The Press Box - Remembering Vin Scully With Jason Gay

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

Bryan is joined by the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay to remember the life and career of Vin Scully, the beloved Dodgers broadcaster who died this week. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Jason Gay Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the NFL preseason. Check out the Ringer Fantasy Football show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Also, if you need fantasy rankings, we've got our rankings and sleepers at Fantasyfuttle. So come listen to Danny Highfitts Craig Horlebeck and me, Danny Kelly, on The Ringer Fantasy Football Show. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to the press box. Brian Curtis of The Ringer here, along with producer Kaia McMullen, who is pinch hitting for Erica once again. We're joined today by the Wall Street Journal's Jason Gay. Jason, I hate that we have to keep doing these,

but we lost another big one. Vince Scully, Dodgers announcer on two coasts, chronicler of Bill Buckner's era and Kurt Gibson shot to Deep Wright Field, died yesterday at the age of 94. Where do we start with Vince Scully? I mean, I think do you have to start with how big the era or eras that he spans are?

I mean, this is a person who, you know, When you consider the length of the career, a lot of people pointed to it's seven decades in the business. But not just seven decades, seven decades of incredible transition in media. This is a radio baby who came of age at a time when television was in its infancy, sports television, and really kind of rode that wave to its summit. I mean, we're talking about calling baseball games at a time when it was still possible to rivet two-thirds of the nation to a baseball game and follow this team in the Dodgers, which when the time he joined them had just taken aboard Jackie Robinson, follow them from Brooklyn to Los Angeles at a time

of great Major League Baseball expansion and sort of represent this westward evolution, not just in baseball, but in the country. I mean, people came of age in Los Angeles with Vince Scully as their guide. He is as consequential an Angelino as there's ever been. I leave that to you as an Angelino now, but I feel he's as vital a part of the soundtrack of that city as anyone who's ever lived. It's an amazing trick to be an absolutely essential Brooklynite and an absolutely essential Angelino and dignify both. When you talk about the span of time, I too am amazed by that. He would talk about in interviews how his family when he was a little kid had one of those giant wooden radios that your grandpa and my grandpa used to talk about. And there was enough room for him to literally slide under the radio and listen to these distant football games that he said he didn't care about.

Just the sound would wash over him. And he would sort of think about, oh, wow, what if I was a broadcaster? What would I do? To go from that to NBC in the 80s. and doing Kirk Gibson's home run is an amazing slice of time. To your point about the lovability of Vince Kelly, he always strikes me as one of the few announcers who had a near 100% approval rating, to what do we ascribe that to?

You know, I think that there was very palpably in the way that he delivered games and the way that he talked about the sports and himself, a very discernible humility. It didn't feel like he ever wanted to make the action about himself. And it's not to say that you're born without ego. If you're talking on the air for four hours a day, you're going to have a certain degree of belief that people are interested in what you have to say.

But his approach was always conversational. He was not the word we throw around a lot with announcers as stentorian. He's not that guy. He was a conversationalist and to go back to what you talked about with the wooden radio in your home. Now we're going to really sound like old people. But, you know, radio is a medium which unlike anything that exists today, including radio itself, has a degree of intimacy that is unrivable. You just feel like the person is sitting in the room with you. There's an ambience to it, especially, you know, we all kind of, if we're a certain age, you have memories of having the transatlantic.

are going in your bedroom, you're staying up later than you should be staying out because you've got to figure out what's happening with extra innings. And these people who speak through this magical device have a kind of life and presence in your life that is unlike any other form of technology. And I think that he was, you know, he managed the transition seamlessly. But I think he fundamentally was this radio person and there was a kind of feeling that he was a friend as opposed to somebody who was sermonizing and certainly not lecturing to you. And I think that accounts for a great deal of his likability. He also, quite importantly, was a very nice guy. You know, I've yet to come across the trove of Vin Scully who was a terrible person accounts because, you know,

they likely don't exist. He was somebody who, on the contrary, when you write something about him, as I've done a couple of times in my life, you hear incredible stories of interactions that people had with him over the years. I got one just this morning from a gentleman who told me that he grew up in the same neighborhood as Vince Scully and surfaced at Dodger Stadium's broadcast door a number of years ago at a security guard. He told the security guard, you know, what the deal was? And the security Guard came back and said, wait here. And Vin came out and gave him a half hour audience with him and his buddies who just couldn't believe that they were in the presence of Vince Cully. So, Wow. Being a nice guy helps the nice guy image, I think, fundamentally, Brian.

