Vin Scully

Tues­day night, August 2, lying in bed in his Hid­den Hills home, Vin Scul­ly, the leg­endary sports­cast­er, drew his last breath.

Cindy and I live across the street from him. I was in my home office when he passed. About 9:00 p.m. I found the news of his death on the Hid­den Hills Face­book page. A neigh­bor two doors down post­ed, “Rest In Peace Vin Scul­ly. With­out ques­tion the great­est sports broad­cast­er and sim­ply awe­some neigh­bor. Huge loss to Hid­den Hills and fans alike. Always will­ing to talk at the mail­box. Always made you feel like this was going to be the year we won it all.”

I stared at that post for a long time.

His pass­ing was not a sur­prise. He was 94 and had been in fail­ing health. A while back, the red and blue lights of emer­gency vehi­cles flashed in our front win­dows when he fell and broke his hip. Pub­licly, he made light of it. “I won’t be doing any­more head­first slid­ing,” he quipped to a reporter, but it was a seri­ous injury.

A few months lat­er, his wife San­di died after a long bat­tle with Lou Gehrig’s dis­ease. Scul­ly was no stranger to grief. He lost his first wife in 1972 to a pre­scrip­tion drug over­dose and a son, Michael, in 1994 in a heli­copter crash, but San­di had been his con­stant com­pan­ion for almost 50 years and her pass­ing hit him hard.

The Sun­day before his death, when we saw fam­i­ly mem­bers gath­er­ing at his home, we antic­i­pat­ed bad news. Despite that, when it came, I had a hard time assim­i­lat­ing it. His smooth voice had been a steady pres­ence in LA since I moved here in 1975. He broad­cast Dodgers games for 67 years, start­ing in 1953 in Brook­lyn, fol­low­ing the Dodgers to LA in 1958, then call­ing almost every game here until he stepped away from the micro­phone at the end of the 2016 sea­son at the age of 88.

He was a liv­ing leg­end. He was vot­ed nation­al sports­cast­er of the year 4 times, Cal­i­for­nia sports­cast­er of the year 33 times, sports­cast­er of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, and the top-ranked sports­cast­er of all time. He received a Life­time Emmy Award. He has a star on the Hol­ly­wood Walk of Fame. He was induct­ed into the Amer­i­can Sports­cast­ers Hall of Fame, the NAB Broad­cast­ers Hall of Fame, the Nation­al Radio Hall of Fame, the Cal­i­for­nia Sports Hall of Fame, and the Nation­al Base­ball Hall of Fame, and he received the Pres­i­den­tial Medal of Free­dom. In LA Straw polls we vot­ed him the most trust­ed media per­son­al­i­ty, the most mem­o­rable per­son in Dodger his­to­ry, and the biggest icon in LA sports history.

When I moved to LA, I’d nev­er heard of Vin Scul­ly. My law firm rep­re­sent­ed the Dodgers. One of my first legal assign­ments was to draft a con­tract for the team. My super­vis­ing attor­ney called me into his office and hand­ed me a file enti­tled Vin Scully.

“Who’s Vin Scul­ly?” I asked.

He paused. “Where are you from?”

“Vir­ginia.”

“I take it you crawled out of the Great Dis­mal Swamp only recently.”

He gave me a good-natured tuto­r­i­al on Vin Scully’s cen­tral role in the sto­ried his­to­ry of Dodger base­ball. We draft­ed a short con­tract in plain, straight­for­ward lan­guage, the kind that depends on trust, good faith, and integri­ty, and the Dodgers pri­vate­ly sealed the deal with him with­out ran­cor, bit­ter­ness, or brinksmanship.

Watch­ing Dodgers tele­casts my first sum­mer in LA, I under­stood why the orga­ni­za­tion held him in such high regard. The way he addressed his audi­ence was dif­fer­ent from any sports­cast­er I’d ever lis­tened to. It was as though a well-read, unpre­ten­tious, nice guy saun­tered into my liv­ing room and pulled up a chair beside me. He talked eas­i­ly about the game, mix­ing in vignettes about the play­ers, coach­es, and umpires, sto­ries about life’s lessons, and some­times bits and pieces of his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture, art, and culture.

Among the con­stel­la­tion of his mas­ter­piece broad­casts, some of the shini­est stars were his per­for­mances dur­ing the biggest moments in base­ball his­to­ry. Like no oth­er announc­er, he under­stood the virtue of silence. At the peak of the excite­ment, while the crowd roared, he kept qui­et, allow­ing the audi­ence to drink it all in. Then, when we’d final­ly caught our breath, his first words per­fect­ly cap­tured the dra­ma and sig­nif­i­cance of the moment.

