You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (7 page)

One day I got a call from someone involved in the production of the show. They were asking if I would be in an upcoming episode, playing the role of a young public defender. A number of my colleagues at KHVH had played bit roles and they had fun. “Sure,” I told them.

I got a copy of the script and, being the perfectionist I am, I made sure I had every line right, every nuance down impeccably. I practiced in front of a mirror. I practiced in front of Linda a hundred times. On the day of the shoot, I checked in at Diamond Head Studios. (I thought nothing of it at the time, but another guest star on the episode was a young actor named Christopher Walken.) Jack Lord was going to be in my scene but I didn’t see him when I arrived. A production assistant greeted me. They put some makeup on me, and I went onto the set. My scene was going to take place inside a jail cell. As local public defender Dave Bronstein, I was going to visit my client, the inmate, who was charged with murder.

Finally, Lord appeared. He was a big man physically, with a larger-than-life persona. He didn’t so much as
acknowledge
me. He said something to the cameraman. He said something to the director. I might as well have been invisible. No “hello,” no “aloha,” no “welcome,” no nothing.

Then it was lights-camera-action, the scene began, and I had the first lines. I said about five words and all of a sudden, Lord looked toward the camera and in this booming voice, he yelled, “Cut!”

I was panicked. I must have screwed up. What did I do? How did I piss Jack Lord off so quickly? I tried to figure out what I had done wrong. Then Lord spoke again. Glaring at a production assistant behind the camera, he barked, “I need more hand makeup!”

What the . . . ? Hand makeup?? How could he even
know
he needed hand makeup?

Lord got his hand makeup in a flash. We then did the scene in about five takes. Then I left, still without a shred of off-the-set interaction with Lord. The episode ran a few months later. (You can check it out on the Internet—the episode is from season two and aired January 14, 1970, titled “Run, Johnny Run.”) I got paid scale—in those days, as I recall, around eighty-five dollars. Hooray for Hollywood.

THE HAWAII ISLANDERS WERE
located more than twenty-five hundred miles from the closest major-league market. When I arrived in 1968, the team was the Triple-A farm club of the Chicago White Sox. Then, in 1969, Jack Quinn made a deal to become the California Angels’ Triple-A affiliate, and also decided to change the business model. There would still be young Angels prospects on the roster, but he was going to surround them with veteran players—former big leaguers at the tail end of their careers. As a fan, and a senior in high school, I saw Bo Belinsky pitch a no-hitter for the Angels on May 5, 1962, against the Orioles at just-opened Dodger Stadium. Bo wound up with the Islanders while I was there, and I called a no-hitter he pitched for Hawaii against Tacoma.

We signed a pitcher who had appeared in three World Series for the Yankees, Jim Coates. We signed Dennis Bennett, who was then in his thirties, and had had some productive years for the Phillies and Red Sox. Bennett would win eighteen games in 1970 for the Islanders. Elroy Face, a pitcher who was approaching his fortieth birthday, but who in 1959 had been an astonishing 18-1 as a reliever for the Pittsburgh Pirates, became a Hawaii Islander. Quinn also bought the contract of former All-Star Juan Pizarro, who went 9-0 in nine starts for Hawaii in 1970 and then was sold to the Cubs.

We had some promising prospects from the Angels organization as well. Marty Perez was the Islanders’ shortstop in 1970, and then was traded to the Braves in 1971, and spent most of his six seasons in Atlanta as a starter. We had a young second baseman, Doug Griffin, who’d wind up winning a Gold Glove in Boston in 1972. Overall, we had a number of players with some name recognition—but not as many up-and-coming prospects as the Angels would have liked. It was more important to the parent team that we developed young talent. But it was more important to Quinn to draw fans, win games, and make money.

Despite this push and pull with the parent club, around the baseball industry the Islanders were seen as a model for what a minor-league team could be. Outstanding attendance (approximately 450,000 fans in 1970—a huge number in those days), good management, an entertaining product on the field. When that happens, a lot of people in the organization benefit by association. It happens in all sports, and is still the case today. If you work for the San Antonio Spurs or the St. Louis Cardinals, that’s a good connection. And in Hawaii, I knew that my name was getting out there and circulating among major-league teams—at least in part because I was with the Islanders.

