Following Sunday’s incredible last-second finish between the Saints and Vikings, the internet exploded with discussions of where this play ranked among the greatest finishes in sports history. The calls from Fox’s Joe Buck and the Vikings’ radio crew of Paul Allen and Pete Bercich will be remembered for years upon years by Vikings fans.
We wanted to know what calls of last-second finishes our staff liked the most, and they didn’t disappoint, going all over the board to multiple sports. Even our resident Saints fan, still smarting from the loss on Sunday, chimed in. Needless to say, he didn’t choose Stefon Diggs’ touchdown catch.
Andrew Bucholtz: I’m going with the CFL here, as it’s produced so many amazing last-second calls over the years. Many of them have come from TSN’s lead CFL play-by-play commentator Chris Cuthbert, including this year’s Grey Cup winner, the 2009 13th man, and Milt Stegall’s 2006 100-yard touchdown, and I’d pick him as my favorite individual announcer.
But my selection for this roundtable is actually from Cuthbert’s colleagues Rod Black and Duane Forde, for their commentary and analysis of the most bizarre ending I’ve ever seen in football at any level, the 2010 Toronto Argonauts-Montreal Alouettes kickabout:
To me, this is an excellent example of announcers being on top of a potentially confusing situation and explaining it to the audience (or at least, those parts of the audience familiar enough with the CFL’s unusual rules for single-point kicks, or rouges). Pre-play, Black initially notes the Argonauts sending punter Noel Prefontaine and two other players to the back of the end zone, Forde explains they’re planning to kick a missed field goal out if they can’t run it out, then Black further emphasizes the value of a single here if the field goal misses.
It does, and that leads to Black making a great call of the play, from Mike Bradwell knocking the ball down and kicking it out to prevent the single, Alouettes’ kicker Damon Duval kicking it back in (Forde appropriately notes that Toronto has to give him five yards as he catches it to avoid a no yards penalty, and then notes that Toronto’s Grant Shaw has to try and kick it out again), and Black giving the final play-by-play “They will kick it out, but they don’t get it out! Who has the football? It’s a touchdown, Montreal, on a bizarre way to end the football game.”
Forde then explains the no yards huddle from the officials and goes over the replay to prove that the no yards rule was followed with each received kick. This isn’t a situation that’s seen regularly, or almost ever for that matter, but the announcers nailed it, and provided a terrific game-ending call in the process.
Phillip Bupp: This may not be as recognized as one of the greatest calls of a last second finish as other calls but once you know the story behind it, you’ll know why it’s my favorite.
As the 1979 Daytona 500 was ending, Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough were battling for the win while Richard Petty, Darrell Waltrip and AJ Foyt were a mile or so behind. This was the first live flag-to-flag broadcast of a 500-mile race so needless to say, this was a huge deal for NASCAR and CBS.
When Allison and Yarborough crashed on the final lap, CBS cameras were so worried about following the leaders that they had no clue where third place was and were frantically trying to find them before they crossed the line for the win and risk missing the finish. Ken Squier did a masterful job not only describing what was going on for the viewers’ benefit but also help the production truck locate the leaders and get a camera on them before it was too late. Cameras caught the three new leaders as they were exiting Turn 4 and Squier helped turn a potential disaster into a classic moment in NASCAR history as well as help vault NASCAR into more of a national, mainstream sport.
This is also a great example for networks to have commentators work on location and not off of a monitor in a studio. If a similar situation happened today and the commentators are working off a monitor, they’re at the mercy of the monitor and can’t do their job. When they’re at the event, they can go off monitors as well as see the action right in front of them and be able to call the game without skipping a beat if things technically go wrong.
Ian Casselberry: As a Detroit Tigers fan, I have deep affection for Dan Dickerson’s radio call of Magglio Ordonez’s walk-off home run to win the 2006 ALCS. I was driving home at that point and pulled into my driveway as Ordonez’s drive left the park. I should’ve run into the house to watch the aftermath on TV, but was just enjoying visualizing the scene in my mind too much. Dickerson captured the emotion of the moment for Tigers fans perfectly.
But my all-time favorite last-second or walk-off call is Jack Buck calling Kirby Puckett’s home run to win Game 6 of the 1991 World Series. The homer sent the series to a Game 7, prompting Buck to say “We’ll see you tomorrow night” before letting the moment and the noise inside the Metrodome take over.
It was a spectacular ending, but there was one more game to be played. The Twins kept the series alive and had a chance to win a championship the following night. Buck just perfectly captured the sentiment of the moment and, with one sentence, also framed the situation of that World Series. You feel the excitement in Buck’s voice, but there was no shouting. His delivery was almost matter-of-fact. Right there, Buck demonstrated how a professional broadcaster should work in a big moment.
Matt Clapp: I’ll go with one that shows off a crazy finish — and announcing call — more than any I can remember, in the Trinity football “Lateralpalooza” against Millsaps. The final play featured 15 laterals, and took 60+ seconds to complete (it’s considered probably the longest play in college football history, and it’s hard to imagine it not being so).
Trinity had the ball at their own 39-yard line, needing a touchdown on the final play of the game (these are D-III teams we’re talking about, so it’s unlikely the QB is able to get a throw far downfield). So for about the first 40 seconds of the play, the Trinity announcers (Jonny Wiener on play-by-play, Justin Thompson as the analyst) are just casually explaining what is going on: basically, here’s a lateral and there’s a lateral, etc.
But then the announcers start to see that Trinity actually, somehow has something brewing with this lateral-filled play. The play-by-play voice picks up as he’s explaining the unbelievable sequence, and then the analyst comes in, “GO! GO! RUN!”
After a few more laterals, somehow the field is wide open for Trinity’s Riley Curry, and the announcers lose their minds. This is just a great example of genuine, confused, stunned reaction and jubilation from two random announcers. It’s beautiful chaos, and you probably shouldn’t watch/listen to it with headphones on:
Joe Lucia: My choice (Sergio Aguero scoring the title-winning goal for Manchester City with the last kick of the season, and everyone proceeding to go absolutely mental) was chosen by someone else, so I deferred to something from my younger years – Skip Caray’s call of Francisco Cabrera’s walk-off, NLCS-winning single against the Pirates in 1992.
This at bat must have been sheer hell for Caray. The Braves’ season came down to a third-string catcher. If Cabrera popped up, or hit a weak fly ball, or grounded the ball to short, Atlanta’s season would be over, the Pirates would be National League champions, and who in the hell knows if the Braves’ dynasty even continues. But Cabrera didn’t pop up, fly out, or ground out. He also didn’t smash one into the gap, as Caray had just mentioned before the final pitch of the Pirates’ 1992 season. He lined a single to left field, Barry Bonds delivered a terrible throw home, Sid Bream somehow chugged his way around third and scored, and Caray abandoned all sense of neutrality after the safe call.
Cabrera’s single wasn’t just a season-changing play, it was a franchise-changing play. And while Caray didn’t know that at the time, what happened in the months and years following Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS elevated this call to another level.
Alex Putterman: Even though I’m far from a soccer guy, I’m going to pick Ian Darke’s call of Landon Donovan’s game-winner against Algeria in the 2010 World Cup. The call doesn’t have any sort of canned one-liner, just a frantic rush of words that mirrored the chaos of the play and the moment.
Darke built the excitement slowly (“There are things on here for the USA”) before exploding upon Clint Dempsey’s initial shot and Donovan’s heroic follow-up. Typically the best calls feature some level of restraint, but this moment didn’t need it. As Americans everywhere jumped and screamed, Darke provided appropriate energy, shouting “Go, go USA.” Then, like any good broadcaster, he knew when to take a step back, eventually letting us enjoy the most thrilling moment in U.S. Soccer history.
Jay Rigdon: This is a category with so many contenders. Last-second finishes produce iconic broadcasting moments, both historic (“The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”) and from the more recent past (“Do you believe in miracles?”) It’s also difficult to separate fan allegiances; your favorite call is probably your favorite team’s biggest moment, as celebrated by your local broadcaster. And that’s how it should be! (Here’s one that will always have a special place for me, even though it wasn’t a championship moment.)
