BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
Elliott Price (2005)
It’s like a bad dream, but it doesn’t appear we’ll be waking up from it any time soon.
I went from the top job in my profession to the unemployment line, not because of my capabilities but because of my nationality. Our situation might get better, even in the next few days, but it’ll probably never get as good as it could have and most certainly should have been.
I have been a baseball play by play announcer for 13 years at the major league level but I face
something that no other play by play announcer at my level faces. It’s already a tough gig to get but let’s face it there’s only 30 of these opportunities in the entire world, and I had one of them. Sadly, while all others can compete for those meager 30 jobs, it appears I have but one to shoot for or I will need a special leap of faith that the hundreds of other applicants won’t have to worry about. The door to the other 29 might have closed in late February, a day that threw my family into total confusion, this February 25th newspaper article from the Washington Times was easily the most difficult one I’ve ever had to get through:
Slowes, Shea selected as radio broadcasters
By Eric Fisher and Ken Wright
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
VIERA, Fla — Charlie Slowes, former play-by-play voice of the Washington Bullets, and David Shea, the radio voice of the Boston Bruins, were named by the Washington Nationals yesterday as the team’s radio announcers. Slowes, in Washington from 1986 to 1997, has spent the last seven seasons as the play-by-play announcer for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Beyond his tenure in Boston, Shea worked the Minnesota Timberwolves’ debut season in 1989 and boasts more than 20 years in sports broadcasting encompassing minor league baseball, college hockey, college basketball and pro soccer.
Shea and Slowes were chosen after an intensive search by Nationals officials that included more than 100 applicants. Team president Tony Tavares said yesterday Elliott Price, a broadcaster with the Montreal Expos since 1989, would have been one of the two selections had he and the team been able to solve immigration and visa issues that prevented him coming to the United States to take the radio job. Tavares consulted two attorneys regarding Price without resolution. “I don’t want to diminish what we have. I am ecstatic for Charlie and David, both very solid pros, but I am disappointed for Elliott,”
Tavares said. The pair will start March 5 when the Nationals play Baltimore in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
I am Elliott Price and this is my story.
IN THE BEGINNING
It’s August 1968 and the neighbourhood kids are where they always are on hot sunny summer
afternoons – gathered at the schoolyard divvying up the local talent for the latest in the
long battle of the schoolyard world series. There has been much discussion about baseball’s imminent announcement about Major League Baseball’s expansion. It seems Montreal is one of the cities with a chance but it’s not believed to be a favorite. The kids in the schoolyard mull over some of the other prominent city names and quickly dismiss the chances of Canada ever breaking the American monopoly in MLB to ever put a team in our hometown.
Just goes to prove, the kids in the schoolyard don’t know everything.
On a special August day in 1968 the stunning announcement is made – the cities of Montreal, San Diego, Kansas City and Seattle would be added to Major League Baseball, giving the American pastime 24 teams while giving Canada its first.
You live in a small world at age 12, no doubt more so four decades ago. There was no internet back then and even television was limited. For English Montrealers that meant local CBC and CTV stations and, if you were lucky to have an antenna, you might be able to pick up border town affiliates of NBC and CBS. An ABC station, on the other hand, was a different situation at that time. Reception was poor at best, the snowy picture with the television placed just so, would make a live July sporting event look like the middle of December.
Baseball on television in Montreal consisted of the occasional Sunday afternoon Yankees affair.
Radio on the other hand was something completely different.
Close your eyes and you could be anywhere and with Montreal where it was geographically, it turned out you could be almost everywhere when it came to major league baseball. Back then the airwaves were uncluttered and a bevy of hall of fame broadcasters could be heard clearly. Games from Detroit, Boston, New York, Washington, Baltimore and Cleveland. And that was just the American League. Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, the other New York team and as far away as St. Louis could be heard at night in Montreal. Close your eyes and fall into a hall of fame dream. Not the dreams of most kids hoping to be the next Mantle, Kaline or even Frank Robinson (my personal favourite) but those of Ernie Harwell, Bob Prince and Harry Carry.
Baseball wouldn’t be just the American pastime in my family. For one thing it wasn’t just
American anymore. It would become a way of life. It would also present me with an opportunity to see more of my dad, becoming the bond that tied us together.
When baseball arrived in the early spring of 1969 I was living with my mother and her new
husband after she had recently remarried. My dad had done that several years earlier and had built a new family with three more children. They were five, six and seven years my junior. My older sister lived with my dad too, though she spent some time bouncing back and forth before settling there for good. I was an only child at home with a family of two brothers and two sisters to visit whenever I wanted to.
