The passing of a legend who meant very much to me and my family

I’m sitting right now at the Experience Event Center in Provo, where the 2022 FAIR Conference is underway.  So far, it’s been very, very good. There is a numerous crowd in attendance at the conference venue, but apparently also a quite large audience watching remotely.  It is, Scott Gordon says, the largest audience ever for a FAIR conference.

On a very different note, though, I hope that you’ll be able to access this short note:

“R.I.P. Vin Scully”

In any event, Vin Scully was a surprisingly important part of my growing up in greater Los Angeles, over many years.  I honestly can’t remember when I first became aware of him; he was a fixture from the time I was a child.  We even listened to his commentary when we attended Dodger baseball games.  (Jerry Doggett , Vin Scully’s long-time co-announcer, was also exceptionally good.)  I sometimes listened to other baseball announcers.  To the Angels’ broadcasts, for example.  Or, during the All-Star Game or the World Series, to still others.  Nobody else came close.  And I don’t think that it was only that I was very familiar with Vin Scully.  (In support of my subjective judgment I offer, as support, the tributes that have been coming in from across the nation, from people far removed from the southern California broadcast market.)  There was a warmth to his voice that was like comfort food, and a poetry to his spoken prose that was unique to him.

Here is something that I posted on this blog just a short while ago, on 10 May 2022:

On the flight from Tel Aviv to New York City the other day, one of the films that I watched was American Underdog, a 2021 effort that tells the unlikely story of the former NFL quarterback Kurt Warner.  And I must say that, although I already knew pretty much how the story was going to turn out, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit.  And seeing it put me in the mood, once again, to watch the 1984 Robert Redford film The Natural.  (Between jet lag and a terrible cold that I picked up on the second-to-last day in Jerusalem, I’m functioning at about 20% of capacity right now, so I’ve watched several movies.)  Those familiar with American Underdog and The Natural will readily understand why the two films are connected in my mind.  And, of course, watching that last at-bat in The Natural immediately took me back to one of my favorite memories of my father.  Those familiar with The Natural and with this story will immediately understand the connection:

On 15 October 1988, my family and I were down in southern California visiting my parents for some reason.  (I can’t recall why; it was during the school year.  I think that I was giving a paper at some sort of academic conference.)  The World Series had just begun, but (again, for reasons that I can’t quite recall) I hadn’t been watching it.  It was a Saturday night, and I had been out.  I vaguely remember that I may have given a Church fireside that evening, somewhere.)  My father, however, had been watching the game on television on television in their upstairs rec room.

The injured Kirk Gibson, hurting in not just one but both legs, was called upon to pinch hit.  The Dodgers were trailing 4–3.  The tying run was at first base, but there were two outs and it was the bottom of the ninth inning.  The Oakland Athletics were the overwhelming favorites to take the Series.

Classic.

I walked into the room to watch the end of the game and to endure the probable Dodger defeat with my Dad.  After all, baseball had been an important part of our lives.  We were seated along the first base line at Dodger Stadium in 1962, for example, when the great Sandy Koufax pitched his first no-hitter

I remember commenting that night that, if this were a movie, the aging, injured slugger would hit a home run, and the Dodgers would win the game as he hobbled around the bases to a standing ovation and a deafening roar.  (Remember that The Natural had come out in 1984.  It was still fairly fresh in my mind.)

But the count on Gibson quickly moved to 0-2.  And his swings looked weak, awkward.  The runner stole second base.  Gibson kept fouling things off.  The count went to 3-2.  He was still there.  He was still alive.  And then . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U157X0jy5iw

It was a truly great moment.  And I shared it with my Dad.

(How I miss him, still.)

About eight years after we watched Kirk Gibson round the bases on the memorable night, my father suffered a devastating and wholly unexpected stroke while undergoing what we had expected to be minor and fairly routine surgery.  Suddenly, a very vigorous, active, and bright man was blind — and acutely aware that his intellectual abilities had been blunted.  Dad couldn’t really do much during those seven sad, long years of incapacity.  But he listened faithfully to Vin Scully’s radio broadcasts of Dodger games.

When I first entered his house after Dad’s death in 2003, I saw the schedule of games that his caretaker had affixed to the refrigerator and I saw the chair in which, day after day, night after night, he sat to listen to the Dodgers.  It was too much for me.  I asked my boys to, please, take that schedule off the fridge and move the chair from the room, to put it outside.  Right away.  I couldn’t look at them.

As Redford’s Roy Hobbs ran the bases to Randy Newman’s powerful score, I teared up.  Not for Roy Hobbs.  For Dad.

And now Vin Scully is gone, as well.  He was, I understand, devoutly though quietly Catholic.  May God bless him and his family.