Growing up, my dad was a big sports fan. He stuck to the basic American fare-football and baseball mostly. Some basketball. Lots of tennis and golf. My father would lie on the floor with his arms outstretched and I would lie on one arm, my younger brother on the other arm, and we would watch weekend games with him as my mother buzzed around in the kitchen. To this day, the most soothing sounds of my childhood are listening to sports announcers on a Saturday afternoon with the smell of dinner wafting through the house.
I'm not really a sports person per se having never played on a team of any sort (except for a brief couple month stint on a girls soccer team in Australia which merely served the purpose of getting me out of Trigonometry for mid day games.) But that being said, I have very personal and sweet sports memories that revolve around other people playing sports.
Skip Caray, the voice of the Atlanta Braves, died Sunday night. Like many Atlanta residents, this is sort of the end of an era for me. I guess his significance can be seen in the very fact that it mattered to someone like me, your atypical sports fan.
It was his voice that ran through my house growing up. His voice that was played on long family road trips in the night in the dark when I would sit up front with my dad and the game would be on the radio. In my early 20s when the Braves were on their winning streak and I would meet friends out at bars and they would turn off the jukebox and we all sat with pitchers of beer and actually sat mesmerized watching every play, it was his voice that alerted us "BravesWin! Braves Win! Braves Win!" I know exactly where I was and who I was with for that game against the Pirates. Having never been a part of that sort of cameraderie, I look back on those moments with great fondness. It had little to do with baseball for me and everything to do with getting caught up in something and riding that wave up and down through the game. Common practice, I guess, for regular sports fans. But it was new to me.
And, it reminded me of all those TBS games with my dad on summer evenings where he would yell at the TV or walk out of the room telling me to turn it off then coming back 3 minutes later telling me to turn it back on again because he had to know what happened next.
Skip had this thing he did where he would always announce where the fan was from who caught the balls. "And a viewer from Gwinnett is taking that one home." I was over thirty before I realized he was just making that up. I thought he knew. He will be missed.
