Being the ESPN Radio 1420 voice of University of Hawai'i baseball, Don Robbs has learned, involves more than just doing the play-by-play accounts of interminable games and squeezing in between-innings commercials.

It has meant sweet-talking the residents of a women's dormitory at the University of San Francisco into allowing you to run a telephone line from a room through the laundry facility to a lanai overlooking the baseball field.

It has included doing a broadcast from the student section of the stands at Santa Clara — during a keg party. And repeatedly having to decline offers to join in.

It has meant doing play-by-play from a picnic table at Cal State Fullerton with chatty picnickers and huddling under blankets in the snow at Brigham Young.

So, when organizers of the Coca-Cola Classic told Robbs this week it would be "impossible" to do Saturday's doubleheader, his first reaction was "how bad could it really be?"

Bad enough, it turns out, that unless a solution emerges between now and then Robbs will, for the first time in 32 seasons of doing 'Bows baseball, be at road games he will be unable to do play-by-play for. For the first time in nearly 2,000 UH games — a milestone he says he is scheduled to hit in May — Robbs will be more spectator than hurried sportscaster, reduced to doing periodic updates.

"This would be a first," Robbs said.

Tomorrow's and Friday's 1 p.m. (Hawai'i time) games from Surprise Stadium against Northern Illinois and Arizona State are not in doubt, Robbs said. But Saturday's games against Michigan and Portland from the Texas Rangers' and Kansas City Royals' fields, respectively, are unlikely, Robbs said.

The problem is that while the tournament will be played on spring training facilities of Major League teams, Saturday's games will be on scattered practice fields for which there is reportedly no electricity or phone connections. "No place to run a phone line — and six or seven hours on a cell phone could be a problem," Robbs said.

At age 71, Robbs has been an ironman, missing only a handful of games. An angioplasty intruded once and Easter Seals Telethon duties kept him away a couple times. He's done games from a mobile home in Wichita, Kan., with no view of right field and from card tables in Utah. He's dodged tornadoes in Omaha, Neb. Each time being reminded that broadcasting college baseball is a sport unto itself.

"There are always surprises and challenges but we've usually handled them," Robbs said.

Until he gets to Surprise, Ariz., perhaps.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.