Thursday, August 4, 2022

Vin Scully, Master Teacher

Vin Scully, the great broadcaster for the Los Angeles Dodgers for almost 70 years, passed away on Tuesday night.  It has be said without exaggeration that Scully was an American icon, whose soothing voice was the soundtrack for summer evenings for three generations of baseball fans.  He was a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was described by at least one writer as the only person about whom no one had anything negative to say on Twitter.

What was it that made Scully so unique?  What was it about the way that he called balls and strikes and home runs that made him so different, so much better, and so much more memorable than the thousands of others who have done the same job over the past seven decades?  Scully did not merely report or describe the action on the field; rather, he taught it to us as only a master teacher could, and, as such, there is much about his style that every teacher can learn from.  

In what ways was Scully a master teacher?  I offer four suggestions.

1) He told us why the game mattered.  Every teacher dreads the question of "why do we have to know this?"  Sometimes, the answer is easy ("you need to know math so you can do your taxes"), and other times our answers seem, even to us, to be more contrived ("you have to learn about the Gilded Era because those who fail to learn history yadda yadda yadda").  Vin found a lesson for life in moments big and small.  

Perhaps his most significant call was when Hank Aaron took over the all-time home run record from Babe Ruth.  This was a big deal - the greatest sports star of the 20th century had held the most famous sports record of all, and now someone had come and claimed that throne from him.  But Scully went further, telling his audience, "A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol."  The moment wasn't just about baseball - it was about racism, and our ability as a nation to overcome it, and as such it was a moment that everyone, baseball fan or not, could and should care about.  Master teacher that he was, he provided a big view of the moment and thus allowed his listeners to connect and to want to tune in more.

2) He was eloquent.  Much has been written about Scully's choice of words and his ability to come up with the perfect phrase in the moment.  Legendary broadcaster Bob Costas commented that it would be impossible for someone to script their words to call the final inning of a perfect game, and yet Scully's call of the last three outs of Sandy Koufax's perfect game in 1965 is held up as an example of broadcasting perfection - and was done on the spot.  This was neither by design not by accident.  Scully was a lifelong learner who, like the best communicators in any field, had read and absorbed widely and deeply from a wide range of authors, broadcasters, and public figures.  He was able to draw on this vast reservoir of the best that language has to offer on a moment's notice, a skill that the best classroom teachers can certainly relate to.  Our commitment to our own development does not end when we begin teaching - it continues forever and our students benefit immensely from it.

3) He knew when to yield the floor.  In the biggest moments, after Aaron's home run and Kirk Gibson's World Series home run in 1988, Scully went silent and allowed the noise of the crowd to make the moment.  He knew that nothing he could say would have a bigger impact than the roar of the home crowd, and he pulled back so that his viewers could feel what everyone in the stadium was feeling.  Broadcasters, like teachers, have the constant temptation to dominate the stage and it is the rare breed in either field who can sense when someone else should be allowed to provide meaning, insight, or emotion.  We sometimes accomplish so much more when we seem to be doing the least.

4) He was a cheerleader.  Vin used to say that his interest in baseball began when he saw a score posted from game 2 of the 1936 World Series, which the Giants lost to the Yankees by a score of 18-4.  He felt so bad for the Giants that he immediately became a Giants fan, and a baseball fan.  For 70 years, his main role was rooting for the players on the field - for his Dodgers, of course, but really for all of the players.  He took a genuine interest in each and every one of them, learning and telling their stories, meeting them and sharing advice, and just generally being happy for their success.  The millions and millions of people who tuned in to listen to him sensed that they were listening to someone genuinely selfless, and that drew us closer to him, made us want to hear him tell us more about the men on the field.  We connect with those people that exude a sense of caring, and if that is true about a sportscaster that we never have and likely never will meet, it is certainly true of the people who walk in front of our classrooms every day.  Our students know which teachers care for them and which teachers are just checking boxes and marking papers (and time).  Vin's magnetism - and hopefully ours - was in his always reminding us that it wasn't about him - which ironically made him the one that we wanted to tune in to.

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