Ernie Harwell was everything you wanted someone you’d admired from afar to be: warm and funny and patient

Ernie Harwell’s death on Tuesday did not come as a shock. He had announced in the fall that he had inoperable cancer and had been told that he didn’t have very long to live. He was 92 and to say that he lived what he would no doubt call a blessed life is a vast understatement.

That doesn’t make his passing any less sad, just not shocking. Ernie was one of those rare people who fit this description: He’s as good as it gets at what he does—but a far better person.

Ernie was one of those voices that came out of my radio at night on occasion when I was a boy. I couldn’t pick up WJR coming out of Detroit on my transistor as regularly as I could pick up WTIC in Hartford (Ken Coleman and Ned Martin doing the Red Sox) or WBAL in Baltimore (Chuck Thompson and Bill O’Donnell on the Orioles) or WWWE in Cleveland (Joe Tait—I think—and Herb Score—I know—on the Indians) but on clear nights it was there along with KMOX in St. Louis (Jack Buck and Harry Caray in those days) and WJR with Ernie.

There wasn’t an announcer in that group—along with my beloved Mets trio of Bob Murphy, Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner, who all did radio and TV in the team’s early days—that I didn’t love hearing. Thompson was an absolute joy and, even though I heard less of him, so was Ernie, with that lilting southern accent that at first sounded out of place coming out of Detroit. Only after I got older did I realize that his voice WAS Detroit.

When I got older and got the chance to meet most of the men I just mentioned, it was about as thrilling as meeting any of the athletes. These guys had been a part of my life in some way since boyhood. I still vividly remember a night when I was in college when I had managed to get myself credentialed to a Yankees-Orioles series in Memorial Stadium. I had convinced the sports editor at The Durham Morning Herald (the paper’s name then) to let me do a feature on Catfish Hunter, who was from North Carolina and lived there in the offseason.

After I had talked to Hunter in the clubhouse, I went up to the old media dining room in the back of the press box. It was dark and cramped (the crab cakes on the other hand were fabulous) and just being there was an adrenaline jolt. I got my food—free in those days, no small thing for a college kid—and sat alone in a booth in the corner. All of a sudden, Chuck Thompson walked up with his food and said, “mind if I join you young man?”

Are you kidding?

When I introduced myself, Chuck began peppering me with questions: what year was I in college; was this what I wanted to do; who else had I done work for; had Hunter been cooperative? If his interest wasn’t genuine, he did a great job of covering it up. Later, when I got to know him, I learned that was the way he was every day. Two years later, when I was in Memorial Stadium again to cover a game, but this time as a Washington Post summer intern, I proudly told him what I was doing there.

“That’s great John,” he said, clapping me on the back. “I’m proud of you.”

THAT was a memorable moment for me.

It wasn’t until years later that I got to know Ernie. I met him on several occasions when the Tigers were in Baltimore, but didn’t spend time with him until I was doing my first baseball book, “Play Ball,” in 1992. That was the year that Tigers management, in one of the boneheaded moves ever made, had decided to ‘retire,’ Ernie (and his longtime partner Paul Carey) who had absolutely no interest in retiring. I was actually in a little bit of an awkward spot because one of the men hired to replace Harwell and Carey was Bob Rathbun, a good friend who had been doing ACC basketball on TV for a number of years.

Rathbun and Rick Rizzs, who came in from Seattle to work with Bob, were in an impossible position: replacing a legend—Ernie had been in Detroit since 1961—is impossible at best but doing so when everyone knows the legend didn’t want to leave is beyond impossible. Fortunately for everyone, Mike Ilitch bought the team during the 1992 season and restored Ernie to the booth in 1993. Rizzs returned to Seattle, where he still works and Rathbun went to Atlanta where he has very successfully worked Braves and Hawks telecasts.

The first time I visited Ernie during the ’92 season was in his hotel in Baltimore. He was doing the CBS game of the week on radio. I told him what a fan of his I had always been but also about my friendship with Rathbun. “Those guys aren’t at fault in any way,” he said. “They didn’t make the decision to fire me and someone was going to sit behind the microphone. I actually feel badly for them because a lot of people are angry at them when they haven’t done anything wrong.”

Like Chuck Thompson, Ernie was everything you wanted someone you’d admired from afar to be: he was warm and funny and patient. Every time I was at a game he was working for the next ten years, I made a point to try to spend some time with him. As anyone who has ever listened to him on the radio knows, he was a great storyteller. When he decided to retire in 2002, I was surprised. Sure, he was 84, but he seemed to me to be as good as he’d ever been. He insisted that he wasn’t, that his vision wasn’t close to what it had been and he got tired far more easily than his younger days. Certainly understandable.

