it came kind of accidentally. But at that point I thought, nearly 10 years of riding buses and not being able to advance for whatever reason, let me look at something else. And so, Pittsburgh was only a two-hour drive from Erie, and I made that connection. And then it’s been soccer pretty much ever since.”
Today’s landscape is dramatically different by comparison, with a stable top-flight pro league, dozens of new clubs across all levels of the pyramid and a more established media market for soccer. The grind remains, though.
Tyler Terens, the newest member of Chicago Fire FC’s TV team, caught the bug at the tail end of his own collegiate playing career at Hobart College in Geneva, New York, when he and a teammate left their coaches and fellow players in tears with a mock broadcast call of a friendly match for which they were sidelined by injuries.
When he decided to pursue a career on the mic after graduating, Terens hit the road, traversing the Northeast United States to call everything from minor-league baseball to college basketball and soccer from New Jersey to Vermont. Three years ago he cold-called the NWSL’s headquarters to inquire about potential opportunities and learned that the women’s league was shifting its on-air operations to the Vista Worldlink facility in Dania Beach, Florida, also the nerve center for USL broadcasts.
“So after the basketball season was over, I drove back down to Jersey, got all my warm-weather clothing and then drove down to Florida and then called 500 games in three years for Vista Worldlink,” said Terens, 26. “And now here I am in Chicago.”
Right place, right time
Long-time soccer play-by-play man Max Bretos started his career at the company that preceded FOX Sports World and FOX Soccer. | USA Today Sports Images
Being opportunistic and resourceful helps as well. Veteran voice Max Bretos, today a central cog of LAFC’s TV team, got his start in the 1990s as a scheduler at Prime Sports Network, one of the first media companies to purchase the US rights to overseas soccer leagues. When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation acquired it in 1995, it set the stage for the birth of Fox Sports World and Fox Soccer Channel, forerunners of the dazzling array of global footy beamed into North American households today. Getting in on the ground floor was priceless.
“We had the Bundesliga, we had Serie A, the Argentine league, all these leagues,” said Bretos. “They had a broadcaster by the name of Kevin Wall who did everything and he was at wit's end. He couldn't do it all. So I said, ‘Hey, can I get in and do a game?’
“Basically they’re broadcasting games off a monitor all day Saturday, all day Sunday, by bulk – no real production to it. And I did [the first game] for free, and it was the Argentine league – Sunday Argentine ‘Clasico del Domingo’ – the big game, River-Boca. While I was working, I fell in love with the Argentine game. I watched every week in Spanish and the broadcaster at the time was Marcelo Araujo, and I mimicked everything off of him.”
Getting a foot in the door
In an industry where trust and dependability is so key, many leverage personal connections or existing relationships. That said, it’s not a luxury that everyone has. Univision's Ramses Sandoval, one of a relatively few commentators equally adept in both English- and Spanish-language situations, had to pound the pavement before he caught his break as a 20-something prospect in Southern California.
“I had no connections whatsoever. Like if I sat down my freshman year in college in my room and tried to think of how I could even begin to have an opportunity in broadcasting, it would be absolutely impossible,” he recalled. “So for me, it was getting out there, putting demos together, driving out to L.A., trying to get stuff into Univision, into ESPN. It was extremely tough.
“I got my opportunity with Chivas USA in 2010, and I was given the opportunity to do their games on the radio, thanks to the late Jorge Vergara, the owner … that was one of the guys that believed in me. And he really just heard my stuff without meeting me. He loved my style, he set me up with the people at Chivas USA, back then at the Home Depot Center in Carson. And everything happened very quickly. I got there, they liked me, I started doing radio. Within a couple of months, they pulled me into the TV broadcasts.”
But getting your opportunity is just the first part of ultimately converting what for many is a childhood dream into a lifelong reality.
“You get your foot in the door, and if you bet your ability, then that's part of the challenge,” said Luke Wileman, now the voice of TSN in Canada but who began his career on this side of the Atlantic making coffee as an intern, despite prominent broadcasting experience in England.
"If you are given the opportunity to be able to do a job and you take it, it's the kind of industry that once you're in, if people know they can rely on you, then you can move along in the industry. And a lot of it is about having that lucky break or that first foot in the door to be able to actually get in.”
