How do we honour someone who gave their life to something we love?
Let me start by saying if you want a complete, full-bodied look at Vin Scully’s career, I’m not the right person for that. I’m not claiming to be. There are far more qualified people who are eulogizing him and you should go read their work if that’s what you are after.
If you’ve followed this newsletter for any length of time, you know what to expect: my honest take on someone who deserves an honest take, with little stories thrown in. Think of this more as an ode to a man who loved something that we also love. This is an acknowledgement of time served in service of a game that has brought us here together, me writing and you reading about a bat and a stick and a ball and a feeling.
I think of a young Vin Scully moving across America in the 1950’s, to Joan Didion’s Los Angeles; a budding mix of metropolis and the remnants of a gold rush in retreat.
Do you think he was scared? I would be.
Once upon a time, I too moved across the country for a journalism job. Comparing my journey to Scully’s is a fool's errand at best, but come along with me here, will you? Like Scully, I chased my dream to the edge of the Pacific, cornered it and stared it in the eyes.
At 24 I went to British Columbia as the night editor of a newspaper. Four months later, failed and defeated, I slinked back to Ontario, a broken man. I could go into detail about how the editors manipulated me into failing, giving me bogus warnings and little training, or how they would leave drawings of airplanes on my desk, insinuating that I should leave, but the moral is this: I wasn’t able to handle that pressure or overcome any of the obstacles in my way. I failed, but in that failing, I’ve learned to take pride in the risk. I bet on myself and while it didn’t work out, I still believe it’s a good bet. I’ve found peace as a teacher, helping to share my love of reading and writing with young people.
Scully would have been 31 when he moved to Los Angeles, still a young man in terms of baseball broadcasting. His job was so much more broad than just calling a baseball game: Scully was responsible for helping an entire coast of potential baseball fans fall in love with the game. In that, he has unquestionably succeeded. The west coast embraced Scully and he became an icon, the voice of a team that is as much a part of the cultural fabric of Los Angeles as Hollywood is. Everyone knows his distinct voice.
In a world before there was a television in every home, Scully was responsible for painting a proverbial picture of a game that is vibrant and beautiful. He used all the colours of the rainbow in his descriptions to draw people to the park and become an instrumental figure in making the Los Angeles Dodgers one of the most prominent sports franchises in North America.
That’s a lot of pressure to put on a young man. Enough to make certain men crumble. I sit here in awe of the confidence he must have had in his abilities to travel across the country, before Los Angeles was the hub of baseball we see today.
To honour them properly I believe it’s important to look at the entire person. To leave out the sticky bits is to paint an incomplete picture. Scully was, by all accounts, a good man. Comments have flooded social media in the past week talking about how he was gracious with his time, treated everyone he met with respect and put forward professionalism at every turn.
But like any of us, Scully wasn’t perfect. His minor protest of no longer watching NFL games because of players kneeling during the national anthem, combined with a resurfaced clip where he condemns socialism makes me wonder if we would not have politically aligned. Probably not. But I also understand that as an American elderly white male, he certainly wasn’t an anomaly. My leanings wouldn’t align with most elderly people with wealth.
These aren’t condemnable acts, to my mind. They’re differences to what I believe is right, but it must be considered that plenty of people have done worse and been deified on much higher petestools. I believe that Scully is worth celebrating, as we’ve seen the baseball and sporting worlds do over the past week.
Scully was the Mr. Rogers of baseball, a storyteller that made a complicated game simple. He was the voice we were happy to invite into our homes, first by radio and then television. A gentleman until the end, he left an indelible mark on the game of baseball.
It's Sammie2kbae from Twitter. You have a gift for wordsmith, a gift of using words to portray a story. It's so well done, I can visually see what you are writing. Your students will remember you, years down the road. Keep you the awesome work. 👌