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GOING BY THE BOOK |
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OF SUMMER |
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New book loaded with
great sportscaster tales
of TheColumnists.com
One guy jumped off
a Florida hotel roof into a swimming pool to show that he could.
Another had a long running affair with the boss’s wife that
wasn’t uncovered until he was almost killed by a car while
crossing a street.
A third guy spent almost every game torturing a future Hall of
Fame shortstop who had wandered into a broadcast booth and stayed
40 years.
These "guys" were baseball broadcasters Bob Prince,
the drunken swimmer; Harry Caray, the brazen sexologist and Red
Barber, the linguist who thought Phil Rizzuto should speak English
as well as Barber did. Rizzuto never expected Barber to play
shortstop as well as Phil did.
Curt Smith has captured the personalities and performances of
all these guys and a hundred more in his charming study of summer
time sounds in a book called, “Voices of Summer” (Carroll
and Graf, $14.95) with a ranking of baseball’s 101 all-time
best announcers.
I spent a lot of summers as a sportswriter traveling the country
with these guys and always enjoyed sitting on airplanes, at breakfast
corner nooks and in baseball dugouts listening to their broadcasting
stories.
Smith collected hundreds of these humorous tales in his delightful
book and also broke down their technical skills in rating the
guys that bring the games to the homes, the shops, the cars,
the beaches, the parks and the shopping centers of America.
My favorite announcer was Barber because he brought baseball
to Brooklyn and that’s where I learned the game. It was
from The CatBird seat, what Barber christened the broadcasting
booth high above the playing field of historic Ebbets Field.
We used to wish as kids that we too could hit an Old Goldie,
the home run that would send a carton of Old Gold cigarettes
(Old Gold was the team broadcast sponsor) down the screen protecting
the fans around home plate.
A 16-year-old kid during World War II named Tommy Brown actually
homered once and when the Old Gold carton came down the screen
for his Old Goldie, the batboy, Charley Di Giovanni, nicknamed
the Brow, who was older than Brown, grabbed the ciggies and ran
them off into the dugout.
Barber only finished fifth in Smith’s book behind leader
Vin Scully, trained by Barber and now enjoying his 55th year
in the broadcasting baseball business for the Dodgers; Mel Allen,
the Yankees guru; Ernie Harwell, a voice of the south who made
it in New York and Detroit, and Jack Buck in St. Louis.
Jerry Coleman, the old Yankee second baseman who spent four decades
as a broadcaster, didn’t make Smith’s list but was
mentioned for his great call when he talked about a player lining
a ball off the wall and “sliding into second with a standup
double.”
Dizzy Dean’s famous line after grammatical criticism by
teachers that a “Lot of people who ain’t saying ain’t,
ain’t eatin’” gets mentioned as do the classic
calls of so many home team, home town rooters hidden in the broadcast
booth.
Smith does a notable job in recreating some of the great baseball
moments via the calls such as the one that always sickens me,
“The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant,
the Giants win the pennant. Bobby Thomson hits into the lower
deck of the left-field stands. The Giants win the pennant. And
they’re going crazy. They are going crazy.”
Ralph Branca didn’t think much of the call.
Lindsey Nelson didn’t have much of a baseball background
when he was teamed with former slugger Ralph Kiner and baseball
enthusiast Bob Murphy as the Mets began play in 1962.
Nelson turned out to be a great baseball guy and a wonderful
interviewer. His standups with Casey Stengel are always worth
the price of admission in the Broadcasting Museum. He also told
me my favorite broadcasting story.
Nelson was calling a big Ohio State-Michigan football game before
his Mets days. Ohio State had a running back named Jerry Fuchs,
pronounced fewkes, not to be confused with the famous
four letter word of the same sounds.
“All week long the sports information director at OSU went
over the pronunciation of the names. Every time he came to this
guy Fuchs he emphasized the way the name was sounded, ‘Fewkes,
Fewkes, Fewkes,’ he would say. The game started and I’m
giving the starting line up before a hundred thousand people,”
Nelson said.
“At right halfback, number 12, Johnny Brown, at left halfback,
number 18, Danny Smith, at fullback, number 14, Jerry Fuchs,
F…U…C….K…..S…You never heard a hundred
thousand people roar so loudly,” said Nelson.
Phil Rizzuto may not have been a classic broadcaster but he had
to be the sweetest guy to sit in a broadcast booth. No ego. No
pretense. No agenda. Just good old Yankee stories, home stories
and lots of laughs. No matter what happened he would utter “Holy
Cow” at least twice a sentence.
One time a bunch of sportswriters and Yankee coaches piled into
taxi cabs to see the first famous crossover porno movie called,
“Deep Throat.” This was in Minneapolis and the movie
theater was about 10 miles away.
“No way,” said Rizzuto, when asked to join us. “If
my wife Cora found out I was wasting money seeing a movie like
that she would kill me.”
Off the cabs went in the dark of the night.
We all sat scattered in the middle of this grungy theater outside
of Minneapolis. The film began and 20 seconds into it there is
a raunchy scene of oral sex by the famed Linda Lovelace.
From the very back of this out of the way, dark and dirty pornographic
theater came the unmistaken familiar voice screaming, “Holy
Cow.”
And they ask me why I loved covering baseball.
©2005 by Maury Allen.
The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The book
cover reproduction is courtesy of Carrol and Graf. This column
first posted on May 23, 2005.
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