Wire to Wire

by George Cantor

  24. Tearful Celebration

  He was the other voice in the radio booth.

  For 19 seasons, including 1984, Paul Carey sat beside the legendary Ernie Harwell, complementing the Hall-of-Fame broadcaster with his rich, full baritone and imperturbable presence.

  Or maybe it only seemed imperturbable.

  “The single most important thing I learned from Ernie was patience,” says the retired Carey, as we sit at the kitchen table in his condo in the northern suburbs of Detroit.

  “I came to the Tigers job from doing basketball play-by-play with the Pistons, and it seemed that when you did NBA games you were expected to question the officials. Maybe I didn’t do it as often as Johnny Most did in Boston, but the Pistons were not a very good team when I was there, and it seemed they were always getting bad calls.

  “Besides, I had been a Tigers fan since 1935 and a loss was hard to accept. So when I started taking exception to some umpiring calls over the air in my first year with the Tigers, Ernie quietly reminded me that it’s a long season. You can’t get too upset or too excited about any one game, because there will be another one the next day. You try to keep it balanced and just describe what you see. That was a valuable lesson and he was the model for that sort of reporting.”

  Although describing what the ’84 Tigers did was an unforgettable professional experience for Carey, it was also a time filled with enormous personal sorrow.

  In the midst of Detroit’s World Series triumph, he learned that his wife, Patti, was dying of a malignant brain tumor.

  “She had started feeling bad late that summer,” he says. “No energy and horrible headaches. By the time we started the playoffs with Kansas City, I knew she had to see a doctor right away.

  “We swept the Royals and I remember watching the National League playoffs and hoping so hard that Chicago would win because I didn’t want to go all the way out to San Diego with Patti at home.

  “The wives were invited to come on the team plane to California, but by that time it was out of the question for Patti to travel. I took her in for a CAT scan as soon as we got back to Detroit. The morning of the first Series game at home I got a call from her doctor. He said he had to study it a bit more, but that he saw a mass there and it didn’t look good.

  “I made up my mind right then that if the Series went back to San Diego, I wasn’t going out there. I had been on the road covering things when my dad and my mom died. I wouldn’t be gone when my wife was facing death.

  “Maybe that’s why my memories of the Series are a little bit hazy. I think it’s a human tendency to block out terrible things. I have no recall of how I got through those next three games in Detroit. I do know that when Lance Parrish and Kirk Gibson hit those home runs in the fifth game I felt a terrific surge of relief because it was going to be over that night. At least I had that part of it off my shoulders.”

  It was Carey’s assignment to go into the Tigers clubhouse afterward and interview the victorious players.

  “I must have been down there for an hour or more after the game had ended,” he says. “When I finished I had a towel draped around me, because the champagne had been squirting all over the place, and I was drenched in sweat because they never air-conditioned that place properly. I was still clutching a longneck beer someone had handed me.

  “All I remember thinking is that, ‘It’s over.’ I had finally been with a winner for the first time in my career as a broadcaster, and I couldn’t revel in it. I just sat down and drank the beer as the clubhouse emptied out.

  “I went back up to the booth where my brother and his wife were waiting. And the thing I remember is the clods of turf that were stuck in the netting. People had just ripped them up from the field and tossed them at the booth, and I stood there and thought how peculiar that looked. By the time we left the ballpark, the streets were empty. The riot was over and they had taken the burned police car away. It was just emptiness.

  “Patti lived for four more months, and then I left for another spring training.”

  Carey was in the booth with Harwell from 1973 through 1991, and while he listened closely, Carey never tried to copy Harwell’s mannerisms.

  “I think Ernie may have been a little distant at the start because he thought I hadn’t paid my dues as a baseball announcer,” he says. “That was the plum of all play-by-play jobs, but my background had been in football and basketball and as a studio guy at WJR. But once he saw I could handle it, we became close.

  “He was such a kind and generous man to work with. He always took the last three innings of every game but when Randy Johnson was pitching a no- hitter against the Tigers one year, he wanted me to take the bottom of the ninth so I could call it. I refused, because that would have been making the announcer more important than the event.

  “I never believed in that business about developing a trademark call for home runs, either. Even Ernie didn’t start saying ‘It’s lonnnng gone’ until later in his career. If anyone influenced me it was Harry Heilmann. I grew up listening to him do the Tigers games and he never tried to intrude on the game. Oh, there was that business when he was sponsored by Bug-a-Boo pest spray, and when-ever an outfielder caught a ball he’d say, “That fly is dead, just like Bug-a-Boo.” I could never do that.

  “Some announcers will tell you that a home run is the toughest call to make. But in Tiger Stadium that wasn’t a problem. There was that terrific backdrop and you could tell whether it was a home run or not from the sound and the way the outfielders reacted. It’s a lot harder in Comerica Park. I lose the ball almost every time it goes up there because it’s so open.

  “For me the toughest call was men on first and second and someone hits the ball up the gap. You’ve got two runners trying to score, a relay developing, a batter trying for extra bases. Things are going on all at once in different parts of the field, and you’ve got to follow it all and keep the names straight, too. You are telling a very complicated story very quickly.”

