I've been a bit slow to put this on virtual paper, but this has been rattling around my head ever since reading Terry Pluto's column on February 18. With the recent passing of longtime Browns beat writer Chuck Heaton, Pluto reflected on the legacies of some prominent local sports media personalities, both living and dead. Heaton. Score. Hamilton. Tait. Chandler. Lebovitz. Coleman. And while basic human decency prevented Pluto from including himself, let the record show that his name graces the spines on many a North Coast bookshelf.
I am too young to remember much of Heaton's work, but it is obvious that he meant a lot to the Browns fans in this town. And since his passing put Pluto in a reflective mood about the Voices of Cleveland Sports, it had done likewise to me.
With that, here are the five Voices that have resonated most with me.
Herb Score
There's an attachment to longtime baseball announcers that cannot be matched in other areas of sports journalism. Growing up in the 80s, I listened to Herb call the action (or something approximately like the action) just about every night on the ancient radio that sat on our kitchen table. It's not that we lacked a television, but the radio broadcasts suited us better. My dad could sit on the porch and read the paper, and I could still follow the game while playing in the yard, or sitting at the dining room table playing Strat-o-Matic baseball. (And yes, in my head, Herb Score called every single Strat-o-Matic game I ever played, even if it didn't involve the Indians.)
To give you an idea of how much Herb Score meant to me as a kid, every time we would go to a game at the old stadium, my sister and I would dutifully trek to the upper deck so that we were situated above Herb's booth, and then we'd lean over the railing and shout, "Hi Herb!" We always made a point to say hi to Herb. To this day, I have no idea if he ever heard us. Heck, since we couldn't see his booth below us, he may not have even been in the booth half the time for all we knew. But we always made a point to say hi to Herb. It was an important part of the game day ritual.
In various books, Pluto has already captured many great "Herb moments", so I'm not really going to get into them here. Herb sometimes got things wrong. And sometimes he got excited on medium fly balls. And sometimes he said things like, "Swing and a miss. Called strike three." And he often mispronounced names. One of my favorites from his final days in the booth was his constant mangling of Eddie Guardado's name. The Twins pitcher was often referred to as "Eddie Guh-DIDD-oh." I don't know why that one made me laugh so much. But it did.
When Edgar Renteria's line drive whistled past Charlie Nagy's glove for the Series-clinching single in 1997, I was obviously devastated like any lifelong Tribe fan. But I was doubly devastated. It was Herb's last game. And while many fans hate Jose Mesa for blowing the Tribe's World Series title, I also mourn that he didn't send Herb Score out as a champion. The man had watched more bad baseball than anyone in history, and I would have given almost anything for the pleasure of hearing Herb Score say something like "the Cleveland Indians are World Series champions of the world!" in his final game.
Tom Hamilton
Again, it's that baseball announcer thing. Hammy was the perfect complement to Herb. He is loud, invigorating, and opinionated, which somehow meshed with Herb's low-key conversational style. And once Herb left the booth, Hamilton has become a legend in his own right.
Let's just say that my laptop computer has an audio clip of "SWING AND A DRIVE!....TO DEEP LEFT FIELD!....WAAAAAAAAAAAY BACK!....GONE!" so I can listen to it whenever I want.
One thing I have always found refreshing about Hammy's broadcasts is that while he can be ruthless in his criticisms, he's not looking for things to complain about. It's not shtick, and it's not one-sided. He hands out praise and criticism to either team as warranted. But when Hammy has a bee in his bonnet, it's a good time. This past season, I was listening to the game when the Tigers had the umpires time Rafael Betancourt with a stopwatch in order to speed up Raffy's annoyingly Hargrovian pitching rhythm. Hammy was perturbed by Detroit's gamesmanship, and was letting the Tigers and the umpires have it over the air. When the inning was over, the station went to commercials, and then the next inning started before the commercial break was over. Hamilton was all over it. His powerful voice dripping with contempt, he said, "Boy, if the umpires are going stand out there with stopwatches, they should do something useful like making sure we get our commercial breaks."
I almost swerved off the road I was laughing so hard.
Nev Chandler
While most kids surely watched the Browns on TV each Sunday, I invariably found myself listening to at least part of each game while in transit to or from a soccer game. And that meant I got to spend some quality time in the car with Nev.
Nobody captured the excitement of Browns football like Nev Chandler. His broadcasts were so electric that each listener felt like they had a beer-soaked seat in "Pandemonium Palace." How great was Nev? It seemed like "Inside the NFL" would go out of their way to use Browns highlights just to find an excuse to broadcast Nev's calls. ("Back-up nose tackles don't get a lot of press, so let us here at Inside the NFL take a feature look at the play of Bob Golic's understudy, Dave Puzzouli.")
As my friend Bill Archer wrote to me after reading Pluto's piece, "Every once in a great while, some station or other will put up some old Browns clip, and you're not really paying much attention and suddenly something strikes a nerve in your soul someplace and you realize that it's a Chandler call of a Browns play and, just for a
moment, everything in the world is as it should be. How do you explain that feeling to someone?"
I don't know, Bill. Thankfully, I don't think I need to explain it to most people reading this blog.
