Home > Furman Bisher > Archives > 2008 > August > 04
Monday, August 4, 2008
Caray defined baseball
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Before television, there was radio. Before ESPN, there was Red Barber, Russ Hodges, Harry Caray, and a “whole host” of others, as the voices of radio would say into those odd-shaped microphones in front of them. Sometimes they weren’t even in the ball park, or even in the town where the game was being played. The game report came in, one play at a time, on a crackling teletype machine.
Baseball is a radio game. Red Barber, Russ Hodges, and of course, Harry Caray made it so, and Skip came along in their tracks. This is not to say that Skip was of that ancient vintage, but that he was one of the kind, born and bred to broadcasting through the bloodlines of his father. Mark Bradley has painted a post-mortem picture as eloquently as one can of the Caray, as we have come to know him in the South. He was born of the kilocyles and later graduated into high definition, but no matter how many times he came on the air, his voice and style were straight out of the days when teams traveled by train and lived in cheap hotels.
Skip had his own style and it fit us like a pair of brogans. He didn’t come among us in a stretch limo brandishing a city-slick style. In fact, he came with the Atlanta Hawks, and a basketball broadcast is about as riveting as a root canal. He even did his one and only hockey game, filling in for Jiggs McDonald, and you never knew the difference, except for the accent. He made his baseball debut in town broadcasting Crackers games in the International League in 1965, opening season of Atlanta Stadium, while the city waited for the Braves to extricate themselves from legal snarls and make their arrival.
Oh, he was versatile. He even worked the Goodwill Games, Ted Turner’s international toy, once broadcast a game that had never been played before, nor since, as far as I know. It was called Motoball, in which men on motorcycles chased a huge medicine ball around a field, like polo on wheels. It was played in a town outside Moscow and I missed the broadcast, which, happily, he did in English, since he didn’t speak Russian.
In 1976, Skip joined up with the team that became engraved on the hearts of Braves’ listeners, he, Ernie Johnson and Pete Van Wieren, with a sundry of others who came and went. Ernie has retired and Van Wieren carries on, the perfect voice of radio baseball.
“I first met Skip when he came here in ‘65, when I was sort of the advance public relations guy for the Braves,” Ernie said. “Then we had all those years together, and I’ll say this: He never glossed over anything. When the team was bad, he said so. He couldn’t stand ‘the wave,’ and has no patience for fools. One time he had trouble getting to the parking lot because of some barrels that blocked his route, and he got on the highway department during the broadcast. The next day, two highway department men came into our booth and gave us two of those barrels with our names on them.”
He once smoked like a forest fire, until the day Josh was born. The delivering doctor warned Skip that Josh showed signs of asthma. “Smoking around him is not good,” he said. Skip took one last drag off the stub he was smoking, threw it aside and never smoked again.
“I’d thought he was doing better lately,” Ernie said. “His voice was stronger, like the old Skip, but I guess I was fooling myself.”
Yep, I guess you could say he was the walking definition of curmudgeon, but of the delightful order. Once I referred to one of the “waves” as the “Skip Caray Memorial Wave.” It’s in order now. He lay down to take a nap Sunday afternoon, I’m told, and never woke up.
Permalink | Comments (128) | Post your comment | Categories: Braves/MLB
Services »