There aren’t really any wrong answers here, so I’ll highlight one that’s always stuck with me as the moment I started to come around on Joe Buck. Long criticized as the beneficiary of nepotism, and as a play-by-play man incapable of acknowledging the importance of a big play, Buck managed to send off one of the most memorable World Series games in recent memory in perfect fashion:
“We will see you… tomorrow night!”
It was a nod to his father Jack’s legendary call from the World Series 20 years prior, when Kirby Puckett sent the Twins to a seventh game via an 11th inning walk-off. Buck helped link what was happening to history, lending the moment an instant classic status, and he did so by acknowledging his dad, who spent his career calling St. Louis Cardinals games in addition to national assignments. It didn’t feel forced, it didn’t feel cheap. It felt perfect.
Matt Yoder: Sticking the knife in with this one!!!
AAGGGGUUUEEERROOO!!!!
That’s all you really need to say for this call by Martin Tyler. It’s just perfect. There may be calls that are more meaningful to American soccer fans (and this could easily be Ian Darke’s call of Landon Donovan’s famous strike against Algeria). There are probably calls I can think about from my own sports fandom that are more meaningful.
But when it comes to an announcing call being 100% perfect for a match or championship winning moment, this is the one that comes to mind for me. It captured everything — the craziness of the game, the stunning goal, the late drama, what it meant to Manchester City, and what a memorable moment it truly was. It’s why Tyler is one of the best.
The key to the successful last-second call is to take the advice of Rudyard Kipling’s If — if you, the announcer, can keep your head while all around you are losing theirs. Even if your team is the winner at the end, all the fundamentals, particularly setting up the situation — score, time, who’s got the ball, etc. — still apply. And as you see, letting the scene show itself, even the sound of the crowd on radio, says volumes.
Few telecasters have become as identified with a single sport to a national audience as Jackson with college football. The reason might be that he began in an era when every game wasn’t televised, and we had only a few channels from which to choose. It might be that he served as the play-by-play man of the top games as college football soared to new heights in American popularity.
Or it might be it was as simple as Jackson was so good on the air.
His folksy, pull-up-a-chair voice told you a story, but he also thrived in the biggest moments. Take the 1994 Colorado 27-26 victory at Michigan, when Kordell Stewart threw a 64-yard Hail Mary that Buff receiver Blake Anderson tipped to teammate Michael Westbrook for the winning touchdown.
Three wideouts at the top of the picture. Stewart, with time. Let’s it go! He’s got three people down there! The ball’s up in the air, caught! Touchdown! Caught by Westbrook for a touchdown! Incredible!
And then, 25 seconds of silence. It was never about Jackson. It was about the moment.
There is no time remaining. (Seven more seconds of silence). There are no flags on the field. Only despair for the Maize and Blue, joy and exultation for the Buffaloes of Colorado.
That’s a graduate class in broadcast journalism.
By that time, Jackson had been calling college football games for more than 40 years. Jackson called NFL games, Major League Baseball, the NBA, the Olympics and you-name-it on ABC Wide World of Sports. But he was as integral to college football as the Big House and Ralphie.
I had dinner with Jackson and his beloved wife, Turi, on the eve of the first BCS championship game, Tennessee’s 23-17 defeat of Florida State in the 1999 Fiesta Bowl. As college football entered a new era of determining a champion, Jackson decided to bow out. He had turned 70 during the ’98 season, he had been calling sports events since his junior year at Washington State, and all he wanted to do was fish and play golf with his bride.
The point of the dinner was to interview Jackson and write a first-person farewell to the game for Sports Illustrated, then my employer. We had a delightful evening. It always struck me as odd that Jackson became identified with down-homeisms such as “big uglies” and “Whoa, Nellie!” I knew him as a courtly man with a reserve that was part Southern manners — he grew up in Georgia — and part shyness. That night, even though he did me the favor of granting the interview, he wouldn’t let me pay the check. He had tolerated being feted that season, but he never took the attention to heart.
“It was a little much to hear myself being called the king of college football, since I’m someone who, like Paul Bryant, grew up riding in a two-horse wagon,” Jackson said that night. The Bear’s personal friends called him Paul.
Jackson had a code. He did things the way he thought they should be done. He took heat after the 1978 Gator Bowl because he did not make any comment when Ohio State coach Woody Hayes slugged Clemson linebacker Charlie Baumann. Jackson didn’t see it, and even when the producer in the truck told him what happened, he wouldn’t tell America what he hadn’t seen with his own eyes.
Maybe that’s why America trusted him so much. As much as Jackson mythologized men such as Bryant just by doing his job, as much as Stewart’s play lives forever on the internet, Jackson never bought into the myth. He saw the sport’s imperfections, too. He called for the players “who produce all the money” to receive a stipend, nearly two decades before the NCAA approved it.
“In and of itself, college football has no redeeming qualities,” Jackson told me that night. “It’s what you’re doing when you’re 40 that matters. You don’t have to be a damn All-America. All you have to do is test yourself and try. The game gives you that choice. If you ever played football, you learned never to give up. Give up, you’re dead.”
Jackson didn’t give up after that dinner and that Fiesta Bowl. In fact, he un-retired shortly before the 1999 season and worked another seven years, almost exclusively on the West Coast, near his homes in Los Angeles and British Columbia.
When he retired for good, his timing remained as impeccable as when he called the Stewart-to-Westbrook Hail Mary. Jackson stepped out after what many consider the greatest game of the BCS/Playoff era, Texas’ 41-38 upset of USC in the Rose Bowl in 2006.
The sport continued on. It always does. He might not have relished being viewed as the king of college football, but the public felt what it felt with good reason. Of all the coaches and players I have met in covering the game over four decades, few gave me the inner glow I felt when Keith Jackson returned a greeting and used my name.
Jackson once said he covered every sport other than hockey, which wasn’t to be found in the Deep South where he grew up. He covered sports a lot of TV watchers had never seen for ABC-TV’s “Wide World of Sports,” including lumberjacking in Hayward.
Wisconsin sports fans would remember him probably for seven things, including, if you’re old enough, NBA coverage when the Bucks were one of the NBA’s best teams …
Like Democrats statewide, the emeritus editor of Madison’s voice of progressivism is hell bent on defeating Scott Walker at all costs, even at the price of truth.
Give Dave Zweifel brownie points for creativity. Wisconsin has more Help Wanted signs than orange traffic cones in spring but somehow, Wisconsin is one of those bad places that Donald Trump recently denigrated. The Haiti of the Snowbelt. Why? Because Wisconsin’s economy is creating so many jobs that employers are scrambling for workers!
“When Wisconsin’s name comes up in news stories or is mentioned in a nationally recognized column, it often isn’t in a flattering context,” my old boss writes in the Sunday WI State Journal.
Wisconsin beats out other states to land Foxconn but my old boss can’t bring himself to mention its potential 13,000 jobs. Instead, he fixates on the 26 acres of wetlands that may be filled to accommodate the huge factory. Oh, the humanity!
Yes, “unemployment is down, taxes are flat and there are more jobs,” Dave grouses. (Sometimes the truth is too obvious even for …) But this good news is really bad news for our liberal-progressive-socialist acquaintances.
“Wisconsin didn’t always need to advertise” for workers, Dave cavils. Humpf! Yes, Wisconsin is waging a $6 million ad campaign to lure workers to Wisconsin. (Come for the jobs, stay because your car won’t start.)
The Democrat(ic) party line reads that Wisconsin must advertise for workers because of:
Because women (supposedly) are dying in childbirth. (Dave writes “attacks on women’s health rights” but we think he means “abortion.”)
And those 26 acres!
“When Wisconsin’s name comes up in news stories or is mentioned in a nationally recognized column, it often isn’t in a flattering context.” Except, there it is, on the very same day as Dave’s trip to the outhouse: Wisconsin, on page one of the Sunday New York Times, in a most flattering context.
In Dane County, Wis., where the unemployment rate was just 2% in November, demand for workers has grown so intense that manufacturers are taking their recruiting a step further: hiring inmates at full wages to work in factories even while they serve their prison sentences.
[The inmate] got that chance in part because of Dane County’s red-hot labor market. Stoughton Trailers, a family-owned manufacturer that employs about 650 people at its plant in the county, has raised pay, offered referral bonuses and expanded its in-house training program. But it has still struggled to fill dozens of positions.
