When the national Fox Sports Radio headquarters were built two
miles away from his house during his senior year of high school,
Larry Brown knew it was meant to be.
“This wasn’t just a local station,” Brown
said. “These were the national headquarters of a major sports
radio network.
“It just seemed like the perfect fate.”
Brown, a 21 year-old senior communication studies major and
sports fanatic, was recently hired to be an update anchor on the
nationally syndicated Fox Sports Radio Network. He is currently
broadcast on the air from Friday night at 11:00 p.m. until Saturday
morning at 5:00 a.m. every week.
As an update anchor, Brown gives sports updates three times an
hour during talk shows that rehash the top stories and scores of
the day.
“It is my job to catch people up with what they missed in
the day in sports,” Brown said. “I have to decide what
is newsworthy and how I can make it interesting and fun for
listeners”
Brown’s passion for sports and persistent attitude have
been the guiding forces that made landing a job as a national
anchor at such a young age possible. It was a combination of these
two traits that led Brown one day, still clad in his high school
baseball uniform after a game, to walk up to the Fox studio and
literally bang on the screen to inquire about an internship
possibility.
Even though Brown was told that he would have to wait until
college to get an internship, Brown’s determination left a
lasting impression on Fox Sports Radio Senior Producer Sam Batesh,
with whom Brown is now good friends with.
“He was obviously a go-getter,” Batesh said.
“He was very persistent and I loved his attitude. He was
funny and he just had a real positive outlook.”
Brown’s motivation to become a sports broadcaster really
kicked in when he failed to make the UCLA baseball team during his
freshman year.
“I worked all summer to prepare to try out for the team
and I didn’t make it,” Brown said. “I was a
little bit uncomfortable for the first quarter of school, I
wasn’t sure what I was going to do.
“But after awhile, I decided that I would turn it into a
positive and I became really motivated to start a career in sports
broadcasting.”
Brown’s first step towards his goal was to get an
internship at Fox Sports Radio. Brown got that internship during
the summer of 2002, working as an intern on John Tournour’s
(“JT The Brick”) radio show. Although his primary role
didn’t extend far beyond screening calls for Tournour’s
show and going on coffee runs for him, Brown also spent a lot of
time getting to know the other hosts and producers at Fox Sports
Radio.
Brown was able to pick their brains to enhance his knowledge of
the business, which helped him land the job he has today.
“I was able to get an idea of what steps I needed to take
in order to get where they were,” Brown said.
Brown also worked at UCLAradio.com, broadcasting football and
basketball games and hosting his own talk show while serving as the
sports director of the station during his junior and senior years.
Brown is quick to point out the immeasurable value of the
experience that he gained working for UCLAradio.com.
“(UCLAradio) offered me a forum for practice and an
opportunity to work on my skills,” Brown said. “There
is no other way I could have gotten that type of
experience.”
Brown continued to work at Fox Sports Radio after his summer
internship as an editor and producer. All the while, he would leave
demo tapes from his UCLA shows in hopes of getting a shot to be on
the air.
Brown finally caught his break in April of this year when he was
told that he would be put through a training program to be an
update anchor. After just three weeks, he was hired as an anchor
and debuted on the air. Brown was ecstatic when he found out.
“It was like when a receiver catches a touchdown and just
flips the ball to the referee,” Brown said. “I was calm
on the outside, but on the inside, I was glowing.”
However, Brown’s ambition extends beyond being just an
update anchor.
“I want to host my own show and ultimately, my goal is to
become a play-by-play announcer for a local professional or college
team,” Brown said.
Those who he has already worked for see the potential.
“As long as he doesn’t run out of energy,”
Batesh said. “The sky is the limit for Larry.”