By Harry Minium
There is no such thing as dead airtime with Ted Alexander. The radio voice of Old Dominion basketball since 2007 and football since 2009, Alexander is the Energizer Bunny of college sports broadcasters.
When the microphone is on, he is always talking, spitting out statistics, jokes, trivia and the best radio play-by-play description of college football, basketball and baseball you will hear anywhere.
"I've never heard a better game broadcaster than Ted Alexander," ODU athletic director Wood Selig said. "Sometimes, I don't think our fans realize how good they have it. He's at the top of his profession.
"You never know what you're going to hear next from Ted, and that's a good thing."
Shut the mic off, and he's just the same: full of joy, laughter, one-liners, friendly sarcasm and always on the move.
You struggle to keep up with him as he walks, and no matter how hard you work, you'll never know more than he does about ODU athletics or the opponents for games he is about to call. He pores over stats, biographies, anything he can find on the internet. The guy does his homework.
And he's creative, especially when it comes to pools – swimming pools, that is, largely in hotels on the road.
In videos he's done for ODU he's stood in a pool, jumped into a pool, sat poolside wearing a pair of slick shades and even accidentally kicked a basketball player's cell phone into a pool.
"All the standups and the goofy stuff he does, that's Ted," said Andy Mashaw, the color commentator for ODU football since the team began playing in 2009.
"That's no show. That's who he is."
Ted also emcees countless fundraising events, banquets and charity events. He never says no when asked to work a gig for ODU. He has emceed the State of the University address and a multitude of other meetings for the academic side of the University.
He does hundreds of videos for ODU's web site on a multitude of sports, not just football and basketball.
When many fans think of ODU, they think of Ted.
Yet there's a lot you don't know about Ted, that he's a survivor, who as a husband and the father of two daughters, he was twice fired, with little notice, and had to hustle to pay the bills and feed his family.
There's not much that's scarier than being told the paycheck and healthcare ends next week. Yet, he quickly hit the street and found part-time work that led to full-time work, without missing a beat.
You don't know that he was once arrested – handcuffed and taken away by the police – for selling encyclopedias door to door without a license.
You don't know the outrageous things he's done on radio shows from West Virginia to Maryland to Georgia. He was once camped out on the top of a Roy Rogers restaurant for a week to raise money for hospice in Frederick, Maryland. Meals were hoisted up to him in a bucket and he raised a boatload of money. That stunt garnered a short segment on the Larry King show on Mutual Radio.
Alexander in the late 1990s
He's done radio broadcasts from hot air balloons and once traveled around the country investigating gruesome murders for a national cable TV show.
And long before anyone had thought of The Bachelor, he did a two-hour love song radio show, from 10 p.m. until midnight, where he would solicit calls from eligible men and women. If you liked what you heard, he hooked you up on a date.
The show resulted in numerous bad dates and a ton of drama, which were described in detail on his show. It also resulted in 11 engagements and two marriages.
And given Ted's very private nature, you surely don't know what a loving, doting father he is, and how much he loves his wife. Nor would you know that in recent years, he has held it together while his wife has fought a courageous and so far successful battle against cancer.
Only once, during about three hours of interviews with me over several days, did he get emotional, when he talked about Laurie, his wife of nearly 33 years. He teared up and called her the most incredible human being he's ever met.
Ted grew up in Darien, Connecticut, but is a New York guy at heart. His dad commuted into the city every day, and Ted was a huge Mets and Knicks fan. He got the radio bug listening to WABC and especially, to famed sportscaster Marv Albert calling Knicks' games.
He would score the game on graph paper as Albert described Knicks games. "The Madison Square Garden crowds were so crazy, and you could hear it on the radio, that it just felt so special," Ted said.
He grew up wanting to be a disc jockey, not necessarily a sports radio guy, and was trying to figure out where to go to college when he got a flyer in the mail from tiny Bethany College in West Virginia.
Ted and Laurie Alexander
It had a picture of a student wearing a radio headset. He later learned you could be on the air as a freshman. Other schools, such as the University of Richmond, made you wait until you were a junior.
So, he chose Bethany, where he was not only a DJ but also hosted a sports show. He won all kinds of student awards for his work at Bethany and thought he'd graduate and head right into the New York market.