In the late summer of 1970, the Angels’ farm director, Roland Hemond, whom I’d gotten to know well, and who was Jack Quinn’s brother-in-law, was going to be named the Chicago White Sox’ new general manager. And as soon as the PCL playoffs were over, he was going to hire Chuck Tanner to be the White Sox manager. Roland told me he wanted to bring me to Chicago to be the number-one announcer for the White Sox, and that he and Chuck would begin to lobby for me as soon as they got to Chicago. He thought he could get the deal done, and just needed to convince the White Sox owner, John Allyn.

I was over the moon. The big leagues were looming. The Islanders’ season ended and I waited about six weeks. “It’s coming along, we’re working on it,” Hemond kept telling me. The job was open. Then, in late October, I picked up the phone and I could tell from Roland’s voice it wasn’t good news. “Allyn loves your tape and feels you have a great future,” he said. “But he just can’t bring himself to hire someone in his mid-twenties and bring him into a market as big as Chicago as the number-one announcer.”

Too young for a big job
again
?

The White Sox wound up hiring Harry Caray, who’d been a popular figure in St. Louis broadcasting Cardinal games before getting fired, and then had spent a year in Oakland. He’d wind up spending eleven seasons as the White Sox announcer, and then of course move across town in 1982 to finish his iconic career with the Cubs.

ON SEPTEMBER 21, 1970,
I had lunch with Don Rockwell, the news director of KHVH. I remember the date because we talked about a show that the ABC network was debuting that night:
Monday Night Football.

The show was in good measure the brainchild of Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports. In the late 1960s, the NFL had played a handful of random games on Monday nights. The ratings were ho-hum. NFL games were as much a part of Sunday as going to church, so pushing the last game of the week to prime time on Monday was a gamble. Pete Rozelle was the commissioner, and had experience with night football games when he was the publicity director of the Los Angeles Rams in the late fifties. The Rams had played some night games when he was there, and he believed that televising a game
every
Monday night could work.

ABC was a distant third behind CBS and NBC in a three-network universe. So ABC had the least to lose by doing this.

Arledge knew that. But Rozelle preferred that the games not necessarily be on the (distant) third-place network in a three-way race. Rozelle asked the others first. NBC passed, fearful of letting football supplant its popular
Movie of the Week
program. CBS passed, too. They weren’t going to bump their Monday night hit
Mayberry R.F.D
. So almost by default, the slate of Monday night football games went to ABC, which replaced two shows—
The Survivors
and
Love, American Style
—to make room in the lineup.

When the rights went to ABC, Arledge felt it was very important to pick his own announcers. This was uncommon. In those days, if a league didn’t actually handpick the broadcasters, they had a strong influence on whom the networks could use on the games.

What’s more, for the
Monday Night Football
games, Arledge didn’t want to utilize just two announcers on the telecast, as was customary. He wanted a three-man booth. And one ofthe hires he had in mind was a former lawyer turned boxing analyst, an iconoclast who used words like
supercilious
and
bellicosity
on the air. That, of course, was Howard Cosell.

The NFL agreed. The New York Jets played the Cleveland Browns in the first Monday night game in 1970. Keith Jackson was the play-by-play announcer/straight man. And Cosell and Don Meredith, the folksy, recently retired Cowboys quarterback, were the color commentators. Don Rockwell, the news director, who was not a sports fan, said the network was making a disastrous decision and that the ratings would be embarrassing. I, on the other hand, thought it would be a phenomenal success, which was mainly due to my wishful thinking. Network sports in prime time? Yeah!

Meanwhile, in mid-November, while I was still getting over the rejection from the White Sox, came a call from the Cincinnati Reds. They were looking for a new radio play-by-play man. Would I fly to Cincinnati for an interview? Of course.

After another weekend of doing five football games—two Friday night high school games, two Saturday high school games, and a University of Hawaii game—I went to the airport to take a red-eye flight to Cincinnati with a connection in Los Angeles, where my mother met me at the airport to bring me my father’s overcoat and scarf so I’d have something to wear in Cincinnati, where I arrived early Sunday evening.

