Baseball's Babbling Brook

To offset such effusions, Allen has a solid corps of detractors, too, one of whose doughtiest said gleefully not long ago: " Mel Allen talks more than a magpie—which isn't saying much." More specific critics point out that Allen dearly loves to labor a point or overwork a pet phrase ("How about that?"), that his voice, deep, rich and mellow as it is, has an irritating edge on it, and that his stilled but not fully hidden enthusiasm when the Yankees are winning violates his rights to the air waves. Sober, industrious and otherwise well-adjusted men have been known to fall into gargling, sputtering rages as, sitting helplessly before their TV sets, they feel themselves assaulted by Allen's tedious, drawn-out explanations ("For the benefit of those not so familiar with the game, the infield fly rule states that, with first and second base or first, second and third occupied and less than two out, a ball which in the judgment of the umpire," etc.. etc.), by his excessively elated descriptions of everyday Yankee catches, by his strangling compulsion to qualify, modify and amplify nearly every general truth he utters. " International Falls is the coldest spot in the U.S.," he said on TV once. "Temperaturewise, that is." And because New York teems with people who love baseball but refuse to pledge allegiance to the Yankee pennant, Allen's "objective but pro-Yankee" broadcasts can turn a ruly roomful of people into a hating, shouting, blaspheming mob. "In New York, Mel's like the drinking friend who takes home the town drunk," says Lindsey Nelson, a fellow sportscaster and a friend of Allen. "Since the anti-Yankees aren't able to change the team, they hit the nearest thing—Mel Allen—with a rolling pin." Says Raconteur Tex O'Rourke: "Mel is Alabama's answer to Tennyson's babbling brook."

After winning a radio-TV "best sports-caster" award in 1952, Allen's first reaction was to say, "It's nice, but what if I don't win it next year?" The fact is, he's won it, wonderingly, every year since. He can no more understand this unqualified praise than he can understand the ire and vitriol of his critics. He seeks to show the same courtesy and restraint in replying to both. If accused of favoring the Yankees, for instance, he answers that his technique is one he has carefully considered for many years, and he would do as much for anyone he worked for. If he is accused of being unfavorable to the opposite team, he bridles and denies it. "You listen," he will say, proudly professional. "I call a Colavito home run the same as I call a Mantle home run. The guy who doesn't think so didn't want Mantle to hit that home run in the first place." Only when accused of talking too much does Allen admit that perhaps he has a problem. "Somewhere," he says, "there must be a middle ground: enough explanation for those who don't understand the game and not too much for those who do. If I don't qualify everything I say, here come the letters. I have lain awake nights wondering where that happy medium is. I do the best I can."

Allen's best, as it turns out, is still this side of prolixity. Phrases like, "That brought the crowd to its collective feet," and, "There's no room for margin of error," will suggest why. Like most people who talk a lot, Allen exposes himself to easy ridicule. The New York Times once characterized him as a connoisseur of the obvious on the clich� matinee. A quotation the late John Lardner once attributed to Allen—and it sounds more like Allen than Lardner—found him in one of his typical on-the-one-hand-this-on-the-other-hand-that situations (a result, says Allen, who happens to be a law graduate, of his legal training). Lardner's quote, picked from a game several years back, went like this: "By sending Mize to the bat rack, Stengel may have kept Boudreau from replacing Brown, because—You see, Collins is a left-handed hitter—Well, we've got a right-handed pitcher in there now, but if Boudreau had called in a southpaw—Of course, Collins is a left-handed hitter, too. But what this might mean—Well, of course, it may mean nothing at all."

Sometimes Allen joins the Allen critics. "When somebody tells me I've done a good job making a bad ball game sound good," he says, "I know I've failed some way. They mean it as a compliment, but it's really a criticism. I never try to inflate a game. Instead I try to ride it like a boat on waves, and to make it sound like no more than it is. My job is reporting, not making up a press agent's release." Like any reporter, he sometimes fails on his face. Afterward he will brood about these gaffes for years. His worst mistake to date occurred in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, when he prematurely blurted, "It's going foul," on a three-run homer by Yogi Berra. Stung by the recollection still, he takes some comfort from the fact that SPORTS ILLUSTRATED at the time called it the biggest boner "since Clem McCarthy's historic miscall of the 1947 Kentucky Derby."

