Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.
* * *
With the Dodgers playing in the 2024 World Series this column, near the top of my archives from 2022, seems fitting to rerun today…
*
As with every Dodgers fan—no, every baseball fan no matter their team affiliation—news of Vin Scully’s death at age 94 gripped my heart and squeezed my wife’s tear ducts. A moment later, we smiled and laughed.
Yes, laughter among the sorrow because we both reached far back to the time the home phone rang and my wife answered and the velvety voice on the other end of the line was unmistakable even before the caller identified himself.
Lisa, unaware I had been trying to set up an interview, didn’t believe here ears. “You aren’t Vin Scully,” she said after he gave his name, amused at one of my friends’ lame jokes…
…and hung up.
The phone promptly rang again, The Golden Voice again asked if I was home, and Lisa instantly realized her embarrassing mistake.
A few days later, I didn’t interview Scully so much as pull up a chair in his Dodger Stadium radio booth long before that night’s game and listen to his enchanted storytelling for an hour.
About a year later we crossed paths at a gala dinner honoring another Southland legend, Jim Murray, washing our hands in the restroom. Remarkably, Scully greeted me by name, but the greater display of his peerless people skills was his insistence I come meet his wife. In turn, I introduced him to Lisa—albeit without mentioning the phone hang up.
Scully’s geniality in person was as authentic as it was on the airwaves.
“I enjoy people, so I don’t mind autograph requests at all,” he told me. “Why not sign? They’re paying me a compliment by asking.”
And what were some of the stranger “compliments”?
“I’ve signed a lot of baseballs, as you can imagine,” he shared. “But also golf balls and even a hockey puck, which is sort of strange. Paper napkins seem popular, even dirty napkins – I think it’s all they have on hand. I don’t expect them to keep it, but I sign anyway because hopefully they will keep the moment.”
How many magical moments did Vin—didn’t he make us all feel like we knew him on a first-name basis?—give us during his 67 years behind the Dodgers’ microphone? Count the stars in the sky and you might have the answer.
Here is another of my favorite personal moments that I keep wrapped in red velvet. Our interview concluded, I asked The Greatest Sports Broadcaster Ever if he would put me in the batter’s box in Dodger Stadium. Oh, how I wish I had recorded his imaginary call of my one-and-only Major League at-bat.
In my mind’s ear, nonetheless, I can hear it still as he announced me digging in at the plate to face the great fireballer, Bob Gibson, who promptly brushed me back with the first pitch: “Gibson says, ‘Welcome to the Big Leagues, Mr. Woodburn,’ ” said Scully.
Next pitch, I swung at a fastball after it was already in the catcher’s mitt, yet somehow “the tall, lanky kid from Ventura”—for I was magically no longer approaching 40 years old—fouled off a couple pitches and eventually worked the count full, 3-and-2.
Scully ended my fantasy with a wink, not a home run. Like “Casey at the Bat”, mighty Woody struck out. It was perfect.
Perfect, too, was Scully’s succinct answer when asked how he would want God to greet him in heaven: “Well done.”
Well done, Vincent Edward Scully. Well done, indeed.
* * *
Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
*
Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.