MARC CHOQUETTE
Perspectives Editor
Growing up near Boston, I never had much use for the Los Angeles teams. I always hated the Lakers, despised the California … err Anaheim … err Los Angeles Angels, and never really got into the L.A. Kings or “Disney Ducks.” However, because of one man who will be speaking at commencement in a few weeks, my disdain for L.A. teams is not across the board.
In those first few, sweltering weeks of freshman year I started watching the Dodgers play ball on television and even got to go to an occasional game. I never exactly knew why I liked watching so much — the team wasn’t much to brag about, my first love was the Red Sox and it just seemed like baseball hypocrisy. I mean, you can’t root for TWO teams, right?
But I soon found out why the Dodgers are special to me and so many others in Los Angeles. It wasn’t about the players, the coaches, the owners, or even those salacious Dodger Dogs. No, it was the man in the booth — Vin Scully — whose golden voice and encyclopedia-like knowledge has defined both the Dodgers and the city of Los Angeles since they moved here in 1958.
Listening to Scully in the booth — he works without a color commentator — is kind of like having that professor who talks too much but has so much jeopardy knowledge that you get sucked in because you can’t wait to hear what crazy fact he’ll drop next.
I’ve been watching the Red Sox for years, but it wasn’t until the exhibition games against the Dodgers this weekend that I learned Jacoby Ellsbury talks to his parents in his native Navajo. Who knew that when the Giants came into town with Noah Lowry on the mound, that Scully would go off on a tangent describing Pepperdine’s baseball program and how Lowry and Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Danny Haren used to be roommates?
The one moment that many fans still remember vividly has to be the Kirk Gibson home run in game one of the 1988 World Series: “And look who’s coming up … you talk about a roll of the dice … this is it!” said a bewildered Scully. Then after the gimpy Gibson crushed one into the right field pavilion to win it, Scully chimed in after 35 seconds of letting the crowd noise tell the story, exclaiming, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!”
And then there was his call in the 1986 World Series — one that I would rather forget: “Little roller up along first … behind the bag! It gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight and the Mets win it!”
Scully has always best exhibited the history, the passion and the lore of America’s pastime in ways that only few have been able to do. He is the living example of one who eats, sleeps, breathes and lives baseball. It was baseball that got him through the tragic and unexpected deaths of his first wife and his eldest son. It was baseball that has sculpted his unmatched dedication to the game, and to broadcasting it in a knowledgeable, unbiased and yet passionate way for 58 years.
What will he speak about? It would seem sacrilegious to speculate as to what the broadcasting great will say, but hopefully he will instill some old-school values in us: picking a passion and sticking with it through good times or bad, stressing the importance of being well-spoken, humble and notably selfless in both one’s public and private life (Example: when they awarded him with a plaque at the Coliseum last weekend, Scully gave the award back to the fans in his acceptance speech). We will be learning from dedication personified — from a kid sending letters to hundreds of radio stations in an attempt to get a job, to broadcasting two different games in different cities on the same day, to his 58 years of service.
These are the kinds of attributes Scully will bring to the podium April 26. After four years in the Malibu paradise, if anyone is to teach us seniors some real life lessons before we go our separate ways, it is him.
For the past few months I was dreading commencement for its sobering celebration of the end of our lives as we know them to be, but now I can’t seem to wait.
04-03-2008
