Monday, October 26, 2009

Missing the Scooter as Yanks prepare for first World Series without him

The Yankees will play in a World Series for the first time since his passing. He has been gone a little more than two years now, but I can still hear his voice calling from the past, from some time in the late 1960s.

I hear the sound of so many of my baseball summers over the crackling static coming through a transistor radio in the back yard on a lazy July or August afternoon that seemed to last forever. No cares; just a boy, a radio and a baseball game.

I began listening to Phil Rizzuto when I was eight years old and he became a huge part of my life for the next 30 years. But even Scooter couldn’t live forever, though I actually thought he might.

The voice finally was silenced on August 13, 2007, a few weeks shy of his 90th birthday and 11 years after he retired. His 40th and final season as a Yankees’ broadcaster in 1996 coincided with the rookie season of a fellow shortstop named Derek Jeter.

It is a funny thing perhaps. Born in Brooklyn, New York on September 25, 1917, Phillip Francis Rizzuto had no tangible affect on my life. I never even met the man, and yet I feel as though I knew him personally. I think there are tens of thousands of Yankees’ fans who feel exactly as I do. When Scooter finally headed off to that big baseball diamond in the sky, I think he took with him the final link to my youth.

Through all those summers, all those seasons, he was my baseball companion. On the beach. In the car. Under the pillows. Along with my dad, Scooter taught me a sport I love more than any other. After helping get me through some of the darkest days in Yankees’ history in the late 1960s, he thrilled me during the return to glory in the 1970s.

Scooter called Chris Chambliss’ pennant-winning home run in 1976 on WPIX channel 11, the Yankees’ long-time television home before the days of cable.

As Scooter screamed, “THE YANKEES WIN THE PENNANT!” I screamed right along with him, waking up my parents. I remember the exact time of Chambliss’ home run – 11:13 p.m. on October 14. I was a senior in high school about to see the Yankees play in a World Series for the first time since 1964.

In the 1970s, New York baseball fans were blessed with two of the best broadcasting teams in the major leagues. For the Mets, there was the trio of Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner. For the Yankees, there was the threesome of Rizzuto, Bill White and Frank Messer, who worked together for 15 years from 1971-1985. The Yankees’ broadcasts were priceless. As former players, Rizzuto and White played off each other, with Messer seemingly serving as the straight man.

There is little doubt that Rizzuto stayed a few too many years and his on-again, off-again talk of retirement did become a little tiresome. He called it quits after missing Mickey Mantle’s funeral in August of 1995 to do a broadcast in Boston.

Rizzuto walked away at the end of the 1995 season but was coaxed back into the broadcast booth for the 1996 campaign. At the end of that season, he retired for good.

Technically, Rizzuto probably couldn’t be called a great broadcaster and he was not without his critics who accused him of being too much of a homer. He didn’t have the golden voice of an Ernie Harwell in Detroit or a Chuck Thompson in Baltimore, nor could he tell a story or wax poetic the way Vin Scully did in Los Angeles, and he certainly wasn’t as bombastic as Harry Caray in St. Louis and Chicago.

Caray claimed that he was the first to use the signature phrase “holy cow” on the air and that Rizzuto stole it from him. Rizzuto says he used the expression when he was a kid growing up in Brooklyn as a way to avoid cursing.

But Rizzuto brought a talent to the booth that few broadcasters have mastered or understood. While he may not have been proficient at providing all the details -
when he missed a play, he wrote “WW” in his scorebook,which stands for “wasn’t
watching” – his greatest gift as an announcer is that he personalized his broadcasts.

Rizzuto brought you into his life. He wasn’t speaking to his entire audience but to each and every listener or viewer,like he was having a cup of coffee with you at a late-night diner.

You learned about his beloved bride, Cora, whom Scooter seemed to talk to on the air. (“I’m coming home soon, Cora”). You learned of his love of Italian pastries and his fear of lightning and anything that crawled.He sprinkled his play-by-play with birthday greetings and get-well wishes and reviews of his favorite Italian restaurants.

Then, of course, there was his quirky habit in later years of leaving in the seventh inning to beat the traffic across the George Washington Bridge back to his home in New Jersey.

In his book “Voices of the Game,” which is an anthology of baseball broadcasting, author and baseball historian Curt Smith quoted an Associated Press story written by Will Grimsley about Rizzuto:

“Housewives love him. The kids all think he’s terrific. And the only man of the house, who normally likes his baseball straight and spiked more with statistics than levity, wouldn’t swap the one hundred and fifty-pound pundit for a ton of those data-sprouting encyclopedias often found behind the mike. Too bad Scooter’s act is confined to the upper East Coast. He is a refreshing departure from the norm. He ought to be a national commodity.”