To your point about radio, I can't prove this. But I have been reading tweets and hearing people say offhandedly for more than a decade that they'll never forget driving around Los Angeles and listening to Vin Scully do games on the radio. And what's interesting is many of these people have never lived in Los Angeles. And I am almost convinced that they didn't actually listen to Vin do games on the radio while driving around Los Angeles. I am convinced, and this is a compliment to Vin, that he is such a giant presence and his voice is so in all of our lives, even those of us who did not grow up in L.A. during his

glory period, that everybody is kind of imagining they did that. And it just seems like you did that at some point in your life because it seems like this Vin is this great collective experience of a person. So like even if you weren't going down the five, you know, flipping channels and hearing Vinny do the Dodgers, you feel like you did. I think that's very true. I think it also, interestingly, I'm going to get the wattage wrong, but I think it was a. 50,000 watt studio that they had in Los Angeles, which means that you were blasting that thing out. I mean, there were people who were growing up in the Booneys of Oregon who were Dodger fans and Ben Scully fans, and they felt that same kind of, you know, warmth from that station. And, you know,

I'm reminded of what's the movie American graffiti where, you know, Wolfman Jack is kind of the ambient noise of that movie. And then finally, you know, Richard Dreyfuss's character gets into the station and he, you know, meets Wolfman. And you can, you know, you can. could have made the same movie with Vince Gully as the ambient noise of the city. He didn't always love doing interviews. I read a quote from him this morning saying that whenever a piece was written about him, even if it was full of praise, there'd always be one or two things that bothered him in the story. So what was your experience like as a journalist getting to talk to him a couple years ago? Well, he was, you know, this was in his last year in the booth in 2016.

and I was one of many people who raised their hands for the opportunity and was thrilled to get the chance and it was before a Dodger game. And, you know, as is what oftentimes with interviews, the most memorable parts are not the Q&A itself. You know, owing largely probably to my own lack of performance there. The things that I remember the most are just watching Vin Scully in his milieu, you know, watching him. navigate the press box cafeteria or the elevator or say hello to other people. I remember at one point him nodding at Fernando Valenzuela in the press box area. And like, I mean, I'm an 80s baby. And it's tough to top somebody like Fernando in terms of what I remember as a baseball nut as a child.

And just seeing that collision was amazing to me. And, you know, this kind of, unless you've been to a Dodger game, it's hard to fully render how significant a figure he is in the fabric of that franchise. It's the first thing you hear when you arrive to Dodger Stadium. I don't know if it's still the case, but it certainly was when he was to Colin Games. His voice welcomed you to the ballpark. Told you to make sure you took your keys from your car. He oftentimes was the most successful part of the franchise in some of the leaner years.

And so to see that, I mean, to have you. your franchises, most iconic presence, actively living and working and participating and moving about it, just to be able to observe that was the thing I took away most. You wrote in your column today that you sat up a little straighter when you were interviewing Vince Cully? Yeah, of course. I mean, first of all, he looked like he just had surfaced from the men's counter at, you know, some beautiful custom clothing place.

He had the pockets squared just so and the lapels were just so and the hair. was just so and you know here i am like trying to make do and shabby j crew and you know yeah absolutely you know when you're in the presence of somebody like that you do perk up a little bit more than you ordinarily might it's interesting to me that he straddles a couple of things he was very much a local announcer starting in 1950 with the dodgers and on the way through to 2016 when you're sitting there sitting up straight next to him but he was also at the same time a national announcement announcer. Starting in 1975 at CBS, but he kept the Dodger gig the whole time, even part-time.