After his release, the inmate bought a car from his earnings while on work-release.
Now he is thinking bigger. Other jobs in the area pay higher wages, and his freedom has opened up more options. He has been talking to another local company, which is interested in training him to become an estimator — a salaried job that would pay more and offer room for advancement.
Those who abjure objective measurements in favor of partisan, political-campaign talking points, read no further. Yeah, Wisconsin roads ARE bad but we can’t help but think that some projects are needlessly expensive. (Doesn’t the Verona Road project seem over-engineered?) Which is why Walker replaced former DOT secretary Gottlieb with a new guy.
For a dispassionate measure, we turned to the recently released U.S. News and World Reportlisting of best states, 2018. The survey measures health care, education, crime, infrastructure, opportunity, economy, and government. Overall, the well regarded survey ranks Wisconsin as the 16th best state overall and second-best in the Midwest, behind Minnesota (#3) and Iowa (#6) but comfortable ahead of Indiana #22, Illinois #29, Michigan #33, and Ohio #35. Of those states, another survey listed Wisconsin as the second “greenest,” behind Minnesota. More here.
It’s a fair point that Walker is trying to sell Wisconsin using Madison as its star attraction while simultaneously bad-mouthing its mayor, now a challenger for governor. But the obverse is also true: Liberals are trying to badmouth Wisconsin. State policies are at least equally responsible for Madison’s success. To take one example, Madison bike paths are largely funded with state money. Even Monona Terrace has state money in it.
If state employees, K-12 teachers, and university professors were being ground down as much as Act 10 bitter-enders like Dave Zweifel pretend, wouldn’t Madison more closely resemble Port au Prince?
… that you’ll notice that the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee didn’t bring up Sunday night.
The person who posted this photo said:
I liked Oprah’s speech. I like her and it was good. She’s a talented and brilliant woman and as gifted a communicator as I’ve ever seen.
But do you know what would have been a great speech at the Golden Globes?
I would have enjoyed a beloved American icon making much of the audience incredibly uncomfortable and causing them to squirm in their seats, making many of them angry and defensive.
I would have liked to see normal Americans watching start tweeting or texting their friends saying “Holy shit! Turn on the Golden Globes now!!”
I would have liked to hear that person call Hollywood and all the perpetrators and enablers out for accepting and embracing a culture that perpetuated sexual harassment/discrimination/assault for years and years and years.
I would have liked to hear that person call out the media generally and Hollywood/entertainment media specifically for knowing it was going on and killing stories about it. And calling out the powerful filmmakers and studios and talent agencies for threatening to ice the media out if they published or ran those ugly, but important stories about powerful big money people and institutions.
I would have liked to hear that person call the whole Hollywood machine out for their sanctimonious, holier-than-thou attitudes and their preaching to normal, working Americans when it was the world they champion and glorify that was as much as anything at the center of all the reprehensible ugliness.
And if I were writing the speech, I’d give a forward-looking, upbeat, optimistic closing that that laid out that forgiveness and redemption was possible and should be pursued – and offering a path to demonstrate it through real actions and meaningful change in attitudes and practices.
That would have been great. It would make a hell of a movie! A lot better than “La La Land.”
What was your New Year’s resolution? More civility toward those with opposing views? Reaching across the aisle to find common ground? Not if you are the hyper-partisan Capital Times.
The CT takes as its sacred mission to “consign Scott Walker to the dustbin of history.”
The Blaska Policy Werkes gets policy differences. We understand rough and tumble. But The Capital Times is drowning in its own hateful bile. Its editorial today will persuade no one not already convinced that Walker drowns little puppy dogs.
Listen to this hyperbole: “There is no way that Wisconsin’s 2018 could be worse than 2017.”
Really? The year 2017 was terrible? The UW Badger football team went 13-1 and won the Orange Bowl. Construction cranes tower over Dane County. The corn harvest was good. UW tuition frozen for five straight years. Property taxes lower (on average) than when Scott Walker took office. Epic is hiring. The stock market is soaring (up 25% for the year)!
That was the one beef our liberal-progressive-socialist acquaintances had against Walker. That he had fallen short of an ambitious campaign pledge to create a huge number of jobs. The Capital Times used to publish job-creation charts showing Walker short of his goal. (Here’s one from June 2014).
Why did they quit running those charts? Because Walker is making good on his pledge. “From Foxconn to sausage makers, Wisconsin companies in expansion mode,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headlined on Christmas Day. But 2017 was terrible!
Outside The Capital Times distortion zone, Wisconsin led the Midwest in job growth over the last year. Our unemployment rate of 3.2% is much better than the nation’s 4.1%. Certainly better than the teachers union-dominated state to the south, which is bleeding population, defaulting on its debts, and nearing junk bond status.
So now The CT is forced to do backflips to explain away the thousands of good-paying jobs Foxconn will bring to the state. It pretends that the $3 billion in promised tax forbearance will come out of the pockets of Wisconsin taxpayers when, in fact, that figure represents new tax income that won’t be collected. It even quibbles that Foxconn will be situated in the southeast part of the state — never mind that is the location of the largest city and most of the state’s population.
If Jim Doyle had managed to bring those jobs, you know who would be singing a different tune.
So we move on to irresponsible hyperbole. Scott Walker is “the most politically corrupt governor in the state’s history.” Except that he is not, by a long shot.
If you want history and corruption, there was William Barstow, a Democrat, who won in 1855 due to forged election returns from nonexistent precincts in the sparsely populated north, “in addition to other irregularities,” before he was removed from office. For that matter, Jim Doyle illegally raided the Patients Compensation Fund. And bought huge campaign contributions from the Indian tribes by trading them gambling rights. But Doyle was a Democrat.
Of course, the CT’s exercise in Joe McCarthyism feeds off the illegal John Doe investigation, which four separate courts ordered stopped. The prosecutors never came close to indicting Walker.
Typical of demagogues throughout the world, The Capital Times must create bogeymen. The Koch Brothers will do nicely. The editorial mentions them no fewer than six times. As if they were Idi Amin instead of free market advocates and generous philanthropists. As if they contributed even a tenth of Walker’s campaign financing. The voters who three times elected Scott Walker? “Toadies” and “political hacks.”
But then, the CT never had anything good to say about Tommy Thompson, Lee Dreyfus, or Warren Knowles — because they were all Republican.
Circling back, the phrase “consign Scott Walker to the dustbin of history” lit up Ol’ Sparky here at the Policy Werkes. Sure enough. The first to use it was the brutal Russian Bolshevik Leon Trotsky. Here is the murderous old Communist reading out the more moderate Mensheviks in 1917:
“You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!”
Why should 2018 be any different? The comrades at The Capital Times cheered the illegal takeover of the State Capitol with bullhorns, defended the UW speech codes, covers for the speech police, demagogues business people, demands income redistribution, plays identity politics, and delegitimizes free and open elections. So it stands to reason they quote Communists.
Actually, having seen four Star Wars movies on New Year’s Day, this came to mind:
And you know how the emperor, the Empire, the Evil Empire and Trotsky all turned out.
Vanity Fair tells the story of one of Star Trek’s favorite episodes, beginning with …
“The Trouble with Tribbles” was the first professional sale for David Gerrold, a 23-year-old California college student. An unknown budding writer in September 1966 when he saw Star Trek’s first episode, he almost immediately began thinking of story premises. One of them drew on his teenage experiences of raising frogs, mice, rats, and fish. “I loved animals,” recalled Gerrold, now an award-winning author of many science-fiction novels and stories, in a recent interview. “But all of those critters died on me.”
So in February 1967, he drew up a proposal for an episode he called “The Fuzzies.”