Every once in a while he would do a game here and there or an inning or two for someone and, when he did, he sounded as great as he’d ever sounded. Even when he was honored last fall by the Lions after announcing that he was dying of cancer, his voice sounded like, well, Ernie Harwell.

No doubt others who knew him better and longer than I did will spend a lot of time in the next few days and weeks tell stories about him. He hasn’t done Tigers games since 2003 and the days when the team was on WJR are long gone.

For some reason, I have always remembered certain moments when baseball on the radio has made me feel good about life. Some of those moments are attached to memorable games, some are not. In 1991, I had just finished covering the Duke-St. John’s Midwest regional final in the old Pontiac Silverdome and was en route to the airport. (These days I would have been en route home in the car). It was—surprise—cold in Detroit in late March. I flipped on the radio and there was Ernie, giving the starting lineups for a Sunday night exhibition game in Lakeland. The Tigers were playing the Twins.

I got to listen to two-and-a-half innings before I got to the airport. I could almost feel the warmth of Florida and of Ernie coming through the car radio. Whenever I think of Ernie, I think of those two-and-a-half innings. And every time, without fail, it puts a smile on my face.

NHL playoffs begin – most dramatic in professional sports; One note on baseball broadcasters

It didn’t take long for hockey to remind us why its postseason is better and more dramatic than any other in professional sports. Two nights in, both No. 1 seeds have already dropped a home game—one of them in overtime. The No. 2 seed in the east is also down 1-0 to a team that needed a shootout in the last game of the regular season just to get into the playoffs. And the defending Stanley Cup champions are also down 1-0, having lost their opener at home. Even when the favorites did win an opener—Buffalo over Boston and Vancouver over Los Angeles—the games were one goal, down-to-the-wire finishes.

Danny Gare, the ex-Sabre who now does TV in Buffalo was so excited after Ryan Miller had (again) rescued his team that his opening comment on the postgame show was: “It’s always important to get two points on a night like this.”

I get what he’s saying, but we aren’t counting points anymore—just wins.

The fact that the Colorado Avalanche and Montreal Canadiens opened the playoffs with wins is certainly something for people to take note of even at this very early stage of the two-month grind that’s ahead. I think that’s especially true in the case of the Avalanche and the San Jose Sharks. A year ago the Sharks were the best team in the league in the regular season, then lost in the first round to the Anaheim (Mighty) Ducks. They have a history of playoff failures after sterling regular seasons. So I have no doubt that semi-panic is already setting in out there and, regardless of what the players say about this being a different year and all the clichés athletes spit out, they have to be doubting themselves just a little bit.

Of course in Washington there’s already mass semi-panic. One local radio host wondered this morning if the Capitals would be ‘blown up,’ if they lost this series to the Canadiens. This about a team that easily won The Presidents Cup this season (best regular season record) and is still one of the youngest teams in hockey. Plus, even though losing the opening game isn’t encouraging, there really isn’t any reason for the Caps—unlike the Sharks—to be all that nervous yet.

A year ago, the Caps dropped the first two games at home in the first round to the New York Rangers and trailed the series 3-1, largely because Rangers goaltender Henrik Lundquist was off-the-charts for four games. But Lundquist finally wore down under the barrage of Washington shots and the Capitals won the series in seven. They then lost in seven to the Penguins, who went on to win The Stanley Cup.

This is a better Washington team than a year ago. Jose Theodore had a much better year in goal and isn’t likely to be yanked again (as he was after one game last year) in favor of a 21-year-old kid with no playoff experience. They have more experience because of a couple of trades made by general manager George McPhee and their stars are a year more experienced.

All of that isn’t going to keep DC fans from getting into a state every time the Caps lose a postseason game. This is a town that has endured the worst owner in sports for 11 years in football; a star player who knocked himself out for a season because he thought guns were toys in basketball; and a baseball team that has gone through back-to-back 100-loss seasons. The hockey team is the town jewel right now and the thought of not making it AT LEAST to the Cup finals makes people around here a little bit ill.