Two of these high points are indeli­bly etched in my mem­o­ry. In 1974 Hank Aaron hit his record-break­ing 715^th career home run in Atlanta against the Dodgers. “To the fence. It’s gone,” Scul­ly said, then fell silent. The crowd cheered as Aaron round­ed the bases and was mobbed at home plate. After 31 sec­onds of silence, a life­time in broad­cast­ing, he reclaimed the mic. “What a mar­velous moment for base­ball. What a mar­velous moment for the coun­try and the world. A Black man is get­ting a stand­ing ova­tion in the deep South for break­ing a record of an all-time base­ball idol.”

In the first game of the 1988 World Series, Kirk Gib­son hob­bled to the plate on crip­pled legs when the Dodgers were down to their last out and mirac­u­lous­ly hit a game-win­ning walk-off home run. Scully’s call: “High fly ball into right field. She is gone.” He said noth­ing more for an incred­i­ble one minute and eight sec­onds as vir­tu­al­ly every­one in LA went wild. Then he expressed what we all felt in our hearts. “In a year that has been so improb­a­ble, the impos­si­ble has happened.”

He spoke in per­fect sen­tences with flaw­less gram­mar while still some­how pre­serv­ing an infor­mal famil­iar­i­ty and casu­al inti­ma­cy with his lis­ten­ers, and most amaz­ing­ly, he made it up as he went along. Base­ball games don’t fol­low a script.  Scul­ly broad­cast each game as it unfold­ed in front of him with words no one could have writ­ten any bet­ter beforehand.

When we moved into Hid­den Hills, I installed a sec­ond tele­phone line for busi­ness calls. The first time I answered its ring, a woman was in mid-con­ver­sa­tion about a per­son­al prob­lem. When she paused, a man’s smooth tenor voice broke in, con­cerned, sup­port­ive, encour­ag­ing. I imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nized the speak­er. He had talked to me for three decades.

“Mis­ter Scul­ly,” I said ner­vous­ly, but he and the woman couldn’t hear me. I hung up, not sure what to do. I picked up the line. They were still talk­ing. I called AT&T on my pri­ma­ry line and told a cus­tomer ser­vice lady my tele­phone line was tap­ping Vin Scully’s phone. “I’m talk­ing about THE Vin Scul­ly,” I said.

“Who’s Vin Scul­ly?” she said.

I paused. “Where are you from?”

“Dal­las.”

“Is there a swamp in Dallas?”

AT&T sent out a big mean-look­ing guy with a sour dis­po­si­tion, who turned into a lit­tle kid with wide eyes and a shy grin when I told him Vin Scul­ly owned the phone line he’d been assigned to repair.

The first time I saw Vin Scul­ly face-to-face was at Hid­den Hills City Hall, our local polling place. He walked in when I was vot­ing. The ancient lady hand­ing out bal­lots said, “Hey, who’s that hand­some red-head­ed fel­la?” The elder­ly woman poll-work­er sit­ting beside her said, “Oh, he’s not much. I heard he sells peanuts for the Dodgers.” They both cack­led, then flirt­ed with him mer­ci­less­ly while they set him up to vote. He was a good sport, laugh­ing and jok­ing through it all.

Not long after that, my dog Zoey and I walked by his house when he came out to the car to head to Dodger sta­di­um to broad­cast a night game. He spoke to me and pat­ted Zoey on the head. I was tongue-tied in his pres­ence. “Good luck at the game,” I stammered.

That was stu­pid, I thought, as I watched his car dri­ve away. I had just wished the great­est sports­cast­er of all time good luck in broad­cast­ing a mun­dane reg­u­lar-sea­son game.

As our neigh­bor remarked the night of his death, he was always will­ing to talk at the mail­box. He always greet­ed me and Zoey on our dog-walks with a warm smile, and his friend­li­ness even­tu­al­ly dis­armed my reticence.

In a makeshift shrine out­side Dodger sta­di­um after Vin Scully’s death, a fan framed a plac­ard that said, “God acquires Vin Scul­ly from the Los Ange­les Dodgers.” God broke a lot of hearts the night of August 2. In a let­ter to the LA Times, a man from San­ta Mon­i­ca said it best. “Lit­tle boys are cry­ing all over Los Ange­les. They just hap­pen to be 60, 70, and 80 years old.”

He is irre­place­able. For almost sev­en decades, in our cars, liv­ing rooms, and bed­rooms, at our kitchen coun­ters and bar­be­cue grills, beside our swim­ming pools on sun­ny sum­mer days, he talked to us in an easy way like an old friend.

There nev­er has been, and there nev­er will be again, a sports­cast­er as great or as beloved as Vin Scully.