Game Six (38 page)

DICK STOCKTON
, whose call of Fisk’s home run offered such perfect accompaniment to a classic moment, thrived in the aftermath of Game Six. The attention that came his way as a result of his outstanding work in the 1975 Series not only soon resulted in a long-term national contract with CBS Sports, he also got the girl: Stockton and
Boston Globe
reporter Lesley Visser had their first dinner date in Boston a week after Game Six. He took her to the romantic, Hungarian-themed Café Budapest at a downtown hotel. One of Lesley’s girlfriends pointed out to her that this would be the
third
time in less than a week that the dapper Stockton had squired a date to that particular restaurant; when Lesley brought that up to Dick over dinner, he responded with a twinkling candor that helped his cause: “What can I say? I like the chicken
paprikash.”
Dick and Lesley
married a few years later, and remain married, happily so, to this day. After establishing her own career as a sportswriter, Lesley became a pioneering figure among female sportscasters for CBS, the first woman beat reporter ever to cover the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and the National Basketball Association, while serving on the broadcast team for every major event in American sports. In 2006, she became the first woman ever honored by the Pro Football Hall of Fame, for her contributions to their game as a broadcaster. Dick Stockton’s long and distinguished career has touched just as many bases, as the lead play-by-play man for the NBA during the 1980s, and during two decades covering pro football and Major League Baseball for Fox and basketball for TNT, where he continues to appear. In 2001, Stockton was given the Curt Gowdy Award by the Basketball Hall of Fame for his outstanding contributions to the sport. His smooth, informed style and thorough professionalism has never wavered, and remains an asset to any contest he covers.

Curt Gowdy, who covered Game Six on radio for NBC, left the network’s baseball broadcast team shortly after the 1975 World Series ended, when lead sponsor Chrysler expressed a preference that Joe Garagiola—already on their payroll as a corporate spokesman—become baseball’s number one voice. Gowdy stayed on to cover football for NBC until 1978, then split his time between CBS and ABC, working for his close friend Roone Arledge, with whom years earlier he had co-created the groundbreaking series
Wide World of Sports.
Gowdy continued to cover countless other sporting events—in a prodigious career that included, to name just a few highlights, thirteen World Series, nine Super Bowls, and eight Olympic Games—and produced and hosted the show closest to his heart and Wyoming roots,
The American Sportsman.
In 1984, Gowdy became the first broadcaster associated with Game Six to be given baseball’s Ford C. Frick Award, bestowed annually since 1978 to a broadcaster who has made major contributions to the game of baseball. Gowdy announced his retirement in 1985, but continued to periodically appear on football and baseball broadcasts all the way up until 2003,
when he called a Red Sox-Yankees game for ESPN as part of their “Living Legends” series. One of the most reliable and admired sportscasters of all time, Curt Gowdy died on February 20, 2006, at the age of eighty-six.

Joe Garagiola followed Gowdy as the principal play-by-play voice of baseball at NBC, teaming with Tony Kubek until 1982, when Vin Scully joined the network as their lead announcer. Garagiola continued on as Scully’s color commentary partner until 1988, when after a contract dispute he finally resigned from NBC after nearly thirty years. After a short stay as part of the broadcast team for the California Angels, Garagiola moved to the Phoenix area, where he lives and continues to work to this day, a more mellow grandfatherly presence both off screen and on than during his network days. Among many other jobs he’s done in television since—including his popular offbeat stints doing “play-by-play” for the Westminster Kennel Club’s annual Dog Show—Garagiola provides his patented folksy color commentary on television for the Arizona Diamondbacks, an expansion franchise that joined the National League in 1998; Garagiola’s oldest son, Joe Junior, served as the Diamondbacks’ first general manager, and now works as senior vice president of baseball operations for Major League Baseball. (One of Garagiola’s broadcast partners for the Diamondbacks from 1998 through 2006 was the team’s lead play-by-play man Thom Brennaman, son of the Reds’ longtime voice Marty Brennaman.) In 1991, Joe Garagiola followed Curt Gowdy as a recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award.