“My original conception was, ‘Aliens are always scary. What if they’re cute but we don’t realize they’re dangerous? What if you had white mice or gerbils that got onto the Enterprise and got out of control?’ ”
Gerrold envisioned a real ecological disaster. “My attitude was that it would be whimsical but that we would have a serious threat,” he said. Nowhere in his work was there to be found now-classic slapstick moments, like William Shatner’sCaptain Kirk getting buried in a mountain of tribbles. Gerrold also imagined the buffoonish and chortling Cyrano Jones, the interstellar trader who introduces the beasties to the Enterprise, as a Boris Karloff type. (“You can just see him stroking it and saying, ‘Can I interest you in a harmless little tribble? . . .’ ”)
That mix of comedy within an actually serious situation (as James Doohan observed, Captain Kirk could have lost his command for an admittedly stupdi situation), along with fantastic dialogue (see McCoy and Spock) is what makes this such a great episode.
I announced a high school basketball game last night. This morning, drinking my first cup of coffee, I read this sad news from the San Diego Union–Tribune:
Legendary sports broadcaster and former Padres play-by-play announcer Dick Enberg died Thursday morning at his La Jolla home, said his wife, Barbara. He was 82.
Barbara Enberg said the family found out later in the day after Dick Enberg failed to get off a flight in Boston, where they were scheduled to meet. She said her husband appeared to be waiting for a car that was set to shuttle him to San Diego International Airport for a 6:30 a.m. flight.
“He was dressed with his bags packed at the door,” she said. “We think it was a heart attack.”
Enberg defined versatility as a broadcaster, covering 28 Wimbledon tournaments, 10 Super Bowls and eight NCAA basketball title games as the play-by-play voice of the UCLA Bruins during their dynasty-building run.
Enberg’s talented voice was paired with relentless preparation and a zest for telling the stories behind a generation’s biggest games. He cared as much about calling a water polo match as a rising star in Los Angeles as the Super Bowls, Rose Bowls, Olympics and Breeders’ Cup spotlights that followed.
His last full-time role came as the TV voice of the Padres. He retired after the 2016 season.
“We are immensely saddened by the sudden and unexpected passing of legendary broadcaster Dick Enberg,” the Padres said in a statement released late Thursday night. “Dick was an institution in the industry for 60 years and we were lucky enough to have his iconic voice behind the microphone for Padres games for nearly a decade. On behalf of our entire organization, we send our deepest condolences to his wife, Barbara, and the entire Enberg family.”
The farm kid raised in rural Armada, Mich., also gained a fierce appreciation for the small guy, the underdog and especially education — sparking the Central Michigan graduate to fund an annual scholarship.
“I’m heartbroken,” former Padres broadcast booth partner Mark Grant said Thursday night. “It’s so sad. I thought Dick was the type of guy who was going to live until he was 100, going on the circuit, talking to everybody about baseball and football and tennis.”
Enberg — known for his signature call of “Oh, my!” — channeled his passion for sports and the people behind them into a new podcast called “Sound of Success,” interviewing stars such as Billie Jean King, Bill Walton, Johnny Bench and Steve Kerr.
He told the Union-Tribune earlier this week that he hoped to lure NBA legend Magic Johnson, controversial quarterback Colin Kaepernick, Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz and actor Jack Nicholson to his online world.
“At the very top of the list,” he said, “is Serena Williams.”
Enberg’s six-decade career felt unparalleled.
Former NFL partner Dan Dierdorf told the Union-Tribune for a 2016 story: “The man is a walking monument to sports television.”
In the same story, tennis great John McEnroe put Enberg’s mammoth, unmatched resume in perspective.
“If people ask me the top tennis players, when I throw out (Rod) Laver, (Pete) Sampras, Rafa (Nadal), Roger (Federer), I would put him in the same category,” McEnroe said. “He’s a Mount Rushmore guy.”
Service information is pending. Padres Chairman Ron Fowler, who has known Enberg for more than 25 years, said Thursday night that the team has offered the family use of Petco Park for a celebration of life.
Long recognized as one of the most versatile and enthusiastic sports announcer of his era, Enberg did it all: major league baseball, college and pro football, college basketball, boxing, tennis, golf, Olympics, Rose Bowls and Super Bowls, Breeders’ Cup horse racing — earning a trophy case full of Emmys, awards from the pro football, basketball and baseball halls of fame, niches in several broadcasting halls of fame and other assorted honors.
He also was an author, a longtime fixture at Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses parade, the host of several sports-themed TV game shows and was still calling San Diego Padres baseball games into his 80s.
“Sportscasting is a kid’s dream come true, which is one of the reasons that I keep doing it,” he said in his autobiography, “Dick Enberg, Oh My!” the “Oh my!” having been his signature call. “I can’t let my dream go. I’m still in love with what I do.”
And how well did he do it? “He could orchestrate a telecast better than anyone I’ve ever worked with,” Billy Packer, former college basketball analyst and longtime Enberg broadcast partner, once told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “I think anybody who worked with him would just stand in amazement at how great he was at anything he undertook.”
As a former teacher, Enberg was noted for his preparation and his knowledgeable yet eager approach to his craft.
“As a broadcaster, you have to be entertaining, you have to be well informed, you have to be excited about what you know and you have to have a sense of your audience — just like in a classroom,” he wrote in his book. “In fact, when I look into the camera, I’m looking into my classroom. When I’m calling a game, I can envision hands shooting up all over the country with questions. ‘Whoops,’ I’ll think, ‘perhaps we need to explain that concept or strategy a little better.’ ”
Even research and preparation weren’t always foolproof, though. Fans could be picky, and when Enberg began using one of his pet calls, “Touch ’em all!” for opposing teams’ home run hitters, Padres faithful rose up in protest and he quickly reserved that call for Padres’ home run hitters.
“Oh my!” was an Enberg family saying, his mother using it to express dismay, such as during the many hours young Dick spent broadcasting imaginary games. He used it to express wonder at athletic grace, but it could just as well have applied to his life.
Richard Alan Enberg was born Jan. 9, 1935, in Mount Clemens, Mich. The family moved to Southern California for several years, then back to Michigan, to a farm near the village of Armada. “We had a one-room schoolhouse and a two-hole toilet,” Enberg recalled for The Times years ago.
He quarterbacked his high school football team, then after graduation, enrolled at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, where he played college baseball. And, fortunately, took a course in debate. One of his debate classmates was the public-address announcer for the Chippewas’ football and basketball teams, and when he graduated the job was passed down to Enberg. He also applied for a job sweeping floors, at $1 an hour, at the local radio station. A station employee liked Enberg’s voice, and instead of a broom he was handed a microphone and went to work as a weekend disc jockey, still at $1 an hour. When the station’s sports director left, Enberg moved into that slot, producing a 15-minute nightly wrap-up.
All of that was fun, but Enberg had more serious things on his mind. After graduation, he enrolled in graduate health science studies at Indiana University, eventually earning both master’s and doctoral degrees. Just as he was arriving in Bloomington, though, a Hoosier radio network was being put together and Enberg was hired, at $35 a game, to broadcast football and basketball.
Four years later, doctorate in hand, he applied for a teaching job at Indiana University. He didn’t get it, but a flier on the health sciences bulletin board, offering a teaching position at San Fernando Valley State College — now Cal State Northridge — caught his eye. Recalling his early boyhood days in Canoga Park, he applied for and got the job, teaching health science and assisting the baseball coach.
The pay was small, and the now-married Enberg went looking for extra income in the other area he knew, broadcasting. He tried more than a dozen stations in the spring of 1962, getting no call-backs. Changing tactics, he began identifying himself as Dr. Enberg, finally got put through to program directors and was able to pick up part-time work.
He got his big break in 1965. KTLA, Channel 5, was looking for a sportscaster and Enberg was hired, at $18,000 a year. “I felt guilty because that was triple what I made as a teacher,” he recalled for The Times in 1987. “Then I found out I was being paid 10% under the union minimum.”
In quick succession, Enberg was calling the weekly televised boxing cards at Olympic Auditorium, became the radio announcer for the Los Angeles Rams, and began working UCLA telecasts during the Bruins’ John Wooden-Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) glory years.
Then it was on to a decade-long association with the Angels, until NBC called. There, he, McGuire and Packer formed an unforgettable NCAA tournament trio, Enberg serving as buffer between the “What will he say next?” McGuire and the almost dour, statistics-driven Packer. So taken was Enberg with the irrepressible McGuire — “My most unforgettable character, and there’s nobody in second place!” — that he later wrote a one-act play about him, “Coach: The Untold Story of College Basketball Legend Al McGuire.”
