OK, here we go again. Sports and God. God and sports, and that old question: Why do many journalists ignore the faith component in the lives of some sports heroes and celebrities?
If you read GetReligion, you know that Vin Scully — the greatest sports broadcaster ever (click here for a collection of his greatest hits) — was a faithful Catholic and that this was a big part of his life, that is if you paid attention to the actions of the man himself. Bobby Ross, Jr. — one of several baseball fanatics who have written for GetReligion — has written about Scully’s faith several times (click here and then here).
It also helps to click on this YouTube link and then close your eyes as you listen to that famous Scully voice speak these words, probably from memory:
Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
I don’t know about you, but I think that the whole “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death” thing might have been relevant when writing a mainstream media obituary for Scully.
Sure enough, readers who dig into the lengthy New York Times obit for the legendary Dodgers broadcaster — Brooklyn before Los Angeles, of course — will learn that Scully went to a Catholic prep school, played for a Catholic baseball team and graduated from a Catholic University. All of that, without a single mention of the word “Catholic.” How did the Gray Lady pull that off? Here’s a hint:
For all the Dodgers’ marquee players since World War II, Mr. Scully was the enduring face of the franchise. He was a national sports treasure as well, broadcasting for CBS and NBC. He called baseball’s Game of the Week, All-Star Games, the playoffs and more than two dozen World Series. In 2009, the American Sportscasters Association voted him No. 1 on its list of the “Top 50 Sportscasters of All Time.”
Mr. Scully began broadcasting at Ebbets Field in 1950, when he was a slender, red-haired 22-year-old graduate of Fordham University and a protégé of Red Barber.
Ah, the word “Fordham” stands in for “Catholic,” in several crucial references. That’s the ticket.
Today, Fordham is nationally known for putting the “liberal” in “liberal arts,” but in the pre-Vatican II days, this famous Jesuit university and its prep school were probably intensely Catholic, even in terms of doctrine and the practice of the faith.
Nevertheless, the Times obit doesn’t contain a single reference to Scully’s Christian faith. I wish there was something even vaguely spiritual to quote, but there isn’t.
Is this Catholic angle relevant? I thought this summary — from a Catholic website, of course — is pretty effective. The headline: “The life, faith, and death of Vin Scully and our longing for God.”
In terms of material appropriate for a mainstream news obit, the key is what Scully said when it came time to sign off, after 67 years on the air:
A devout Catholic, he often said his faith helped him cope with the deaths of his first wife, Joan, from an accidental medical overdose, and the death of his son Michael in a helicopter accident. When he was honored at Dodger Stadium in 2016, his final season with the team, he mentioned his childhood dream of being a sports broadcaster.
Then he said, “I had a child’s dream, and the grace of God not only gave me the fulfillment of my dream, he gave it for sixty-seven years.”
Part of his signoff for his final Dodgers broadcast included this message:
May God give you for every storm, a rainbow,
For every tear, a smile,
For every care, a promise,
And a blessing in each trial.
For every problem life sends,
A faithful friend to share,
For every sigh, a sweet song,
And an answer for each prayer.
Well, what about ESPN? After all, your GetReligionistas have frequently been critical of the sports Mother Ship’s tendency to avoid direct references to religious faith, even in the most obvious cases (click here for some samples).
As you would expect, ESPN — like other elite publications — captured the great sweep of this man’s “iconic” — that’s the right word — career. The headline: “Vin Scully, iconic former Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster, dies at age 94.” Here’s a typical passage:
As the longest-tenured broadcaster with a single team in pro sports history, Scully saw it all and called it all. He began in the 1950s era of Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson, on to the 1960s with Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, into the 1970s with Steve Garvey and Don Sutton, and through the 1980s with Orel Hershiser and Fernando Valenzuela. In the 1990s, it was Mike Piazza and Hideo Nomo, followed by Clayton Kershaw, Manny Ramirez and Yasiel Puig in the 21st century.
"He was the best there ever was," Kershaw said after the Dodgers' game Tuesday night in San Francisco. "Just when you think about the Dodgers, there's a lot of history here and a lot of people that have come through. It's just a storied franchise all the way around. But it almost starts with Vin, honestly.
"Just such a special man. I'm grateful and thankful I got to know him as well as I did."
Would it help to know that Kershaw is a very outspoken Christian? Maybe.
However, it’s time for a word of praise. In this case, the ESPN team came through with a totally relevant remark drawn from another symbolic moment in this amazing life. Here is that passage, with a crucial factual Mass detail, showing the larger context:
Scully was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame that year and had the stadium's press box named for him in 2001. The street leading to Dodger Stadium's main gate was named in his honor in 2016.
That same year, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
"God has been so good to me to allow me to do what I'm doing," Scully, a devout Catholic who attended Mass on Sundays before heading to the ballpark, said before retiring. "A childhood dream that came to pass and then giving me 67 years to enjoy every minute of it. That's a pretty large Thanksgiving Day for me."
Now, that wasn’t very hard, was it? Bravo.
I could end with lots of quotes from Scully tributes offered by — #DUH — Catholic and religious publications. After all, that’s where religious facts and themes are supposed to be printed. I will settle for something subtle from this Jesse Cone essay at First Things: “What Vin Scully Taught Me.”
Is this passage about faith? You be the judge:
I, like so many others, learned to see baseball through Vin’s eyes. He’d help you see possibilities: Maybe they will hit and run, or pitch around this batter, or try to throw inside. Baseball is tremendously complicated, and if you spent time listening to Vin, you’d begin to see it blossom. Baseball is one of those distinctly human things that the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls a “practice”: a particularly elevated kind of cooperative human activity. Practices (like chess or playing the piano) reveal goods internal to it; in other words, people who excel at the practice hone skills that we praise. The pitcher who can throw his fastball and his changeup with the same motion, the hitter who can hit to the right side in order to move the runner — these are “good.” When we learn a practice, MacIntyre suggests, we begin to understand what it means to have a virtue. We start to understand what it means to be an excellent person by learning what it means to be an excellent practitioner of an art. Vin showed us, in the scaled-down cosmos of the baseball field, what it means to be an excellent practitioner of the art of baseball — and thereby, helped us understand something between the foul lines that we couldn’t see in our tabloids and tablets: virtue.
May his memory be eternal.
FIRST IMAGE: Promotion photo featured by Crux in a tweet for this 2016 feature: “Vin Scully is back on the air, this time calling the Rosary.”