RIP Curt Gowdy

Curt Gowdy, sportscaster, passed away yesterday (February 20th, '06) at age 86. I read that he had had a long battle with leukemia.

It was Curt Gowdy's voice that introduced me to broadcast sports. It was his voice on the radio, together with Ned Martin's, that was snuggled up on the pillow with the 10-year-old not-too-athletic boy after bedtime, the 1960 pocket transistor radio turned way down low so that the dreaded Mother could not hear that her eldest son was listening to the Red Sox after bedtime, instead of sleeping like he was supposed to be doing. There were no headphones in those days, at least none our family could afford even if they would have been tolerated, and the "ear buds" that did come with the radios were dreadful things. So it was tin speaker all the way - and begging for batteries the next day, after the little lad fell asleep with the ball game in the sixth inning, and the radio died of big band music at three in the morning with no one to hear.

I became aware too late for Ted Williams, and too early for 1967's Impossible Dream. The Red Sox in the 1960s were horrible. Carl Yastrzemski was still the poor kid trembling in the giant boots of the Splendid Splinter. Rico Petrocelli was a whisper in the minors; Fred Lynn, Jim Rice and Carlton Fisk, in Little League. You prayed for a start by Bill Monbouquette as the best small chance for a win, or that the team would somehow last long enough for Dick Radatz (another recent casualty of the sea puss's claw) to get into the game and blow the Yankees away.

It didn't really matter. Gowdy's voice was enough for a summer's evening. Until the great jolt, the criminal unfaithfulness, the spring morning in 1965 when Gowdy was gone and this miserable upstart Ken Coleman took his place alongside Ned Martin. How dare he? In 1965, our TV was still black and white and heavily rationed, so it wasn't until much later that I realized that Gowdy had gone national. That I wasn't good enough for him. My introduction and acclimation to the message I would get from women the rest of my life. (Another time.) When I got over the shock, and learned enough to know what this meant, I was happy for him. And he had a good run. A very good run. A little bit of a garrulous old windbag near the end, but hey. I should be so lucky.

A couple of years ago, the current Red Sox broadcasters had both Gowdy and Coleman in the booth. It was a mutual admiration society, but it didn't matter. It was like old times, except that the fortunes of the Red Sox were much different than in the earlier years of the 1960s.

Now they're both gone. Requiescat in pace. OK, reductus in pulvis if you must, Mr. Bierce. Your fate and mine, as well as theirs. I will keep my memories of the voices, their calls of the fleeting glories of sports, as long as I may.

  - O Ceallaigh

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