Basketball also gave Enberg, and his fans, an especially memorable experience. In a UCLA-Oregon game in 1970, Oregon went into a stall, leaving Enberg with little to talk about and air time to be filled. He began humming “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” from the big movie of the previous year, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
At the next game, UCLA’s pep band played the song and the student section called for him to sing it. He demurred, saying he didn’t know the words, but they insisted and he promised he’d learn them. Then, after the last home game of the regular season, he walked to mid-court and sang.
A few days later, he heard from a music professor, who wrote, “I’ve spent 30 years studying music and you hit two notes I’ve never heard before.”
Dan Patrick pays a nice tribute:
I’ve written here before about Enberg’s announcing the football games I played on the front lawn or the street. He was my favorite announcer, so this feels like a personal loss. It’s not as if I sound like him, but the importance of preparation he always felt, and the enthusiasm he brought to every event he did are something every announcer, full-time or part-time, needs to bring to any broadcast.
I read this this morning, and it’s excellent advice, reportedly from July 2016:
“Mr. Enberg, what is the biggest piece of advice you’ve received during your career that you now pass along to future announcers?”
“Never say No to anything you’re offered. Big city, little city, Big pay or no pay, You never say No.”
Excellent advice that I have inadvertently followed.
To quote Dave Matthews, everyone goes in the end, but it’s kind of sad to watch highlights of Enberg’s 1980s NBC games with Merlin Olsen and know that neither of them are with us anymore …
… similar to watching 1970s Monday Night Football games with Frank Gifford, Howard Cosell and either Don Meredith or Alex Karras and now that none of them are around anymore.
Certainly “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which NBC stations will carry Sunday at 7 p.m. Central time, is a Christmas movie. What’s somewhat unexpected about it is that it was considered a box office failure when it first came out, as in making approximately half its production costs at the box office. (Some of that was due to stiff competition around Christmas 1946.)
What’s more interesting is the story behind the movie, particularly its star, James Stewart, as reported by the London Daily Mail:
Jimmy Stewart suffered such extreme PTSD after being a [bomber] pilot in World War II that he acted out his mental distress during ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’.
Stewart played George Bailey in the classic movie and channeled his anger and guilt into the scenes where he rages at his family.
Stewart was haunted by ‘a thousand black memories’ from his time as an Air Force commanding officer that he took with him back to Hollywood after the war.
Pilots who flew with him said that became ‘Flak Happy’ during World War II, a term to describe what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
Stewart wrestled with the guilt of killing civilians in bomb raids over France and Germany including one instance where they destroyed the wrong city by mistake.
Stewart felt responsible for the death of his men and especially one bloodbath where he lost 13 planes containing 130 men who he knew well.
Stewart never spoke about it, even to other veterans, and bottled up his emotions that came out in the acting parts he chose when he returned to Hollywood.
He acted it out during It’s a Wonderful Life, where character George Bailey unravels in front of his family – the emotional core of the film after a lifetime of setbacks, including being unable to go to war while his brother becomes a decorated hero.
Films like Shenandoah and Winchester 73 allowed Stewart to explore his dark side which was never there before he went to war.
Matzen writes that Stewart’s decision to join the military was less surprising than his decision to become an actor; his grandfather fought in the Civil War and more distant relatives fought in the Revolutionary War
Stewart was finally called up shortly before the assault on Pearl Harbor in 1941 which forced America into the World War II.
Asked by a studio boss why he wanted to give up his life in Hollywood, Stewart said: ‘This country’s conscience is bigger than all the studios in Hollywood put together, and the time will come when we’ll have to fight’.
Stewart was initially put in the Air Force Motion Picture Division because commanders wanted to use him to make films to convince more airmen to sign up.
He was also used for PR stunts until he demanded that he see combat like other airmen.
Stewart’s chance came with the creation of a B-24 bomber group, the 445th, and he was appointed commander of the 703rd squadron.
Matzen writes that the ‘key moment in Jim’s life had arrived. There would never be another like this, not before, not after’.
Speaking to DailyMail.com, Matzen said that Stewart signed up because he ‘felt he had to prove himself, especially with women, to prove he was attractive enough, charming enough’.
He said: ‘He wanted to prove he was responsible enough, that’s the key with him. He wanted to prove he was responsible enough to be an officer, that he could handle this, he could make his dad proud of him’.
According to ‘Mission’, Stewart and the 445th were deployed to Tibenham in East Anglia in England where they would carry out bombing raids on German targets.
Stewart did not stay on the ground and flew with his men.
Unlike other commanding officers Stewart, who was a Captain, took time to get to know his men as he wanted a team atmosphere.
The tactic worked but at a huge personal cost – when they started to be killed off it hit him harder.
Their first mission was to bomb a Nazi submarine facility in the city of Kiel and went off better than Stewart had expected.
As the flight got underway Stewart’s dream was finally realized – he was in combat.
Matzen writes that he ‘became part of something vital, something like the phalanx of the Roman legions’.
The biggest shock was the flak from anti-aircraft guns.
Matzen writes that the training about it ‘bore no resemblance to the experience’ and their bombers yawed left and right and pitched up and down as explosions went off all around them in the sky.
None of Stewart’s planes were shot down during the raid – but soon the bodies began fall.
During a raid on Bremen, the second largest port in Germany, enemy fighters took down a bomber called ‘Good Nuff’. Of the crew of ten, just three parachuted out.
Not for the first time, Stewart had to write a letter to the parents of the dead airmen saying they were missing and presumed dead.
A mission over Mannheim ended in catastrophe when they lost two planes with 20 men inside.
And as the weeks went on, this all began to weigh heavily on Stewart.
Matzen said: ‘He was a perfectionist and he was so hard on himself. It wasn’t just that he had responsibility for his plane, if he was in a group it was 15-20 planes and it was sometimes 75-100 planes.
‘It just got to him and it got to him pretty fast.
‘Every decision he made was going to preserve life or cost lives. He took back to Hollywood all the stress that he had built up.’
In total Stewart flew 20 missions and the stress manifested itself physically and mentally.
Stewart could not keep his food down which became a problem when he was embarking on draining eight or nine hour missions.
Stewart survived the war on peanut butter and ice cream which meant his diet consisted of just protein and sugar.
Unable to sleep, he became more and more wore down by the demanding flights – that became more and more bloody.
The worst was one that Stewart did not actually fly on, but his squadron did.
The raid on the city of Gotha, Germany, led to the loss of 13 planes, or 130 men all in one go.
Those who survived told horrific tales of bodies flying through the air and planes exploding in front of them.
More more than two hours Nazi fighters ‘poured death and destruction’ at Stewart’s men from every direction.
They used cables with bombs attached to them to bring their bombers down, fired rockets ‘like the Fourth of July’ and fired rockets at will.
Nazi pilots followed the planes as they went down to make sure there were no survivors.
Stewart heard all this and knew that the next day he had to lead the next nearly identical mission.
That night he did not sleep – miraculously his flight was nowhere near as bad.
Perhaps the episode which disturbed Stewart the most was a raid which went terribly wrong.
The 453rd were assigned to bomb a V-1 rocket facility in the northern French village of Siracourt.
The instruments in Stewart’s cockpit malfunctioned and 12 bombers deployed their payloads on the city of Tonnerre instead.
At least 30 tons of general purpose bombs rained down causing unknown numbers of civilian casualties.
Stewart’s pilots tried to cover for him but he took the blame himself, something which earned him their ultimate respect.
In all Stewart had served four-and-a-half years during World War II and was awarded the Air Medal with oak leaf clusters, Distinguished Flying Crosses and the Croix de Guerre.
Matzen told DailyMail.com that he interviewed one of the pilots who flew with Stewart who told him that Stewart once said that he had gone ‘flak happy’ and was sent to the ‘flak farm’.
‘Flak happy’ refers to what has now become known as PTSD but was little understood at the time, while the ‘flak farm’ was a treatment center for soldiers.
For Stewart his soul had been ‘ground down to nothing’ and his ‘youth had died’.
When Stewart’s mother Bessie and his father Alex saw him for the first time they were ‘shocked by what they saw – their boy had aged what seemed decades’.
