OLEAN -- Some readers thumped me as a hateful jerk for a column earlier this summer detailing my love for the Boston Red Sox and my antipathy for the New York Yankees, but they should know there were some Yankees greats I greatly admired, respected and quietly rooted for.
Phil Rizzuto, who died at 89 on this paper's deadline last week, was foremost among them. My appreciation of Rizzuto started out having little to do with his impressive statistics or incredibly steady play. It was because he was short.
Rizzuto was 5-foot-6 in his cleats. Trying to make my high school's baseball team, so was I. (I still am.) Even though I'd had modest success as a Little Leaguer -- and practiced fielding every day with a rubber ball thrown up against the garage doors, side of the house or any other hard surface I could find -- I thought I was too small to make the squad and was going to avoid embarrassment by not even trying out. My two older brothers tried to talk me into it without much success (although I did appreciate the unusual praise they gave me for my budding athletic skills). My father, a rabid Yankees fan, took me aside.
Look at Rizzuto, he said. I knew the Yankees formidable lineup in detail because the only games on the radio back then in the North Country near Watertown, N.Y., were those played by the Bronx Bombers. At the time, Rizzuto had just retired from 13 years as the best shortstop in the major leagues. As described by the honey-voiced Mel Allen on our old Motorola, the clutch-hitting Rizzuto was always doubling in the go-ahead run, or stealing a base during a key rally, or smothering a Red Sox rally with an incredible fielding play. I shrugged. What about him?
"He's exactly your height," said my father. Somehow, I hadn't known that. It was not a visual world back then. I knew he was short and that his nickname was "Scooter," but the only images I had in my mind were blurry head shots from the local sports pages, or a fuzzy Saturday afternoon figure on my grand-father's early Zenith TV. Wow. I was as tall as a famous professional baseball player?
I tried out for the team. I made it. I played first string second base on four league championship teams, two of them undefeated. I could flash leather. A St. Louis Cardinals scout, watching our hugely talented pitchers Dick Pound and Anda Cooper, once complimented one of my backhand stops as one of the best defensive plays he'd ever seen anywhere, big leagues included. I hit .353 in high school. The overall experience gave me the self-confidence I needed for success in later life, in many fields, not just sports. Over-compensation can be a great psychological weapon. Thank you, Phil Rizzuto. Thank you for being short, and great. Thanks for your stellar role modeling.
Later in life, I learned Rizzuto had similar problems because he was small. The big difference was his own confidence in his athletic abilities from the get-go. Born in Brooklyn, Rizzuto tried out for the Dodgers when he was 18, but Casey Stengel -- then manager of that team -- told him he was too short, with the advice to "go get a shoeshine box." It always rankled Rizzuto, even when he played for Casey on five consecutive World Series-winning teams, even when Stengel continually described him to reporters as "the greatest shortstop I have ever seen."
When he followed up his athletic career with four decades of play-by-play announcing for the Yankees, Rizzuto became even more famous as a colorful broadcaster and baseball personality who was never far from a sports-lover's consciousness. And you didn't have to be a Yankees fan to love Phil Rizzuto.
"He was fantastic," says my friend and former New York state trooper Dave O'Brien, a lifelong Cleveland Indians rooter who grew up in this Southern Tier city. He remembers attending a Yankees-Indians game with three other Olean pals in Cleveland's massive, old, horseshoe-shaped Municipal Stadium about three years before they tore it down in the mid-1990s.
"We had good seats and between innings in the middle of the game, we looked up toward the press boxes," Dave recalled last weekend. "There was Rizzuto standing right above us on a catwalk, sneaking a cigarette between innings. We waved. He hollered down 'Where are you guys from?' We said Olean.
"Rizzuto hollered back, 'Hey, do you know Lou Russo?' We sure did. Lou Russo sang the national anthem at the St. Bonaventure basketball games for years and knew everybody in town. Rizzuto chatted on from above about what a great guy Russo was until play resumed and he went back into the announcer's booth. He couldn't have been friendlier. It was like you'd known him forever."
The much-beloved Rizzuto was famous for this. Unlike many of today's sports-connected celebrities, he would converse with anybody, searching for friends in common, or restaurants both yakkers had frequented, or places they'd both been.
I also admired Rizzuto because, like my idol Ted Williams, Rizzuto interrupted his promising career to serve in World War II. (This led to a famous remark Rizzuto made at his Hall of Fame induction speech. Recalling his approach toward New Guinea on a Navy ship, the Scooter recalled jokingly he had expected to find many fellow Italians there. You couldn't get away with that in these politically correct times, no matter what your ethnic background.)
