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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > August > 10
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Truth be told, Van Wieren won’t be having fun
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Pete Van Wieren will offer a eulogy at Skip Caray’s memorial Mass Monday, and that will be hard. But he expects the hardest part to come with Tuesday night’s game, with the resumption of a decades-old routine that can never be the same.
“We’ll be in the press box at Turner Field and we’ll see all the people Skip was used to seeing,” Van Wieren said. “But he’s not going to be there anymore.”
Van Wieren was flying to San Francisco on the Braves’ charter Aug. 3 when he learned his on-air partner of 33 years had died. He’d been asleep, and Braves manager Bobby Cox roused him with a tap on the shoulder, and instantly Van Wieren knew something was wrong: “Bobby never comes to the back of the plane.”
Owing to the baseball schedule, the Braves and Van Wieren won’t be able to return home until Sunday night, and the week away, he conceded, “has been tough.” His voice cracked and his eyes welled up during the opening of last Monday night’s broadcast, “but then the game starts and you’re trying to do the game … And it wasn’t really strange not seeing Skip around the hotel because he hadn’t been traveling the last couple of years.”
So Van Wieren had a week to sift through a trunk of memories. Over those 33 years the two had done everything together — “Even in the offseason, we’d do things with the wives,” Van Wieren said — and they never stopped laughing. “We’d laugh on a daily basis. We’d be doing a game and we’d laugh about somebody wearing a funny hat.”
They laughed, mostly from necessity, through the lean early years, and they laughed just as hard during the Braves’ run of 14 consecutive division titles. They’d settled into their respective roles not because they were “roles” because they were who they were. “Skip was Skip,” said Van Wieren, famously nicknamed the Professor, “and I was the guy with the record book.”
Caray had a credo: “Have fun and tell the truth.” And his brand of fun flared into all manner of tangents. Such as:
There was the time he came to the ballpark with a risque joke — Skip always had a new one — he wanted to tell on the air. He told the joke to Van Wieren, who said, “I don’t think so.”
But Skip was seldom easily deterred. “He was determined to tell this joke on the air,” Van Wieren said, and sure enough …
“He came up with the concept where he would tell the punch line only. The punch line was as clean as a whistle, but anyone listening who knew the whole joke had to be falling off his chair. So that started a whole series of punch-line-only jokes. People were sending us jokes, just to hear the punch lines.”
Then there was the time Skip was doing a late-game SuperStation promo. “It was for ‘Squirm,’ a really bad horror movie. And Skip said, ‘If anybody stays awake long enough to watch this thing and writes a review of it, we’ll send you an autographed baseball.’ We got a couple of thousand reviews.”
And then there was the time back in the ’70s when a certain newspaper ran a Sunday story claiming nobody was watching or listening to the games. “Skip was incensed,” Van Wieren said. “So he gave out the phone number of the Atlanta Journal & Constitution on the air and said, ‘If you’re listening, give them a call.’ So many people called up that it blew out their switchboard … He was always great at provoking a response.”
Atlantans will bid farewell to Caray these next two days, first at Monday’s funeral service, then at a Tuesday morning “tribute and celebration” at Turner Field. And then, hours after the latter, the surviving half of the timeless duo will gather his stats and his record book and seat himself in the familiar perch, and that’s the part he dreads most.
“It will be an awful lot different,” Van Wieren said, “going back in the booth.”
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