You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (13 page)

One of my favorite Murcer stories: In August 1976, already well out of the playoff race, we had an eleven-game road trip that took us to Atlanta, Montreal, and then Philadelphia. In Montreal, Bobby sustained some sort of nagging injury that looked like it would keep him out for at least the first game or two of the Phillies series. He didn’t play the Friday night game, and then he didn’t play Saturday, either. Well, after the Saturday night game, in which the Giants got trounced, 13–2, in between multiple and interminable rain delays, we got back to the Bellevue Stratford Hotel after 2
A
.
M
. The hotel bar was long closed, but the guys knew of an after-hours joint down the block that was open all night. Bobby and I went there with a number of other players, and around four o’clock the place starts to thin out, except for half our roster. Once again, the Giants with proof positive they’re not the Reds. Now it’s almost five o’clock. The rest of the guys start to leave. “Bobby, I’m out of here. I’m on the air seven hours from now. I’m working and you’ll be out of the lineup again.” He says, “Just one more.” I say “no” and he says, “Stay for one more and I promise you I’ll be in the lineup today.” I say, “You’d better be.” Twenty minutes later we walk the one block back to the hotel and I say to him, “Listen, you bum, you know you’re ready to play, and you better be in the lineup.” Bobby promises me again.

I toss and turn with the sun coming up through the windows and sleep for about an hour, and by nine, everyone’s luggage had to be in the lobby. It was a getaway day, and the bus would be leaving for the stadium at nine thirty. I felt as if a rail had been rammed through my head. Bobby came down looking like a bag lady, totally disheveled and completely hungover. On the bus, I said to him, “Listen, you pig farmer. Thanks to you, I’m sick as a dog. Don’t even think you’re
not
going to play today. Your ass is in there or I’ll murder you.” Bobby just chuckled.

We got to the stadium, and an hour later the lineups are announced, and Bobby is in there, batting fourth and playing right field. I’m ready to go on the air with a humongous headache and a roiling stomach. It’s a road I’ve never been down before, and will never go down again. I am miserable. I could only imagine Bobby’s state. Then a couple of minutes before the start of the game comes an announcement on the press box PA: “There’s a lineup change for the Giants. Bobby Murcer is still battling his strained muscle and Gary Thomasson will be batting fourth and playing right field.”

I began to think what price I might have to pay for assault and battery.

I announce the first two innings. With our format, I was off in the third and seventh innings. In the top of the third, I turn the microphone over to Bill Thompson, who was working a number of games with us that season. I leave the broadcast booth and take the elevator down to the visitors’ clubhouse at Veterans Stadium. I barge in, and there’s only one person in the clubhouse. And there he is, laid out on the training table, sound asleep and snoring.

“I’m going to kill you,” I yell, as I made a beeline for the trainer’s room. He sits halfway up, looks at me, and with a goofy smile says, “I’m sorry.”

“Strained muscle, my ass,” I bellow.

And then as I turn the table over on its side, he slides off onto the floor and starts laughing.

I went back up to the booth to fight my way through the rest of the game in my compromised state. Bobby spent the rest of the day going beddy-bye in the clubhouse.

In 2008, Bobby Murcer died of brain cancer at the age of sixty-two. Linda and I are still friendly with a fabulous lady, his widow, Kay. I miss the Pig Farmer dearly.

WHEN MY SECOND SEASON
with the Giants ended in 1975, I had made a deal with CBS to work a number of regional NFL games, most of them going to 10 to 15 percent of the country. I recall covering around ten games with five different partners, including one game with Johnny Unitas. Unitas had retired two years earlier and was just getting his feet wet in broadcasting. In November, Unitas and I were assigned to a game between the New Orleans Saints and the Raiders at the Oakland Coliseum. I was living in Menlo Park, so this was a home game for me, and a couple of days before the game, I drove over to the Raiders’ practice facility in Alameda to meet with the Raiders head coach, John Madden.

It was the first time I had met him, and as I sat with John in his office for about a half hour it was immediately apparent that he was so much more than a football coach. He was an immensely curious man, and at one point that day, he mused about how when he was done with coaching, he wanted to get into a motor home and travel all over the country and explore everything. We then started to talk about the fabled John Steinbeck classic,
Travels with Charley,
which, of course, is about a trip around America with a dog. John was also a huge baseball fan and had heard me on the Giants’ broadcasts, and we talked about that as well. I remember thinking,
Here’s a guy who’d be terrific company on a regular basis.
He was interested in everything. Twenty-seven years later, that chance would come.