So he always had one foot in one world and one foot in the other world. And if you look at his national years, there's a lot of NFL in there, but really as a national baseball announcer on television, it's really 1983 to 1989, not a huge span of time when he's doing the game of the week for NBC. And even then, he's alternating world senior. series with Al Michaels, which is itself kind of mind-blowing. But it's true. But he gets to do the World Series in 1986.

When the ball gets past Bill Buckner, he gets to do the World Series in 1988 when Kurt Gibson and limbs up to the plate and hits the ball out, just like he'd got to do the catch in 1982, Cowboys 49ers. So his timing was just absolutely impeccable. Yes, when he drew even years with Al, you know, that was really an incredibly vital decision. I mean, I remember being... I remember being kind of flabbergasted at the idea that some of these iconic national voices were also local voices. My first experience is that somebody who didn't grow up in Los Angeles with Vince Kelly, we're seeing him as a national television presence and being like,

wait a minute, this guy who does these big world series does 162 Dodger games on top of that. mostly by himself, that's mind-boggling. But yeah, I mean, I think that it speaks to the power of the Dodger brand, his talent, which was kind of what helped, among many other things, but helped elevate that Dodger brand and sort of the consistency that he had. A funny through line, mentioned the Buckner era in 1986. Like a lot of people I've spent the morning listening to some of the great calls when Aaron hits 715, that's Buckner and left field watching the ball go over the fence.

And he's in the call, Bill Buckner, approximately, I guess 13 years previously. Amazing. Totally amazing. And it's again, you and I sometimes allow ourselves to be the old men in these podcast situations. I cannot describe to anyone who wasn't around how electric the Buckner error and then the Gibson home run were in sports in the 80s. they are top of whatever pantheon you want to make. Super Bowl sucked many of those years. Those moments were absolutely incredible.

Absolutely incredible. And also just rendered in a completely different kind of environment. Now we have this campfire of social media where the game is actually kind of like background music to the chatter that we're having, you know, over the game and over the announcers and kind of ridiculing every little like eccentric thing we see on screen. then it was, you know, first of all, spectacular ratings. I mean, the ratings of World Series would do in the peak of the 80s is, you know, multiple times larger than it is today. But also just, you know, our experience of processing it was quite lonesome.

We were in our bedrooms or we were in our television, you know, on our TV rooms, maybe with family, maybe with friends. Maybe we'd open up a window and scream out of it. But it was really us and who we were here. hearing on TV or if you had a lunatic father like I did who like to turn down the television and play the radio broadcast for a lot of different sporting events. That was our way of doing it. One person got to call it live on television, a couple people on the radio. It was not a, it was not a crowded space, as they say. Rewatching the Gibson thing this morning. I am struck once again by she is gone.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Just feels like a pronoun that he has smuggled in from another era onto network television in 1988. And he did that early. I believe he feminized home runs in the 50s in Ebits. So that was an early thing that he did. You know, what's staggering. And again, I would recommend for anybody who hasn't done it already to go back and watch a clip like the Gibson thing, because it's all there. You know, all the skill. is what a lengthy piece of theater that is, what a roller coaster is.

Oh my God, it goes on and on. And he looks completely out of sorts. You watch the first two strikes of it, and you're like, what is Lassorda thinking? What a dumb call this was. And Eckersley, effectively toying with him, he looks like he should be instantly rolled into the disabled list. And then when it happens,

when he pulls it off, there's silence. which again was, you know, another part of the magic of Vince Gulli, knowing when to turn it off, which he did for Gibson, which he did for Aaron, which he did many times for the great, great moments, to know that there was no verbal accompaniment that would be sufficient and to just let it be. It's become kind of a generic compliment to an announcer that they let the moment speak for themselves. People like to say that, to which I would amend that, no, no, no. there are certain moments you let speak for themselves. And when Kirk Gibson hobbles up to the plate in the ninth inning of a World Series game and hits that home run, yeah, that's when you lay out, baby.

