Play by Play

by Verne Lundquist

  Once again, I had to produce my passport along with my visa. Another group of policemen searched the vehicle. One officer with a mirror attached to a long pole examined the car’s chassis looking for a stowaway. The trunk slammed shut, putting an exclamation point to their fruitless search.

  Kurt grew more irksome and shouted angrily. I walked toward him, hands up in surrender and to soothe our friend. All we wanted to do was get out of East Germany and then back home. I’d been accused of pissing in the face of an American president. Imagine what might happen if my bosses got wind of involvement in some international incident at the Berlin Wall?

  A tense ten to twenty minutes passed. Our driver had seemed bent on breaking something. Fortunately, no irreparable damage was done. Once back on the Kurfürstendamm, the main artery through East and West Berlin, I remained tense. Even after we passed through Checkpoint Charlie and into the West, my jaw remained clenched. Just as the first lights of dawn were leaking across the edge of the horizon, we got to the Kempinski Hotel. At that hour, the city was ablaze in light, a warm glow against the winter chill. I exited the car and turned back toward the Wall and the dark expanse beyond it. I sighed deeply, grateful that the only smell on the predawn breeze was of freedom.

  I suppose that in terms of my own career prospects at ABC, I should have read the writing on the wall. To an extent, I did, but my eyesight has never been the best. I wanted to keep myself in ABC’s good graces. So I agreed to take on any assignment they “offered.” I’d learned my lesson from that encounter I’d had with Chuck Howard when he pulled the plug on my PGA Tournament debut. I’d protested long and loud, ignoring advice not to, and felt like I was on Chuck’s shit list as a result. I was learning that sometimes you have to go along to get along. So, now I can at least say that I’ve covered twenty sports in my time in broadcasting. Sometimes those sports came in bunches, as they did at a sports festival in Syracuse, New York, when Chuck told me to get my butt up there. I did weight lifting, short-track speed skating (with Eric Heiden as analyst), and archery (solo). I can tell you that a person can barely hear the sound of a string humming the breeze above the sound of the collective snoring back home. I also did post-event interviews with track-and-field participants.

  I say that in jest about archery. I did learn a lot about different sports and applying those Glieber rules for Success paid dividends. I don’t think I ever sounded completely out of my depth. Frank’s other bit of advice, Don’t ever say no to a request, tried my patience. Sometimes my ventures into other sports surprised me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. In 1986 I was “invited” to do the Show Jumping World Cup in Aachen, Germany. I watched every bit of video I could find on the sport, and then sat in awe in a stadium crowded with sixty thousand fans watching those beautiful animals run and leap. Princess Anne was there, an accomplished equestrian herself. I had a first-time analyst named Robert Ridland in the booth with me, and despite being a complete television novice, he was an expert rider himself. He was the captain of the U.S. equestrian team at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. All I had to do was get the names of the horse and rider correct, the country they were representing, and Robert did the rest. Some of my best research material on Charlemagne the Magnificent—he was born in Aachen—went unused.

  I enjoyed the travel and my colleagues, but the lack of high-profile assignments got to me. Like a lot of people, I thought that my employers didn’t appreciate everything I brought to the table as a broadcaster. Versatility can be its own kind of curse—you don’t get known for doing any one thing especially well. There’s a fine line in some people’s minds between being a professional and being a hack. I don’t think that the folks at ABC ever considered me the latter, but when I asked Chuck Howard where I stood with him, he was honest. He said that I was a square peg that didn’t fit into the proverbial round hole. He honestly wasn’t sure what he could do with me. He had tried to figure out what I excelled at but hadn’t been able to. I appreciated knowing exactly where I stood. You have to have a bit of an ego to succeed at anything; a man without pride isn’t much of a man.