I also worked three or four games with Hank Stram. At the end of the previous year, Stram had been fired as the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. The first time we were paired was in November in Atlanta, and the following week, wouldn’t you know it—we were assigned to a game in Kansas City, with the Chiefs facing the Detroit Lions. Hank coming back to Kansas City was huge news—a picture of Hank in the booth would wind up on the front page of the
Kansas City Star
the day after the game.

Before that, though, it was customary, as it is now, for the broadcast team to meet with the home team’s head coach a day or two before the game. So, our meeting was set up for Saturday afternoon with Paul Wiggin, Hank’s successor. I had known Paul because prior to his getting the Chiefs job, he had been an assistant coach for the 49ers and lived in my neighborhood. Stram, meanwhile, was still chafing over his firing by the Chiefs, and had no interest in going to that meeting. I met with Wiggin alone. That night, Hank and I were going to dinner, and as we drove to the restaurant, he grilled me on everything Wiggin had to say. But the one thing Hank obsessed over was if Wiggin had redecorated his old office. Had he moved the furniture? Had he gotten new furniture? What pictures were on the wall? And what about that Tiffany lamp?

As the season wound down, Hank and I were assigned to a game in New Orleans between the Los Angeles Rams and the Saints. We were supposed to have dinner the night before the game, but Hank called my room at around six to say he had to cancel because John Mecom Jr., the owner of the Saints, had called to ask if he could join him for dinner at eight.

I knew immediately that the Saints, whose record was 2-10 at the time, would almost certainly be looking for a new coach at the end of the season. So it was abundantly clear to me why Mecom was meeting with Stram. The next morning—game day—with a scheduled noon start, Hank and I were going to have breakfast together at nine o’clock. But at 6:45, my phone rings. I pick up the phone. “It’s Hank. We have to have breakfast
right now
.” Bleary-eyed, I drag myself out of bed, put some clothes on, and go downstairs to meet him in the hotel restaurant.

Stram is already there, and before I can even sit down, Hank says, “Do you think I have a future in the broadcasting business?”

“Absolutely,” I told him.

“I’m enjoying this, but I have to tell you, last night John Mecom asked me to consider becoming his next head coach. I have to think about it.”

“Hank, to me, it’s very apparent that you still want to coach. I think you have a lot of coaching left in you,” I told him. “I think you should take the Saints job because broadcasting will always be there for you. And at some point, you’ll come back to this.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

Sure enough, Stram took the job and coached the New Orleans Saints in 1976 and 1977. He went back to coaching for only two years, and then—no surprise to me—had a long and very successful run at CBS Television and Radio.

THE GIANTS HAD FINISHED
a game below .500 in 1975. Horace Stoneham was going bankrupt. Attendance was terrible. At the end of the season, Stoneham—the man who had moved the Giants from New York to San Francisco—announced that the team was for sale. There appeared to be no local people interested in buying. The group that was most interested? Labatt’s Brewery—based in Toronto.

I had a three-year contract with Golden West Broadcasting. So I was not employed by the team itself—as I was in Cincinnati—but by a broadcast entity with the tacit approval of the team. In November, with the Giants now in limbo, I got a call at home from someone at Labatt’s saying, “We’re going to buy the team, and if we do and move the team to Toronto—which is our plan—we want you to come here as well. Are you interested?” I had to choose my response carefully. I gave him an amorphous answer, but when I hung up, what I really wanted to do was
throw
up. We had come back to California and settled into a beautiful home on the San Francisco Peninsula; a move to Toronto was an absolute nonstarter.

It would never come to that. The American League would soon expand, and Toronto would be granted its own franchise, starting play in 1977. Also, the National League president, Chub Feeney, had been a Giants executive, and had moved the league offices to San Francisco. Chub loved the West Coast and there was no way he wanted to leave, either. If there was no team in his market, he would have to move. Still, at this point,
everything
was up in the air. Spring training was not that far away, and it was no certainty that the team was going to remain in San Francisco. Then a local buyer emerged—Bob Lurie, a native San Franciscan and a real estate magnate. Bob was a big Giants fan. He was in attendance frequently at Candlestick. I’d gotten to know him. I liked him. The problem for Lurie was that he was willing to come up with only half the money and needed to find other investors. The asking price for the San Francisco Giants in 1976? Believe it or not, $8 million! Think about that. Today there are dozens of
players
making $8 million
a year.