  Carey’s clearest memory of ’84 was the confidence the team had from the start.

  “Just before we left Lakeland that spring, the local paper did the traditional story, asking various people where they thought the Tigers would finish. I picked them for third place in the Eastern Division.

  “Well, Parrish and Gibson picked up that paper and they were all over my case. They kept telling me that I didn’t have a clue about what was going on with that team. They knew they were going to win it.

  “I know that some of the print guys had problems with a few of those players. I think that was the season Jack Morris announced that he wasn’t talking to any media. But Ernie would go up to him and talk, because there wasn’t anybody who wouldn’t talk to Ernie. So I figured if he talked to Ernie, he’d talk to me, and we got along fine.

  “I never tried to push myself on anyone. I know that everyone has their moods and I just tried to pick the right time for an interview. I never felt I had a God-given right to one.

  “Now someone like Chet Lemon was approachable all the time. You asked him one question and he was good for three or four minutes. With Lou Whitaker you knew it was going to be a chore. But that was just Lou.”

  Carey is happily remarried. He and his wife spend the cold weather months on the Alabama Gulf Coast and return to Michigan for the good seasons.

  He remains a low-key guy. Even the day on which he announced his retirement in 1991 was overshadowed by the simultaneous revelation that the Tigers were dumping Harwell, a public relations blunder that haunted the franchise for years.

  “I’m not a collector,” Carey says. “I never went in for that sort of thing. A few photographs and that’s about all.

  “Even the seasons tend to run together after a while. I know I must have done the call when Dave Bergman hit that home run off Roy Lee Jackson. It was the tenth inning and I always did th
e tenth.

  “I remember what a great at-bat it was for Dave and how important that game was for the Tigers. But what I said, how I made the call, I have no idea.”

  Because that would have been too much of an intrusion. And Paul Carey never intruded on the game.

  Evans (left) and Morris are joined on the field by fans and a groundskeeper after the Tigers clinched the American League pennant on October 5.

  Paul Carey’s understated style in the radio booth became the accepted manner for Tigers announcers throughout the team’s history. The shouters and screamers went elsewhere. In Detroit, the game was the thing.

  The pattern was set at the dawn of broadcast baseball by Ty Tyson, whose calm and witty descriptions were a beloved part of the team’s success during the thirties. After him was Harry Heilmann, a well-regarded former star whose home-run call (“It’s trouble, trouble.”) was imitated by a generation of Detroit fans.

  The highly dramatic presentation of Van Patrick, who broadcast Tigers games during the fifties, was an exception. Patrick loved to hype the action, a style he had polished while broadcasting games for three world champion Detroit Lions teams.

  But it was the calm, reportorial approach of Ernie Harwell that was the gold standard. Harwell let the game tell the story and always managed to come up with the felicitous phrase that would advance or summarize the scenario. He and Carey made one of the most easy- going, informed, and listenable broadcast teams in the big leagues.

  25. Gibby

  There were times when he seemed to be playing in a white rage.

  Baseball was not so much a game with Kirk Gibson as it was a war of wills. Who will lose the will to compete? Who will be intimidated? Who can best subdue his own inner demons?

  The statistics tell nothing. You had to see him play during his prime, as brief as it was, to understand what a force the man was. An elemental energy, a laser gun that could dissolve anything that got in its way.

  That is why when Tigers fans voted for their all-time 20th century team, they placed Gibson in the outfield—along with Ty Cobb and Al Kaline.

  To the purists, that was wrong. His numbers certainly didn’t match up with Harry Heilmann or Sam Crawford, two Hall of Famers who are towering figures in the franchise’s past.

  But they played a very long time ago. To those who voted in this election, they were only names. But the voters had watched Gibson play, and they didn’t forget what they saw.

  As a former football hero at Michigan State who could have become one of the top wide receivers in the NFL, few players in the team’s history have ever come to the Tigers freighted with the expectations that Gibson carried.

  He had size and speed, and he was a local kid, having grown up in the Oakland County suburbs. Then Sparky had to go and say that he had “a chance to be the next Mickey Mantle.” That tore it. Who could live up to that?

  There were times when it seemed too much even for Gibson to haul on his broad back.

  “The man I’ve got to give a lot of the credit to is Jim Leyland,” he says. “He was my first manager in the minors. He picked me up at the airport when I flew down to join the Lakeland team and he aired me right out. He told me he didn’t care where the Tigers had drafted me. What I had done in college meant nothing to him.

  “I was going to be on the field at 8:00 a.m. listening to what he said. And if I didn’t, he told me that he would send me home to my momma. I really believe he would have fought me, the little shit.

  “But you know he busted me, he challenged me, he demanded respect. It didn’t hurt me. His job was to get me to the bigs. I understood that later. And he was instrumental in making that happen.”

  Then he was turned over to the tender mercies of Sparky Anderson. Sparky finished what Leyland began.

  “He took me to my knees,” says Gibson. “He let me struggle when it was going bad. Man, I had some fights with him but he kept the priorities straight.