Rizzuto wouldn't even be in the Hall of Fame, in fact, were it not for his friend Ted Williams. The spray-hitting shortstop only hit a handful of home runs (38) in his career and was rejected 26 straight years by the longball-loving blockheads who now run baseball and write about Cooperstown. Finally, fellow baseball immortal Williams made a couple of impassioned speeches about the storied Yankees-Red Sox rivalry and maintained, "If we'd had Rizzuto in Boston, we'd have won all those pennants instead of New York." That nudged the selectors into a positive vote for Rizzuto.
Mike Vaccaro, the terrific New York Post sports columnist -- who graduated from St. Bonaventure University's journalism school -- describes the close Rizzuto-Williams friendship in his much-praised recent book "Emperors and Idiots" about the century-long rivalry between the Yanks and Bosox:
"If they seemed an odd couple, it was genuine warmth they shared. Williams first struck up a conversation with Rizzuto in Rizzuto's rookie year, 1941, the season Williams hit .406 and almost always seemed to be finding his way to second base, in Rizzuto's neighborhood. After one double, he told Rizzuto, 'You play hard. I love this game, and you better love it too.'
"So touched was Rizzuto by Williams' words that when his manager, Joe McCarthy, later order Rizzuto to jump and wave in the field while Williams was hitting, in a bush-league attempt to distract the great hitter, Rizzuto refused, admitting, "I felt funny doing that."
Once, during a Fenway Park home game with the Yanks, Williams hit a double and standing on second base asked Rizzuto and his wife, Cora, to join him for dinner. Rizzuto said she was in a Boston hospital getting tests.
"Holy cow, he was at that hospital after the game before I was," Vaccaro quotes Rizzuto as recalling. "I came in, and Ted had a broomstick in his hand, showing her some hitting tips. Cora was scared to death."
Rizzuto was a fantastic glove man. He still holds career World Series records for putouts, assists and double plays as a shortstop. Yankees pitcher Vic Raschi, one of the team's stalwarts during his career, put it best: "My best pitch is anything the batter grounds, lines, or pops in the direction of Rizzuto."
Yogi Berra, who visited Rizzuto weekly during the latter's declining days, got off one of his best remarks when the famous Yank slugger Joe DiMaggio married movie star Marilyn Monroe. Asked what he thought of it, Yogi is said to have replied that it sure beat "rooming with Phil Rizzuto."
Rizzuto was almost as famous as a baseball broadcaster. His stream-of-consciousness commentary was so scrambled -- yet with a certain meter and whimsical logic to it -- The Village Voice took to running it as poetry: "Absolutely/ If you don't get a little/ a few butterflies/ no matter what you do/ on the first day of anything/ you're not human."
He took chances at the microphone, too. In his early broadcasts, he once found himself describing a Seattle Pilots game from the West Coast and recognized it was 1:30 a.m. in New York, so he figured no one was listening. As New York Daily News writer Bob Raissman recalled in his obit appreciation of the Scooter, Rizzuto started describing his hotel room during a break in the action: "The hotel has round walls. If my wife, Cora, was on the trip, there would be no cornering Cora tonight."
Rizzuto could act upon his emotions, too. When his beloved teammate Mickey Mantle died 12 years ago this month, the Scooter planned like most members of those famous Yankees teams to attend the funeral in Texas, but WPIX insisted he remain in Boston to do color on a Red Sox game. He departed the booth in the middle of the telecast declaring he could not continue. It was only a matter of weeks before he announced his retirement from the broadcast booth. He returned the next summer, but only for about a fourth of the games.
Phil Rizzuto was a one-of-a-kind, multi-media sort of guy. Oddly, he could be controversial without really being controversial. Thirty years ago this summer, the hot musical effort was Meat Loaf's eventual gold record "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." (The New York Times insisted on referring to the singer as Mr. Loaf). The lyrics seemed to be describing a baseball game but were really the thinly veiled double entendre account of the singer's initial attempts to score with his future wife and featured Rizzuto's famous excited voice: "Holy cow! He's rounding third and heading for home ..."
Parents and clergymen started to complain. Rizzuto implied he was duped into lending his voice to the infamous cut. Meat Loaf disagreed: "Phil was no dummy. He knew exactly what was going on."
Doesn't matter. One of history's very best baseball players and classiest guys is gone. He played an important part in many, many lives, including mine. I miss him, more than I thought I would, already.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Aug. 21 2007 |