Commentary: Dillon just a natural

For 22 years Tom Dillon provided the eyes for Arizona State University and Arizona Cardinals fans on the radio even if they were in the stadium.

Dillon, 65, collapsed and died Monday night in his Ahwatukee Foothills home.

• See also: AF, Valley lose sports icon Dillon
• From the Tribune: Memorial service for broadcaster Dillon Friday

He was the "voice" of the Sun Devils football, basketball and baseball teams from 1979 through 1997.

Dillon also got to know the commercial airlines' overnight red-eye schedule without looking it up.

From 1989 through 1997 he could be broadcasting an ASU football game and a Cardinals road game within 12 hours or switch from Sun Devil baseball to basketball as fast as he could hoof it across the parking lot.

It's been said that baseball and radio were made for each other.

Baseball, radio and Dillon were a natural.

His detailed play-by-play certainly saved me one weekend in California.

I was covering ASU baseball for the former Phoenix Gazette and traveling with Dillon and the late Arizona Republic sports writer, Bob Eger, when a sudden and mysterious eye infection nearly blinded me in the San Francisco airport.

Returning to Phoenix was not an option with a three-game conference series coming up at Stanford University.

I could barely find the keys on the computer so seeing anything beyond two rows in front of the press box was out of the question.

That weekend I sat next to Dillon in what Stanford called a baseball press box -- a table set up on the top row of the bleachers backed up into the trees behind home plate.

I never "saw" a game more clearly than I did through his broadcast.

Ballpark food like hot dogs, nachos, pizza and soft pretzels are the usual bill of fare of the people who cover these games.

But away from the stadium Dillon made it a personal quest to find the finest bill of fare on a budget in every port and never failed his media entourage.

He also knew how to set up a joke and with his timing and voice inflection and always got a laugh.

Away from the microphone he had a perfect-pitch baritone singing voice and was also an accomplish guitar player.

His musical taste leaned toward Willie Nelson and he enjoyed collecting those obscure "somebody done somebody wrong" country-westerns songs with outlandish titles.

But he also enjoyed instruments like the harp.

During ASU baseball trips to Southern California he tried to make it part of the agenda to stop in a place in Marina del Ray to hear a harp player.

He was also a fan of the Kingston Trio.

Dillon had heard that one of the members of the original Kingston Trio lived in the Ahwatukee Foothills area and from time to time tried to make some kind of contact.

After he joined his wife, Bonnie, as a full-time real estate agent with Bonnie Dillon Luxury Homes Real Estate he hit the jackpot.

When Bill Zorn, who replaced Bob Shane in the Kingston Trio in 1973, was looking for a house in Ahwatukee Foothills and Dillon became his Realtor.

Last summer Dillon got to jam with the group in a fantasy camp.

To him, that was playing in heaven.