Marty Brennaman has manned the microphone for the Cincinnati Reds ever since the 1975 World Series, and since 2007 he has worked in the booth along with his son Thom, one of the most unique broadcasting partnerships in baseball history. Their spirited, opinionated on-air debates about the game are like listening to an elevated version of the dinner table/front porch conversations that take place within every baseball-loving family in America. When he was deservedly given the Ford C. Frick Award, Marty Brennaman joined Curt Gowdy and Joe Garagiola in the Hall of Fame in 2000.

Not only did the 1975 World Series return record revenue for NBC, their coverage of the event also won an Emmy for outstanding sports broadcast of the year. Executive Chet Simmons left the network a few years after the ’75 series to become the first president and CEO of a new cable TV network—revolutionary at the time but often dismissed as an unworkable business model—called ESPN. After launching that network, Simmons went on to work as commissioner of the short-lived United States Football League, a competitor to the NFL that, as it happened, was an unworkable business model. Simmons is now comfortably retired and lives in Savannah, Georgia.

After winning election to a second term in 1976, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn remained at his post until the end of the 1984 season, when he was replaced by Peter Ueberroth. Often controversial during his time in office—one of the most tumultuous periods in the game’s history—Kuhn is now rightly considered to have been one of the most effective and evenhanded stewards baseball has ever known. The former lawyer retired back into private practice, then into retirement in Florida, and died in 2007, at the age of eighty. Kuhn was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame the following year.

THE PLAYERS IN GAME SIX
who had never been stars, and even some who were but whose careers were already in their twilight by 1975, never got a taste of the Monopoly money that free agency subsequently stacked on the table. Reserve infielder Doug Flynn went to the Mets in the Tom Seaver trade, and enjoyed productive years there and in Montreal as a starter before retiring after eleven seasons and entering the business world back in his native Kentucky. Back-up Reds catcher Bill Plummer, who played nearly his entire ten-year pro career behind Johnny Bench, now works in the minor leagues for the Arizona Diamondbacks organization.

Jack Billingham, who in his thirteen-year playing career, which ended in 1980, won 145 major-league games—talent that would
have been worth multiple millions in today’s marketplace—has remained in baseball ever since as a minor-league pitching coach, mostly in the Houston Astros organization, a respectable but modest living for a great competitor and all-time stand-up guy. The Red Sox’s Rick Wise—eighteen years, 188 wins, through 1982—recently retired as the pitching coach for a nonaffiliated minor-league team, the Lancaster Barnstormers. Both Wise and Billingham were lifers, intelligent talents still in love with the game that entranced them as kids, having never known another profession, who missed easy street by a decade. At the other end of the scale, Boston left-hander Jim Burton, who surrendered the Series-winning hit to Joe Morgan in Game Seven, pitched only one more game in the major leagues and ever since his early retirement has owned a successful printing business in North Carolina.

When his dreadful arm troubles persisted, Gary Nolan finally called it quits in 1977—110–70 in his outstanding career—and has since prospered in a second career outside of baseball, working for Steve Wynn in the hotel and gaming industry. The classy, understated Nolan joined many of his former teammates in the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame in 1983. Scrappy starter Fred Norman stayed with the Reds until 1980, finishing his career a game over .500, at 104–103. Clay “Hawk” Carroll retired after fifteen years of pro ball in 1978 to a quiet life on his farm in Kentucky; he made it to the Reds Hall of Fame in 1980. It took Cesar Geronimo a while longer to join Nolan and Carroll there—he was finally inducted in 2008—after his fifteen-year professional career ended in Kansas City in 1983; active in many social and charitable programs, he’s lived ever since back in his native Dominican Republic. His fellow countryman and Reds teammate Pedro Borbon, who retired after twelve years in the majors in 1980, now splits his time between the island and Houston. Reds’ reserve infielder Ed Armbrister’s pro career lasted only five years, until 1977, and he soon returned to his home in the Bahamas—still one of only five Bahamians ever to play Major League baseball—and for a while served as his coun
try’s director of sports, but his name lives on in New England: “Armbrister” remains graven in the memories of Red Sox fans of a certain age like a jailhouse tattoo.