  Funnily, Don Drysdale, the Hall of Fame Dodgers pitcher turned baseball broadcaster, said this to me when I was covering spring training for the Rangers. Don was known for his fearsome disposition on the mound and his willingness to hit or low-bridge hitters or back them off the plate just with his stare. We were talking about the business we both found ourselves involved in. “Verne,” he said, “at the end of the day they’re in charge and we ain’t nothing but talking dogs.”

  If Don felt that way some of the time, then imagine what this little mutt often felt.

  LIKE I SAID, I SHOULD have seen the writing on the wall, and to an extent I did, but I was also under contract. I was going to fulfill my obligations and see what I could do about improving my lot at ABC. I wasn’t simply going to roll over and phone it in—given what happened in Moscow I’d begun to think that phoning it in was a lot more difficult than most folks thought. I was going to demonstrate my worth, rough off the square edges, and fit in that round hole.

  I was attending the John R. Wooden Award ceremony in Los Angeles.

  I received a call from Chet Forte at ABC in New York. (He had earned wide acclaim as the first director of Monday Night Football.) ABC had just signed a two-year deal to televise the North American Soccer League starting in 1979. They would do nine regular season games plus the playoffs that culminated in the Soccer Bowl championship game. The league had been in operation since 1964. I was aware of its existence because of the role that Lamar Hunt—the AFL’s principal founder—had played in its formation. Lamar was an impressive proselytizer for the world’s game. Because of his influence, I’d gone to the World Cup in 1970, 1974, and 1978 and enjoyed the passion and the pageantry of the game. Being on the streets of Buenos Aires in 1978, joining millions of fans celebrating the home country’s victory, is among my all-time thrills in sports. I’ll spare you the details of Uncle Verne the man of international intrigue and his involvement with Saudi princes, women of questionable virtue, and Henry Kissinger.

  In spite of my admiration for the game, I wasn’t sold on the idea of soccer doing particularly well in the United States. However, the owners of the league and of the New York Cosmos figured that if there was a problem, then throw some money at it. In this case, they threw money at some of the most prominent names in the game at that time—Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, and a few others. Attendance and ratings rose through the mid-1970s, though many called into question the quality of the game play. ABC jumped in at what seemed an opportune time. I was going to report from the sidelines while Jim McKay handled the play-by-play. Networks seemed to have a rule of thumb back then. You needed an Englishman for games that originated overseas. ABC brought in Paul Gardner as the analyst. Gardner had been covering a variety of American sports for British publications for years.

  The morning of the first broadcast, Jim McKay drove us to the Sombrero, the stadium in Tampa that was the home of the Tampa Bay Rowdies and the NFL’s Buccaneers. The Rowdies were going to square off against the Cosmos. I was happy to see Jim again and to work with him directly was going to be a real treat. As we made our way to the game, Jim was effusive in his praise for this venture. He compared how he felt on the cusp of this game to 1961, when Wide World of Sports kicked off its first season with amateur track and field events, the Drake and the Penn Relays. Laughing, he said that we are all going to be off and running after this, chasing a great success. He felt that we had a tiny little secret and we were about to spring it on an unsuspecting and ultimately grateful nation. He had me convinced. When I was down on the field and looking up at the forty-five thousand fans in the stands, I knew this wasn’t exactly Wembley Stadium, but it was something to see and feel.

  The buzz in my stomach lasted until the first goal of the game. We missed it. We didn’t show it live. None of us had a lot of knowledge about the game, and the confusion for the signal for a goal kick and a corner kick kicked ou
r butts. With a goal kick the player takes the ball in hand and boots it down the field, similar to a punt. That would be a safe time to go to commercial. Thinking that was what had been signaled, the producer made the call to take a break. As it turned out, the officials had signaled for a corner kick—one of the more exciting plays and one that offers a prime opportunity for a goal. In this case, that opportunity got cashed in while we were making some cash through advertising dollars. Having to come back from commercials to say, essentially, here’s what you missed while we were away, wasn’t the best of starts to our coverage.