Like he knew the difference between when to talk and when not to talk. Like that's a skill. That's not just a principle that's written on a board that you do whenever there's a big play. And the sound for that was absolutely, was just so right on. But again, that's like a higher level thing, I think, than some people. think. I agree. I think also that, you know, it became cliche because he turned it into something. I think people imitated him. They understood from watching him that letting the moment breathe nonverbally was the way to go. I also think that, you know, again, he was coming up at a time when, you know, we weren't

atomizing these things and publishing them all over social media and saying like, oh, look at this catchphrase and look at this clever thing that he said. And you and I both know that are a number of people in the business who like to write down the things that they're going to say in the event that things are going to happen. You watch something like the Eckersley Gibson Showdown and there ain't no prep that is going to make you turn that into an incredible moment. There's nothing you've, you know, you've, you've pre-ordered to say in advance. You didn't write that on your boards when Kirk Gibson limps up to the plate say this. No. I mean, it's, Crazy. Crazy.

Without doing the math, do you want to guess how old Vince Cully was when he called that home run? Back of the envelope, I was 63. 60. Okay. So he's only seven years older than Joe Buck is now. Yeah. And I don't think I'm just doing this from the vantage point of 2022, but he felt a little

bit like an older figure in that world, especially when young pups at the time like Bob Costas and Marv Albert were part of that pregame show and part of that World Series coverage. Sure. But then he did another 28 years on television. And I think this is part of his legacy too. We've seen a lot of announcers get old on national TV. And people start to pick and go, you know, has he lost his fastball? He was great.

He was great. But dot, dot, dot, can we get the succession plan? Scully does something really interesting. NBC loses the rights to baseball 1989 when he called the championship series. So then he basically, he did a lot of World Series on the radio, but then he reverts to basically being a Dodgers announcer. Yeah. People who are listening to him love Vin Scully and are happy to roll with Vince Gully deep into his 80s

and not worry about it. To me, that's key to his appeal too. He also had a sense, I think, for what he could do and to work within his limits. He was somebody who modified his schedule. He didn't go on every swing possible. He wasn't trying to grind out every possible opportunity to do it. He was doing a modified schedule as he got older. But I also just think that he was somebody who, in complete metaphor to like a pitching routine,

like, you know, there wasn't a lot of labor to his delivery. You know, he was not somebody who had a high kick and flung himself through the plate. He was somebody who stylistically could go for long periods of time because of his economy of language and the way that he did it. He was not full of bombast as we've gone over. So I think if anybody was sort of born to do it for a long period of time, he was. And to his credit, another thing, you know, and I don't know if the national experience helped or I don't know of the fact that he was born in one region and moved. move to another region to help, but he never sort of became his own version of a cliche, which is what happens, I think, to a lot of the great iconic announcers is that at a certain

point, they become this character, right? You know, they're going to have the, you know, t-shirts and bobbleheads and like, you know, the catchphrases that people come to hear. And if you get a little bit of that, you're satisfied. He actually was still a very, you know, intellectually vigorous, contributor to these games. He wasn't just playing Vince Cully on the radio and TV anymore. I want to return to a point you made earlier

about ego or lack thereof. I'm not capable of peering into Vince Cully's soul and understanding what he thought about his own abilities. But publicly, he was the first guy to downplay himself. 1982, Dodgers do this big ceremony when he gets the

Ford Frick Award. Just think about that. He got the Ford Frick Award from the Hall of Fame in 1982, a full 40 years ago. And he got up there and said, oh, it's just me. It was almost the same words when they introduced him on the field. And same words he said in 2016 when they did a big big celebration of the stadium when he was retiring. Hey, heck, it's just me. You and I have talked to a lot of announcers online and offline. Let me tell you something. There's not a lot of all. It's just me among those types. Even performative, all, it's just me. There's not a lot of

oh, this is me on this podcast, Brian? I mean, for gosh sakes. Listen, he was somebody who resisted coming back to the sport, which would have been incredibly easy for him when the Dodgers make the World Series the very next year. Remember that? There was a lot of Sturman

drawing about like bring back Vin for the playoffs, bring him back for the World Series. He does one thing. And it's beautifully done. He does the walk on in the World Series before the game with the first pitch, which is just lovely and just enough. But you don't think that every network would have been lining up to throw a couple of innings with Vin for the World Series. Everybody would have done it. He resisted it.

