One broadcast giant salutes another

Giants broadcaster Jon Miller was planning to be in Cooperstown this weekend for the posthumous presentation of the Ford C. Frick Award to Bill King. He’ll miss it for a family matter.

“I just wanted to go up as a fan and celebrate,” said Miller, the Frick winner in 2010.

Miller said he learned to broadcast listening to King call Warriors and Raiders games, how to put a game into words and paint a picture behind the mike. By the time King began calling A’s games in 1981, Miller was broadcasting in the big leagues with the Red Sox.

Some memories:

Early in interleague play, when the A’s played a game at Candlestick Park, Mark McGwire homered to right field. Miller recalls his call wasn’t the greatest, in part because he didn’t immediately identify the right fielder. “Later, on the A’s station, I hear Bill’s call. Geez, he just killed me on that. He had the perfect call. I told that to Bill’s daughter (Kathleen Lowenthal), and she asked if I ever told Bill the story. I said no. I never told anybody. I wasn’t too happy about it. She said he would’ve liked it.”

King was a painter, among his many other passions. “He showed me photos of his work. I wanted to buy some, but he said, ‘No, people would buy them because I did it. That’s not right.’ He was such a purist about everything. He wouldn’t sell them. Somehow he thought, no, he hadn’t suffered enough as an artist yet to sell them for money.”

Noting that King isn’t in the Basketball Hall of Fame, Miller said, “How could that happen? Who was better than him? All those guys were good, but Bill, he was like a work of art. His tempo in basketball always reflected the tempo of the game. That’s what was really cool about it. You’d have a nice, easy pace going, then all of a sudden, it would get really frenetic, and so would Bill.”

Nobody was better detailing a game in real time than King. “I kept score one night off the radio, and at halftime, he gives all the stats, and I have all the stats right but I miss by one rebound. I’m sure he had it, but I probably screwed it up. He always got it all right.”