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of TheColumnists.com
Holy Cow!
Who are we going to make fun of around
Yankee Stadium now that Phil (Scooter) Rizzuto is gone? He died
August 14, about a month before his 90th birthday.
Teammates stuffed insects in his glove when he played, scared
him to death by imitating sounds of thunder when he broadcast,
kidded him about leaving games in the seventh inning in the Bronx
so he could beat the traffic over the George Washington Bridge
to his New Jersey home and made fun of his size.
Bill Veeck brought a midget, Eddie Gaedel, into baseball with
the St. Louis Browns and when the league banned Gaedel, Veeck
asked, “What about Rizzuto? Is he a tall midget or a short
man?”
He exaggerated his height to 5-6 and his weight to 150 but he
was the anchor shortstop on nine Yankee pennant winners from
1941 through 1955, won the MVP title in 1950 and was credited
with being the difference between the Boston Red Sox and the
Yankees for more than a dozen years.
“If we had Rizzuto,” Ted Williams once said, “we
would have won all those pennants.”
In 1956 he was called into the office of Yankees GM George Weiss
and manager Casey Stengel. They wanted some help with the upcoming
World Series roster. They discussed about a dozen names they
could drop to make room for Enos Slaughter on the team.
“It finally it dawned on me,” Rizzuto recalled. “Holy
cow, I was the guy they wanted to let go.”
He went home and bawled like a baby for several days. He spoke
to no one, including reporters or his family.
“Then I got a call from the Yankees asking me if I wanted
to go upstairs to the broadcasting booth. It was good that I
didn’t pop off,” he said.
He became as legendary a figure on the air as he was on the field.
His grammar wasn’t that good and his Brooklyn accent amused
most listeners. He was just the same lovable character on the
air he was on the field with his greetings to friends, his sharing
of Italian goodies with broadcast mates and his constant birthday
wishes to friends and strangers.
Rizzuto was signed off the Brooklyn sandlots after tryouts with
the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers failed to gain him a
contract.
“I went to Ebbets Field and worked out before Casey Stengel
who was the Dodger manager. When I finished taking a couple of
ground balls he called me over. “Hey, kid,’ Casey said,
‘go get a shoebox.’ That really hurt.”
He was signed by the Yankees, made it to the big club in 1941,
loaned Joe DiMaggio $18 after DiMaggio’s hitting streak
ended so the Yankee Clipper could soothe his sorrow in a nearby
bar--money never returned--and became famous for his fielding,
bunting and clutch hitting skills.
He spent 40 years as a broadcaster and was helped by Mel Allen
and tortured by a condescending Red Barber. He smiled through
all the grammatical corrections and became as loved a Yankee
figure as DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle or Yogi Berra.
Pee Wee Reese, his Brooklyn rival, was elected to the Hall of
Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1984. George Steinbrenner,
the Yankee Boss, was steamed that Rizzuto was kept out. In the
early 1990s, Steinbrenner said the Yankees would never again
play an exhibition in Cooperstown if Rizzuto wasn’t inducted.
In 1994, under much pressure, Rizzuto gained admission. His induction
speech was a rambling classic.
Hall of Famers are allowed 20 minutes to recall their careers.
Rizzuto talked non stop before an hysterical audience for 55
minutes without mentioning anything about his career. He talked
of how he met his wife, Cora, how Stengel never liked him, how
he struggled in school and then starred on the air.
He met Cora, daughter of a fire chief, when he substituted for
DiMaggio at a 1941 firemen’s banquet. They paid him $25
for his talk. He kept calling for dates and she kept refusing.
Then he told her he was enlisting in the Navy and would call
every day from Japan. She finally agreed to go out and they were
married for 66 years.
In the late 1980s I had lunch with him at Yankee Stadium. He
complained about how hard the job was getting, how much he hated
the baseball travel and how unappreciated he felt around the
Yankees as they fussed over Mantle and DiMaggio and ignored him.
“I’m gonna quit,” he said. “This is my last
year.
My front page story in the next day’s New York Post shocked
the Yankees, all Yankee fans and Rizzuto himself. After almost
50 years with the team, he was leaving.
When he saw the reaction in the Bronx he proclaimed, “I
was only kidding.”
My editor, Jimmy Wechsler, a legendary journalist, defended me
and blistered Rizzuto in print. It was probably the only “bad
ink” he got in New York in almost half a century. Rizzuto
shyly apologized for leading me on and causing me embarrassment.
He was honored after his Hall of Fame induction and was presented
with a live cow in honor of his oft-repeated expression of amazement,
“Holy cow.” The cow immediately knocked over the waif-like
former shortstop.
The Yankees had all those booming bats through the years--Ruth,
Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle and Alex Rodriguez. They had only one
Scooter Rizzuto. They’ll never have another one.
©2007 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel.
This column first posted Aug. 20, 2007.
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