Matzen writes that he was a decorated war hero, was rake thin and had gray hair and a ‘command authority’ that made his father uneasy.
Stewart faced a grim reality: He was 37 but looked 50 and his career as a romantic lead was over. He struggled to find work until director Frank Capra hired him for It’s A Wonderful Life.
Matzen said that it was a lifeline for Stewart and rehabilitated him in the eyes of Hollywood, showing directors that he could still act.
Speaking to DailyMail.com, Matzen said: ‘Jim came back from hell on earth and groped around for a movie to make, and his only offer he had was for what would become the most beloved motion picture in all American culture.
‘In an unlikely life full of unlikely things -this gangly stringbean becoming a movie star and then a war hero -this was the unlikeliest.’
The movie also provided an unlikely outlet for his still raw emotions.
Matzen said: ‘I don’t think he had that kind of capacity before the war. It enabled him to be ferocious and to have that raw emotion.
‘You see it time and time again; I think he would look for scripts where he could demonstrate that rage. I think that was the side of him that in there all the time and that’s how he would let it out.’
Stewart did not leave the military and continued to serve until May 1968 when he retired after 27 years of service during which time he was a bomber pilot during the Vietnam War.
But the memories of World War II never left him and he would see people in the street who reminded him of the airmen who had died under his command.
In ‘Mission’, Matzen writes: ‘Was he still flak happy, on a flak farm? Who could tell what was real after all that had happened over five long years.
‘The nightmares come every night.
‘There was on oxygen at 20,000 feet with 190s zipping past, spraying lead and firing rockets, flak bursting about the cockpit. B-24s hit, burning, spinning out of formation.
‘Bail out! Bail out! Do you see any chutes? How many chutes? Whose ship was it? Oh God, not him?
Not them! Bodies, pieces of bodies smacking off the windshield.
‘And the most frequent dream, an explosion under him and the plane lifted by it and the feeling that this was the end.’
The movie was directed by Frank Capra, of whom University of Nevada Prof. John Marini writes:
Frank Capra was born in Sicily in 1897 and came to America in 1903. Yet by the 1930s, his movies—movies like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Meet John Doe—were said to embody the best in America. Capra’s films were nominated for 35 Academy Awards and won eight, including two for best picture and three for best director. But Capra’s star faded after the Second World War, and by the end of the revolutionary decade of the 1960s, the actor and director John Cassavettes could say: “Maybe there never was an America in the thirties. Maybe it was all Frank Capra.” By that time, Capra’s films were widely viewed as feel-good fantasies about a country that never was. But is that view correct?
Capra, like Lincoln, believed that our inherited political edifice of liberty and equal rights is a fundamental good. He believed that if our treasure is in the ideas of our fathers, it is the duty of each generation to make those ideas live through the proper kind of education—including through literature and art, including his own art of filmmaking. Accordingly, he believed it is important to celebrate the deeds of those ordinary individuals who continue to exercise the virtues necessary to maintain those ideas.
In celebrating these deeds in his movies, Capra rejected social or economic theories based on progressivism or historicism—theories in which the idea of natural right is replaced with struggles for power based on categories such as race and class. Such theories had taken root not only in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, but elsewhere in the West—especially in the universities. …
Capra was often thought to be a populist. But Capra did not assume that a virtuous opinion existed in the people, or that the people simply needed mobilizing. He was aware that the modern public is created by modern mass media whose techniques spawn mass society, posing a danger to individual freedom. Capra wrote that his films “embodied the rebellious cry of the individual against being trampled into an ort by massiveness—mass production, mass thought, mass education, mass politics, mass wealth, mass conformity.” He did not believe in the use of mass power to improve society or to right historical wrongs. Reform, he thought, must take place through moral regeneration—thus through moral education.
Consider Capra’s 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which an idealistic man goes to Congress, runs into rampant corruption, becomes despondent, is later inspired at the Lincoln Memorial, decides against hope to stand on principle, and prevails. Capra had doubts about making Mr. Smith. While in Washington preparing for the film, he attended a press conference in which President Roosevelt outlined the great problems facing the nation. Capra wondered whether it was a good time to make a dramatic comedy about Washington politics. In his troubled state he visited the Lincoln Memorial, where he saw a boy reading Lincoln’s words to an elderly man. He decided, he later wrote, that he “must make the film, if only to hear a boy read Lincoln to his grandpa.” He left the Lincoln Memorial that day, he recalled,
with this growing conviction about our film: The more uncertain are the people of the world . . . the more they need a ringing statement of America’s democratic ideals. The soul of our film would be anchored in Lincoln. Our Jefferson Smith [the film’s lead character, played by Jimmy Stewart] would be a young Abe Lincoln, tailored to the rail-splitter’s simplicity, compassion, ideals, humor. . . . It is never untimely to yank the rope of freedom’s bell.
When watching Mr. Smith, it is important to notice where Capra locates the corruption. FDR customarily attacked “economic royalists,” or the private corruption of corporations and monopolies. For FDR, the solution to corruption was to be found through the government and through the unions, which would combat the economic forces of the private sphere. But in Mr. Smith, Capra located the corruption not in the private but in the political sphere—it was the politicians who had usurped the institutions of government on behalf of their own interests and the special interests. When Smith goes to Washington he reveres a Senator from his state who had been a friend of his father. Smith’s father, a newspaperman, had been killed while defending an independent prospector against a mining syndicate that was likely in cahoots with the union. Capra, like Smith and his father, understood America in terms of a common good—a good established by the principles of equality and liberty as the foundation of individual rights.
The setting of Mr. Smith is deliberately timeless. There is no mention of the Depression or of impending war. There is no indication of partisanship. What Capra hopes to bring to life are the words that have been carved in stone on Washington, D.C.’s monuments, but which are now forgotten. That is Jefferson Smith’s purpose as well. In a central scene in the movie, gazing at the lighted dome of the Capitol, Smith says:
… boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty is too precious a thing to be buried in books. … Men should hold it up in front of them every single day … and say, “I’m free to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn’t. I can. And my children will.”
What Smith is advocating in the film is the establishment of a boys camp that will teach them about the principles of their country. Moreover, it is not to be paid for by the taxpayers, but with a loan from the government to be paid for by the boys themselves. At the climax of Smith’s battle in the Senate, he says this:
Get up there with that lady that’s up on top of this Capitol dome—that lady that stands for liberty. Take a look at this country through her eyes. … You won’t just see scenery. You’ll see … what man’s carved out for himself after centuries of fighting … for something better than just jungle law—fighting so he can stand on his own two feet, free and decent—like he was created, no matter what his race, color, or creed. That’s what you’d see. There’s no place out there for graft or greed or lies—or compromise with human liberties. And if that’s what the grown-ups have done with this world that was given to them, then we better get those boys camps started fast and see what the kids can do. It’s not too late. … Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light. They’re right here. You just
have to see them again.
For Capra, like Lincoln, the problem is how to make people see the principles again.
The politicians in Washington in 1939 did not like their portrayal in Mr. Smith. Many tried to keep the movie from being shown. Capra thought it to be a ringing defense of democracy—and the people agreed. It was a tremendous success, not only in America, but throughout the world. In 1942, a month before the Nazi occupation of France was to begin, the Vichy government asked the French people what films they wanted to see before American and British films were banned by the Germans. The great majority wanted to see Mr. Smith. One theater in Paris played the movie for 30 straight nights.
By the time America entered World War II, Capra had become America’s most popular director and was president of the Screen Directors Guild. Yet four days after Pearl Harbor he left Hollywood to join the Armed Forces. He was sent to Washington and was given an office next to the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall. Marshall was worried that millions of men would be conscripted, many right off of the farm, having little idea of the reason for the war. He assigned Capra to make “a series of documented, factual-information films—the first in our history—that will explain to our boys in the Army why we are fighting, and the principles for which we are fighting.” Capra was nearly cowed by the assignment. He had never made a documentary. But after giving it some thought, he brilliantly dramatized the difference between the countries at war by using their own films and documentaries, in this way illustrating the character and danger of tyranny.