Then reality set in, and he accepted a job in Wheeling and later Morgantown, West Virginia. In Morgantown, he did the morning show and hosted a two-hour special before each West Virginia University football game. That's where he met Laurie in 1984 – she wrote commercials at the station – and he quickly asked her out.
They loved Morgantown, but wanted to make more money, and to move into a larger market, so he took a job in Augusta, Georgia.
He not only got to cover the Masters Golf Tournament and play the Augusta National Golf Course, but it's where he and Laurie were married in 1988.
They moved to Frederick, Maryland and it was there that he moved from radio to television. Laurie was working at a television station in Hagerstown, Maryland. They needed someone to fill in on the weather segment and Ted jumped at the chance and then filled in for some sportscasts.
A few months later he made the move from radio to television fulltime at WHAG-TV. In 1994 they went back to Augusta to the CBS station there.
Then, in 1996, he took a job at WTKR-TV in Norfolk. He's been in Hampton Roads ever since.
He was eventually promoted from weekend duty to the main sports guy. But then new management took over and he was fired.
"I thought we were doing fine," he said. "When I asked what the problem was, they said you're 'too professional.' I'll never forget that. I never learned what they meant by that."
"I had a wife, two kids, and the birds were chirping and looking for little worms and suddenly the worm supply had dwindled."
Ted Alexander interviewing Ryan Henry
He began shipping out tapes across the country, but based on a tip from a friend, quickly got a job doing research for The Forensic Files, a show on The Learning Channel that described in detail how forensic science was used to solve murders. It was a popular show that produced more than 400 episodes.
For eight months he traveled around the country, interviewing police detectives, doctors, witnesses and most importantly the families of those who were murdered. His voice was never heard on air – the show was narrated by Peter Thomas – but the script, the interviews, the focus of the shows, were all his work.
It got old quickly. "It was so hard asking people to relieve the worst moments of their lives," he said.
Once, he sat with the mother of a murder victim for five hours, trying to convince her to do the interview. "Eventually, she agreed because she realized we would allow her daughter to be remembered the way she would want her to be remembered, and not just through the media coverage of the horrific event.
"She was pleased and comforted by the fact that she got to tell her daughter's story."
WTKR then called him and said, "you know, the guy we hired to replace you? He hasn't worked out. Would you like to come back?"
"I don't burn bridges," Ted said. "You try to keep relationships and be professional and, in this case, it worked in my favor."
He was there for three years before moving to 2WD radio, but a year and a half into a three-year contract, he was on the street again. "They told me Whoopi Goldberg starts tomorrow morning," he said.
That was on Sept. 20. He was told his paychecks and health coverage would end Oct. 1.
So, he went back to WTKR and asked if they had anything for him and started doing freelance work in news. Eventually, he was told if he shaved is goatee, he would return as the full-time sports guy.
The next day he showed up clean shaven.
By then he was already doing ODU men's basketball on the radio and when the University began football in 2009, he wanted the job badly. Problem was, he had never called a football game.
Amanda, Laurie, Natalie and Ted Alexander
Undaunted, he got a media credential to a Norfolk State home game against Morgan State, and sitting in the visitors' stands, during a rainstorm, balancing an umbrella and all of his notes on his lap and holding a tape recorder, he called the game and sent the tape to ODU.
He got the football gig and in 2011 he went to Selig and proposed that the University hire him as a full-time sports caster, emcee, videographer and all-around promoter.
Being a pretty intelligent guy, Selig agreed.
Ted has covered some remarkable events in his nearly four decades journalism. He went to New Orleans on Jan. 1, 2000 to cover Virginia Tech in the national football championship game against Florida State in the Sugar Bowl four days later.
If you're older than 40, you remember that was the time of the Y2K scare, the fear that computers all over the world would shut down because they had not been programmed for the 21st Century, including those on planes.
Ted's first flight from Norfolk to Cincinnati landed without incident. The flight from Cincinnati to New Orleans was a different story, with only five passengers on board. The airline needed planes in New Orleans, so they didn't cancel the flight, "The drinks were flowing," he said.
With his camera man recording, he got on the intercom and announced he would be serving drinks, and then took the cart up the aisle. "I turned and opened the curtains, and you could see no one was on the plane," he said.
When asked of his favorite memories of ODU games, they are likely yours as well. ODU's 49-35 football victory over Virginia Tech in 2018 may be his favorite. "That game was so important because Old Dominion fans could finally have a conversation with the Tech fan across the street, and you and your school were thought of in a different way," he said.
