Broadcaster vocation — not Show-bound, the WETA post, the fist-broadcast compulsion

pivotal · STANDING

• When: STANDING (established "very early"; WETA tenure since the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar)
• What: Because it became clear very early that Troeltsch would never reach the pro tour ("the Show"), he has poured himself into a projected tennis-broadcast career instead. He sinks every dollar his parents send into an InterLace/SPN pro-match-cartridge library, calls pro action with the room viewer's volume down, ingratiates himself with visiting I/SPN sportscasters, owns a rack of generic blue blazers, and practices combing his hair to a glassy toupee-like sportscaster sheen. He has done the sports segment of WETA — the Tuesday/Saturday closed-circuit intercom "broadcast" — undislodgeably since Schacht came to E.T.A., forever hunting synonyms for "beat" and "got beat by." The compulsion runs everywhere off-air too: he calls play-by-play into his empty fist, into disconnected headsets, and over pro-wrestling cartridges alone in his room (tackiest sportcoat on, Seldane bottles at hand) until his roommates flee. He regards Lateral Alice Moore's antique iron stand-up intercom mike as beneath the profession, and has been "prohibited from playing with her chair." The persona has even won a real institutional concession: juniors' and seniors' in-room cartridge-viewers are "a two-year-old administrative concession the credit for which goes largely to Troeltsch, who made such a pest of himself with Charles Tavis over the issue that Tavis finally relented just to keep the kid from lurking in his office's waiting room, speaking into his fist, pretending to report on 'the flames of controversy surrounding individual rights raging here in quaint and peaceful Enfield'" (n106 p. 1004). His friends note he is nonetheless "not a born public speaker" — and that teammate Freer, not Troeltsch, has the InterLace looks the career would want.