Praying for Gil Hodges by Thomas Oliphant

Author:Thomas Oliphant
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312322779
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

9

The Man from Fordham

For millions of Dodger households that day, the last out of the Dodger half of the fifth inning of the seventh game in 1955 did not simply mean that the game—barely an hour old—was half over. It also meant that Mel Allen’s southern accent and booming baritone was about to be replaced by the flatter, already beloved, Bronx accent of Vin Scully. My parents detested Mel Allen—less because he was a notorious “homer” in his adulatory descriptions of Yankee games than because he was corny. I was used to his relentless hype and more amused than turned off by his folksy demeanor; most of my friends could recite his tobacco and beer spiels for White Owl cigars and Ballantine beer and ale (“Make the three-ring sign and ask the man for Ballantine”).

Allen had two trademark expressions when he did games. By accident early in his career (he had started doing Yankee and Giant home games in 1939), he had described a long fly ball he wasn’t sure was going to be caught or, as it happened, end up a home run: “Going, going … gone!” And after a particularly sterling play, usually by a Yankee, he always exclaimed, “How ’bout that!” He seemed pleasant enough.

But Vin Scully was way beyond pleasant. Astonishingly, on that historic day he was only twenty-seven years old, Junior Gilliam’s age, broadcasting his second World Series, having emerged almost immediately from the shadow of as hard an act to follow as a person could imagine—Red Barber.

Despite their different origins and accents, and very different ages, each was renowned for essentially the same reasons: economical use of language, absence of noisy hype, almost casual tone, and a continuous flow of detailed information communicated in clear English.

Barber had been hired by Larry MacPhail in Cincinnati and went with him to Brooklyn. He achieved iconic status in the 1940s, a trailblazer in the difficult arts of wise understatement and wry wit that more sophisticated listeners in postwar America appreciated. By contrast, Vin Scully had barely had time to learn from the master as the very junior member of his broadcasting team when circumstances thrust him into the national limelight with virtually no warning.

“It was 1953,” he told me when we talked in his booth at Wrigley Field in Chicago, where he had accompanied the Dodgers on a road trip fifty years later, still at the very top of his profession. “Gillette was offering him two hundred dollars a game for the Series, and Red wanted more, and Gillette made it clear that they were not offering a penny more. Red was just not going to do the broadcasts for that amount of money.”

In the Dodgers’ booth that year, the second man at the microphone was another broadcaster with a rich resume, Connie Desmond. If Barber was a father figure to the young Vin Scully, Desmond (out of Toledo, Ohio) was the big brother. However, he also drank heavily, there had been an episode or two on the air, and NBC did not have confidence in him before a national audience for the World Series.

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