Home Schooling

While the book is packed with stories and anecdotes from my life in broadcasting, one of my favorite chapters is entitled “My First Broadcast Booth.” In it, I explain how my brothers and I started our own broadcasting school in a little room of our house. I was just an 8-year-old squirt when I fell in love with sportscasting. I knew at an early age that I wanted to be a professional sports announcer when I grew up. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

We would turn down the sound of Yankee games on a small black and white TV and from this makeshift press box which was actually my parents’ folding card table, we practiced our play-by-play. The three of us alternated on the call. While one of us did the play-by-play, another would control the sound of the crowd with a sound affects record while the other would simulate the crack of the bat with two price-marking pencils from our father’s grocery store.

Back in 1958, I probably didn’t realize what was happening. It just seemed like the right thing to do. And we couldn’t get enough of it.

Believe me, my parents had no idea what was going on in that room. At least, I don’t think they did. They could probably hear us describing the game action through the walls. I do know this for sure. They never told us to stop.

My father wasn’t a diehard fan like my brothers and me but he enjoyed sports. My mother was definitely not into sports. She didn’t understand sports at all or why people could be so passionate about it.

As I think back, it amazes me how not one, not two but three sons of a grocer from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn not only made it in the highly-competitive business of sportscasting but, in all due modesty, excelled in it on the national stage.

When we were kids, my mother used to plead with us, “Why do all three of you have to be sportscasters? Can’t just one of you become a doctor?”

I remember thinking, then who would knock the pencils together to make the sound of the bat hitting the ball?