Jim Ingraham
I may be going a little off the traditional path with this one, but the News-Herald's Indians beat writer, Jim Ingraham, was undoubtedly the most influential sports writer of my youth. To this day, I look forward to waking up and reading the opening salvo from his game story. Win or lose, it's almost always good for a laugh.
One of my childhood rituals was to wait for my dad to come home with a fresh copy of the News-Herald. I would immediately tear into the sports section and read Ingraham's opening paragraph aloud to my dad so we could both have a good chuckle before that night's game. Ingraham's writing ingrained in me from a very young age that sports should be fun. And barring that, sports should be funny.
(The man once described a Tribe strikeout as "Shin-Soo Choo went swing-swang swung.")
My good buddy Flick is a Reds fan from Dayton and grew up reading the legendary Hal McCoy. Nearly every morning in the summer, we swap McCoy and Ingraham gems at the start of the work day. We both recognize how blessed we were to have such an entertaining beat writer cover our teams for as long as we can remember.
Rummaging through some old e-mails with Ingraham quotes, he can be funny when the Indians win...
Listen to that crowd!
Ooops! There was no crowd.
That meant the Indians on Monday night had to make the most of the noise themselves, which they did by hammering baseballs off the furniture in many parts of mostly empty Tropicana Field, as the Tribe rolled to an 11-4 demolition of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
Or this one after the Tribe's continued pummeling of AL Central aces last year...
Remember Santana Schmantana? Make way for Verlander Schmerlander.
The Indians continued their trashing of the American League's fine China cabinet Tuesday night, as they laid waste to another elite pitcher while rolling to a 7-4 victory over Detroit, all but officially ending the Central Division race.
As funny as he can be after victories, he can be funnier when the Indians lose, such as this opener from one ill-fated game during the ill-fated 2006 season...
First pitch: 7:05 p.m.
First Indians error: 7:06 p.m.
Who says these guys don't come ready to play...poorly?
Or this opener from another 2006 game...
Well, let's see.
Except for the two stolen bases and the home run they allowed in the first inning, the error in the second inning, the hit batter, the error and the passed ball in the third inning, the two errors, three walks and the stolen base allowed in the sixth inning, the six walks allowed in the last four innings alone, the four errors for the game, and the six stolen bases allowed overall, the Indians played a fairly clean game Monday night.
Or this gem tucked deep into an article...
Belliard tried to go from first to third on a single to left field. Bad idea. Sox left fielder Scott Podsednik threw out Belliard at third by 10 feet. "If I make it, it's a good play for us," said Belliard, who didn't, so it wasn't.
And then man can get poetic. Take this splendid opening after the Tribe completed a mid-September sweep of the Tigers to all but clinch the division.
And so that's that. Wiping the dirt from their hands as they walked from the grave late Wednesday afternoon, the Indians saw what three weeks of playing good old country hardball better than anyone else has so gloriously wrought: A clear, unimpeded view of October, which now stretches so invitingly before what is arguably - let's just throw it out there - the best team in the major leagues.
For all practical purposes, the last tree has been chopped. The last hurdle cleared. The last Tiger tamed.
Beautiful.
I can't say enough about my love of Jim Ingraham's writing. One of the first Tribe games I ever covered, my seat in the press box was directly behind his. I was more or less star struck. It's kind of embarrassing, really. I can't remember the last time I was star struck while talking to a pro athlete, but here I couldn't even bring myself to make small-talk with a middle-aged guy sitting at a laptop computer.
That's so lame. But Ingraham's writing is anything but.
Hal Lebovitz
What's there to say about Hal that hasn't already been said? The man was a legend in every sense of the word. He was a first-hand resource for several decades of Cleveland sports history, the national go-to guy for rules interpretations, and as well-connected and well-respected a writer as there will ever be. His Sunday notes column in the News-Herald was the must-read event of the week. After moving from Cleveland, I hated...hated...hated that the News-Herald would not put his Sunday column online. I understood their logic. I mean, who sold more News-Heralds than Hal Lebovitz? But still...it was hell on those of us who had moved away. I'd call my dad for highlights. (I couldn't in good conscience ask him to read a 5,000 word article into the phone every week.)
If I may share another Jacobs Field anecdote, what struck me was how revered Hal was by his media brethren. I believe this was during the 2004 season, maybe a little over a year before he died. I wasn't around often, so I can't say this for sure, but I got the impression that while Hal was still writing his column every week, at 88 years old, he wasn't a regular in the press box anymore.
Or maybe it was his first game back after an absence of some time.
Either way, I will never forget the day Hal showed up at the Jake. It was like the Pope had come to town. Everybody stopped what they were doing. Never mind that there was a game going on, reporters got out of their chairs and made their way across the press box to shake Hal's hand and say hi. It was an event.
From overhearing the press box chatter the rest of the day, there was hardly a soul in that room who had not been inspired or influenced by Hal, or been on the receiving end of some wise and gracious advice from the old pro. If that press box were an orchard, Hal was Johnny Appleseed.
As ESPN has demonstrated time and time again, a room full of sports reporters cannot agree on anything except the need to shout their opinions. But in that room, there was no need to hold a vote. It was clearly unanimous.
Of all the great voices in the history of Cleveland sports, Hal's was the greatest.
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So those are my five. Who's on your list? And why?