Thursday, September 21, 1995
Seattle Times
The Summer I Fell In Love With Dave Niehaus
Terry McDermott
I first realized I was falling in love with Dave Niehaus sometime in the late summer of 1985. It was at night – these things always happen at night, don’t they? I was running up U.S. 97 out of Wapato. The moon was bright, the August air still as stone. I was alone.
It was my first year with the Mariners, already Niehaus’s ninth as the team’s radio broadcaster. It was late. The Mariners were losing and it suddenly occurred to me I didn’t care. I wasn’t listening to the game. I was listening to Niehaus.
“The right-hander sets, checks the runners,” Niehaus said. “He delivers the 1-2 pitch. Breaking ball.”
Then came the word that did it: “Looooooooowwwwwwwwww.”
That ball-two call stretched out through the Yakima Valley to the Cascades, impossibly deep and long and rich. It soothed. It hurt. It had in it the ache of cattle braying on the plains. It had the idle joy of Niehaus’s southern Indiana youth.
Harry Caray coming in out of St. Louis on KMOX. Watermelon cooling in a No. 10 washtub. Mama’s got the sun tea ready. Fireflies flashing. Run to get a Mason jar and jab holes in the lid with an ice pick. Squash the bugs and pull the lights off just to see how long they glow.
“That’s baseball. And that’s radio. The mud and the bugs and the smell of stale beer,” Niehaus said last night. “The theater of the mind.”
Niehaus has waited ever since for a summer when baseball would come that alive, when he could do what he is doing right now – calling a pennant race. Last night, for the first time in the club’s history, the Mariners moved into first place at a time in the season when it meant something to be there.
It’s never been work; now it’s a joy. He’s a fan and he’s rooting for the Mariners to win their division, the pennant, everything. But even if the team falters, he already has what he came to get. He has spurned jobs in bigger places for more money so that he can be here now.
Fans see in him somebody who likes what they like. They send him homemade pies and asparagus and Walla Walla onions. Jams and jellies. Boxes of them. Crates of them.
“I’m glad I stuck it out. This town has been incredibly patient. To see the fans so happy, to know what a pennant race is really like. Even if we don’t win it, they’ll know what it was like to be here.”
Like all great artists, Niehaus gives the impression he is artless, that you could do what he does. You could not.
He prepares but never practices. He almost never thinks about what he will say or has said. He asks; the words answer. He laughs, parts the air with hands and arms, enjoying the sound of the words as they come sailing out.
Early in a game he pours forth information and anecdotes, decanting the day. Last night’s game was all romp and celebration. Niehaus was effusive.
Okey-dokey, he said, starting the third. That’s a can of corn, he said, ending the fourth.
Later, California’s dauber was said to be completely down and Vince Coleman’s first two hits were “a brace of doubles. . . . The first one was a leg double. This one was just a little parachute job that took a kangaroo hop on the Astro-turf.”
By late night his voice eases. The bits of gravel in it get smaller as the night wears out and he gains some distance on the previous day’s smoke and drink. He is at his best then, when a tight game finds its rhythm. He adjusts to the gait and begins to measure what he says, rubbing words gently onto the action, adjusting pitch and cadence to the story as it builds, then erupting.
“My oh my,” he’ll shout, rearing back from his seat to watch a ball sail into the stands. “That will fly away.”
After a routinely spectacular catch at the left-centerfield wall by Ken Griffey Jr., Niehaus last night whispered, “Junior, you’re amazing.” Yet he is no idolator. It is not the players he praises. It is us.
Bart Giamatti, the late classicist who somehow ended up commissioner of baseball, once wrote that games were ways of remembering “our best hopes.” It’s to this sense of memory and fable that Niehaus genuflects.
Today’s an off day. The team and its fans will have at least another 24 hours to relish first place. For Niehaus, the joy has already been made myth. It will last forever.