Lurie was willing to invest $4 million. The question became, where was he going to get the other $4 million so that the Giants could remain in San Francisco? Out of nowhere at the eleventh hour came a cattle rancher from Arizona by the name of Arthur “Bud” Herseth, who was willing to put up the difference. Lurie and Herseth had never met, had only spoken by phone, but the deal got done almost overnight and a press conference was set up on the eve of spring training at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill to announce that, jointly, Lurie and Herseth were buying the team. The two men shook hands for the first time literally twenty minutes before they sat down at a dais to meet the press. Herseth came out wearing this gigantic cattleman’s hat. He took it off and didn’t say much. All of us in the room were thinking:
This is going to be the greatest co-owner ever. He’s going to stay out of the way. He’s in the cattle business—he lives out of town, but just wants to come to a few games and have some fun with his grandchildren. In the meantime, he’s just saved the Giants for San Francisco.

Well, he turned out to be too good to be true. The Giants for years had trained in Phoenix, Herseth’s hometown. Soon, Herseth would be at almost all of the Giants’ spring training games. And it became clear by the end of March that what all of us saw in San Francisco that day bore little semblance to what we were seeing in Arizona. Herseth would sit in the ballpark next to the dugout in Phoenix, and was loud and often obnoxious. One afternoon, Von Joshua, the Giants’ center fielder, who is black, trotted back toward the dugout after an inning had ended. Herseth shouted out to him, “Hey, boy, get over here and sign some autographs for these kids.” What we thought we had originally seen in San Francisco that day, we didn’t quite get. By then Lurie, too, had been taken aback, but a deal was a deal, and there was nothing that could be done immediately. A year later, however, Lurie would wind up buying Herseth out for $6 million. So the cattleman made $2 million, a 50 percent profit in one year. Meanwhile, Bob was now in for $10 million—but it would work out well in the end for him, too. First he became a major local hero by helping to save the franchise for the city. Then, in 1992, Bob sold the team for over $100 million—with part of the condition being that the team stay in San Francisco. History had repeated itself. Today the Giants, in good measure because they moved in 2000 from perhaps the worst stadium ever constructed to what some consider be the best stadium in baseball, AT&T Park, are now valued at around $800 million.

PRIOR TO THE 1976
season, Lon Simmons would unretire and become my broadcast partner. Lon is in the broadcasting wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and has a Hall of Fame sense of humor. We had a million laughs—during a season that for me, turned out to be a crazy adventure when ABC hired me to be the play-by-play announcer for
Monday Night Baseball
concurrent with my job at KSFO.

Much more on ABC in a moment. Meanwhile, once Lurie had helped save the Giants for San Francisco, he brought back his old buddy Bill Rigney as manager. Rigney had managed the team when they had first moved to the Bay Area in 1958. We had one great character on the team—a full of life, irrepressible pitcher by the name of John “the Count” Montefusco. The Count had been called up at the end of the 1974 season, and in his major-league debut at Dodger Stadium, had walked in his first plate appearance and then homered in his first official at bat. In addition, he’d pitched brilliantly in relief of Ron Bryant and proclaimed on our postgame show that night, “Mark my words—next year, I’m going to win twenty games!” On a team with more than its share of dullards, hopelessly out of the race, Montefusco was the all-time breath of fresh air.

In 1975, he’d lead the pitching staff in wins with 15, and in 1976, with another 15 wins already under his belt, he’d make his final start of the season in a meaningless game on September 29 in Atlanta. The Giants were twenty-seven games out of first place. An hour before the game, as I walked from the field up to the broadcast booth, I passed through our clubhouse. Montefusco was the only player in there, and he was hunched over in front of his locker. I walked over and said, “Count, are you all right?” He looked up with watery eyes said, “I feel like I have the flu.” I started to walk away and said, “So you’ll probably go out there and pitch a no-hitter.”