Philip K. Wrigley, the late Cubs owner, called Jack Brickhouse into his office. It was May 1960, three weeks into the new season. The Cubs already had plunged into the National League cellar.
“Jack, I want to make a trade, and I want you to handle it for me.”
“Who for who?”
“And Mr. Wrigley looked me in the eye,” Brickhouse recalled, “and said, `Lou Boudreau for Charlie Grimm.’ “
And once again the Cubs made baseball history. Boudreau, who had been Brickhouse’s sidekick on the club’s telecasts, descended from the broadcasting booth and into the dugout to become the team’s manager. In the exchange, Grimm replaced Boudreau.
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So it was with Jack Beasley Brickhouse, the Hall-of-Fame broadcaster who died Thursday at 82. He always seemed to be on the inside of the inside. More than likely, he was Wrigley’s principal confidante for a quarter of a century.
“Jack, what about Leo Durocher?” Wrigley asked five years later. “I know he has a bad reputation.”
Brickhouse acknowledged Durocher had stepped on a few toes but gave Wrigley a favorable report. Durocher was hired on the strength of Brickhouse’s recommendation. It may have been Brickhouse’s only mistake.
Later, Brickhouse and Durocher had a big squabble. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember Brickhouse’s anger.
“I tried but I failed,” he said. “I just can’t get to like the guy.”
Brickhouse wasn’t alone. Many baseball people didn’t speak kindly of “the Lip.”
“Jack always had a happy face,” recalled Jim Gallagher, who was the Cubs’ general manager when Brickhouse climbed aboard in the late ’40s. Before that, in 1946, he was in New York, announcing the Giants’ games with Russ Hodges (“It was the longest season of my life,” Brickhouse said later).
“Even when he was a young announcer, he never missed a free meal,” Gallagher added. “But he paid for his supper. Every time he went to a banquet, he always got up and made a speech. He sang for his supper.”
I knew Brickhouse for more than 40 years. We were friendly but not close friends. When we were on the road and the Cubs had a free Saturday afternoon, he would invite me to go to the theater with him. And after the show, he would go backstage and speak to the players. He knew everybody and, of course, they knew him.
It was during these moments I often thought he was a frustrated actor, that he may have preferred a career on the stage.
Brickhouse was among the champions of the “gee whiz” school of broadcasting. The late Howard Cosell was at the other end, captain of the “aw nuts” brigade.
“I debated Howard about this,” Brickhouse said in “A Voice for All Seasons,” his third and last biography. “I told him he’s got his act and I’ve got mine. I don’t want to be a stick-in-the-mud, but when you go overboard you don’t hurt just the athlete. You hurt his wife going to the grocery store and his kid going to school. Why? What does that prove?”
Brickhouse did more than 5,000 baseball telecasts, probably a national record, and acknowledged there were times when he wasn’t eager to get to the ballpark. He had his down days. But then he would open a letter from a shut-in or look down at the seats behind home plate and see the fans in wheelchairs and realize he was a lucky guy, getting paid for talking about a ballgame.
Brickhouse suffered with the ill-fated 1969 Cubs but didn’t let it show. More than once, he would come into the press box and remind us we weren’t covering the Nuremberg trials. Baseball was part of the entertainment business and nothing more.
Some of the cynics chided him for his Pollyanish approach, that he always was trying to make the players and management look good. But it wasn’t true. He was critical but never in a nasty manner. He never tried to point out his expertise by impaling someone else.
And he had a good sense of humor. Irv Kupcinet, his partner for 24 years of Bears broadcasts, recalled, “When the Bears were 1-13 (in 1969), Jack would say, “The game we’re broadcasting isn’t necessarily the game being played on the field.’ “
It’s probably impossible for the current generation to realize how big he was and understand his contributions to broadcasting and specifically to WGN. He was its man for all seasons. He was at the mike at all the local sports events, big and small. He covered politics and the theater and was among the first to do man-on-the street interviews.
“He was a rare individual,” Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz said Thursday. “He couldn’t say no. He made more charity appearances, twice as many, as anyone I know, and he did it for the kids. He always had a wholesome message.”
We were fortunate to have him in our midst.