Barry Tompkins: When the game seems incidental

I grew up a fan. From the time I was in grade school to the time sports became a business for me, I cared. I really cared.

I never read a comic book in my life growing up. I read the Sporting News, Sport and Sports Illustrated magazines. And while I never quite got the idea of compound fractions or how percentages were figured, I could instantly mentally compute a baseball batting average or how many yards per carry a running back accumulated.

Then sports became my vocation and suddenly I wasn’t allowed to care any longer who won or lost a game. It was a job. One which required days of preparation. By the time I walk into the broadcast booth to call a game, I feel I’m covered. Any circumstance that could come up is somewhere in my notes. Nothing is unaccounted for.

Except the kind of thing that happened Monday night in Cincinnati. For that, there are no notes,

I was doing a very non-descript game on August 12, 1978. It was a game between the Oakland Raiders and the New England Patriots. A who-cares preseason NFL game of no consequence to anyone except maybe the coaches who had to decide on a final roster from a 90-player pre-season camp.

A New England wide receiver named Darryl Stingley came across the middle and caught a pass from quarterback Steve Grogan. He turned up-field and was met with a devastating hit by Raider safety Jack Tatum, one of the league’s most feared head-hunters.

The next forty-five minutes was a blur. There was a loud burst of joy by the fans for the ferocity of the hit. And an instant later, the cheers turned to stone silence.

This was the situation that no announcer can prepare for. Darryl Stingley didn’t get up…….now what?

I bring this up because there was a lot of online trolling of ESPN’s announce team for how they handled Monday night’s near on field death of Buffalo safety Damar Hamlin. It was 100% unwarranted.

The trolls were all over Buck for saying that the game would resume after a five-minute warm-up session for both teams. He wasn’t making this up. The information came from the NFL itself. An item which the league now emphatically denies.  You just don’t make stuff up in situations like this.

Joe Buck, for some reason, is reviled in many parts of the country because he is interpreted as a “homer” for the other team. People here think that, people in Dallas think that, people in Miami think that. In and of itself, that should tell you that he’s not a “homer” for anyone. If everybody everywhere thinks that, Joe Buck must be doing something right.

I always know I’m being fair in a broadcast when half the people criticize me for being a homer for one team, and the rest think I’m a homer the other way.

I know Joe Buck. He is a true professional. What he did in the tragedy that unfolded on the field Monday night is noteworthy.

I know. I’ve been there.

Joe dealt with the information that he was given. Which, in situations like that, is limited. As an announcer we can’t speculate. You see the picture as it plays out and you just try and express what you’re viewing from afar. It’s a no win.

Darryl Stingley wound up paralyzed for life. He died too young, at age 55 in 2007. I have no recollection of who won that game. I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now. But I can still replay that whole scene in my mind’s eye.

I had to go back and listen to that tape to see what I had said. When you’re in an adlib situation and there’s so much downtime, there could be a tendency to kid inappropriately, or make an off-handed remark that lessens the direness of the situation. You can’t diagnose, or in any way speculate what might or might not be. Yet you have to just keep talking. And you can’t prepare for it.

Somehow, I got through a 45-minute adlib without any improprieties. So did Joe Buck and the rest of the ESPN crew on Monday night. They’re to be commended. Trolls be damned.

Goodbye to a personal hero

And, while we’re on the subject of the “old days.” The world lost a bona fide super star last week when Pele died at 82 in Brazil.

I had been taught by my mentor Don Klein — former voice of both Stanford football and basketball, and the San Francisco 49ers — way back when I first started yammering on the air about sports, that “You’re not a fan anymore.”

I took that to heart and never asked a single athlete I’ve been fortunate enough to be around for an autograph. Except Pele.

I had watched Pele on film, and heard people speak of his dominance in the game of soccer, and already had this image of a bigger-than-life icon. I had been doing local television here in the Bay Area for just a couple of months when Pele and his Santos of Brazil team came here to play an exhibition game at the Oakland Coliseum. I was already in awe of the image of this man despite never having seen him play.

My cameraman and I were shooting right next to the net that was set up in front of the Oakland A’s dugout. Pele fired a shot on goal that missed. But it whistled by my ear at a speed that simply could not be created by a human foot. It hit the back of the dugout wall with a sound that I’d only heard in war movies.

I asked Pele for the autograph after seeing (and hearing) that kick, and later conducting an interview with him during which, he continually bounced a soccer ball from foot to foot, then up to his elbows, then behind his head, and back to his feet again. I fully expected him to play the violin at the same time. He was truly one of a kind.

“Ola Bari (OK, so he misspelled my name)….Pele”

I still have both the autograph and the ever-lasting image of that kick.