“In life, as in broadcasting, the greatest indictment is if you’re a fraud,” said Curt Smith, an author of books about baseball broadcasting and biographies of Scully and Mel Allen. “Santo wasn’t. He never presented himself as a professional who did his homework, even if he did it; he certainly knew baseball. If you were a Cubs fan, he was your guy, he loved your team, you loved him, and he loved the city you loved.”
Santo was not a play-by-play announcer like Allen, or nearly all the baseball voices most often lionized. But he wanted happy endings for the Cubs as Allen did for the Yankees, although he expressed it as the raw, eternally adolescent id of the games that he called with Pat Hughes.
Hughes, who also worked beside Uecker in Milwaukee, said: “You can take Larry Bird with the Celtics, Jerry Rice with the 49ers or Wayne Gretzky with Edmonton, and no other star player ever loved his former team more than Santo. He loved the organization, the fans and Wrigley Field. He was genuine. He spoke from the heart. He wasn’t trying to fool anybody.”
Hughes recalled standing for the national anthem with Santo in the Shea Stadium radio booth in 2003 when the heater above them ignited Santo’s favorite hairpiece.
“I saw smoke coming out of his hair and he was rubbing his head,” Hughes said. “I said, ‘Man, what did you do?’ He hadn’t noticed how close he was to the heater. I took a cup of water and doused it.”
Santo wore it during the game despite looking as if a “golfer had whacked a divot in it,” Hughes said. He eventually discarded it but had three others, one worse than the next.
Steiner admired the on-air camaraderie of Hughes and Santo.
“Pat was Bud Abbott,” he said, “and just let Ron fly.”
(Excerpted from the N.Y. Times)
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