A florist must have decorated his voice

Sporting News, The, April 7, 1997 by Curt Smith

Walt Whitman wrote, "I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear." For seven decades, Mel Allen helped baseball sing. Ask anyone who heard him enchant Peekskill and Peoria. That fan will tell you: A florist must have decorated his voice.

Allen was the 1940-64 voice of the New York Yankees. Inexplicably fired, he left radio/television, was off the air for a decade, then began a second career with TV's This Week In Baseball. He endured sadness, but made of sport existential pleasure.

Last year, Mel died, at 83, in Greenwich, Conn. Opening day, 1997, marked the first time in memory that he didn't utter his trademark, "How about that!"

In a 1950s poll, Variety magazine called Mel Allen "one of the 25 most recognizable voices in the world." In 1978, he and Red Barber became the first broadcasters to enter baseball's Hall of Fame. Said the Mets' late Lindsey Nelson of Allen: "He was the best ever to announce the game."

Allen may have sold more fans on baseball than any broadcaster who lived. Awed, his voice expressed it; if Mel was bored, it never showed; and as the voice of the Yankees and This Week, he became the Voice of Baseball. You still expect to hear his crisp-voweled lilt. It stuns that he is gone.

Born near Birmingham, Ala., Mel became a University of Alabama law graduate at 23 and voice of the Yankees at 27. From the start, he split America into two battalions. Yankee haters said he talked too much. In 1958, a wire reached Mel during Game 2 of the World Series. "Allen, you Yankee lover," it read, "shut up." The message was sent two hours before the game began.

By contrast, idolaters thought Allen's rhetoric the mirror of baseball's orb. Home runs were "Going, going, gone," or "Ballantine Blasts," or "White Owl Wallops." Full counts prompted, "Three-and-two, what'll he do?" When Mickey Mantle went deep, "How about that!" climaxed the event.

"Freeze-frame this era," said Nelson, Allen's 1952-64 NBC colleague. "Keep in mind that it was the World Series--not just the Yankees--that made Mel an icon." Before 1966, the Series regularly aired local-team broadcasters. The Yankees appeared almost yearly. Thus, Mel did, too--calling 11 of 13 World Series from 1951-63 and a record 20 overall. To many, the Series meant one of the great actors of our baseball time.

You can hear him now--Allen at his Everest: "Welcome to this country's greatest sports event, the World Series!" Tom Gallery was then NBC sports director. "I always thought," he said, "that there was something about Mel that brought a special drama to the big event." Sadly, Mel's life soon acquired a drama of its own.

By 1964, Mel had described 24 All-Star Games, aired the Rose Bowl, East-West Game and heavy-weight fights, and served as sports impresario of Movietone Newsreels. Then, one fall day--with no justification, not even an announcement--the Yankees released him. "He gave the Yankees his life," Barber said, "and they broke his heart."

Even now, no one knows why the Yankees fired Mel Allen, only 51--after nearly 3,500 baseball games, 18 Bombers pennants, 12 World Series titles and a quarter-century of triumph. "The Yankees never even held a press conference to announce my leaving," Mel said last year. "They left people to believe whatever they wanted--and people believed the worst."

Allen's voice grew soft. "The lies that started were horrible," he said, "that I was a lush or had a breakdown or stroke or was numb from taking medications for my voice." Lacking any "(explanation)," a writer said, "Allen became a victim of rumors. He was supposed to be a drunkard, a drug user. Neither rumor was true, but he couldn't fight them. It was as if he had leprosy."

In involuntary retirement, Allen--childless, unmarried--began a decade of banquets, commercials and voice-overs for Ballantine beer. His phased withdrawal from baseball lingered into the late 1970s. Then, in 1977, Mel's comeback began as host of This Week In Baseball, the pastime's first syndicated TV series. The highlight program became sport's highest-rated serial--a fetching and inspired display.

"Mel was This Week," said executive producer Geoff Belinfante. It revitalized Allen's career--leading Sports Illustrated to profile The Voice as "back where he belongs, a keeper of tradition. For years he was a forgotten man, but it has all come back to him in abundance. The taste must be sweet." It was.

Such a life deserved a coda, and got it, as Mel traveled around the country. He was besieged by teenagers and eighty-somethings. "Kids knew Mel from This Week," Belinfante said, "fans in their 30s and 40s from his Yankee days. Older folks remembered things he'd done in the early days of radio. Everyone had a frame of reference."

Improbably, Allen had come to have an even higher reputation after his exodus from play-by-play than before. Again courting the status of national pronouncement, it was as if he had never been away.

At the end, he seemed the Grand Old Man of Broadcasting--not "going, going, gone" but instead, like baseball, timeless. Retrieving the virtues of the past, you thought of Roy Hobbs in The Natural. Mel Allen was perhaps "the best there ever was."