Thanksgiving week

We all enjoy the trimmings and being surrounded by family and friends, but let’s all of us take a moment to actually give thanks.

We live in a great country that allows us to truly be free.

Go to some others and you’ll see the difference.

All of us have experienced adversity and negative times in our lives. No one has escaped that. But if we dwell on the good things that have happened to us we will all be uplifted.

We can pinpoint the highlights. They are different for everyone. But they come to mind without much prodding.

Think about them.

If you have photos of the good times, get them out and sit down and remember.

If your family is around have everyone sit down, look at them and talk about them.

If you’re alone talk about them out loud.

Personally, I have a ton of things for which I am grateful.Not everything in my life has been a bed of roses.

But it is now. In spades.

It’s the best it’s ever been and at my stage it is a true blessing.

Professionally my life has been more than I deserved.

Yes, there were rocky moments along the way. People may find that hard to believe, but it’s true.

They look at my career and figure it was smooth sailing all the way.

Hardly. Some day I will discuss them.  It doesn’t bring me down.

In fact, I embrace the adversity I faced because I hung in and endured.

I tell others to do the same.

When I broke into the broadcasting business, a man named Win Baker asked if I wanted to merely follow others who did the sports segment on the nightly news programs. In other words, give the scores, show the highlights, and simply report the sports news of the day. Or did I want to branch out and occasionally do a commentary, which would be labeled as such, written with thought, expressing my personal opinion on anything in sports?

I took a chance.

Often it would be critical of something. A team, a player, a coach, or a game.

Half of my commentaries were a negative take on something.

Today it is a common practice to take shots. It wasn’t back in the sixties.

The ratings went through the roof.

Viewers were poised to hear who Dick Stockton was going to knock tonight.

I started this format on weekends in Philadelphia, then as a full-timer in Pittsburgh and in Boston.

I was a success.

But I wasn’t happy.

I would wake up each day thinking about what I could say, who I could criticize.

One day I realized that I loved sports growing up. It was my purpose in life.

Now I was constantly looking at the negative. I didn’t like it.

I made the decision to concentrate on getting into the play-by-play end of sports announcing.

It wasn’t easy.

I was rebuffed by the same man who originally gave me my first opportunity.

The same man who gave me my big break.

I understood his point of view. What I was doing was working. Why upset the apple cart.

To this day I owe Win Baker the world for giving me my first shot.

But things got unpleasant.

Eventually we had a parting of the ways and I stated on a new path, practically having to start over again.

There is a story dealing with my jump to play-by-play, which has always been the most enjoyable task for a sportscaster.

I was recommended for the Baltimore Colts pre-season football package.

But the man who was to make the final decision rejected me immediately pointing out that I was too critical on my sportscasts and that was the last thing the Colts needed or wanted to report on their six exhibition games going into the season.

I phoned him and promised that those days were over, that I would abandon that style in talking about the Colts.

That man was Ernie Accosi, then the public relations director of the team.

He relented and accepted me.  Today, Ernie is my closest friend in the world.

We have been great pals for half a century.

I made a sharp change of course because I wanted to embrace sports, not always thinking of the down side.

Of course, now that I am retired, I view it from a different angle, and sometimes not everything I see is positive.

However, back then, play-by-play was about reporting, not opinion.

My new professional route started slowly. But things picked up and as they say, the rest is history.

I thought I would share with you, on this particular Thanksgiving week, one of the significant events I give thanks for:  The tale of two lives in the career I chose.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!