Of course upsets happen in the hockey playoffs all the time. In fact, a No. 1 seed has lost to a No. 8 seed three times in the last 10 years. A seven seed beating a two seed isn’t uncommon either. Upsets like that almost never happen in the NBA. The reason is goaltending. A great goalie can make an inferior team competitive and an average goalie can make a superior team vulnerable. That’s why home ice seems to mean so little in hockey. I sometimes wonder if a road team wouldn’t struggle more if the fans simply sat silently throughout the game. Athletes get used to noise, in fact, even when it’s hostile, they enjoy it. Most will tell you that the hardest thing to do—home or road—is play in front of empty seats or a dead crowd.

One reason I believe The Philadelphia Flyers (the No. 7 seed that needed the shootout just to make postseason this past Sunday) can beat The New Jersey Devils is goaltending. Now THAT really sounds stupid doesn’t it? No one has been better in goal in the NHL the last 15 years than Martin Brodeur and he had another brilliant season at the age of 37 this year.

But I think he’s been overplayed—77 games. And I think the Devils are TOO dependent on him. He has to save 37 of 38 shots (or 38 of 38) just about every night for them to win. He’s certainly done it in the past but the Devils haven’t been a good playoff team for a while now (last Cup in 2003) and I think that has a lot to do with it. If they DO survive the Flyers I just don’t see how they can go deep unless Brodeur is even more superhuman than he’s been in the past.

Regardless of who advances—I still think the Caps beat Montreal in five or six in case anyone cares—the next two months are going to be fun. One thing I love about this time of year is finally being off the road for a while and getting to switch back-and-forth at night between the hockey playoffs and baseball—although I have to admit, as much as I love baseball it is tough to take your eyes off a hockey game that is either tied or a one goal game. On the rare occasion of a blowout, then you move over to the baseball. The last two nights I haven’t seen a lot of baseball—although I did get to see some of the Mets win over the Rockies yesterday afternoon. My guess is they will never lose another game. Omar has a plan.

That’s an issue for later. For now, I’ll look forward to seeing if the favorites can bounce back in their game twos (they usually do but not always) and I can’t wait until—almost inevitably—there are game sevens. There’s nothing quite like a game seven in a hockey playoff in sports EXCEPT a game seven that goes into overtime.

*****

One note on my Vin Scully/baseball broadcasters column on Wednesday: I would NEVER slight Ernie Harwell, who was wonderful to listen to (I used to be able to pick him up on WJR 760 at night when I was younger) and an absolute mensch—as my mother would say—as a human being. I was focusing on guys who are still working on Wednesday but completely agree with all the comments on Ernie. And for the guy who confused SKIP Caray with CHIP Caray, SKIP was one of the great characters both behind a microphone and in person. I once asked him how old his dad (Harry) was and he said, “Well, ten years ago dad was 74. Now I think he’s 72. I figure I’ll go past him in another dozen years or so."

The Beauty of Baseball – a Year Without Pennant Races Still Gives Reasons to Listen

I was looking at the baseball standings this morning--as I do every morning throughout the season--and a lamenting the fact that there are no pennant races to speak of with two-and-a-half weeks left until the end of the season. Oh sure, someone might make a late run--less likely, I suppose since the Mets aren't leading a division--but it certainly looks as if the division winners will be the Yankees, Tigers, Angels, Phillies, Cardinals and Dodgers with the Red Sox and Rockies as the wild cards.

That's a shame, because there is nothing quite like the day-to-day suspense of the last couple of weeks of a real pennant race, emotions sliding up and down the scale on an almost inning-by-inning basis. One of my most vivid baseball memories is being in Boston in 1978 on a vacation in mid-September while the Yankees and Red Sox were staging their historic race that culminated in the "Bucky bleeping Dent," game on my mother's birthday that October.

I was a year out of college and was the cops and courts reporter in Prince George's County, Maryland for The Post. I took a few days off to visit two friends who were in law school and business school in Boston. Every night we watched the Red Sox and found a radio to pick up the Yankees on the radio. On a Sunday afternoon we went sightseeing, driving up to see Salem and Gloucester. We listened to both games on the radio--I'm not exactly sure how we got the Yankees signal in the afternoon, but we did--switching back and forth constantly. My friends were both Red Sox fans. Being a Mets fan, I was just a spectator, but loved every second of it.

I also remember devouring the Boston papers every morning. There wasn't an aspect of the race that wasn't covered in great detail. When I got back to Washington I walked into George Solomon's office. He was the sports editor and I was still doing a lot of work for sports even though I was on the Metro staff. "You know what George," I said, still exhilarated by the week in Boston. "You just can't be a real sports town without a baseball team."

"Get out," Solomon said and went back to editing the seven "Skins prepare for Lions," stories the paper was running the next day.

