Man in charge

If you’re a golf fan, turn on your television right now and click to the British Open. You’ll be listening to the artistry of Hayden Lake resident Peter “Pug” Puglisi who’s in charge of the sound mix for the match.

He’s so good at his job, in fact, that he’s also the man in charge of the television sound for the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA championship, the last 15 Super Bowls and every summer Olympics but one since 1988.

If that isn’t sufficient testament to his skill, four Emmys and two production awards presented by the National Association of Television Arts and Sciences grace his office. They’re for his work on the Seoul, Barcelona and Athens Olympics, the 2004 Masters and the 2005 British Open.

So why does the 45-year-old whiz live in North Idaho?

Love, that’s why. Read on.

“I’m an Iowan,” he says, “graduated from the U of Iowa in 1983 with a finance degree. Moved to Los Angeles and worked for a while as a financial consultant, but it just wasn’t fun. So, I decided to try the entertainment industry. That looked like fun.”

Puglisi applied to the three major TV networks, and NBC gave him a job in its scheduling department. For the next year, he dispatched technicians including camera operators and audio specialists to assignments on the various shows produced by the network.

Owing to his computer skills and enthusiasm, he was placed in charge of the office after one year, but by the time another year had passed, he’d tired of that kind of administrative job, and applied for a transfer to the sound department.

“I wanted to learn the craft, and I was single, so I could afford to take a salary cut and start at the bottom,” he says.

So he toted equipment, pulled cables, and learned which doohickeys fitted into which ports.

One of his assignments, to cover the 1990 Goodwill Games, took him to Spokane, and in the old Cavanaugh’s Restaurant by the river he met Lora Dilly, a registered nurse and single mother of three.

They created opportunities to get together several times over the next year, and married in 1991.

By 1992, he figured he’d learned enough to go out on his own, so he quit NBC, started freelancing, and the newlyweds moved to Mesa, Ariz. to escape the L.A. crush.

Because most of his work still was in Hollywood, he commuted by air, spending three to four days a week away from home. That set up a working pattern Puglisi maintains to this day.

Only now, he flies out of Spokane since the Puglisis moved here in 1998 for a better climate, the small town atmosphere, and to be closer to Lora’s relatives and her many friends in the area.

The latter two factors have become especially important now that they have children of their own, 14-year-old Maree and Jozee, 10.

He reckons he commutes about 100,000 miles a year, and his career has taken him all over, including Cuba, Argentina, Japan, Australia, Portugal, Spain, Scotland, England, Ireland, Bermuda and the Bahamas.

On the job, Puglisi is the guy in a production van with some 400 patch cords and seemingly hundreds of sliders and switches in front of him. He patches audio signals from the field to the air, blending in music – usually of his own choosing – with crowd noises and announcers’ voices. If he does his job right, we’re not even aware of it.

After all these years at his craft, he still gets a kick out of what he does: “It’s live, it’s intense, it’s exciting,” he says. “And I still get butterflies before every show.”

A couple of his best moments, he says, were at last year’s British Open at Scotland’s St. Andrews course.

“It was Jack Nicklaus’ last major,” he says. “And as he was leaving the course, the gallery was cranked up. I slipped in ‘Eminence Front’ by The Who, and the result just left you tingling.

“The next day, the new champ, Tiger Woods, was walking to the 18th hole to clinch his win, and the crowd was roaring. I told the director on the intercom that I wanted to cut out the announcers’ voices, and he OK’d it. So it was just Tiger, his huge smile, and the crowd noise. It was awesome.”

It’s obvious, too, that he still gets a kick out of meeting the celebrities associated with the events he works. At the 2002 Super Bowl, he found he was standing next to one of his heroes, Paul McCartney, during the pre-game show.

One of the entertainer’s security escorts tried to chase Puglisi away, but McCartney demurred, and Puglisi persuaded the reluctant security man to take a picture of the British knight and his sound man fan.

His nearly constant travel – Puglisi is on the road about 26 weeks every year – could take a toll on a marriage, but wife Lora insists that he makes up for his absences by being a No. 1 Hubby and Daddy when he’s in town.

“He has to miss many holidays and weekends, because that’s when lots of sports are played,” she explains. “And birthdays and anniversaries sometimes get postponed, too.

“In 1995, when I was having our last baby, one of my sons, Gene, was playing on the offensive line for UCLA in the Aloha Bowl. Obviously, I couldn’t make it to the game in Hawaii, but Peter talked ABC into assigning him to that game so family would be there.

“That was pretty special.”

Puglisi relates that, now and then on far-flung locations, crew members will talk about their homes.

“When it comes out that I live in Hayden Lake, Idaho, the first question people ask is ‘Where is that?’ And the second is, ‘Why?’

“You know what I tell them? I say, ‘I live there because I can.’ “