LOS ANGELES -- The tribute was composed in the 28 seconds it
took Henry Aaron to round the bases and the roar to finally
subside. Listen to it today, and it will still make the hair on
your arms stand up straight.
Vin Scully wasn't working from notes. He had nothing prepared
because, well, that might ruin the magic of the moment.
He let the crowd in Atlanta tell part of the story. Then he
spoke from his heart about the magnitude of it all.
"What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment
for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for
the country and the world," Scully told Dodger fans back home in
Los Angeles. "A black man is getting a standing ovation in the
Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And
it's a great moment for all of us and particularly for Henry Aaron,
who is met at home plate not only by every member of the Braves but
by his father and mother."
Until now, Scully thought most people had forgotten about it. At
the age of 79, he still lives in the day-to-day world of
play-by-play, where what you say in the first inning is history by
the first pitch of the second.
"Everything we do is skywriting," Scully said. "It's put up
in the wind and it blows away."
The wind couldn't scatter this call far enough. Through the
beauty of the Internet, it lives on for anyone savvy enough to use
a Web browser.
He's had other magical calls. Dodger fans would argue that it's
magic everytime he sits in front of a microphone and welcomes them
to a beautiful night at Dodger Stadium.
Scully was doing just that Wednesday night, in his open-air
booth two levels above home plate. Cup of coffee in hand, tie
carefully knotted and not a hair out of place, he settled
comfortably into a seat he has occupied for almost every home game
since the stadium opened 45 years ago.
The hated Giants were in town, usually a series that Scully
relishes for both the rivalry and the history that goes back to
when he was broadcasting for the Dodgers in Brooklyn and the Giants
were playing across town at the Polo Grounds.
But this night was different. This series was different.
Barry Bonds came to town with a chance to tie or break Aaron's
home run mark. If he did, Scully would be making the call, 33 years
after he did the same for Hammerin' Hank.
He wasn't looking forward to it, but not for the reasons you
might think.
"It's nothing personal but I'd just as soon have the Aaron one
and not a second one," Scully said. "The Aaron moment was so
precious that if I got to do another call it wouldn't be the same.
It would just be the second one."
The night before, 56,000 fans jammed the stadium to watch the
spectacle, many with portable radios to listen to Scully's
broadcast. It's a tradition at Dodger Stadium, where most nights
you hear snippets of Scully's smooth voice as you walk through the
park.
He is as much Dodger baseball as Sandy Koufax, even more a part
of the fabric of the team than Tommy Lasorda. He's the reason
Dodger fans can arrive late and leave early, confident he will
paint the picture for them while they listen to their car radios.
He's a modest man who still seems surprised when people tell him
that, as kids, they'd fall asleep listening to him on the
transistors they would sneak under the covers. In the interest of
full disclosure, I was one of those kids, thrilling to his calls of
Sandy Koufax pitching a no-hitter and Don Drysdale setting the
scoreless inning record.
My kids listen to Vinny now, and someday their kids might do the
same. He shows no real signs of slowing down, even though he's the
only announcer in baseball who works solo and has twice the airtime
to fill.
He won't fill it with talk about performance-enhancing drugs or
speculation about players who might be out partying all night and
chasing Hollywood starlets. That's left to others. His job is to
entertain you for a few hours with what is unfolding before him,
and he is a believer in someone being innocent until proven guilty.
"I am not a judge or a jury. It's none of my business," Scully
said. "I just do foul lines."
The game was now just a couple hours away, and the first fans
were coming into the park. Bonds was battling cleanup, and Scully
had some work to do to make sure he had the right facts and stories
for this night.
He had nothing prepared for Bonds, though, just as he didn't
rehearse Aaron's historic home run or Kirk Gibson's ninth-inning
homer in the 1988 World Series. It just wouldn't seem right if it
was in the can and, besides, the crowd would help out.
"To me the story is how the crowd reacts and it will be very
interesting to see how the crowd will react here," he said.
"There's nothing I can say that will be penetrating and
incisive."
Dodger fans would disagree. They know better because they've
listened to the Aaron call, the Gibson call and thousands of calls
in between.
They've heard magic on the air.
They know that no matter what happens on the field, they have a
treasure in the booth.
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Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated
Press. Write to him at tdahlbergap.org