There was the 2016 basketball season, when the basketball team made it to the NIT finals in New York, his first, and to date only, time he got to call games in his beloved Madison Square Garden, and the 2019 Conference USA men's basketball championship team, which defeated Western Kentucky three times.
ODU's upset victory at No. 9 Georgetown in Washington, D.C. in 2009 "was the best game I never saw," he said.
He was scheduled to broadcast the game, but had to take care of his television duties, so instead of traveling with the team, he took the train from Norfolk to Washington. Alas, his train was delayed for hours by a snowstorm that blanketed the nation's capital.
He was able to arrange for Georgetown's radio game broadcast to be carried in Norfolk. He did the pregame show on the train, the halftime show inside a subway station and the postgame show, with head coach Blaine Taylor, via telephone while walking across the Key Bridge, trudging through almost a foot of snow.
By the time he arrived at Georgetown's McDonough Arena, the ODU bus was about to leave. Taylor smiled at him and told him to jump aboard.
"Ted is a complete pro," says current basketball coach Jeff Jones. "And not just with the radio stuff.
"When he's emceeing an event, such as our basketball banquet, he's so smooth. When he's interviewing you, he makes it easy on you. He gets to the heart of the matter and then sprinkles in some of that Ted Alexander sense of humor.
"Ted has such a wonderful sense of humor. It's pretty dry. I think a lot of times that people might not get that he's being funny. It's a very smart sense of humor."
Former ODU All-American Dave Twardzik, the color commentator for Monarch basketball, said that Ted loves to spoof him on air without anyone knowing about it.
"He does a fabulous job painting the picture for listeners," he said. "But Ted is a music guy and will use musical references that I usually don't react to. Sometimes I do it on purpose just to see his reaction.
Te
Ted Alexander proposed to Laurie on a tennis court
"When he took his headset off one time, he said, 'really, no reaction to the Shakira comment?' "
Twardzik responded by asking, "I guess she's a singer?"
Twardzik said Ted plays it straight on the air, even after becoming a University employee. When he thinks an ODU team is playing poorly, he says so, sometimes with remarkable candidness.
"When he's critical, he does it in an honest and diplomatic way. He doesn't go out and try to bury anybody," Twardzik said.
That's something that he and Selig agree is necessary.
"He's going to call things like he sees it," Selig said. "If we're stinking up the joint and he says we're playing lights out, the fans will know that's not the truth.
"The fact that he's honest adds to the integrity of the broadcast. There are a lot of athletic directors I know who don't want their radio guys calling it like they see it. But the game should not be viewed through rose-colored glasses by the voice of your program.
"And I think our fans appreciate the honesty of his broadcast. I know I do."
Ted said he doesn't know any other way to operate.
"I'm a fan like anyone else, but you have to tell it like it is," he said. "Otherwise, you lose your credibility.
"If you say, 'that was a great play' and it wasn't and the fans see that, you're a homer."
Added Selig: "We just want Ted to be Ted."
The first time Ted laid eyes on Laurie Rostosky, he stopped in his tracks. "She was gorgeous," he said.
After he got to know her, he realized that she was smart, fun and a great companion. They were both working at WCLG radio in Morgantown and quickly became a couple.
As Ted describes their meeting: "I fished off the company pier and got the catch of a lifetime."
Ted was a tennis player at Bethany – and is still pretty sharp on the court – and gave Laurie tennis lessons. He proposed to her on Feb. 13, 1988, on a tennis court in Augusta, Georgia.
Jeff Jones, Dave Twardzik and Ted Alexander
"The ring was frozen in an ice cube inside a thermos," he said. "I kept asking if she wanted a drink.
"By the time she finally did, the ice had melted and she saw the ring at the bottom of the thermos."
Laurie worked at radio and television stations, as a copywriter, producer and other jobs, until she had her first daughter, Amanda. She then became a stay-at-home mom. She sacrificed for her kids and at least partially as a result, both are very successful.
Amanda is a social worker with a master's degree from the University of Southern California who works at the Virginia Beach Psychiatric Hospital. Natalie, their youngest, is studying for her doctorate in ODU's physical therapy program.
"I don't hold a candle to Laurie when it comes to parenting," Ted said. "She allowed me to work nights, to go on trips, to have all the fun, and she kept the ship afloat at home.
