Husband and Wife a Winning Combination in Baseball Booth
By Max Linsky
Enrique Oliu steps off the Number 74 bus, folds out his white guiding cane and feels for the curb. "Tap. Tap tap."
It lands and Oliu steps up onto the northwest corner of the parking lot at Tropicana Field. Oliu has nearly completed the routine trek from his day job at the public defender's office in Tampa to his night job as the Spanish-language color analyst for the Devil Rays on WAMA, 1550 AM.
And yet he waits to complete the last one hundred yards, even though he's walked into the stadium from this spot countless times before.
Enrique Oliu, 42, excels at a job that most people would assume is impossible—he describes a game he cannot see. Oliu is quick to point out that he got to the 1550 AM booth on his own, by utilizing a memory that his producer describes as "encyclopedic" and cultivating a lifelong love of sports. But for all of his talent, Oliu still needs help. He has an on-air partner, play-by-play announcer Danny Martinez. He has an off-air partner too-his wife.
He knows she's coming when she's still 20 feet away. "There's my wife," he says, standing tall with a red raincoat under his arm, waiting patiently for her to make it all the way to him.
After standing on her toes for a quick kiss, Debbie Perry, 49, guides Oliu's hand to her forearm and the couple head toward the stadium.
Oliu smirks when he says he can't remember when he went blind. "For practical purposes, (at) three months maybe?" He says. "But that's long gone." Oliu left his native Nicaragua at the age of 5 to attend boarding school in Costa Rica, and came to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine five years later. There he fell in love with sports, playing kickball in school and staying up late listening to Jack Buck calling games on the radio.
Oliu met Perry, a former Air Force sergeant who grew up watching her brother play military league baseball in Hawaii, when a mutual friend sent them to a Lightning game together in 1998. "It was a blind date," he says, unable to keep a straight face. "We just spent the whole time talking, we didn't even watch the game."
Oliu uses the words "watched" and "saw" often. "There is vision with the eyeballs, or (there is) perceptive vision," he says. "Eyes will give you an image, but if you didn't perceive it, you didn't see it."
Oliu, who has been calling home games since the team's inception six years ago, uses the skills of a baseball manager to analyze the game. He studies tendencies, percentages and situations. He gets some information from the morning paper, which Perry reads to him, and he's got most of the Devil Rays' media guide memorized. But he relies on other skills as well. He knows whether the pitch is a fastball or curve by the sound that comes of the catcher's mitt. He walks the warning track in the outfield to feel for the intricacies of the wall. And he relies heavily on his relationship with the Rays' Latino players, some of whom speak very little English, to provide a context when they are at the plate or on the mound.
His knowledge, Oliu says, allows him to see the game.
Before the first pitch, which Oliu will announce with his right headphone off his ear so that Perry can whisper facts to him that she finds in the daily game notes, the couple take a walk around the stadium.
With his cane folded away in his black shoulder bag, Oliu lets Perry guide him through a newfound throng of fans. "We've never seen this place so electric," he says about the unusually large crowd drawn to Tropicana Field by the Rays' recent winning streak. Perry, who is the benefits coordinator for the Devil Rays, and Oliu say hello to ushers, vendors and ticket-booth attendants as the pair work their way around the bottom level of the stadium. Their stroll is interrupted repeatedly when Perry bends down to clean up a wet spot on the cement floor or throw away an errant soda cup.
"That's my wife," Oliu says, standing above her and tapping the tips of his fingers together in rhythm.
Perry and Oliu get to their booth with enough time to review before the first pitch. Perry starts by organizing the space in front of her. The thick annual media guides, one for the Devil Rays and one for the visiting Toronto Blue Jays, go in one corner. The game notes, printed daily with the latest statistics, go directly in front of her. These are what she will rely on most, because they have the kind of intricate up-to-the-minute figures that can't be found in the media guides or the morning newspaper. She starts to pore over them, sliding her wedding ring up and down her finger.
Perry didn't start coming to the games until last season. "I did it to spend time with him," she says. At first, they say, it was difficult. She didn't know what statistic he would want when, and he would get frustrated.
"She's my wife," he says looking back on those first few games. "But she's gotta be good, too."
It wasn't easy when they first started dating either.
Early on, Oliu, who also does the Spanish broadcast for the Buccaneers, went to Perry's apartment to watch a football game. At one point, she recalls, he came back from the bathroom bleeding after walking into something in the hallway.
"You're just going to have to get used to this," Oliu said.
And she says she has tried. "Every relationship has something different," she says. "And his blindness is ours. Half the time you don't even notice it."
Their work relationship also has become second nature.
If she has a figure ready, Perry says she will place her hand on her husband's back to let him know. Oliu will often touch his ear if he's ready for it or hold up a finger if he isn't. Yet when asked, Oliu says "the touch means nothing. Sometimes, she just puts her hand on my back," as though anything else would be a form of special treatment.
As Orlando Hudson, the Blue Jays' second baseman, steps up to the plate in the first inning, Perry leans over with an insight pulled from the game notes. "He has hit in four straight," she whispers, making sure to keep her voice low enough that Oliu's microphone doesn't pick it up.
Oliu takes the information in English, translates it instantly and sends it out over the air in Spanish. "Tiene una racha de cuarto juegos bateando de hits," he says, telling the listener of Hudson's four-game streak. The broadcast doesn't miss a beat.
"I don't know how he does it," says Paul Olden, who calls the Devil Rays' games in English for WFLA, 970 AM.
Oliu's talents have allowed him to move beyond his disability. "I don't think I'm that much of a big deal," he says. "I'm just a guy that's been given a microphone."
Oliu may play this achievement down, but certain examples stick out to Perry as particularly telling.
"The guys have started razzing him now," she says. "Anytime a foul ball is hit up towards us, I cover his head. And the writers (who sit next to Perry and Oliu) have started to make fun of him-saying he can't protect himself."
Perry has some jurisdiction, however. Oliu managed to catch not one, but two foul balls during a game last year.
There are hazards for Perry as well. She is admittedly focused on not taking any of the spotlight away from Oliu. During a fourth-inning promo for the Spanish broadcast, in which a live feed of the booth is shown on the big screen in the outfield, Perry realizes a second too late and gets caught jumping out of the frame.
"It's his show," she says.
As the game draws into the eighth inning with the Rays comfortably in the lead, Perry and Oliu begin to relax. She rustles his graying hair and he slings his arm around her hip.
Oliu, who once dreamed of being a commentator for Major League Baseball, now has his sights set on ESPN Deportes, a Spanish-language affiliate of ESPN that was launched Jan. 7. He wants to be a television studio anchor, and he might be the only one who thinks he can do it.
But for now, all Oliu can hope for is to get to bed soon. He has to be up at 5:30 a.m.
He's got a bus to catch.
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