Up Close

Speaking of brushes with the rich and famous. I had my Andy Warhol 15-minutes when I appeared on ESPN’S Up Close with seven-time award winner, Roy Firestone.

Am I bragging here? No, although it’s been 32 years, I was scared skinny then and remain terrified today at that years ago memory.

St. Martin’s, my publisher, flew me to Hollywood for the TV interview. The subject was my book Pen Men: Baseball’s Greatest Bull Pen Memories Told by the Men Who Brought The Game Relief. And, about the only thing I was comfortable with was the material in the book, a collection of stories that had taken me from Fenway Park, in Boston to Candlestick in San Francisco. The content wasn’t making me nervous. I knew the stories by heart.

Or at least I thought I did.

Now, before we go lights, cameras action here I’d like to share my first wake-up call, a reminder I might have had reasons to be nervous. The Firestone show sent a limo to my hotel and the driver (a man who evidently was in the celebrity motoring business), glanced at me in his rearview mirror, and said “Who the hell are you?”

I tried to laugh it off suggesting I’m sure he, in his day, had motored his share of celebrities.

“Picked up Olivia Newton John at the airport this morning,” he said.

Ouch!

That’s when the anxiety attacked. Although I didn’t see Roy Firestone until later, his producer, Cindy Katz, was very reassuring. She sent me to Make Up which was a first for me.

Having produced and written some Mickey Mouse cable shows for NC State called STATESIDE, that featured faculty, students and administrators, I knew how TV worked. And post makeup there would be a question and answer session where I’d meet with Roy or maybe his producer and we’d go over the questions, maybe get my insights into the best material in the book.

This was just the way TV interview shows worked.

Or so I thought!

It turned out, according to his producer, that Roy (a master of the interview by the way) didn’t pepper his guests with pre-show questions. There was no pre-show interview.

I was really getting nervous.  I was ushered into the studio. Roy was, of course delightful, and suddenly the hot lights were on, and he was talking to his audience, telling them who the hell I was.

Before I knew it, he hit me with the first question. “Bob, I really enjoyed your book. Why don’t we start with you telling us how Tug McGraw (Tim’s father and the great Phillies pitcher) got the nickname of Tug.”

That’s when I froze, just choked, couldn’t come up with the answer to what was a softball question, a kind way on Roy’s part of getting us started.

Finally, I heard myself say it.  The answer was there somewhere back in the recesses of the more than 70 interviews that I’d done for Pen Men. I blurted it out. “Well, Roy,” I said. “It seems that he was a very aggressive breast feeder and so his mother named him Tug!”

The rest, again, even today, remains a blur. But I do remember this. When my nerves had calmed and while that same limo driver returned me to my hotel, he peeked in the rearview mirror and said, “Well, how did it go hotshot?”

“Well, I was no Olivia Newton John,” I said, “But all in all pretty good. By the way do you know how Tug McGraw got the name Tug?”