Hockey tickets were tough to come by in Montreal but my dad never missed a game and on
Saturday nights from the age of eight or nine, neither did I. The chance to acquire season tickets for Montreal Canadiens games was much like the Green Bay Packers of today. You basically had to have them handed down from another generation or wait forever on a list that almost never moved. So while we were able go to the games together, we only WENT to the games together, we didn’t sit together.
We would arrive at the hallowed Montreal Forum and meet up with Dad’s cronies in the same
corner every time. Then it was off to our seats, this youngster sitting by himself next to people he had never met before and would never see again. Then I would make my way back to the cronies corner for between period bantering. It all seemed quite normal to me but in reality it was anything but.
Dad’s group was quite a collection. They had names like Jack “The Hook” and Jimmy “The Book”, small time gamblers, bookies, loan sharks, ticket scalpers and the like. So that’s where he got those almost impossible to come by tickets. Dad was a taxi driver by trade but those cronies would certainly have a different slant on his occupation.
My dad was known as “Manush”, so named as the story goes after finding the baseball card of
former major league second baseman Heinie Manush. If the story was accurate it would have served him well to save that card of a hall of fame baseball player from years gone by, but he didn’t. This group would often ask the youngster for the night’s predicted outcome and if he provided the correct information, he might be rewarded with a buck or two. I was further brought into the fold by the Forum’s head usher who tended to the visiting dressing room.
‘Charlie’ had a running hockey pool, way ahead of the government in this country that now runs that sort of gambling. Dad seemed to know everyone in this place and the Montreal Forum felt like home. All was not always so rosy however.
Charlie’s hockey pool ran this way: You could buy 3 of his lottery tickets for 5 dollars. If the score on your paper matched the final score you were a winner. There was a lesser prize for a reverse score. So if you had the Canadiens beating Boston 3-1 but Boston won 3-1 you were still a winner. A tie score however paid best since there was no reverse score, so it paid both ways. So it was on this night when I was but a wee lad and entering Charlie’s pool for the first time. I arrived in the third period of a close game with a winning ticket for a 5-5 tie, big payday indeed. It must have been thirteen dollars or so waiting. Now wouldn’t that buy a bevy of hockey cards at 5 cents a pack? Do you have any idea how much those cards would be worth now?
Well as the minutes ticked away in the third period my heart was racing, seconds were taking
hours. We had ourselves a 5-5 tie. Tick…tick…tick. Dad would put the ‘occasional’ wager on a game here and there and I heard the thought process out loud. He would count down the seconds and so I did as well. Somewhere inside of 120 seconds the Rangers found the back of the net, leading them past the hometown Habs 6-5.
I was crushed.
Normally a victory by the visitors was a time for celebration, after all I sat among an almost
unanimous Canadiens crowd and cheered for the visitors every Saturday night, a not so booming voice in the wilderness. And it was a rare night indeed that saw a team come into the Forum and defeat the vaunted Habs, but there was no cheering on this night. I went home, went to bed and wept. It was just mom and me at this time and she came in to comfort me wondering what ailment had elicited such tears. It was not what she was prepared to hear. So let’s run a list of why she left my dad in the first place.
Gambling might not have been number one, but it sure as hell was up there, not to mention the lifestyle associated with it. There were no cellphones in the day and for that he was probably lucky but he got his earful and what could he have possibly responded with? We’ll never know now that both have departed. The next Saturday night dad said if he knew I felt that badly he just would have given me the thirteen dollars. I told him I didn’t want the money as much as I wanted to win. It was a discussion that took place on the way to the basement area of Montreal’s Forum prior to that night’s affair. A trip that led us, of course, to Charlie in front of the visitors dressing room for that night’s lottery tickets.
Dad was no ordinary sports fan, for Manush was the king of the hecklers. Definitely not someone to get on your bad side as many would attest including future hall of fame goaltender Jacques Plante, whom he had a running battle with. Dad possessed a booming voice that could not only be heard all the way to the top and both ends of the Forum but certainly out on Ste Catherine Street as well.
But his first love was baseball.
Legend had it that he once timed a bellow so well that he forced a minor league pitcher to throw a ball aimed at home plate into his own dugout. There were three vacations every year -spring training, baseball’s mid season all star game in July, and the World Series in October;
reached the same way each time for the taxi man – always by car, always a non stop drive.