  I can’t say that things would have turned out different if we’d not made that opening blunder. For many reasons, our broadcasts only brought in about half the number of viewers projected. As with much of my time at ABC, I thought the NASL was going to open doors that even Chuck Howard could see. And it never did.

  The only door that Chuck could see for me was the exit. To put it in polite terms, my contract was not renewed. I was informed of this before the actual date it would lapse. I was angry and a bit panicked. I was forty-one years old. What prospects did I have in a business that was seeing an influx of young talent? My agents were at International Management Group, the enormously influential sports marketing agency that Mark McCormack founded in 1960. It grew to prominence representing Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player. My representative assured me that I had no need to panic. Still, the clock was ticking on my ambitions.

  I was enormously fortunate that prior to this period of professional unease, I’d been enormously blessed to find a partner to share my life with, a woman who made all these career disappointments bearable. God knows what might have become of me if it weren’t for Nancy Miller coming into my life. I’ve witnessed some memorable sporting events, but for me, meeting her tops all of them and merits some play-by-play.

  When I did that East German boxing telecast in Schwerin, my life was at low ebb. I was three months removed from my second divorce. I knew that if I went straight back home to Dallas, I would have been prowling around the house surrounded by little more than bad memories and mementoes of my failure. So, I went on a ten-day Scandinavian excursion, hoping that doing the tourist bit would get me out of a rut. Maybe some ancestral pull was at work as well.

  This was the first week of March 1980, and I don’t have access to all the weather data from Stockholm, but the three days I spent in that rain-soaked world capital were about as dank and miserable as any I can remember. To show you that my thinking wasn’t particularly clear, I had a great thought. Why not go to Norway? The weather in Oslo will certainly have to be better than it is here. Oslo is a lovely city but at that time of year the weather in Scandinavia is hardly balmy and bright. I remember standing on a street corner of the busy thoroughfare that ran along one entrance to the Vigeland Sculpture Park. The morning snow had begun to melt and I stood there looking into a frothy puddle of slush and ice. A city bus screeched to a stop inches before it would have showered me. Later that day, I went to the SAS office and booked a flight to Copenhagen.

  After ten days on the road visiting my ancestral homelands, I returned to Dallas in mid-March. Still feeling a bit haunted, I finished the ten o’clock newscast and decided to go out, hoping to meet someone. I went to the Greenville Avenue neighborhood in my beat-up Chevy. Greenville was one of the hot spots back then and I went into a disco called DaVinci’s. I edged my way past the Saturday Night Fever-esque dancers, squinted through the pulsing lights, sat down at the bar, and ordered a drink.

  Fortunately for me, a young man recognized me and saw I was very much a fish out of water at that spot. He suggested kindly that I might be better off going to a place called Arthur’s. A steakhouse with a nice bar, people more my age tended to be there. The following week, I took the young guy’s advice. Man, I’m glad that I did. On March 18, 1980, my life changed. Local notoriety paid off for me that night as well.

  The restaurant had closed, but the bar was hopping. And it was an upscale bar. They had a trio playing over on the dance floor in the corner. A very attractive woman was sitting on a bar stool. Two guys were standing with her.

  One of the men, the taller of the two, recognized me and said, “Verne, come on over here.”

  I did.

  He told me that his name was Raymond Willey and he owned the Coors beer distributorship in Dallas.

  He then added, “This is my date, Nancy Miller.”

  “And this is my friend Paul, who’s a stockbroker, Paul Bass.” The two of us shook hands.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” Raymond offered.

  I barely heard him. All I could think about was the woman he was with.

  Nancy was sitting down. She had the prettiest smile I’d ever seen in my life, and she still does, thirty-eight years later.

  Raymond broke the spell. He sidled over to me and said, “I know you’re single now, and I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine. Maybe we could double date.”

  Meanwhile, I was looking at Nancy, thinking, Boy, is she pretty.

  Nancy was keeping pretty quiet. Raymond was a talker. Given his business interests he was used to entertaining clients. Nancy didn’t look enthralled at all.

