Quote of the Day (Baseball’s Dizzy Dean, Displaying His Way With Words)

"The runners are returning to their respectable bases."—Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Jay Hanna (Dizzy) Dean (1910-1974), showing that he could be equally colorful in the broadcast booth, quoted in “To Ol' Diz, King's English Was a Snap,” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1986

Quote of the Day (Joe Garagiola, on an Ideal Baseball Broadcast)

“I want the broadcast to sound like two guys sitting at the ballpark, talking about the game, with the viewer eavesdropping. It’s not High Mass, and it’s not a seminar—it’s a ballgame.” — Catcher-turned-Hall of Fame sportscaster Joe Garagiola (1926-2016), (right, at the 1985 All Star Game, with Vin Scully), It’s Anybody’s Ballgame (1980)

Quote of the Day (Baseball’s Dizzy Dean, on ‘The King’s English’)

“After a spectacular career as a pitcher, Dizzy Dean went on to become an equally spectacular sportscaster. Ignoring grammar and inventing words, he took such liberties with the language that a colleague was prompted to ask: ‘What made you become an announcer when you don't even know the King’s English?' ‘But I do know the King's English,’ indignantly retorted Dean. “ ‘And so is the Queen.’” —Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher, sportscaster, and interpreter of English Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean (1910-1974), quoted in E.E. Edgar, “Famous Fables,” Pottstown (Pa.) Mercury, June 19, 1976

It was, perhaps, incidents like this that led Dean to say, “The good Lord was good to me. He gave me a strong body, a good right arm, and a weak mind.”

This Day in Sports History (Howard Cosell, Broadcast-Booth Mouth, Dies)

Apr. 23, 1995— Howard Cosell, perhaps the best known—and certainly most controversial—sportscaster of his time, died at age 77 of a heart embolism at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York City. Even as the strength in his body had faded in the last few years under the assault of multiple diseases, the memory of him had faded from a public that once tuned in to hear his outrageous utterances (or, as he put it, “telling it like it is”) on TV prizefights or with partners Frank Gifford and Don Meredith in the early years of “Monday Night Football.”

Cosell might have initially thought of himself as a sports journalist, but as he grew more famous, his fame extended far beyond those confines—a fact he abetted and reminded everyone about, on every conceivable occasion. 

In the early 1970s, Woody Allen spun comic gold from him in not in one but two films. In Bananas, Cosell made a cameo, giving a play-by-play narrative of the honeymoon night of Allen’s character, Fielding Mellish. In Sleeper, the humor was more pointed. A historian shows a tape of Cosell to Miles Monroe, Allen’s cryogenically frozen visitor from a century before: “At first we didn't know exactly what this was, but we've developed a theory. We feel that when citizens in your society were guilty of a crime against the state, they were forced to watch this.”

“Humble Howard,” they nicknamed him at the height of his fame, with irony as obvious as the toupee he wore on TV. He not only admitted to his egotism, he owned it. “Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff,” he once said. “I have been called all of these. Of course, I am.”

Sportscaster Jimmy Cannon put it far more hilariously and, of course, concisely: “If Howard Cosell were a sport, he’d be roller derby.”

In the mid-1970s, a relative of mine bought the live LP, Sinatra—The Main Event, in which Cosell introduced the Chairman of the Board. From a generation that worshipped The Beatles and Bob Dylan, I was aghast at the thought of purchasing anything by Ol’ Blue Eyes. But anything with Cosell constituted double grounds for temporary insanity.

“Not just Sinatra, but Cosell,” I asked my relative, staring at the LP. “What did you do?”

“It was a BIG mistake,” my relative allowed.

It’s hard to explain to anyone below the age of, say, 35, who came of age after Cosell receded from the limelight, what he had been like. I can say that when I was a kid, some of my friends took to mocking him. “THIS is How-ard CO-sell,” they would say, clutching an imaginary microphone, “speaking of sports.”

I might have thought better of Cosell if I thought he might be a bit bothered by the impromptu parodies of him by me and my friends. After all, it might be said that he got into sportscasting partly because of his advocacy for children.

Into his mid-30s, Cosell had been a sports attorney, with enough famous clients (including the young Willie Mays) to have become at least moderately successful. But at one point, while helping a client form a Little League with the novel idea of young ballplayers interviewing major leaguers, Cosell decided it would be even more fun—and, more important, lucrative—if he did so.

By 1956, Cosell was doing so well with sportscasting and commentary for ABC Radio that he was able to quit the legal profession.

The title of Cosell’s 1985 autobiography, I Never Played the Game, was a double-entendre. The meaning he wanted readers to get was that, unlike the “jockocracy” he endlessly railed against, he wasn’t a dimwitted cheerleader for a sport. But the other, literal meaning of the title was also true, albeit in ways he didn’t like to think about: He had never participated in the games he announced, as player or coach, and, therefore, brought no special insight into what to watch on the field or court, or in the ring.

The stands that Cosell took were less noble than he gave himself credit for. It wasn’t Cosell who was taking himself away from his livelihood in his prime, but Curt Flood when he battled baseball’s reserve clause all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And it wasn’t Cosell who lost the greatest honor in his sport by following the precepts of a dimly understood religion by refusing to go to war in Vietnam, but Muhammad Ali (the former Cassius Clay).

After leaving "Monday Night Football" in 1984, Cosell gradually scaled back his activity, retiring for good in 1994. By the time Robert Lipsyte got around to writing in The New York Times about a visit to him for his 75^th birthday, I had practically forgotten he was even still around.

