I tried to watch the Ohio State-Notre Dame college football game Saturday night on NBC – emphasis on tried.
This was because the guy doing play-by-play, who looked like he might not yet have a driver’s license, kept getting the details wrong.
A player gains 3-4 yards and this announcer says he hits a stone wall. Since this was a goal-line offense situation, the gain was noteworthy, not hitting a stonewall. And so it went, with the announcer being loose with his calls and my wife telling me to stop yelling at the television.
She was right and I audibled (clever football pun intended) to watching back-to-back John Wick movies on another outlet. I never did get back to the game.
But, in a case of making lemonade out of lemons, the struggling guy on the broadcast got me thinking about the late, great Carroll “Beano” Cook, and one of the quotes from him that you don’t necessarily find in online compilations.
The story goes that Cook, as Pitt’s sports information director, was at Army for a game vs. the Black Knights of the Hudson. The press box announcer kept botching his calls, awarding too many, or too few yards on any given play.
Eventually, Cook felt the need to critique the man, to which the announcer replied with the equivalent of, What difference does it make?
Shot back Cook: You must have been in charge of the body count in Vietnam.
For the younger audience, one of our failings during the Vietnam experience was exaggeration of the number of enemy killed. This sort of dagger quip was vintage Beano. No one really called him Carroll during his adult life.
It was Beano who famously quipped, after our hostages had been freed from Iran and then-MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn had gifted them with lifetime baseball passes, “Haven’t they suffered enough?”
Beano was something less than a fan of baseball.
I had the great fortune to spend many hours with Beano when I worked as a sports columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Beano often showed up before Steelers or Penguins games to mix with the media members in the press lounges.
Beano would hold court and I made it a point to get to his table early and leave late. Beano would depart eventually, often before the games had begun.
I can still hear his gruff voice explaining to me, “Sam, this is what it’s all about. I can stay home and watch the games on TV, but you can’t get this at home.”
Cook had gone from that Pitt SID job to a variety of posts with Pittsburgh sports operations, national networks and, eventually ESPN, which gave him his widest audience. Beano changed jobs often, but never changed his style.
By the time I met him, Beano mostly was a free-agent raconteur.
There never will be another one like him in sports media, partly because he was politically incorrect. Beano saw nothing wrong with admiring a woman’s beauty. Beano was blunt, a trait common to a man of his generation. But, he was not crass.
Beano also would not toe the corporate party line. He would be very saddened by what has happened to college football, with traditional conferences splitting in geographically illogical ways, the transfer portal becoming a full-blown free agency system for players, and various other ongoing bastardizations of the traditions that Beano revered.
We are coming up on the 11th anniversary of Beano’s passing at age 81, on Oct. 11, 2012. That would be 10-11-12.
Somewhere, I suspect Beano still gets a chuckle over his parting numerical flourish.
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