'Holy Cow!' -- what a treasure
Posted: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 12:27 PM
The best way I can think of to describe the kind of personality Phil Rizzuto, who died Tuesday at age 89, was is to tell you about coming to New Jersey nearly 30 years ago with my new bride to embark on a career of annoying Bergen County’s sports fans. Although she grew up with three brothers in a family of five in Ann Arbor, Mich., where her father, Maurice J. Sinnott was the associate dean of engineering and a member of the athletic control board at the University of Michigan, she managed never to be bitten by the sports bug.
Margaret didn’t need the drama and escape of sports, getting more than her share of that in parlor mysteries by Agatha Christie and Rex Stout, Jeeves and Wooster stories by the inimitable P.G. Woodhouse, and British dramas on PBS. She remembered Mark Fidrych of her hometown Tigers, and may have had a vague idea of who Al Kaline, Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich were, but her sports knowledge pretty much stopped there along with her interest.
Until, that is, she discovered Phil Rizzuto -- “The Scooter.”
She didn’t have a lot of choice in being exposed to him. Those were the days when households had just one television and the cable universe was limited to a couple dozen channels. And when I was around, I’d frequently watch the Yankees and Mets – it was my job, after all – which meant she couldn’t avoid Rizzuto’s Irish tenor delivery and his delightfully meandering broadcasting style.
She didn’t have many friends in New Jersey, and when she became pregnant with our first child, she found herself with a lot of time at home when I was on assignment. And then, even when she didn’t have to, she’d turn on the ballgame to catch another episode in the stream-of-consciousness life of the Scooter.
Margaret never really did become a baseball fan – she was mildly surprised last year to learn halfway through the World Series that the Tigers were playing in it. But she was a Scooter fan for life.
I’m not sure my wife even knew that Rizzuto had been a terrific little shortstop for the Yankees before he set up housekeeping in the broadcast booth when his career ended. I’d send her to his lifetime stats page at baseball-reference.com, but the numbers wouldn’t mean anything. What mattered to her and to countless fans was the way he made baseball games fun to listen to.
Every superior play was greeted with a “Holy Cow!” and every blunder was inevitably committed by a “huckleberry.” And he made no apologies about cheering for the Yankees, the team he grew up rooting for and then spent his entire life working for. But what Margaret liked best was the stories he told about his wife, Cora, with whom he was clearly helplessly in love after decades of marriage.
He was frequently getting lost in the tales he was trading with one of a host of broadcast partners he had over the years, or becoming distracted by the wonderfulness of his mid-game cannoli, or getting so involved in wishing Edna and Edith and Maria and Louie and countless others happy birthdays and anniversaries that he lost track of such minor matters as who was at bat and how many outs there were. If it weren’t for his partner and straight man – Bill White was the best of them, for my money – he may never have found his way back to the game at all.
He was, in fact, famous for inventing the scoring notation “WW,” which appeared with some regularity on his scorecard. It meant “wasn’t watching.”
In the interests of fairness, when the games really meant something, the Scooter was all business and called the action as well as anyone – even if sometimes the shortstop ended up catching a ball that he initially said “might be out of here.”
In New York, he brought a smile to the face of anyone who spotted him and a lusty shout of “Scoo-tah!” And he always smiled back, grateful for the wonderful life baseball had given him.
I could repeat his quotes for pages, such as the time at the end of a broadcast he learned that Pope Paul VI had died and told his listeners, “Well, that kind of puts a damper on even a Yankee win.” Better you just go here and read them all. You can also try the Wikipedia biography – which seems to be pretty accurate.
I’d rather just say that few people ever enjoyed life more – or deserved to. He smoked those skinny little cigarette-like cigars, loved rich Italian food, and didn’t shy away from a drink.
I once met a woman who worked for a time as a gopher at the stadium, and on her first day, she was told to get Mr. Rizzuto his milkshake before he started his broadcast. A milkshake wasn’t an easy item to find in Yankee Stadium, but somehow, after trudging aimlessly about for what seemed to her like an hour, she secured a vanilla shake and delivered it to him.
“What’s this?” he said, taking a sip.
“It’s a milkshake,” she said.
Rizzuto pulled her aside and whispered to her that a “milkshake” is what he called a White Russian because he didn’t think I would do for people to know he liked a drink to lubricate his vocal chords.
I’m sure dieticians and health fanatics would object, but the reason the Scooter was so lovable was because he so enjoyed life – especially when washed down by a glass of wine – or brandy – and a good cigar. Despite those breaches of the health-nazi rules, he was still going great at 88, entering a nursing home only last year when he started to break down. He died, they say, in his sleep. He was 89.
And he made my wife a baseball fan.