  “I had a pretty good game early in my career, won it with a home run. All the media was around my locker afterward and I was feeling pretty good about myself.

  “After they all left I noticed that Sparky was still sitting in his office. He motioned for me to come in and then he shut the door.

  “‘The only reason you got a chance to win that game,’ he said, ‘was the play that Lou Whitaker made in the top half of the inning. Did you mention that to the press?’

  “He was telling me that we can’t accomplish anything in this game by ourselves. Without the support of your teammates, it means nothing. I should have acknowledged what Lou did.

  “I never forgot that. It shaped what I did in baseball.” For his part, Sparky waves off such testimonials. “Ahh, Gibby was easy,” he says. “He was a cinch.

  “You start with a man who is very intelligent, with great knowledge of human behavior, and all that natural talent. The rest falls into place. He didn’t have to understand what the manager was doing. That wasn’t his job. But I had to understand his situation.

  “It didn’t take him long to pick up on what I was trying to do. He came from being the Almighty in college to just being one of the troops. I had to show him that’s where his leadership had to come from, by his actions with the rest of his teammates.

  “It’s very gracious of him to say nice things about me and I like to hear it. But I liked Gibby so much. My only regret was that he didn’t play more baseball in college, because when he came to us he still was a raw talent. If he had been given those few extra years with the game, there’s no telling what he could have done.”

  Gibson is sitting in his office, tucked away in a nondescript ground-floor space in an unobtrusive Grosse Pointe Park building. A shredding machine is chopping away on the desk behind him. Oversized posters of his heroic moments with the Tigers and Dodgers are on the walls.

  He has enjoyed success after retiring from the game by running an investment firm. But the call is too strong. Although it won’t be announced for a few days after we talk, he has already accepted an offer from Trammell to come back to the Tigers as a bench coach. It is another challenge. There can never be enough for him.

  “After you fail, you have two choices,” Gibson says. “You can sit there and shake your head and say, ‘Gee, I failed.’ Or you can tell yourself that you can perform better. The only thing that counts is what you say after you failed the last time.

  “My season in 1983 had been a failure. What did I end up hitting? Something like .227.

  “I was at the point in my career where Sparky couldn’t protect me anymore. I had to go out and do it on a daily basis.

  “That’s when I went out to the Pacific Institute in Seattle. Really, to understand who I was. Not just as a baseball player but what my role in life was. Did I have the ability to overcome, to persevere? Was I willing to accept my role?

  “I call it defeating the Beast. This is the lifelong battle with the voice within you that tells you to abandon your dreams, accept defeat, and fills your head with doubts. That’s the Beast.

  “It’s a game within yourself. As an athlete I defined it as an unwillingness to concede mentally, to keep pressing my opponent until I can dominate him. That’s my job.

  “And to do that you try to create a positive scenario in which you accomplish that goal. I tell young players to try to visualize success. That’s how you defeat the Beast.

  “As a player, I was a vocal, emotional guy. Sparky knew how much I could take on my shoulders, and he put a lot there. That was his skill as a manager. He knew when to turn the juice on.

  “He called the nucleus of the team in and made it clear what he expected us to do. ‘Don’t worry about so and so,’ he said, ‘I’ll take care of him. You guys keep yourselves ready.’

  “So there was never any hesitation about getting in each other’s faces. I had such tremendo
us respect for Darrell Evans. But he could call me out, get on my ass, and I could do the same to him. Because it was all constructive, we were all working together for the same thing. We lived the game.”

  One of the things Gibson couldn’t overcome was the media. It was a time in which both of Detroit’s daily papers had climbed aboard the gossip trend, and lo! Gibson’s name led all the rest on a regular basis.

  He was linked with any number of women, seen in every saloon in town. Much of it was painful for him, because it affected his relationship with the woman he would eventually marry.

  So he made a big mistake. He tried to fire back, which only gave the writers more fodder. His relationship with the Tigers’ beat writers was also tenuous, consisting primarily of shouts and curses.

  “I was prepared for everything but the media,” he says. “I had high expectations of myself. I planned on being in the starting lineup from day one.

  “I’ve always been a fighter, but I was totally overmatched. I was fighting city hall. I didn’t understand my role.

  “I put my uniform on and I was ready to go to battle. I didn’t want to talk. You wanna race me? You wanna try to tackle me? I’ll knock the shit out of you. That was my attitude. But eventually you learn how to be a professional. With me it just took a little longer.”

  After the playoffs with Kansas City, the mood was subdued among the Tigers.

  “There are certain things you try not to let yourself acknowledge as a player,” Gibson says. “The fear that things can turn on you. You don’t even say it, but you sense it.

  “You have to check these things inside your head. But they’re still there. And we knew that unless we went out to San Diego and took care of business, none of this would be remembered.”

  As the Tigers boarded their plane for California, Gibson’s thoughts were with Goose Gossage. He had struck Gibson out on his first time at bat in the majors and dominated him ever since. He knew that somewhere in the Series it might well come down to him against Gossage.