Scully's call on Aaron's 715: Not everyone enjoyed it
The other day, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a column by Furman Bisher that wasn't all that complementary about the call the Dodgers' Vin Scully made on Hank Aaron's 715th home run back in 1974.
Fact is, ol' Furman has decided Scully's call was rather "irksome."
See if you can figure out where he's coming from:
You know — a term frequently used as punctutation by athletes who didn’t major in grammar — I’d never heard this thing until the other day, all these years since it was spoken in 1974. And no reason I should have, for I was at the Braves game that night, not listening to a broadcast from Los Angeles.
The Dodgers were in town, and Vin Scully was doing the game on his West Coast network. Henry Aaron had just hit his 715th home run, and old Atlanta Stadium was in hysterics, when Scully, putting his touch on the event, spoke into his microphone, “A black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep South for breaking the home run record of an all-time baseball idol.”
Beg pardon? I don’t know what I’d have thought at the moment, for I’d have been too swept up in the event. Aaron had passed Babe Ruth. The most unbreakable record in baseball had been broken in our own precinct. Hank Aaron had broken it, and he was getting a standing ovation, and why not, I should ask? And why should it not happen in the South?
My god, this was 1974. Yes, this was the South, but there was something about the way Scully said it that made your hackles rise. We’d thought we had that pretty well worked out, and we’d had all winter to get ready for it. Aaron had hit No. 713 off Jerry Reuss the September before, and No. 714 off Jack Billingham on opening day in Cincinnati. No. 715 couldn’t be far removed.
So the human eruption came. People danced, cried out in delight, jumped and did wild things. A couple of young fellows leaped from the stands and joined up with Aaron around second base, then disappeared into the billowing crowd. (One of them is a lawyer in Atlanta today.) Neither of them had the color of Aaron’s skin on their mind, nor did any of us in that pit of glorious insanity.
Scully wasn’t sitting in a studio in Los Angeles. He was there in the middle of it in Atlanta Stadium, and it’s not as if he’d never been South before. His wife is a Southerner, from the county seat of my hometown. If this had been in the Bronx would he have announced, “A Harlemite is getting a standing ovation in New York City!”
Nah, they don’t pick cotton in New York, draw well water, milk the cow, or perform other such agricultural chores. I can tell you I have. I’ve done it all. It makes you sweat, but it doesn’t make you any different, no matter what your color. No doubt, Aaron had absorbed a ton of junk from the stands who had more than Ruth’s record on their mind.
I didn’t like seeing Ruth’s record go, but I liked the idea of it settling on Atlanta, and had taken on the project of collaborating with Aaron on his life story. Beyond that, times had been hard on Aaron. He had gone through divorce, split from his family, his ears burning with the bellowing of dissenters, and the frequent target of every kind of nut case on the planet.
“I’ll tell you this much,” he said once at the height of his pursuit, “this kind of abuse isn’t going to stop me. The more they push me, the more I want the record. All I want is to be treated like a human being.”
There’s a certain authenticity in Aaron’s home-run production not found in Bonds’. Aaron’s were evenly distributed over the years; eight times he hit 40 or more, 47 his highest. Bonds never reached the 40s until his eighth season in the majors, then it was eight seasons later that he erupted into the soaring number of 73. Never close before, never close since. Aaron led the league in a column more important to his team, runs batted in, four times, 2,297 the record for a career.
All these years have passed and Aaron finds himself firmly seated at a similar popularity level as Babe Ruth when his record was under assault, though for reasons of differing nature. It’s not the home runs as much as it is the genuine respect for the man. The Babe had his record in his own time. The Hammer has the record for all time, as most of us see it. Don’t know how Vin Scully will address it if and when it happens that Barry Bonds passes the record, no more than I can imagine whatever brought him to to say what he said when it happened in Atlanta in 1974.
I do know it’s keeping a lot of us up past our bedtime while the Braves carry the fight to the West Coast.
Comments
Bisher seems almost willfully ignorant here, as if the past 100-300 years of history in the South hadn't happened - not to mention the death threats Aaron got up to the big moment. So he's neglecting that context - and it doesn't help that he's excerpting Vin's quote out of context as well:
"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.
"A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly Henry Aaron."
Yeah, he's really slamming the South there.
The point Vin made so eloquently was how wonderful it was that skin color wasn't affecting the crowd's judgment of Aaron's moment.
Posted by: Jon Weisman![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.insidesocal.com/tomhoffarth/nav-commenters.gif)
|
July 28, 2007 09:20 AM
Jackie Robinson had only broken the color barrier 26 years earlier. Seperate but equal would have had a young Henry Aaron sleeping in segregated hotels on road trips. By 1974 Jim Crow had only recently been dismantled and the civil rights struggle was still fresh in the minds of America. So to see a black man recieving a standing ovation in Atlanta Georgia, the hub of the Confederacy, was a huge deal. Scully, a man who witnessed the trials and tribulations of Jackie Robinson personally, was merely pointing out the obvious; that the country had come a long way in a short time and it was a beautiful thing to see.
Posted by: damon standifer | July 28, 2007 11:57 AM