Lawler says Scully's greatness `unmatched'
Ralph Lawler used to listen while commuting to work, the longtime voice of the Clippers tuned in to Vin Scully calling Dodgers' spring training games with such style, substance and depth that the basketball broadcaster would shake his head in astonishment.
“He'd be weaving this marvelous story, inning by inning, that was humanizing, and that touched your heart,” Lawler recalled. “And I'd think, `My god. Save that for the World Series!' But he had a story for every moment.”
Lawler is a Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer who called Clippers games for 40 seasons before retiring in 2019. And like so many, he was a huge fan of Scully's.
Every broadcaster was, Lawler said.
“It was just so much more than telling us the story of the game,” Lawler explained. “And all of us aspired to be able to learn something or do something like Vin, but he was so far above the rest of us, there was no way. He was the best in our business, regardless of the sport. The best there ever was. Nobody is a close second in my mind.”
Lawler spoke by phone from Oregon on Tuesday night, shortly after he learned Scully died at his Hidden Hills home. Scully was 94.
Scully called Dodgers games for 67 seasons before his retirement in 2016, longer than anyone in pro sports history. With his dulcet delivery, Scully was a reliable narrator with unparalleled institutional knowledge and a story for every occasion.
“He had,” Lawler said, “the ability as a broadcaster to reach in and massage our souls in a way that nobody else in the business has ever come close to doing.”
Ten or 15 years ago, Lawler remembers being invited to introduce Scully at a Screen Actors Guild event at which he was to be honored.
“I was thrilled to death and nervous as could be at the thought of doing it,” said Lawler, who remembers spending a great deal of time perfecting a four- or fiveminute speech full of “lavish praise and admiration” for that night's honoree.
“I stumbled through it OK and then he got up, stood for 15 minutes, and without a note, without even giving a thought to what he was going to say, he just spoke brilliantly,” Lawler remembered. “And I thought, `Damn! I wish I could do that.'”
No one could do it the way Scully did.
There was one habit of Scully's that Lawler could mimic, he decided. That notion came a few days after the SAG event, when one of the gracious thank-you notes Scully was famous for found its way to Lawler.
“That was one case where it did teach me a lesson, the value of writing notes to people when they do something kind of nice for you,” Lawler said. “So I tried to do that — but still never as well as he did.”
Sometimes, Lawler said, it wasn't Scully's words that delivered. Every now and then, in the right moments, it was his silence. Take the joyous aftermath of Kirk Gibson's gutsy pinch-hit home run in the 1988 World Series.
As the walk-off homer cleared the outfield fence, Scully announced “She is gone!” And then he paused for a long while before delivering what became one of his most famous lines of on-thespot poetry: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”
“I have shared this with so many young broadcasters and not-so-young broadcasters, the brilliance of that call,” Lawler said. “He waited a minute and seven seconds before speaking, just let the crowd carry the moment.
“Too often, we broadcasters will call a big moment and we think we have to embellish it, but you can't embellish it more than the crowd going crazy while fans are viewing it on television or listening on the radio and going crazy themselves! … He understood that better than anybody: Let the crowd tell the story.”
Scully's story, Lawler insisted, “is unmatched.”
“He did things that the rest of us could just try to aspire to, but never ever, ever reach,” Lawler said. “I just wish I had his words to describe him, because he would do it so much better.”