Remembering Bob Uecker
The wonderful Bob Uecker passed away today at the age of 90. Impressively, he was still announcing Milwaukee Brewers baseball even through last season. Because his lousy baseball career (which turned out to be immensely profitable for him in his hilarious self-effacing ridicule about it), appearing in the Major League movies, starring in the series Mr. Belvedere, appearing in commercials and other announcing, he had a seriously wide-ranging career.
I didn't hear much of his Brewers announcing, though -- since you could pick up the Milwaukee radio station from Chicago that carried their games -- I did periodically listen to a few of his games. He wasn't as funny as his persona in his play-by-play, but he was very professional in calling the games and enjoyable to listen to. Though I didn't hear this one particular game, my brother (who lived in Milwaukee for several years) did and told me about it -- it was a ballgame that went extremely long, and when they got to the 14th inning, he lead the crowd again in a second Seventh Inning Stretch.
As lousy has his playing career, his announcing was top-notch enough to get him voted the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003. And his acceptance speech was hysterically funny. I actually heard it live on the radio. (The ceremony wasn't broadcast on TV yet, that didn't come until later when the MLB Network started in 2009.) When I finally was able to watch the video of the speech, it was almost funnier -- that's because you could watch all the baseball legends behind him laughing throughout the whole thing.
Here's that speech. Even if you don't like baseball or sports, I think it's still highly worth watching. You might not get a few jokes, but you'll get almost all of them, and you'll get the point behind the others. And as a heads-up, I'll just make clear that the point is he's totally ridiculing his utter incompetence. In pretty much everything.
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