Remembering Vin Scully and a Christmas Day phone call

Vin Scully called me on Christmas.

Sure, I had sent him an email interview request hours earlier on Christmas Eve, but it never crossed my mind that he would phone me during the biggest day of the NBA season.

Hearing the sad news that Scully died Tuesday at age 94 made me think back (and dig up our interview transcript) to an occasion that to me said so much about the person he was. Scully may have been synonymous with baseball and the Los Angeles Dodgers, but he broadcast professional golf, too, first for CBS – including the Masters eight times from 1975-1982 – and then with NBC from 1983-1989, where he partnered in the 18^th-hole tower with Lee Trevino.

As much as I would have loved to listen to him speak for hours on baseball, it was his time in golf that I was asking him to reminisce about. I had forgotten about this until I did an email search, but the person who shared with me Scully’s contact information (and shall remain nameless) gave it to me on Aug. 13, or more than four months before Christmas. No phone number but an email address – I guess at this point I’m not revealing too much by saying his email started red@ – and a fax number. Who still had a fax? Apparently, Vin did! I never faxed him but now that I think of it, I wish I had just to say I did.

This was some quality procrastination from mid-August to late December, even for me, but sounds about right – have a direct line to the man, the myth, the legend Vin Scully and wait until most of the Catholic world was at a midnight mass service to bother writing him for an interview.

Santa could not have given me a better gift than a call from Vin had jolly Saint Nick landed his sleigh on the roof of my downtown Orlando condo and dumped out a bag of toys. The year was 2013, and while the specifics are a bit vague, I think I had seen a movie earlier that day and was watching the NBA in the late afternoon before dinner with my parents when I answered the phone and heard his unmistakable voice.

I may have procrastinated on writing him, but I had prepped several questions and I scrambled to pull them up on my laptop and fumbled to find my digital recorder. Again, who calls a total stranger on Christmas and sits for a lengthy phone interview? Vin Scully, that’s who!

I’m not going to post the full transcript of the interview, but here are a few things he said about Trevino, a partner he considered a true friend, that stuck out:

“Most people think of Lee Trevino they think…