After the war, with the danger gone, it became increasingly clear that American intellectuals, who had rejected the political principles of the American Founding, had not understood the phenomenon of tyranny. For them, it was simply historical conditions that had established the distinction between right and wrong—or between friend and enemy—during the war. For them, in fighting the Nazis, America had simply been fighting a social movement. Subsequently, they looked on those who still revered America’s Founding principles as representing a reactionary economic and social movement to be opposed here at home. For the same reason, Capra’s wartime documentaries—known collectively as Why We Fight—came to be seen merely as propaganda.
Capra never thought of his documentaries as propaganda. He saw them as recognizing the permanent human problems—those problems that reveal the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice. The fundamental distinction in politics is between freedom and slavery or democracy and tyranny. Winston Churchill said of Capra’s wartime documentaries, “I have never seen or read any more powerful statement of our cause or of our rightful case against the Nazi tyranny.” In his view, they were not propaganda at all. Churchill insisted that they be shown to every British soldier and in every theater in England. At the end of the war in 1945, General Marshall awarded Capra the Distinguished Service Medal. And on Churchill’s recommendation, Capra was awarded the Order of the British Empire Medal in 1962.
Capra’s last great movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, was made in 1946. Shortly before making it, he said, “There are just two things that are important. One is to strengthen the individual’s belief in himself, and the other, even more important right now, is to combat a modern trend toward atheism.” This movie, he wrote, summed up his philosophy of filmmaking: “First, to exalt the worth of the individual; to champion man—plead his causes, protest any degradation of his dignity, spirit or divinity.” Capra understood that Hollywood would be changing, because the culture and society had begun to change. The historical and personal categories of class and race had become political, and self-expression and self-indulgence had replaced those civic virtues that require self-restraint. In his 1971 autobiography—imagine what he would think today—he wrote that “practically all the Hollywood filmmaking of today is stooping to cheap salacious pornography in a crazy bastardization of a great art to compete for the ‘patronage’ of deviates.”
In 1982, when he was in his 85th year, Capra was awarded the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award. In his acceptance speech, he touched on the things that had been most important in his life. He spoke of celebrating his sixth birthday in steerage on a 13-day voyage across the Atlantic. He recalled the lack of privacy and ventilation, and the terrible smell. But he also remembered the ship’s arrival in New York Harbor, when his father brought him on deck and showed him the Statue of Liberty: “Cicco look!” his illiterate peasant father had said. “Look at that! That’s the greatest light since the star of Bethlehem! That’s the light of freedom! Remember that. Freedom.” Capra remembered. In his speech to the Hollywood elite so many years later, he revealed his formula for moviemaking. He said: “The art of Frank Capra is very, very simple. It’s the love of people. Add two simple ideals to this love of people—the freedom of each individual and the equal importance of each individual—and you have the principle upon which I based all my films.”
It is hard to think of a better way to describe Frank Capra’s view of the world, and America’s place in fulfilling its purpose, than to turn to another great American who made his living in the world of motion pictures. Ronald Reagan was a friend and admirer of Frank Capra. They were very much alike. The inscription that Reagan had carved on his tombstone could have been written by Capra: “I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there is purpose and worth to each and every life.” Both Capra and Reagan looked to a benevolent and enduring Providence, and the best in man’s nature, as the ultimate grounds of political right. For them, as for Lincoln, America was more than a geographical location or a place where citizens shared a common blood or religion, or belonged to a common culture or tradition. America was a place where an enlightened understanding of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” had made it possible to establish those principles of civil and religious liberty that gave “purpose and worth to each and every life.”
Capra was aware that the moral foundations established by those principles, as well as belief in God, had become endangered by the transformations in American life following World War II. He saw the necessity of reviving the moral education necessary to preserve the conditions of freedom, because he understood that in a democracy, the people must not only participate in the rule of others, they must also learn to govern themselves.
In his last and most personal tribute to his adopted country, Capra recalled his family’s arrival at Union Station in Los Angeles after their long journey across America in 1903. When they got off the train, his mother and father got on their knees and kissed the ground. Capra’s last words to his assembled audience were these: “For America, for just allowing me to live here, I kiss the ground.” Capra did not believe that he had a right to be a citizen of America. Rather he was grateful for the privilege of living in America. He understood that freedom not only offers economic opportunity, but establishes a duty for all citizens—a duty to preserve the conditions of freedom not only for themselves, but for their posterity. Only those willing to bear the burdens of freedom have a right to its rewards.
For Capra, the real America was to be understood in terms of its virtues, which are derived from its principles. In his view, his art was dedicated to keeping those virtues alive—by making those principles live again in the speeches and deeds of that most uncommon phenomenon of human history, the American common man. It was the simple, unsophisticated, small-town common American that Capra celebrated in his films. But for Capra, as for his friend John Ford, no one epitomized this phenomenon better than Abraham Lincoln.
“Our record as journalists in covering this Trump story and the Russian story is pretty good,” legendary reporter Carl Bernstein recently claimed. Pretty good? If there’s a major news story over the past 70 years that the American media has botched more often because of bias and wishful thinking, I’d love to hear about it.
Four big scoops recently run by major news organizations—written by top reporters and, presumably, churned through layers of scrupulous editing—turned out to be completely wrong. Reuters, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and others reported that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office had subpoenaed President Donald Trump’s records from Deutsche Bank. Trump’s attorney says it hadn’t. ABC reported that candidate Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election. He didn’t (as far as we know). The New York Times ran a story claiming that K.T. McFarland, a former member of the Trump transition team, had acknowledged collusion. She hadn’t. Then, CNN topped off the week by falsely reporting that the Trump campaign had been offered access to hacked Democratic National Committee emails before they were published. It wasn’t.
Forget your routine bias. These were four bombshells disseminated to millions of Americans by breathless anchors, pundits and analysts, all of whom are feeding frenzied expectations about Trump-Russia collusion that have now been internalized by many as indisputable truths. All four pieces, incidentally, are useless without their central faulty claims. Yet there they sit. And these are only four of dozens of other stories that have fizzled over the year.
If we are to accept the special pleadings of journalists, we have to believe these were all honest mistakes. They may be. But a person might then ask: Why is it that every one of the dozens of honest mistakes is prejudiced in the very same way? Why hasn’t there been a single major honest mistake that diminishes the Trump-Russia collusion story? Why is there never an honest mistake that indicts Democrats?
Maybe the problem is that too many people are working backward from a preconception. Maybe newsrooms have too many people who view the world through an identical prism—which is to say they believe he stole the election with the help of Russians. And perhaps the president’s constant lashing out at the media has provoked some newsrooms to treat their professional obligations as a moral crusade rather than a fact-gathering enterprise.
For instance, the CNN reporters who wrote the DNC story, Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb, contend they had two sources who told them Donald Trump Jr. was offered encryption codes to look at hacked DNC emails. They both must have lied to them about the same date on the same email. CNN says that the duo followed “editorial process” in reporting the piece. This brings three lines of questioning to mind.
First: Do news organizations typically run stories about documents they’ve never authenticated? If so, what other big stories over the past few years have been run based on unauthenticated documents? Can they point to a single story about the Obama administration CNN has written using a similar process? What part of CNN’s editorial guidelines deals with this sort of situation?
Second: Why would two independent sources lie about a date on the email to Trump Jr. if they didn’t want to mislead the public? And how independent could they really be? How many stories regarding the Russian-collusion investigation has CNN run from these same sources?
Three: If sources lie to you, why not burn them? There may be good reasons to avoid exposing a dishonest source. Perhaps it will scare away legitimate whistleblowers. Perhaps reporters want to preserve relationships with people like Adam Sch—er, with those in power—because they may help on other stories in the future. And at the end of the day, you’re in contest for information. But these people have put the reporters’ reputation—even their jobs—in danger. Moreover, they have engaged in a serious abuse of the public trust and an abuse of power. Who knows how many of these mistakes, spread over numerous outlets, came from the same sources? This seems newsworthy.
When honest mistakes are found, the reflex of many political journalists has been portraying themselves as sentinels of free speech and democracy. Often they will attempt to do this by contrasting their track record on truth with that of Donald Trump. Yes, Trump is a fabulist. His tweets can be destructive. And maybe one day Robert Mueller will inform us that the administration colluded with Russia. What it has not done up to this point, however, is undermine the ability of the press to report stories accurately. Trump didn’t make your activist source lie.
