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Out of Left Field |
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It's a special World Series
for New York this year
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
MIKE WEISMAN, the veteran
television producer supervising the Fox Network production of
the post-season baseball dramas, lives in California, but he
is a New Yorker through and through. The Douglaston, Queens native
said the other day, “When the Sept. 11 tragedy happened
and I saw how wonderful the New Yorkers were reacting by coming
together, by being so truly magnificant, my wife and I felt a
great sense of pride in the city.”
So Weisman, who was scheduled to handle the first Yankee playoff
game against Oakland on a Wednesday, flew into New York Monday
night, and asked one-time NBC colleague Curt Block to accompany
him down to Ground Zero Tuesday for a first-hand look at the
wreckage scene. “I was terribly moved,” he said, “as
anybody would be.”
Weisman brought that sense of New York at this time into the
playoff telecasts he handled with director Bill Webb working
with announcers Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. It was that New York
smarts that made Mayor Rudy Giuliani a part of two of the telecasts
in a way that transcended politics.
Weisman said, “We weren’t interviewing a politician.
We were talking to Giuliani as a fan, not a mayor because he
is a fan more than he is anything else. We asked security if
we could put a microphone on him in the stands and it all worked
out because it was spontaneous. We could ask him if he thought
a ball hit by an Oakland player was fair or foul and he answered,
‘foul’ admitting he was rooting for it to be foul.’
Buck, a St. Louis native, was eloquent in setting up the mayor’s
appearance, extolling New York, saying “we are all New Yorkers
at this time.”
Weisman said, “We were doing a three-announcer telecast,
but the third announcer was smack among the people in the stands.
When we came back to New York, I was proud of a subtle decision
I made. The Giuliani people said he would be happy to come up
to the booth if we wanted, but I thought that would be antiseptic.
So we kept him in the stands and we let him watch and it turned
out to be real and spontaneous--his kid even interrupting him
to ask how the Giants made out” [in a football game being
played over in New Jersey].
Weisman is 51, a graduate of Queens College. He worked his first
World Series as a production assistant in 1972. This will be
his 20th series, putting him No. 2 to only the late Harry Coyle
as a TV technician working World Series. “I was there for
the [Carleton] Fiske homer in 1975, the [Bill] Buckner error
in 1986 and the [Kirk] Gibson homer in 1988.”
Weisman achieved artistry with the pre-game segment he fashioned
the day after a gimpy-legged Gibson hit a dramatic pinch-hit
home run off Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley. He interspersed
Gibson swinging and making his run around the bases with shots
of Robert Redford hitting a dramatic homer and circling the bases
in the movie, “The Natural,’ the haunting movie music
underscoring the dramatic visuals.
In all the years Weisman, who had a baseball scholarship at North
Carolina before the death of his father forced a move back to
Queens, hasn’t become sated with baseball. “Oh, there
are times during run-of-the-mill Game-of-Week telecasts during
the season when your mind wanders. But the World Series is so
important, every pitch meaning something, there are always challenges.
“Baseball is the ultimate challenge for a TV crew,”
he said “because there is so much down-time. Basketball
and football action is almost continuous. With baseball you have
time to flash back or to move ahead. I am always looking ahead
and Webb is always on top of things as a director.”
For this World Series, Weisman doesn’t plan to bring Giuliani
back unless there is some dramatic situation in what looks like
might be the approaching end of the Series. “But we will
have fun with [Arizona manager] Bob Brenley,” he said.
Brenley was an announcer with Fox the past few years. Weisman
said, “I will retrieve tape of some of Bob’s stuff
when he was announcing, some of the tomfoolery he did jumping
into he pool in the Arizona stadium. As this Series nears an
end--whether he is winning or losing--we will show a tape of
Brenley’s post-Series interview with Bobby Valentine last
year after the Mets lost to the Yankees.”
The patriotism theme was scheduled for the scene-setting before
Saturday’s first game of the Series. “And,” he
said, “toward the end of the first game I will promote that
we will have Ray Charles on hand in person for the second game
to sing his classic, ‘America the Beautiful’ before
the National Anthem. And during the seventh inning stretch when
they sing “God Bless America” Webb says we will show,
not the players, but the fans, because this is the time of the
fans.”
A New Yorker is always a New Yorker, he agreed. “This is
one of the most satisfying things I have ever done because it
has taken on an added significance over and above baseball. It
will rank high among those 20 World Series I have done.”
Maybe the highest by the time this week’s dramatics have
been concluded.
© 2001 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©
2001 by Jim Hummel. The World Series illustration is from IMSI's
Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael,
CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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