Fifteen Minutes Of Fame

My radio career took a turn in 1993 when my wife Pat was promoted into management with Carolina Telephone. We moved from Ahoskie to Fayetteville. As if luck was on my side there was a job opening at WFAI radio.

They were trying to go into sports radio full time but then they were half the day religion and half sports. Part of the full time sports they were going to start in the spring of 1994 as the voice of the Fayetteville Generals and carry all the Generals game on the station. The Generals were then in the South Atlantic league A team.

I got the job which was to be the Generals announcer as well as the executive producer which means sell the advertisers in order to carry the games.

In late May of 1993 I was on the job promoting the Generals for next season but we needed to get something on the air for this summer. Then Cumberland County was tied in with Babe Ruth little league.

Cumberland County finished the year up with a county tournament and then the all star teams were picked. The first week was the 9/10 year old tournament and the next week was 11/12 year old tournament. Cumberland County had at the time about forty little league teams.

I sold the ads and in the process of two weeks did a double header on the air every night for two weeks. In all I did little league games twenty seven of them in thirteen days. Then when the all stars play we covered the games on the radio. The 9/10’s played in Kings Mountain and 11/12’s played in Reidsville.

Just as the little league was finishing up the death of James Jordan occurred just down the road in Lumberton. I was in the office one day and WBZ TV in Boston was on the phone. They had looked in a TV/radio guide and saw us WFAI listed as a sports station and called us to find out what the deal was on Michael Jordon’s fathers death.

There was a news talk station which I think is still active in Fayetteville WFNC. I had monitored them so every thing I knew came from them, The Fayetteville Observer or WRAL-TV who was also all over the story.

I told WBZ what I knew. Before long the phone is ringing again this time it was the sports station in Chicago. They ask me to be a runner for them to prepare stories that they could use on air and I would finish up saying this is Tony Doughtie and insert the station call letters which I have long forgotten reporting from Fayetteville, NC.

I was the man with the news. A TV station in Miami called, then Las Vegas, Los Angeles. There was a period of about two weeks that I was on the national news as much as Dan Rather.


The station in Chicago calls me one Friday and wanted to know if I would be their guest on a two hour radio show that Sunday night in Chicago and take calls from people from Chicago and tell them what I knew. By now the two suspects had been arrested and there was now more news to report.

The only actual time that I had done any so called news work, Pat and I did ride down to see where Jordan’s car was eventually found, other than that all my information had been gotten from live news conferences on the radio or info I saw in the paper or on TV.

About a month after the dust had settled in James Jordan’s death I get a notice that I had a bounced check. After trying to figure out what had happened, I found that my company check had bounced and I had no money in the bank. It didn’t take long to find out the station was bankrupted and my chance to be the announcer for the Fayetteville Generals died before it ever got off the ground.

My fifteen minutes of fame is sadly linked to Michael Jordan most tragic time.