Another stand-up guy whose time in baseball was all too short, pitcher Pat Darcy—forever known as the man who surrendered the home run in Game Six to Carlton Fisk—played only one more season in the major leagues before a torn labrum in his pitching shoulder curtailed his career. After struggling to get healthy during three years of minor-league ball, Darcy moved into life after baseball in 1981. He went back to college and finished his business degree, married and started a family in Tucson, Arizona, and has worked ever since in commercial real estate and banking. He stays in touch with many of his former Reds teammates, and unlike some players who’ve given up famous home runs in their pasts, he has never shied away from talking about his fateful encounter with Carlton Fisk in Game Six. Darcy’s only gripe with his place in baseball history, and it’s a small, good-natured one, has to do with the depiction of their shared moment that appeared in the Oscar-winning 1997 film
Good Will Hunting.
In order to draw out the suspense of Fisk’s climactic at bat, just before the home run pitch is thrown, director Gus Van Sant cuts to a shot of Darcy kicking dirt around on the mound, looking concerned, as if he’s trying to delay confronting Fisk. That little piece of landscaping actually occurred at the
beginning
of the inning, after Darcy had completed his warm-up tosses but before Fisk stepped into the box. Shocking, isn’t it, Hollywood rearranging reality to suit its narrative requirements—and apparently there’s gambling in Casablanca as well. (Speaking of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s esteemed screenplay, Dick Stockton and Lesley Visser couldn’t help but notice when they saw the movie together that Robin Williams’s psychiatrist character recounts to Damon’s Will Hunting that he also met his future wife on the night of Game Six, at a bar just outside of Fenway.) Anyway, Pat Darcy would like you to know that he didn’t hesitate before throwing his last pitch to Fisk, acknowledging manfully that this does nothing to
change the fact that Fisk still walloped it into the night. And you can still hear Dick Stockton’s original call of that moment in the movie, permission for which the filmmakers graciously thanked him in the final credits.

Arm trouble bedeviled other members of the Reds’ pitching staff. After his first championship free-agent season with the Yankees in 1977, pitcher Don Gullett was limited by injury to only eight starts the following year and wasn’t on their active roster when New York won its second straight World Series, over the Dodgers, in 1978. The serious rotator cuff problems that then continued to plague him ended Gullett’s baseball career when the Yankees released him in 1980, after only nine seasons and a remarkable record of 109–50. In 1993 he rejoined the Cincinnati Reds as their pitching coach, a post he held until 2005. Don Gullett entered the Reds’ Hall of Fame in 2002.

On the heels of his MVP season in 1977, George Foster signed a healthy long-term deal with the Reds that kept him in Cincinnati as a frequent All-Star and consistently productive player—his numbers to this point earned him frequent mention as a potential future Hall of Famer—through the end of 1981. The five-year $10 million free agent contract he then signed with the Mets—the richest the game had then ever seen—brought him into the radioactive bull’s-eye of the New York spotlight. The quiet, shy, and devout Foster—so dangerous for years as a central player of the Reds’ Midwestern ensemble—did not prosper as a leading man on Broadway. He stumbled badly during his first season, never came close to matching his once lofty numbers, and the shocking way in which his productivity quickly trailed off—he was released outright by the Mets in August of 1986 during the final year of his contract—became a cautionary tale for the perils of long-term contracts in the era of free agency. George Foster’s baseball career ended as suddenly as if he’d hit a wall, at the age of thirty-seven. He suffered through some serious financial difficulties after retirement, and it was rumored he’d been compelled to sell the famous Fisk home run ball that he’d caught off the foul pole in left field at the end of Game Six. Foster
has since worked as a motivational speaker for various Christian organizations and causes, and as a committed supporter of youth baseball programs.

His fellow outfielder Ken Griffey Sr. left Cincinnati for the greener fields of New York as well after the 1981 season, signing as a free agent with the Yankees. If he never quite matched the lofty expectations that his first few seasons with the Reds had raised, Griffey remained an outstanding professional ballplayer for a career that lasted nineteen seasons, into the early 1990s, when after a brief sentimental return to the Reds he made major-league history by playing alongside his oldest son, Ken Junior, just then beginning his soon-to-be Hall of Fame career with the Seattle Mariners. (In one memorable game they even hit back-to-back home runs.) Ken Griffey Sr. collected more than 2,100 hits, drove in 859 runs, and averaged .296 in his two decades in uniform, and he retired comfortably to Winter Garden, Florida, when his playing days were done, one of the first beneficiaries—because he’d always been smart with his money—of the free agent era.