It wasn't about him. It was about the Dodgers. And it was the stupidest thing, if people remember this at the time, because it was America's media critics who were doing things like calling Joe Buck and said, will you stand aside and surrender an inning in the World Series to Vince Cully? To which Joe Buck of course responded, yes, I will, yes, I will gladly give Vince Culley the whole game whatever Vince Culley wants. But Ben Scully did not want to do that. And everybody was just arguing on behalf of this thing that had no chance of happening. It reminds me a little bit of the conversation that's occurred of the last 48 hours

whether or not the NBA should universally retire number six for Bill Russell. If you know anything about the life of Bill Russell and the discomfort he had about calling to attention to himself, the person who would have hated that gesture more than anybody on planet Earth would have been Bill Russell. Bill Russell didn't want to have his own number retired for his own team, the only team he ever played for, he didn't want any part of that. And so the notion that you're going to somehow universally, you know, eliminated throughout the league. I mean, it's just like, it's completely antithetical to the man. And same with Vin. He was not about Vin. You know, I mean, again, you cannot be somebody who's on television, on radio for hours and

hours a week and not have a sense of self and a sense of importance about what you're saying. But I think he still understood his role was to be the storyteller, was to be the friend, which was to be the neighbor, and not to be the anchorman type personality. Before you go, I want to talk to you about one, what we're required, I always say here at the ringer to call a sliding doors moment. This happens in 1981 at CBS. The network has just found a hot new announcer named John Madden.

Oh, yeah. And they go shopping for the right play-by-play man to put with John Madden. And they said, well, we got two guys. We got Vince Cully and we got Pat Summerall. and I believe Scully got the first four weeks. I think Pat was doing the U.S. Open or doing tennis at the time. And then they switched.

And we all know the end of the story is that Pat Summerall winds up getting this incredible mid-career rejuvenating boost of being the guy sitting next to John Madden, and of course adding his talent to it too. While Vinny gets incredibly angry is given the NFC championship game with Dwight Clark as kind of a lovely parting gift and then departs very quickly to NBC. Do we want to imagine what the Vin Scully John Madden pairing throughout the 80s would have been like on NFL games?

You know, I wonder what sort of oxygen would have been left. And I don't mean that in the fact that the guys were just, you know, too overtokers because they weren't. They sort of understood like how to share a booth. They showed that throughout their careers. But I think the combination was much more correct with Summerall and Madden. They were different types, you know, and there was no way on earth that a Pat Somerall personality would compete with a John Madden personality. It is an interesting question because he did show an ability to share the booth with people.

You know, no one was more complimentary, interestingly, of Madden after Madden's passing. not that long ago. I think Scully did recognize the fact that the right call was made. It is so interesting because Scully goes off, you know, again, call the World Series throughout the 80s, become this icon inside and outside of baseball. Pat, some or all,

it's a big star of the 70s. His reputation, at least in that era, was secured, but then he gets 10, 20 more years of not only career, but prime time games and super, Bulls because of that one decision that was made at CBS. I think that's really interesting. Any last words? Yeah. And I would just, you know, for people who are, you know, crashing a little bit of

in Scully in the, you know, coming hours and dads, you know, the LA Times has had some really great coverage. I think the Los Angeles aspect of this cannot be understated, you know, the fact that he comes to this city when the city is becoming what it becomes. You go to a place like Chavez Reven and you walk in there and you cannot believe that people are allowed to play baseball here every day. It does feel like heaven. And he was the perfect voice of heaven. If you go to heaven, if there is a heaven, you kind of want it to sound like Ben Scully. That's a neat trick for somebody who was raised in the Bronx educated at Fordham and had the formative years of his career at Ebbets Field, which was the complete, you know, opposite of what Dodger Stadium was.