The fact that many political journalists (not all) have a political agenda is not new (social media has made this fact inarguable), but if they become a proxy of operatives who peddle falsehoods, they will soon lose credibility with an even bigger swath of the country. They will have themselves to blame.
Covering the Trump presidency has not always been the media’s finest hour, but even grading on that curve, the month of December has brought astonishing screwups. Professor and venerable political observer Walter Russell Mead tweeted on December 8, “I remember Watergate pretty well, and I don’t remember anything like this level of journalistic carelessness back then. The constant stream of ‘bombshells’ that turn into duds is doing much more to damage the media than anything Trump could manage.”
On December 1, ABC News correspondent Brian Ross went on air and made a remarkable claim. For months, the media have been furiously trying to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Ross reported that former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had just pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, was prepared to testify that President Trump had instructed him to contact Russian officials before the 2016 election, while Trump was still a candidate. If true, it would have been a gamechanger. But Ross’s claim was inaccurate. Flynn’s documented attempts to contact the Russians came after Trump was president-elect, allegedly trying to lay diplomatic groundwork for the new administration. Ross was suspended by ABC for four weeks without pay for the error.
Later that same weekend, the New York Times ran a story about Trump transition official K. T. McFarland, charging that she had lied to congressional investigators about knowledge of the Trump transition team’s contacts with Russia. The article went through four headline changes and extensive edits after it was first published, substantially softening and backing away from claims made in the original version. The first headline made a definitive claim: “McFarland Contradicted Herself on Russia Contacts, Congressional Testimony Shows.” The headline now reads “Former Aide’s Testimony on Russia Is Questioned.” The website Newsdiffs, which tracks edits of articles after publication, shows nearly the entire body of the article was rewritten. (The Times website makes no mention of the changes.)
Still in that first weekend of December, Senator Orrin Hatch criticized the excesses of federal welfare programs, saying, “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves.” The quote was taken wildly out of context. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough as well as journalists from Mic, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times reported that Hatch was directly criticizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program, with some suggesting Hatch thought children should be put to work to pay for subsidized health care. Not only was Hatch not criticizing the CHIP program, he cowrote the recent bill to extend its funding.
On December 5, Reuters and Bloomberg reported that special counsel Robert Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank account records of President Trump and family members, possibly related to business done in Russia. The report was later corrected to say Mueller was subpoenaing “people or entities close to Mr. Trump.”
Then on December 8, another Russia bombshell turned into a dud. CNN’s Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb reported Donald Trump Jr. had been sent an email on September 4, 2016, with a decryption key to a WikiLeaks trove of hacked emails from Clinton confidant and Democratic operative John Podesta—that is, before the hacked emails were made public. (WikiLeaks is widely surmised to act as a front for Russian intelligence.) MSNBC and CBS quickly claimed to have confirmed CNN’s scoop. Within hours, though, CNN’s report was discredited. The email was sent on September 14, after the hacked Podesta emails had been made publicly available. CNN later admitted it never saw the email it was reporting the contents of.
This is just eight days’ worth of blundering. Since October of last year, when Franklin Foer at Slate filed an erroneous report on a computer server in Trump Tower communicating with a Russian bank, there have been an unprecedented number of media faceplants, most of them directly related to the Russia-collusion theory. The errors always run in the same direction—they report or imply that the Trump campaign was in league with Moscow. For a politicized and overwhelmingly liberal press corps, the wish that this story be true is obviously the father to the errors. Just as obviously, there are precedents for such high-profile embarrassments in the past. (Remember Dan Rather’s “scoop” on George W. Bush’s National Guard service?) But flawed reporting in the Trump era is becoming more the norm than the exception, suggesting the media have become far too willing to abandon some pretty basic journalistic standards.
Editors at top news organizations once treated anonymous sourcing as a necessary evil, a tool to be used sparingly. Now anonymous sources dominate Trump coverage. It’s not just a problem for readers, who should rightly be skeptical of information someone isn’t willing to vouch for by name. It’s a problem for reporters, too, because anonymous sources are less likely to be cautious and diligent in providing information. According to CNN, the sources behind the busted report on Trump Jr.’s contact with WikiLeaks didn’t intend to deceive and had been reliable in the past. Maybe so, but given the network’s repeated errors it’s difficult to just take CNN’s word for it.
But it’s one thing to use anonymous sources; it’s quite another to be entirely trusting of them. CNN decided to report the contents of an email to Donald Trump Jr. based only on the say-so of two anonymous sources and without seeing the emails. “I remember when I was [a staffer] on the Ways and Means committee and I would try and give reporters stories, and I remember the Wall Street Journal demanded to see a document,” former Bush administration press secretary Ari Fleischer tells The Weekly Standard. “They wouldn’t take it from me if I didn’t give them the document, and I thought, ‘Good for them!’ ”
What makes the botched story of the WikiLeaks email more troubling is how quickly MSNBC and CBS ran with CNN’s scoop. “It’s hard to imagine how independent people could repeatedly misread a date on an email and do so for three different networks,” says Fleischer. “Whose eyesight is that bad?”
This points to an additional problem with the sourcing on these unfounded reports. The only way three networks could claim to have verified the same specious story is if they were all relying on the very same sources. Many of the flawed Trump reports appear to be sourced from a very narrow circle of people, who no doubt share partisan motivations or personal animus.
Certainly, it appears a number of recent spurious stories have originated as leaks from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee. In Raju and Herb’s report, they revealed that Trump Jr. had been asked about the WikiLeaks email in closed-door testimony before the committee. After CNN’s scoop imploded, a spokesman for Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee, issued a classic non-denial denial, telling Politico “that neither he nor his staff leaked any ‘non-public information’ ” about Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony.
Meanwhile, the Russia investigation has been very good for raising Schiff’s profile. A December 13 press release from the Republican National Committee notes the congressman has at that point spent 20 hours, 44 minutes, and 49 seconds on television since Trump took office, talking mostly about the investigation (pity the low-level staffer who must have had to do the research for that release). During that time, Schiff has always declined to discuss the particulars of the intel committee’s work. Nonetheless, consideration of his sensitive position hasn’t stopped him from offering all manner of innuendo to national TV audiences about evidence suggesting Russia collusion.
For their part, the media don’t seem to be coming to grips with the damage they’re doing to their own credibility. CNN, which calls itself “the most trusted name in news,” didn’t retract their WikiLeaks report but rewrote it in such a way as to render the story meaningless. They also came to the defense of Raju and Herb, saying the reporters acted in accordance with the network’s editorial policies. And of course they didn’t out their sources—the ultimate punishment news organizations can mete out to anonymous tipsters who steer them wrong.
It understandably infuriates the media that President Trump remains unwilling to own up to his own glaring errors and untruths, while news organizations run correction after correction. And it also understandably upsets the media to watch the president actively attack and seek to undermine their work, which remains vital to ensuring accountability in American governance. What they haven’t grasped is how perversely helpful to him they are being: On a very basic level, President Trump’s repeated salvos against “fake news” have resonance because, well, there does indeed appear to be a lot of fake news.
“There is nothing wrong with holding powerful people accountable. There’s nothing wrong with investigating whether or not collusion took place. But there’s a lot wrong when because you want to believe in the story so much you suspend skepticism,” says Fleischer. “You let your guard down. You abandon the normal filters that protect journalistic integrity. And you fail to also hold to account powerful leakers, or powerful members of Congress who themselves have an anti-Trump agenda. It’s called putting your thumb on the scale.”
There is no question that the national media is treating Trump far harsher than it treated his predecessor. As Fleischer points out, the media should hold powerful people, including presidents, accountable, but it should treat everyone in power, Democrat, Republican or no party, equally accountable. Even before that, the media has a bigger obligation to get what it reports correctly.
Outside The Capital Times distortion zone, Wisconsin led the Midwest in job growth over the last year. Our unemployment rate of 3.2% is much better than the nation’s 4.1%. Certainly better than the teachers union-dominated state to the south, which is bleeding population, defaulting on its debts, and nearing junk bond status.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 