Sadly baseball had deserted Montreal when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los
Angeles. The city had been one of the best in all of minor league baseball with its support for the Triple A Montreal Royals. The Dodgers needed their best players in close proximity to the parent club and let’s face it, Montreal was a much easier trip to Brooklyn than it was to L.A. and so the best of the best in the Dodgers’ system were no longer sent this way. A franchise that had boasted Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider and even Roberto Clemente would not be seeing that kind of talent anymore and the city would not settle for anything second rate. Decades later it would play out all over again. (Yes Clemente should have been a Dodger but you’ll need to go elsewhere to find out how the Dodgers messed that bed.)
The Montreal Expos were born at Shea Stadium in New York when they beat the always god
awful New York Mets in a game started by future Hall of Famer Tom Seaver. Who knew those perennial doormats and loveable losers starting just their 8th season were embarking on a
magical season that would lead to an improbable world championship over the powerful
Baltimore Orioles of Boog Powell, Brooks and Frank Robinson and Jim Palmer? It didn’t matter to Expos fans, for their team was underway and they were perfect.
Dan McGinn of all people, a left-handed relief pitcher, former punter from Notre Dame had hit
the team’s first home run. Later, soon-to-be Montreal hero Rusty Staub, hit one as well. Staub was about to be nicknamed “Le Grande Orange” by The Montreal Gazette’s beat writer Ted Blackman. Makes sense, doesn’t it, that the kid who felt more in common with Ernie Harwell than Al Kaline would have his future more affected by Ted Blackman than Rusty Staub.
The city of Montreal had promised they would eventually build a new ballpark for major league
baseball but would temporarily inhabit an old baseball facility in the interim and hurriedly
broke ground at Jarry Park to house the new professional baseball team. There was tremendous worry that everything would get done on time for opening day, from the seats in the stands to the sod in the field. There had been a great amount of snowfall leading up to the first ever regular season Major League game outside of the United States and while folks could stand on the collected snow hills in back of the outfield fences on opening day, April 14th 1969 turned out to be a glorious day indeed, a picture perfect 72 degrees fahrenheit. While my classmates were studying history, geography and mathematics, I was studying baseball.
This was my first ever major league baseball game.
You have to wonder how my dad convinced my mom that a baseball game was better than school, but he won the battle with some constant prodding from his son. How was she to know that this would be some of the most important vocational training I would ever receive? Still, she wasn’t happy about this and being the honest to a fault person that she was, her note to the teacher to explain the previous day’s absence read this way:
To whom it may concern,
Please excuse Elliott”s absence from class yesterday. He was at the baseball game.
Mrs. Rae Zwirling
Manush went right to work picking up where he left off with the Triple A Montreal Royals. The taxi driver had somehow managed to procure season tickets in the boxes about 15 rows
above the visitors dugout, amongst the city’s elite. There was no way he wouldn’t be heard all over Jarry Park from those seats.
This odd collection sitting so close to each other for 81 days a year became a group of fans that would become like a country club, folks strung together with cowhide and red stitching;
youngsters with their parents who would someday inherit those seats and bring their own
children. One eye on the baseball and the other watching families grow and the passage of time.
Baseball became my passion.
I was either at the game, watching on television or listening on the radio. Schoolwork would
become secondary at best. I had been a fan before, how could I not be with Manush as my dad? Somehow I cheered for whichever team he didn’t. He was Tigers, I was Orioles. He was Dodgers, I was Giants. It worked that way in every sport, we did not have a team in common.
Until the Expos were born.
Through his scorecards Dad had developed a league of his own. Only the games he scored could count in the statistics and I soon latched on to create my own league with my own stats to compare to his. And so started the endless cycle of games.
Baseball on television was starting to explode. Red Sox and Yankee games were available in the area, not to mention baseball’s network games of the week. If you dropped in at the right moment you might catch me sitting in the hallway between my room and my mom’s with a radio listening device in my ear, one eye on the Red Sox game in Mom’s room, the other on the game of the week on my television and three scorecards in front of me.
The 1969 All star game was in Washington that year and since Dad was going and I wasn’t
I would have to watch the game by myself. I went about making my own all star game program and scorebook. I put pictures of all the stars inside and wrote a brief synopsis of each and every player. it was and still is quite the spectacle.
How was I to know that the baseball cards that I cut up for those pictures would be worth
thousands of dollars?
Hall of Famers like Seaver, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Frank Robinson and even that
celebrated non Hall of Famer, Pete Rose, were cut up to fit into my 1969 All Star game program. What I had wrought wouldn’t hit me for another 15 years or so but it was a beautiful sight at the moment and a testament to my devotion.
Chapter 1 – To be continued