So that part of it is really incredible. And I think that we're very lucky to have this reservoir of digital material now where we can draw up this stuff and watch this stuff and look at it. But I also think it's really important, Brian, and not to pat ourselves on the back for doing this, but I do feel that these are really seismic moments in sports. These are individuals who, you know, whether it's Bill Russell or Vin Scully, you know, have incredible connective tissue between the beginnings of games, the Renaissance of games, the revolutions that happen in games and what the games became. And they are so vital to this minute that I just feel like you can't talk about them enough. You can't read about them enough.

You can't watch what they did enough because they're, once they're gone and we are losing, individuals like this increasingly, they're not coming back. Careers like this will never, never be replicated. The profession has changed. The American relationship to the profession has changed radically. So I just think that, you know, if there ever was a time to sort of press pause, and certainly the beginning of NFL training camp is a perfectly fine time to press pause and pay attention to other things.

Pay attention to the life of Vince Gully. pay attention to the life of Bill Russell, look at what they stood for a representative, look at what they did because you can go back and look at it. Now, NBA channels playing Game 7 of the 1968 NBA Finals the other night. Incredible. There just was really nothing like these people. So in Scully's case, the to-do list would be YouTube,

search around, find some good stuff. I tweeted out a 1985 profile that Rick Riley wrote for the L.A. Times about Vince Cully, which is quite an interesting piece at a moment in both of their careers. Yeah. The Jason Gay columns. Yeah. What else can we recommend? There's a Kurt Smith biography of Sculli.

Get in there with the golf? I don't know. Is it bad? Who's in the pot bunker that he does the kind of, you know, background piece on? You know, the golf is incredible. The football is incredible. You can go back and you can find the Dodger stuff. you can listen to the entire ninth inning of the Drysdale.

I mean, sorry, the Don Larson, rather, perfect game, which is incredible. Also incredible, Brian, to not hear someone butt in there and say, like, brought to you by Fandul. I mean, just the fact that, you know, you have this, you know, long narration without all this obligatory stuff. I remember recently talking to some announcer and saying that, like, they were jealous of announcers from as little as 20 years ago because the amount of like B material they have to get through, whether it's advertising or other programming on the network nowadays. Like foul shots are now an advertising opportunity and there's no time to actually

catch up on what's happening in the game. So like to hear just someone talking about Don Larson for nine minutes straight is incredible. I'd also go back and listen to what announcers who were influenced by Scully would say. I've seen Al Michaels doing a few interviews today. Speaking of a guy who went from New York to L.A. to just about in unison with Vin Scully. Marve Albert, you know, would show up at Abbott's Field. And if I'm remembering my history correctly, actually grab some of the radio scripts, the ads that Vince Cully would discard on the floor of the booth and read them in his own voice to learn how to be an announcer. He was a big teacher like that, too, to just about everybody, you have that generation in sports.

Yeah, I would say that Al is the true descendant. You know, I think he really, really is. I think he's the person. We talked about sort of economy of motion. He is very much that himself. There's not a lot of, you know, just kicking and, you know, moving around. I mean, Al Michaels is somebody who gets it done with as little fuss as possible. The voice alone transports you into a feeling that this is a big thing.

You know, you ask why, you know, an Amazon would pay a fortune to have Al Michaels come aboard and do Thursday night football. Well, it's because the second you hear his voice and you hear the way that Al Michaels not by raising his voice, but by lengthening the voice makes it feel like a moment that's incredibly worthwhile. I think he's probably the true heir to the,

to the Scully legacy. Thanks very much to Jason Gay for joining us. We have production magic today by Kaya McMullen. I'm Brian Curtis, podcast icon David Shoemaker, and I will be back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then.