Lipsyte’s piece, written two years before Cosell’s demise, shocked me—and, I suspect, a number of other readers—in its unsparing depiction of a man who—outside of the limelight he once courted, beset by cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, mild strokes, still absolutely bereft by the death of his beloved wife Emmy—seemed to be awaiting death impatiently:

“He does not get out of the apartment much. His daughters, Jill and Hillary, are concerned that physical activity, crowds, pressure of any kind could exacerbate his various ailments. The many medications he takes tend to leave him dopey and smiley. And with few real interests since his wife died three years ago -- he watches little TV and does not read much anymore -- the need to keep his eyes open diminishes.”

Quote of the Day (Digger Phelps, on Al McGuire)

''I learned defense from Bobby Knight and psychology from Al McGuire. People need to be refreshed on what Al McGuire was. He was a rock. He was the best. He did for Milwaukee in college basketball what Vince Lombardi did for Green Bay in pro football.''—Former Notre Dame basketball coach Digger Phelps, on rival and friend Al McGuire, quoted in Frank Litsky, “Al McGuire, 72, Coach, TV Analyst and Character, Dies,” The New York Times, January 27, 2001

I have a confession to make: I’ve not only paid virtually no attention to March Madness this year, but in decades. The last time I did was in the Bird-and-Magic show back in ’79. But if you want to know the truth, the time I felt a truly powerful tug to the NCAA finals was two years before that. 

For nearly a decade, Al McGuire had been making a run of it in either the NCAA or the NIT: shouting, gesticulating, cajoling, ref-baiting, anything to bring his Marquette team to the Promised Land. It had been a Sisyphean struggle: going 26-0 in the regular season in ’71, only to lose in the regional semi-finals when star Dean Meminger fouled out; in 1972, in the second round, exiting at the hands of McGuire’s old nemesis, Kentucky; in 1974, after reaching the Final Four, losing largely because of two technical fouls levied on the coach; and in 1976, falling before Bobby Knight’s unbeaten Indiana. 

But, on this date in 1977, victory was finally McGuire’s. It came in dramatic fashion: Marquette had tied the game when North Carolina’s Dean Smith put on his four-corners delay offense, which had frustrated other opponents. Then Marquette got the ball and it was their turn to slow down the tempo. It worked, and against a strong squad that included Walter Davis, Phil Ford and Mike O’Koren, Marquette pulled it out, 67-59.

And then, on the baseline of the court, occurred one of the most unforgettable moments in sports history: as the realization sank in that, at last, he had won the long-elusive prize, in what was to be his last game, McGuire, overcome by memories dating back, he recalled in this YouTube video, to "Belmont Avenue," wept despite himself. 

I couldn’t help but identify with the scrappy coach now letting his heart out for all to see. To start with, he was, in a phrase my Irish-American family might say, “one of ours,” having grown up working in his family’s saloon in Rockaway, N.Y., “the Irish Riviera.” He was “one of ours” in a way that Jack Kennedy—aristocratic, cool, finally unapproachable—couldn’t be. I always thought  of him as up from the city streets. If that last phrase means anything to you, you might hear the echo of New York Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith, who bore the same first and middle name of the coach and whose run for the Presidency occurred the same year as his birth. It was, simply, a thrill that “one of ours” was a master of the city game.

Last year, on the brink of Chris Mullin’s induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, his St. John’s coach, Lou Carnesecca, told The New York Times’ Harvey Araton, “He was born inside a basketball—you know what I’m trying to say?” McGuire would have, because he was the same type: a gym rat. Oh, he might not have had the talent of his brother Dick (who would join him a year later in the Hall of Fame, and who I discussed in this earlier post), but he lived for the smell of the arena and the sound of that ball bouncing on the court.

I don’t think many people realized at the time—I sure didn’t—what McGuire’s triumph meant for college basketball fans. He walked away—and stayed away—from a game that had meant so much to him—consumed him, really. He left on top of the game, sparing us scandals involving recruiting (a task he loathed); hanging around for too long, after your personal style has become an anachronism; or, in its way worse, retiring, only to come back a year or two later, batteries recharged, to another school or even pro team, with a fatter contract this time, and his old school university left behind.

When he stepped away from his coach’s perch, McGuire gave fans another gift: a brash, funny lingo, as a sportscaster for NBC and CBS, that led The New York Times to term him "the James Joyce of the airwaves" before the 1995 NCAA tournament. Some of the lines are true, out there for all to see (“I think the world is run by C students”); but more often, it was a term that sharply defined a player or a moment. Think of it: “white knuckler,” “aircraft carrier,” “sand fights,” “French pastry,” or the one he had come to know intimately at Marquette, “The Big Dance.” 

On the court, and even more so in the broadcast booth, McGuire embodied a different kind of Irish archetype: not Paddy but what the novelist Peter Quinn, in the title essay of his collection Looking for Jimmy, terms "Jimmy," a melding of Jimmy Cagney and Jimmy Walker, gifted with a "blend of musicality and menace, of nattiness and charm, of verbal agility and ironic sensibility, of what today is known as 'street smarts.'"

The average raw skill and ability of college players may be higher than in McGuire’s time, but I doubt if I’m missing much by not watching March Madness lately. After all, with the great coach and announcer gone, the carnival gates are closed. There isn’t a show that could top it.