  “Listen,” Raymond said, “I’ve got a schoolteacher who’s obviously single. Her name is Janet Fulton. She’s thirty-five. Let’s double date.”

  He looked down at Nancy and said, “What are you doing Thursday night?”

  And she said, “Nothing.”

  He said, “Good. You and I will have a date and we’ll double date with Verne and Janet Fulton, and I will call her tomorrow and we’ll set this thing up.”

  I thought, Great, but I kept looking at Nancy.

  A while later, Raymond went to the men’s room and I asked Nancy if she would dance with me. I’m not a dancer. I never do that. But I thought, Well, the door’s open here for maybe two minutes.

  We got on the dance floor and I said, “I don’t mean to intrude, but how involved are you with Raymond Willey?”

  Nancy shrugged a bit. “Well, this is our first date. We had a blind date.”

  A doctor, a surgeon who had both of them as patients, had suggested they get together. They had gone to see Ella Fitzgerald at the Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel and they were just having a nightcap.

  Just to be certain I said, “So your first date, right?” And she said, “Yeah.”

  I said, “Well, in that case, let’s forget about what he’s suggesting on Thursday night. What are you doing on Saturday night?” Nancy got this grin that I will never, ever forget and kind of looked up at me: “I think whatever you’re doing.”

  I asked for her number and she gave her work number. Turned out she worked as a radio and television spokesperson. She supplemented her income as a receptionist at a recording studio. I didn’t have a pen or paper on me, but thirty-eight years later I can still recite it.

  361-9189.

  I can do that because that night Nancy said, “Imagine a dial tone, a push-button telephone, and it makes a certain tone.” Her lovely voice went up and down singsong fashion as she repeated those digits. She rose at the end, hitting a high note and lifting my spirits. We spent a good twenty minutes out on the dance floor. I’m no dancer, but the longer I kept her away from Raymond and in my arms and in my sight the better.

  By the time we rejoined the two other men, Raymond suggested that he and Nancy should be on their way.

  I hoped that what I saw in Nancy’s eyes was regret. I know that I saw the two of them getting into Raymond’s Rolls-Royce. I had a formidable opponent to face, but I was undaunted by the challenge.

  Well, I couldn’t wait to get home and go to bed and call her the next morning, and she was out on an audition. I left a message; she never called back. I called again about one o’clock, and she didn’t return the call. I called again at three o’clock, and they said, “Well, she just got back from her assignment. She’s in her office, but she’s got the door closed.” And I said, “Well
, please get a message to her that I’ve called three times and have her call me at Channel Eight.”

  And finally, about five o’clock, I called back again and she took the call. And she said, “Listen, I’ve been thinking all day about this. I’d love to go out with you on Saturday night, but I don’t want to break up a friendship.”

  I said, “We’re not friends. I’ve never met Raymond Willey in my life.”

  And she said, “Well, he greeted you like an old friend.”

  And I said, “Well, Nance, that’s the phenomenon of local television. People assume, if you’re a guest in their living rooms or their bedrooms every night and they know who you are, then conversely, you must know who they are,” and it’s a phenomenon that still exists. “And Raymond just . . . he knew who I was.”

  She said, “Well, you got along so well.”

  I said, “Well, he seemed like a nice guy.”

  She said, “Well, I still don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  And I said, “I promise you it’s a good idea.” So we did, she agreed, and that Saturday night, we went to a restaurant called Farfallo’s.

  When we did get married two years later, the bartender and the young woman who was our waitress that night both came to our wedding. Nancy and I enjoyed that special night and she’s been my constant companion ever since. At every possible opportunity, she’s joined me on the road. Back then, neither of us had a full sense of just where those roads would lead, but it didn’t matter as long as we were together. I feel the same way today.

  Chapter 7

  Yes, Sir: A New Home at the Masters

  What in blue blazers are you talking about?