"That," says Allen with relish, "was their biggest boner since Clem McCarthy's historic miscall of the 1947 Preakness."

Because he is usually sitting behind a microphone, Allen is pictured by most people as a short and dumpy man. He is not. Unbent, he stands taller than six feet, weighs about 200 and wraps his large, bearish frame in loose-fitting casual jackets and slacks. Like his father and his brother, he is balding, but unlike them he disguises the truth with a hairpiece. He has heavy features, translucent blue-gray eyes and is handsome in an aging way. He looked like a cupid when he was born on St. Valentine's Day in 1913.

Mel Allen's grandfather, William Israel, was a Russian Jew who came to the U.S. when he was 35, settled in West Blockton, Ala., where he ran a dry goods store and raised a family of seven. One of his sons, Julius Allen, Mel's father, remembers West Blockton as a tough mining town, and the meanest man around was an outlaw lyrically named Bart Thrasher. Julius Israel also remembers his father as a stern patriarch unfavorably disposed toward boyhood idleness and particularly inimical to baseball, since it interfered with Julius' chores. "How do you reckon he would like it if he knew his grandsons were making their living just looking at baseball games?" says Julius delightedly. "Ho!" Julius' other son, Larry, is a statistician and spotter on Mel's staff.

Mel Allen's mother, Anna Leibovitz, the daughter of a cantor, was born in Russia and came to this country when she was 9. She married Israel in 1912 and, by the time Melvin was born, Julius was well established in the dry goods business in Johns, Ala., a small mining town 30 miles southwest of Birmingham. Continuing to prosper, Julius moved his business and his family first to Sylacauga, Ala., later to Bessemer, a large steel-producing center, where he opened a ladies' ready-to-wear shop. It was in Bessemer that young Melvin began flabbergasting his elders by reading the papers, particularly the sports pages, and by reciting, at the slightest provocation, current batting averages, RBIs and ERAs of popular major league players.

Hit hard by the postwar depression, Bessemer's economy collapsed, and so did Julius Israel's business. In 1922 he moved it to Cordova, Ala., where things went sour again. The Ku Klux Klan, a phoenix in a dirty bed sheet, was re-emerging at about that time, and high on the Klan's list of un-American activities was being Jewish. Cordova's citizens began to boycott the Israel store, and before long, the $20.000 Israel had salvaged from his Bessemer operation was gone and, in declining health, he turned to selling shirts on the road. Bitter as Allen's mother is about Cordova's Klan, she cannot forget a second disappointment that took place there. Her ambitions that Melvin should become a concert violinist were shattered when he just about cut off his left forefinger while paring a peach.

By the time Julius Israel moved the family to Greensboro, N.C. the siren call of a career in major league baseball had become a real and vital thing to Melvin, age 11, and he got a job as bat boy with the Greensboro Patriots. Already beginning to spread his time thin, he also delivered dry cleaning on roller skates and spent Saturday afternoons at the corner cigar store posting baseball scores on a blackboard. "Always it was baseball this or that," Anna Israel recalls. "There was never the time to study his school-books or his music lesson [Mel was now supposed to become a concert cornettist]. One day—it was a beautiful sun-shining day just like I prophesied—I see the school principal coming up the walk. My God, he's been expelled, I thought. My God, let me fall down dead on this spot and I will welcome it, I thought." The principal had come not to expel Melvin, but to praise him. The principal announced that the boy had been selected by the Civitans to serve in Raleigh as North Carolina's lieutenant governor for one day. It was an occasion that comes back vividly to Mel Allen. He was introduced that day in round-eyed wonder to the Tar Heel electric chair.