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He was born Vincent Edward Scully to Irish immigrant parents on Nov. 29, 1927, in the Bronx. His dad, a silk salesman, died when Vin was little and his mom remarried a man Vin liked. He's described his family as "not poverty-stricken, just poor." He grew up in a fifth-floor walk-up in Washington Heights, and he knew what he wanted to be almost from the beginning. "I was about 8 years old and we had an old radio on four legs with crossed bars between the legs," he told his friend Danny Kaye in a TV tribute in 1982, "and I would come home to listen to a football game -- there weren't other sports on -- and I would get a pillow and I would crawl under the radio, so that the loudspeaker and the roar of the crowd would wash all over me, and I would just get goose bumps like you can't believe. And I knew that of all the things in this world that I wanted, I wanted to be that fella saying, whatever, home run, or touchdown. It just really got to me." He was a pretty fair baseball player at Fordham Prep, and went to Fordham University on a partial baseball scholarship in 1945. He served a year in the Navy, then returned to get his degree in 1949, giving up baseball in his senior year because it interfered with his chance to do some work at a local radio station. He also was a stringer for the New York Times, wrote a column for the college paper -- and sang in a barbershop quartet. Upon graduation he got a job at WTOP, the CBS affiliate in Washington. A network executive mentioned him to Red Barber, CBS's sports director (and lead announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers). Not long after, Barber had a sudden need for an announcer to do the Boston University-Maryland football game, part of "The Saturday CBS Football Roundup," which had Barber in the studio in New York throwing it to whichever one of several games around the country was most exciting at the moment. Barber called Scully at home and got his mom, who was thrilled, if confused. "What kind of mother would I have?" Scully said. "Irish, red-headed and excitable. She took the message, but she said it was from Red Skelton." Scully went to Boston to do the game from Fenway Park. But because of a mix-up, there was no booth for him. He ended up on the stadium roof with a long microphone cord, walking up and down to follow the game, freezing -- he'd left his coat and gloves at the hotel, thinking he'd be inside. When Barber got a note from Fenway officials the next week apologizing for not having a booth for his man on Saturday, he was shocked and impressed: Scully had never mentioned his plight on the air, had never grubbed for sympathy from the audience. Although Scully was sure he'd done a lousy job and blown his big chance, Barber soon offered him the job as No. 3 man in the Dodgers booth. He was 22 years old. How can it have taken so long? Koufax, feet together, now to his windup and the 1-2 pitch: fastball outside, ball 2. (Crowd boos.) A lot of people in the ballpark now are starting to see the pitches with their hearts. The pitch was outside, Torborg tried to pull it over the plate but Vargo, an experienced umpire, wouldn't go for it. Two and 2 the count to Chris Krug. Sandy reading signs, into his windup, 2-2 pitch: fastball, got him swingin'! "We just needed somebody to sort of take an inning here and there and just do little things. As I put it, carry our briefcases if necessary," said Barber, known as the Old Redhead, who would become Scully's mentor. "Scully was a very apt young man. And he took right over. He made the most of his opportunity." It used to be the other way around, but now if you listen to old tapes of Red Barber, you hear some of Vin Scully's cadences. Barber's call of Cookie Lavagetto's game-winning double in Game 4 of the 1947 World Series ("Here comes the tying run, and heeeeere comes the winning run!") sounds almost exactly like Scully. "Red never taught me how to broadcast, he never taught me baseball, or anything like that," Scully said in the 1982 video. "What he did teach me was among other things an attitude -- get there early and do your homework and bear down. Use the crowd." Scully uses the crowd like nobody else. He still gets those goose bumps from the roar of a crowd, and he makes it a part of the broadcast. At the most exciting, historically significant moments, when other announcers would blather on about how exciting and historically significant the moment is, Scully shuts up. When Koufax struck out Harvey Kuenn to complete his perfect game, Scully stayed quiet for 38 seconds while the crowd roared. When Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth's career home run record with his 715th in 1974, Scully said, "It's gone!" -- and then took off his headset and stood in the back of the booth so he wouldn't be tempted to ruin the moment by talking. When the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series, in 1955, he said, simply, "Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world." (He would later claim that he would have been unable to say more, for fear of bursting into tears.) The strike 1 pitch: curveball, tapped foul, 0 and 2. And Amalfitano walks away and shakes himself a little bit, and swings the bat. And Koufax with a new ball, takes a hitch at his belt and walks behind the mound.
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