news-record.com

GREENSBORO - It's a job for which he was never paid until a few years ago.

Yet season after season for 22 years, Ed Phillips faithfully returns to his courtside seat, hooks up an old microphone to the public-address system and announces basketball games at Page High School.

Phillips does it for one reason. "I just love the kids," he says. "I want to see them do well in life as well as athletics."

Phillips' love for sports dates back to his boyhood days when he played baseball and football. But all that would change one fateful day, the day his life was turned upside down for the next seven months by hospitals, needles and an endless stream of doctors.

"It all happened so fast," recalls Phillips, who was 11 at the time. "All I could do was move my fingers a little."

Phillips had polio.

It is a disease easily prevented now with a vaccine, but during the 1940s, being diagnosed with polio was devastating.

"The doctors told my parents that I might never walk again," Phillips says.

He gradually learned to walk again with the use of a leg brace that he still wears. The brace makes his walk so unsteady that one of his doctors joked that Phillips walks "like a drunken sailor."

Phillips laughs about that, but he's not embarrassed about his disability. Neither are his friends or family.

His wife, Penny, says Phillips has been her "hero for almost 48 years."

"He's an inspiration to me," says Rusty Lee, the longtime athletics director at Page High School. "He's got that polio and that wheelchair. Our gym is not really equipped for the handicapped."

After rolling into the gym to call the Page-Grimsley games last week, Phillips received assistance from friends who helped him from his wheelchair into his courtside seat.

Once seated, Phillips starts each game the same way: He introduces the visiting team, then the home team - but with one small exception: "The visitors don't get the same emphasis."

Now 72 and enjoying retirement, Phillips has no plans to leave his microphone anytime soon. He says that Lee told him, "I had a lifetime contract. If I leave, they would leave, too."