I’m already on record with the not-so-patented CSTB two thumbs down for former Cubs/currrent Astros radio voice Milo Hamilton. That said, the hapless homer redeems himself somewhat with his forthcoming trashing of Harry Caray. From the Chicago Sun-Times’ Ron “I’m Not” Rappaport.
In Making Airwaves: 60 Years at Milo’s Microphone ($24.95, Sports Publishing L.L.C.), co-authored by Dan Schlossberg and former Cubs public-relations director Bob Ibach, Hamilton describes the revered Caray as a vain and treacherous man who made Hamilton’s life miserable while making a mission of running him out of Chicago.
”’Well, kid, if I were you, I’d leave town,”’ Hamilton, who has been the Astros’ broadcaster for the last 22 years, says Caray told him when they met shortly after Caray left the White Sox for the Cubs. ”So much for ‘How’s the family?’ and other pleasantries.
”He rode managers. He rode players. It didn’t matter. He treated everyone the same way,” Hamilton writes. ”In short, he was a miserable human being.’
Hamilton’s relationship with Caray and Tribune Broadcast President Jim Dowdle reached its low point at the start of the 1982 season when he was hospitalized with a recurrence of leukemia. Dowdle visited him at Northwestern Memorial, ”almost as if he was dropping in to see if I was really that ill, if perhaps I was faking it,” Hamilton writes. ”I could sense that from his body language. Can you imagine anyone being that inconsiderate?”
Caray’s response to his illness, Hamilton says, was to say on the air that he never had missed any games and he ”couldn’t understand how a guy can take time off during the season.” Later, he boasted to a reporter that he never had missed an inning in his career, ”unlike some other broadcasters I know.”
”You can imagine the temptation for me later on, when that sonofabitch suffered a stroke in 1987, to say something bad about him,” Hamilton writes. ”But I didn’t. It’s not in my nature.
Hamilton says he was ”stunned and saddened” when he learned of the Caray statue, which he says was Dowdle’s idea. ”The first statue put up outside Wrigley Field should have been for Ernie Banks,” he writes. “That’s a given.”
The only piece of public art uglier than that staue of Harry is the Picasso downtown, but at least Picasso intended his work to look like a baboon. It sums up the Tribune Co’s attitude towards the Cubs perfectly, and it should be Ernie. Hamilton’s account of Harry backstage reminds me a lot of Leo Durcocher’s version of Jack Brickhouse in “Nice Guys Finish Last,” where Brickhouse goes off on Leo for missing a game and tries to run him out of town. The column doesn’t explain too well why everybody hated Milo so much, like Trib execs who didn’t have to fear Harry, but I will happily get Milo’s book when it’s released as a book-on-tape, but only if they get Skip Caray to read it.
Skip Caray and books-on-tape. What a dangerous combination! I could imagine it now: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it’s 8:06 pm.”
Oh, sorry that’s Chip. I had my Carays confused.
This is the stuff that great sports movies are made of. Have the rights been optioned yet? Maybe Philip Seymour Hoffman as Milo and Will Ferrell can reprise his Harry?
you, i think, are the miserable human being
Milo Hamilton is a treasure. His wit and baseball knowledge have never been surpassed by anyone, including the beloved Harry Caray. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes, but on the michrophone, Hamilton is clear, concise, humorous and on to the point. He’s been called a “homer”, but I see him as a home-town announcer who isn’t afraid to tell it like it is. There are those announcers who never say a bad word about anyone connected to the home team and there there are announcers like Harry, who took joy in running players and announcers out of town (whether they deserved it or not, just to satisfy his ego). Hamilton is correct. Ernie Banks should have had the first statue at Wrigley. Santo and Sandberg should have followed. Harry Caray’s statue belongs outside the Anheuser Bush Brewery in St. Louis