"You take that for granted to a certain extent. You try not to but then you do, and then the diagnosis comes, and you realize just how much they mean to you."
Laurie had cancer years ago and was successfully treated, or so doctors thought, and hit the five-year mark, the time when you're supposed to be cancer free.
"And then five years later, the cancer was back. And that's where we are," Ted said.
"She's such a battler. She looks great and feels great."
Ted and Laurie have kept her battle with cancer largely private.
Although he and Mashaw are close, Andy admitted: "I didn't know about it until a couple of weeks ago.
"It's not like he hides it but he's not trying to draw attention to it. We talked about it. I told him we're praying for you and let me know if there's anything you need. He told me about all the circumstances.
"And then he went right back to talking about football. That's the way Ted handles things. He compartmentalizes things. He's really a strong person."
Twardzik, said "I've never seen Ted down. Never. He's a lot like my wife Kathi. We've been married 49 years and we dated four years before that. I've seen her down maybe three or four times.
"If Ted is ever down, he masks it very well.
"The great thing about Ted is that he has his priorities straight. He loves his job, he loves Old Dominion, he loves what he's doing.
"But that's all secondary when it comes to his wife and two girls."
Ted and Laurie have saved well and at age 62, he could retire tomorrow. Ted said he has no plans to step aside, but his job at ODU will be his final stop. Selig said when Ted leaves, "it will take several people to replace him. He does so much for athletics and the university."
And while the videos and emceeing will be missed, it will be his articulate, passionate voice behind the radio microphone that will be missed most of all.
"He has a way of bringing radio almost to TV-like quality when you're following a game and that's really hard to do," Selig said. "Our fans tell me when our football and basketball games are on TV, they turn off the TV sound and turn on the radio. They want to hear Ted."
It's Wednesday night, Sept. 1, and business is brisk at Wild Wing Café in Chesapeake. It's the first Ricky Rahne radio coaches' show, and in fact, the first football coaches' show at ODU since Thanksgiving week of 2019. The Monarchs did not play football last season because of the pandemic.
There are about 50 ODU fans eating dinner, including members of Rahne's family, and when he walks in the door, he gets a standing ovation.
Ted is quiet until 7:03, then the green light turns on and he introduces the show as only he could.
"It's been 22 months since we played football, and we've endured a lot of hardship," he says. "You miss a lot of things, but most importantly, you miss the people and the relationships forged through ODU football."
For the next hour, Ted skillfully questioned Rahne, eliciting answers about his family, how he kept the team together through the 22 months, about his interview for the job at ODU – his first came at an In-And-Out-Burger parking lot in Las Vegas – and Friday's opener at Wake Forest.
During commercial breaks, Ted wanders through the crowd with the mic, asking trivia questions and handing out game tickets and other prizes and joking. Long-time fan Steve Hardt answered correctly when Ted asked where Rahne first coached – at Holy Cross – but then Ted noted he was sitting with Rahne's family.
"Oh, that's not right, you had help, didn't you?" he chides Hardt playfully.
It's not in his contract, he doesn't have to engage the audience, but that's Ted.
"Ted is amazing," said Ilana Davlin, part of a group of about 20 fans who attend every coaches' show.
"He's always on full speed and he always delivers a good show."
Harry McBrien, who heads the Oceanfront precinct for the Virginia Beach Police, said he met Ted 25 years ago when he volunteered to emcee a police charity event for kids.
"He's the same man he was back then," McBrien said. "He hasn't changed. He would do anything for you."
"He's the best," added Ray Roenker, owner of Wild Wings Café. "I hate to think of what happens when he retires. He's irreplaceable"
Ted says he doesn't think that will happen anytime soon.
"The people at ODU have been so great to me," he said. "I love this job, love what I'm doing. When it's time to hang it up, I'll know it. And it's not time yet.
"I mean, could you have a better job than mine? You're calling games for a living and you're around student-athletes and that keeps you a little younger at heart.
"It's been such a fun ride. They've allowed me to be a part of this great program, and I've made some great memories along the way."
And here's to many more memories, Ted.
Minium was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in his 39 years at The Virginian-Pilot and won 27 state and national writing awards. He covers ODU athletics for odusports.com Follow him on Twitter @Harry_MiniumODU, Instagram @hbminium1 or email hminium@odu.edu
Minium: There's More to Ted Alexander Than Just His Articulate and Passionate Voice
