Rain lashed against the windows of Fordham’s Rose Hill Gymnasium, a 3,400-seat basketball facility cloaked in the style and masonry of a Gothic Revival church. Finely dressed attendees filed past the three double doors at the main entrance under the soaring archway with a cross at its crest. The gym’s gray Manhattan schist, the same stone that is bedrock to the city’s skyscrapers, acquired a more serious tone without the sun to twinkle its mica.
The nation’s oldest continuously used NCAA Division I basketball facility was built in 1925. Three years later, in the same neo-Gothic style and four miles away, the Church of the Incarnation rose on West 175th Street in Washington Heights. In between, in 1927, was born one of the most famous matriculates of both the university and the parish school, Vincent Edward Scully.
Scully, class of ’49, returned to Fordham to give the commencement address to the class of 2000. It was the first time he had returned since he and the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles in 1958.
“I’m not a military general, a business guru, not a philosopher or author,” Scully told the graduates in the adjacent Vincent Lombardi Fieldhouse. “It’s only me.”
Only me? Vin Scully is only the finest, most-listened-to baseball broadcaster that ever lived, and even that honorific does not approach proper justice to the man. He ranks with Walter Cronkite among America’s most-trusted media personalities, with Frank Sinatra and James Earl Jones among its most-iconic voices, and with Mark Twain, Garrison Keillor and Ken Burns among its preeminent storytellers.
His 67-year run as the voice of the Dodgers—no, wait: the voice of baseball, the voice of our grandparents, our parents, our kids, our summers and our hopes—ends this year. Scully is retiring come October, one month before he turns 89.
One day Dodgers president Stan Kasten mentioned to Scully that he learned the proper execution of a rundown play by reading a book written by Hall of Fame baseball executive Branch Rickey, who died in 1965. “I know it,” Scully replied, “because Mr. Rickey told me.” It suddenly hit Kasten that Scully has been conversing with players who broke into the major leagues between 1905 (Rickey) and 2016 (Dodgers rookie pitcher Ross Stripling). When Scully began his Dodgers broadcasting career, in 1950, the manager of the team was Burt Shotton, a man born in 1884.
It is as difficult to imagine baseball without Scully as it is without 90 feet between bases. To expand upon Red Smith’s observation, both are as close as man has ever come to perfection.
“Los Angeles is a city of stars,” says Charley Steiner, a fellow Dodgers broadcaster for the past dozen years and, at home games, a regular 5:30 p.m. dinner partner with Scully and Rick Monday, another colleague. “And Vin is the biggest star of them all. I don’t care who it is—Arnold, Leo, Spielberg, Kobe, Magic—nobody is bigger than Vin, and I’ll tell you why: With everybody else you can find some subset of people who don’t like them. Nobody doesn’t like Vin Scully.
“Vin is our Babe Ruth. The best there ever was.”
Scully was named the most memorable personality in Dodgers history in a fan poll—beating all players—and that was 40 years ago. With Jerry Doggett, Scully formed the longest-running broadcast partnership in history—until his partner retired 29 years ago. Scully was inducted into the broadcaster’s wing of the Hall of Fame—34 years ago.
I am not in search of more tributes to Scully, nor, as appreciative though he may be, is he. “Only me” is uncomfortable with the fuss about him. He blanches at the populist idea that he should drop in on the call of the All-Star Game or World Series.
“I guess my biggest fear ever since I started,” he tells me, “besides the fear of making some big mistake, is I never wanted to get out ahead of the game. I always wanted to make sure I could push the game and the players rather than me. That’s really been my goal ever since I started—plus, trying to survive. This year being my last year, the media, the ball club, they have a tendency to push me out before the game, and I’m uncomfortable with that.”
Tributes are plentiful. What I am searching for is a rarity: Scully on Scully, especially how and why he does the incomparable—a man on top of his game and on top of his field for 67 years.
Vin is America’s best friend. (“Pull up a chair….”) He reached such an exalted position not by talking about himself, not by selling himself, or, in the smarmy terminology of today, by “branding” himself, but by subjugating his ego. The game, the story, the moment, the shared experience…. They all matter more. As I drive up Vin Scully Avenue toward the Vin Scully Press Box (more tributes) to meet with Vin Scully last month, I worry that getting Scully to turn his perspicacious observational skills on himself may be harder than Manhattan schist.