CHICAGO _ The smoothest voice in Chicago sports felt rougher than usual.
Cubs games on the radio sounded the same to the untrained ear of so many fans that 2014 season, with polished play-by-play man Pat Hughes comfortably providing the soundtrack of summer car rides and barbecues like always. But by the time October arrived, the legendary announcer sensed something was different. Something was off.
"Anybody who uses their voice for a living, you know when it's not right," Hughes said.
And long before Hughes would undergo three surgeries in a 14-month period because of a precancerous lesion known as dysplasia on one of his vocal cords, he knew. Or at least he knew what he didn't know, and it scared the bejesus out of him.
The health crisis Hughes concealed publicly until now started with a bout with bronchitis that June, which went away thanks to an inhaler. But an irritation in Hughes' throat lingered. Put in baseball terms, he possessed the vocal range of a Gold Glove shortstop but suddenly struggled getting to every ground ball. He especially noticed raspiness whenever he tried producing a deeper pitch. At first he wanted to attribute the issues to fatigue from the grind of calling another 162-game schedule.
"Everybody gets run down at the end of the year, your whole body, including your voice," Hughes said. "You expect to be tired and your voice to be scratchy. But a month after the 2014 season, the scratchiness didn't go away. Normally it did. So I knew there was something wrong. I also knew I wanted to continue my career. I wasn't ready to quit. I needed to get it fixed."