I love college basketball, I love golf and I love football--preferably the college game. I'm a huge hockey fan and I still really like to watch tennis although covering it would make me nuts because the people involved in the sport--especially those who run it--are so completely clueless. As an old swimmer I enjoy watching swimming on almost any level and I can still get chills watching the Olympics on those rare moments when NBC isn't showing figure skating or gymnastics.

But there's nothing like baseball for me. My ex-wife once commented in a pejorative way that baseball was, "ubiquitous." That's exactly what I love about it. Tonight, I will be in my car driving back from New York. I do not have satellite radio simply because I'm too lazy to get around to having it put in my car. The other reason is that I know when I'm driving at night I can pick up the Mets, the Yankees, the Phillies, the Red Sox, the Orioles and, most nights, the White Sox on my radio if I'm anywhere on the east coast. If I venture into the midwest I can get the Pirates, the Indians, the Cardinals (who can sometimes be found on the east coast) the Tigers and the Cubs. Someone is always on.

And, even without serious pennant races, there's always good reason to listen. Two weekends ago, when I was in Ohio for the Navy-Ohio State game I listened to the Indians and Twins for a little while on Friday and for a long time on Saturday. My old friend Tom Hamilton does the Indians play-by-play and what was remarkable was that if you closed your eyes and just listened (not a great idea while driving) you'd have thought the Indians and Twins circa 2009 were the Yankees and Red Sox circa 1978. Tom was enthusiastic about the game itself, kept explaining why it was so important to the Twins and talked about the young players the Indians had in their lineup and what they hoped to see from them in 2010.

That's the other thing about baseball: even when the Indians are 18 games under .500, even when the Mets have collapsed, there is always the hope of spring training the next year. I know that's true of other sports but does anything feel quite like spring training. If you live, as most of us do, in a place where there is snow on the ground in February or at the very least it's damn cold, the site of baseball players pitching and catching in Florida and Arizona always makes us feel good. Our team is undefeated and warm weather can't be that far away if spring training has started.

Tonight I'll switch back and forth as I head down the New Jersey Turnpike. I'll listen to the Yankees for a while so that John Sterling can explain to me why A-Rod is really a good guy if you know him and so my old friend Suzyn Waldman can use the phrase, "our old friend," about 100 times. I'll switch over to the Mets and listen to Howie Rose subtly pick apart the team he and I both grew up loving and then I'll pick up the Phillies and the Orioles as I get closer to Washington. The trip--once I get out of Manhattan--will take about four hours. It won't feel nearly that long.

As I write this, Ernie Harwell has been diagnosed with cancer at the age of 92. No one ever broadcast baseball better than Ernie Harwell did--first with the Orioles long, long ago and then for years with the Tigers. Harwell always had that southern lilt to his voice and he knew exactly when to raise it and when not to. Unlike a lot of today's broadcasters he didn't scream about an RBI single in the first as if it was Kirk Gibson's home run in the '88 World Series.

He is also one of the nicest and most generous men I've ever met. When the Tigers management had the ridiculous notion that firing him after the 1991 season might be a good idea, Harwell never ripped the franchise publicly, even though he was hurt. It didn't take long--less than a season--for the Tigers to realize they'd made a mistake. That's no knock on Bob Rathbun and Rick Rizzs, his successors who were (and are) very solid baseball broadcasters. But there is only one Ernie Harwell and, fortunately, Tom Monaghan figured that out before the 1992 season was over.

I miss listening to Ernie. I still LOVE getting the chance to hear Vin Scully and I really miss Bob Murphy, who I grew up with as a Mets fan. Murph retired in, I think 2002, after doing Mets games for 40 years. On the night of his last broadcast I was giving a speech on the eastern shore of Maryland. When I was finished, I explained to the guy running the dinner that, while I'd like to stay and mingle, I HAD to get to my car and get home.

I was telling the truth--sort of. I had to get to my car so I could flip on WFAN and hear Murph's last call. The Mets lost 4-1 to the Pirates that night. I was on the Bay Bridge as the bottom of the ninth began. Murph's signature was always to say at the end of a Mets win, "we'll be back with the happy recap." It was pretty apparent there wasn't going to be a happy recap for Murph's final game. He knew it too. So, as the ninth began he said, "well, the Mets are going to need to rally here if there's going to be one last happy recap."

The Mets didn't rally. But I had a big smile on my face hearing Murph talk about the happy recap one last time.

And women wonder why all men cry when Kevin Costner says, "Hey dad...want to have a catch," at the end of "Field of Dreams."