Bobo Brayton Recording Radio Commercial

Excerpted from The Spokesman-Review - April 11, 1990 - by John Blanchette

Take away the 999 wins and Chuck "Bobo" Brayton still has a place in the hall of fame of the mind's eye.

Maybe you've never seen him in uniform, never seen one of his baseball teams play at Washington State. Maybe you're on the road to Lewiston or Walla Walla on a Saturday afternoon, changing the dial when the oldies station segues into static and coming up between innings of a ball game out of Pullman.

"Hey!" booms a voice bereft of even a hint of a Spanish accent. "Que pasa, muchachos? You like Mexican food?"

For all we know, Bobo Brayton would sound like another Pavarotti if his vocal cords weren't made out of barbed wire and the words weren't filtered through all the pebbles stirred up by his plow and his infield rake the last 40 years.

Que pasa? It's just Bobo, on call for baseball. You can see him charging into the studio in his batting helmet and low-stirrup socks to cut these tapes for the local flower shop ("Tell them Bobo sent you!") and the campus ice cream store ("Mmmmm!")

John Olerud, Jr., the best player in Bobo's bulging scrapbook and possibly the most stoic as well, was about to put his name on a major league contract last summer when the reporters gathered for his press conference launched into their best Bobo Brayton-for-Arby's impersonations. Olerud betrayed a smile and quickly hid it behind the sports page....

KQQQ-AM, Pullman, WA began producing regular broadcasts of WSU Cougar baseball in the mid-1980's. One of the perks of sponsoring these broadcasts was having Coach Bobo Brayton voice a radio spot for your business. We didn't have digital audio workstations back then. We were still using large reel-to-reel tape recorders. When Bobo came in to record his commercials for sponsors, we'd put up a clean 15-inch reel and just let it roll until he'd finished reading all his spots. Then we'd extract the good "takes" and do the final production.

Came time to record a spot for Alex's Restaurante in Pullman. One line in the script read: "Eating at Alex's is like taking a trip south of the border, to one of those friendly cantinas, where pretty señoritas serve up authentic Mexican dishes that taste as good as they look."

Bobo's first take was a little different: "...where pretty señoritas serve up an authentic Mexican dish that tastes as good as they look." The food on the dish tastes as good as the waitresses look?? That mental image, combined with Bobo's innocent mangling of the Spanish vocabulary, set the tone for the remainder of the session. Hilarious.

From the outtakes I later spliced together a little "behind the scenes" glimpse into our recording sessions. The resulting 4½-minute feature, originally broadcast simultaneously on the radio and over the PA system at the ballpark between the first and second games of double-header against Gonzaga, delighted Bobo's fans and friends. Fortunately, I kept a copy for posterity. Would you like to hear it now? Press the PLAY button below....