Rizzuto seemingly complained about everything on the air.It was too hot,too cold; there were too many bugs in the booth. He was everybody’s favorite hypochondriac. You couldn’t do anything but laugh. He was like your eccentric old uncle. If someone did something to annoy Rizzuto, that person would be called a “huckleberry” but in a good-natured way:

“Hey, White, do you know what that huckleberry did to me? Holy Cow!”

Rizzuto’s banter with his broadcast partner was beyond hilarious.There was one
time during an intro when Rizzuto, reading from a teleprompter, appeared to forget his name: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Bill White.” White, standing right next to Rizzuto, began laughing hysterically – and all this was going live over the air.

Rizzuto had the rather odd habit of referring to his broadcast partners by their last names.

It wasn’t “Bill” or “Frank” but “White” and “Messer”. White once joked, “How would
you like to work with a guy for 15 years and he still doesn’t know your first name?”

Rizzuto was the master of the non sequitur. It was almost as though his brain didn’t have an edit button. He’d think of something to say, then say it before
realizing he said it. Does that sentence sound like something Yogi Berra would say? But part of Rizzuto’s charm, of course, was that you were never quite sure what was going to come out of his mouth when he fell into that stream of consciousness.

There was this comment to Bobby Murcer, one of his broadcasting partners in the
later years:

“Oh, those Yankees can get the clutch hits, Murcer. I might have to go home early. I just got a cramp in my leg.”

On August 5, 1985, the Yankees honored Rizzuto during a ceremony at Yankee Stadium when they retired his uniform No. 10. As part of the celebration, the Yankees brought on to the field a bovine with a halo around it’s head – a real live holy cow.

What happened next was a classic Rizzuto moment as the cow knocked him over, sending a 67-year man sprawling to the ground, head over heels. It seemed part of the script, something that could only happen to Rizzuto. He was not injured, just embarrassed – and 50,000 people laughed at his expense.

I decided that if Rizzuto ever got inducted into the Hall of Fame, I would have to be there, so when the day finally came on July 31, 1994, I drove five hours to Cooperstown.

It was a great day, sitting in a field amid the rolling hills of upstate New York, listening to the speeches and baseball songs.

Most younger fans, myself included, remember Rizzuto only for his broadcasting career which began in 1957, the year after he retired as a player. Rizzuto enjoyed a 13-year playing career with the Yankees that was interrupted for three seasons by World War II, winning seven World Series titles.

Rizzuto was overshadowed by bigger names like Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra, and his career numbers weren’t great: a 273 lifetime batting average with 38 home runs and 563 RBI. But Rizzuto was a durable shortstop known more for his bunting skills and base running ability. He did win the MVP award in 1950, when he batted a career-high .324 and recorded 200 hits.

Not everyone shares the opinion that Rizzuto is worthy of the Hall of Fame. However, Boston Red Sox great Ted Williams claimed Rizzuto was the glue that held those great Yankee teams together. Nearly 40 years after his played career ended, Rizzuto was voted into the Hall of Fame by the veterans committee. His legion of fans said an injustice finally had been righted.

Most Hall of Fame inductees take their speeches seriously as they want to say
something poignant and memorable. They often hire people to help them write their
speeches. Not Scooter. I don’t think he had anything prepared. He just started talking off the cuff, like he did for 40 years on the air. He was all over the map, veering from one subject to the next.

It was classic Rizzuto. No one really had any idea what he was talking about, yet he had people eating out of his hands for 20 minutes. I have his speech, if one
could call it a speech, on tape. Occasionally, when I’m in a bad mood, I pop it into the VCR. Works like a charm every time.

Thank you, Scooter. You were - and still are - my all-time favorite broadcaster.

I fear Rizzuto was the last of a dying breed. The industry seems so bereft of true
characters. Announcers today all seem to sound alike, as if they are all cut from the same mold and following the same script. Many of them seem to think the game is about them.

Fox’s Joe Buck is a fine announcer – when he isn’t doing a stand-up comedy routine, when he doesn’t think he is a junior version of Don Rickles. The younger Buck is so unlike his father, the late Jack Buck, the legendary broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals. And Yankees fans have to suffer the arrogance of John Sterling, who may be the most pompous broadcaster in the business. His home run call – “it is high, it is far, it is gone” – - is so lame and contrived.

I feel bad for today’s kids. They never got listen to Phil Rizzuto. They have no idea what they missed.

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