The next morning, I was picked up at the hotel by Gordy Coleman, the former Reds first baseman then working for the team in community affairs. The Reds hadn’t even met with me or made an offer, but Coleman was assigned to show me around town and drive me around some neighborhoods where I might want to settle if they offered me the job
.
Even if nothing was explicitly said, it seemed like a good sign for my prospects. We started in Kentucky directly across the Ohio River from downtown Cincinnati. I couldn’t say this to him, but the truth was, I had grown up in Brooklyn and then moved to Los Angeles. Now I am living in Hawaii. How could I possibly tell my family and friends: we’ve just moved to Kentucky! Our new address is in Kentucky! I couldn’t wait to get back on the other side of the river.

At around three thirty that afternoon, I arrived at the Reds’ team offices in the Central Trust Tower. (Riverfront Stadium had opened in the middle of the 1970 season, but the team offices were still under construction.) I met with the team’s general manager, Bob Howsam; his second-in-command, Dick Wagner; and the team’s director of broadcasting. Broadcasters didn’t have agents in those days. We talked for about an hour and a half, and they offered me the job. Two weeks earlier, I was told, in essence, that I was a little too young to be the Chicago White Sox’ number-one announcer. What a difference a fortnight makes, huh?

It turned out that Dick Wagner had called Chet Simmons, the number-two executive at NBC Sports. My father had known Chet, and Simmons had been to Hawaii on a few occasions for the Hawaiian Open golf tournament, where I’d visited with him. Chet had occasionally seen and heard my work. Simmons told Wagner that yes, he knew me, and I’d be someone they should interview.

The offer from the Reds was a three-year deal: $24,000, $27,000, and $30,000. I was disappointed. It was 162 regular season games, all thirty spring training games, and even some duties in the off-season. It was more money than the Islanders were paying me, but less than I was making in Hawaii all put together. In Cincinnati, I wasn’t going to be supplementing my income by working at a local television station. Then again, it was the Cincinnati Reds—the big time. I told them I would give them my decision after speaking with my wife.

A million thoughts were rocketing around in my head. One of them: as far as I could tell, the city of Cincinnati had two dominant colors on that November day, gray and brown. It had been a dank 41-degree day (82 in Honolulu that afternoon), with the streets looking like Warsaw at rush hour. I walked from the meeting back to my hotel, and was waiting for a light to change. I glanced to my right, and in a ground-floor window of the Terrace Hilton Hotel was a travel agency. And as I was standing on the corner, bundled up in my father’s scarf and overcoat well before Christmas or even Thanksgiving—what do I see in the window? A huge poster of Diamond Head. Not only that—as I looked a little closer, I could see the apartment building that Linda and I had called home.

Marbles were shooting out of my brain.

In no way could I pass up the Cincinnati Reds, the team that had just won the National League pennant, to go back to the Hawaii Islanders. I called Linda. Then I called my boss in Hawaii, Jack Quinn.

“What do you think,” I asked.

“A fabulous opportunity. You have to take it,” said Jack.

I had dinner that night with Wagner at the Maisonette—a longtime world-renowned restaurant, may it rest in peace—and told him that I wanted the job, but that the money was an issue. We’d just had a baby. Sooner than later, we would want another. This was less than what I was making in Hawaii. He came up a little. And I accepted. (Of course!) Before we left the table, Wagner made arrangements for a press conference the next morning to announce my hiring. I would fly back to Hawaii in the early afternoon. My partner would be Joe Nuxhall, a former pitcher best known for being the youngest player in major-league history, having debuted for the Reds when he was fifteen years, ten months old in 1944. Nuxie, as everyone called him, a beloved figure in Cincinnati, had already been a part of the broadcast team for four years.

Back at the hotel after dinner that night, I spoke to Linda for almost two hours (a very expensive call in those days—I was already eating well into the $24,000). I tried to sleep but couldn’t get a wink. I was up all night rolling around in bed, pacing by the window, thinking about this wonderful existence in Hawaii I would be leaving behind. I couldn’t back out of the Reds job. But I was so exhausted that I even had thoughts about going through with the press conference, then flying back to Hawaii and calling Howsam and Wagner in a few days to say I’d had a change of heart. It’s not like they would fly five thousand miles to reel me back in.