You might say that Brad Lilley’s life these days is a five-ring circus.
Some days the Port Angeles resident is a radio disc jockey and commercial voice-for-hire.
Other days he’s the long-distance-commuting music director for the Los Angeles Dodgers, rubbing shoulders with baseball legends like broadcaster Vin Scully and former manager Tommy Lasorda, and for the Great American Skateboard Tour led by longtime pal Tony Hawk.
Then there are the days he’s traveling across the United States as a music host and on-air personality for sports cable network ESPN, working high-profile “extreme” athletic competitions such as the Great Outdoor Games and the X-Games.
Sometimes he manages to be merely a devoted husband and father of three little girls who loves nothing more than a Civic Field baseball game, a snowboarding expedition on Hurricane Ridge or a surfing excursion at the mouth of the Elwha River.
But right now, the 40-year-old Lilley is taking his easygoing surfer-dude persona and encyclopedic knowledge of rock music to Athens, Greece, where he’s serving as the music director for all baseball events at the XXVIII Olympic Games from now through Aug. 25.
It’s the second Olympics for Lilley, who worked at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
There, he was the overall music director, responsible for hiring and managing more than a dozen DJs and putting together a 7,000-song compact-disc library that covered every genre, every sport, every athlete and every situation at a finger’s touch and a second’s notice.
This time around, the Greek Olympic leaders have compiled the majority of the music and are handling the management, making Lilley’s job much easier.
He may be just a high-end button-pusher, but, as he puts it, “I’ll be the one playing the music when the countries’ flags are being raised and the whole world is watching.
“Maybe it’s just me, but that’s pretty cool.”