James Metzger - Everything I ever needed to know about business I learned on the sports field » Legendary Broadcaster Recalls His Schoolboy Days

Legendary Broadcaster Recalls His Schoolboy Days
Mar 03, 2014Posted by james

“Although this sounds corny, it’s true: I was born in the Bronx, and my mother actually wheeled me in a carriage on the campus [of Fordham University]. “That was years ago. Little did I know, or she, that God would be so kind as to allow me to get into the Prep.”

Vin Scully, legendary broadcaster for the Brooklyn and now Los Angeles Dodgers, uttered these words a few months ago when he was honored by his alma mater for his achievements in his professional field and for the many years of support for his school.

Following graduation from Fordham Preparatory School, Scully served in the U.S. Navy. When he returned home, he quickly enrolled at the university and he became involved in the beginning stages of FM radio in New York. At the school’s radio station, Scully honed his broadcasting style by calling Fordham baseball, basketball and football games. A month before his 1949 graduation, he landed a job with a CBS Radio station in Washington, D.C. Soon after, he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.

When he was a student, Scully also played two seasons on the university baseball team. He was Fordham’s center fielder in one game against Yale. The first baseman during that game was George Herbert Walker Bush. Fordham lost and both Bush and Scully went hitless.

“Years later,” Scully said at the award presentation, “I’m playing golf with the president, and we eventually got to talking about the game. I said to him, ‘Mr. President, as long as you’re in office, you can say anything you want about your baseball career (he was captain of the team). But remember, the day you walk out of the White House, we both went 0 for 3.’”

Only Vin Scully could say that to a president of the United States! I would have enjoyed playing in that foursome to hear Scully’s lyrical delivery of that line, gauge the president’s reaction and then enjoy what no doubt had to be a hardy laugh. I wouldn’t be surprised if President Bush often repeats that story. After all, he received a personalized oral box score report from a baseball broadcasting legend.

While Scully has met the cream of the crop in sports, broadcasting, politics and entertainment since he left Fordham, one story that he told at the Fordham gathering tells us so much more about the man—the kid in the stroller, the high school and college student at Fordham, the service veteran and the friendly professional broadcaster. His story began by remembering a day at the prep school when he sat in the auditorium next to classmate Larry Miggins.

“We were talking about what we hoped to do when we finished school,” said Scully. “Larry said I’d love to be a major league ballplayer, and I said I’d love to be a major league broadcaster. And we both kind of chuckled.”

Years later, on May 13, 1952, Scully was behind the microphone in the broadcast booth at Ebbets Field. Miggins approached the plate to bat for the Cardinals.

“It was so hard to speak. The Dodgers had a left-handed pitcher named Preacher Roe from Ash Flat, Arkansas. Preacher Roe was going to face my buddy Larry Miggins, and I’m going to describe whatever happens,” added Scully. “And Larry Miggins hit a home run!

“You can imagine what an emotional moment it was. First, the shock that the ball was going to go so far, then the realization that it’s a home run and I have to talk about him running around, and it hits me—that back row in the auditorium at Fordham Prep. Somehow it all came to pass.”