ATLANTA — Pete Van Wieren was Dick Smothers, or Dan Rowan, or Dean Martin when suave Dino was half of Martin & Lewis. Pete wasn't the guy who told the jokes, but he was the guy who made the jokes resonate. He was the straight man to Skip Caray's smart aleck, the balance in the last great booth of an era now officially at its end.
The Professor recently announced his retirement, and his leaving is altogether fitting — why keep talking when you've done everything you've wanted to do and said everything there is to say? — but massively sad. We as listeners are left with no link to the formative days of TBS and their silly slogans (remember "One Crazy Summer"?) and the giddy sensation that Ted and the boys were flying by the seat of their khaki pants.
For a larger, high resolution image, click HERE |
Those were the Braves before they went corporate, before they started winning. It was a time when cable TV wasn't treated as an inalienable right but as the coolest Christmas present any of us ever got. Those were the Braves of good ol' Ernie and funny ol' Skip and the learned Professor, and that was, in the grand scheme of things, as good as broadcasting ever got.
Pete would give us the numbers. Skip would laugh at the guy in the mezzanine wearing the funny hat. Ernie Johnson, his voice as comfortable as a broken-in slipper, would say, "We're zippin' right along." Ol' Ernie was pretty much gone by the time the Braves got good, but Pete and Skip zipped merrily along, becoming not just a novelty act but the aural chroniclers of one of the best baseball runs ever.
As nice as the tributes to Skip were in his passing, the one regret was that Pete wasn't quite given his due. As good as they were with other partners, they were matchless as a pair. Skip played off Pete and Pete set up Skip. Two Skips would have been too much, and two Petes not enough, but together they were just right.
One of the truly inside bits of inside baseball was this: Pete's a funny guy himself. He just left the funny business to others while on the air. On Tuesday, he noted he had two granddaughters and a third on the way, and he said, "That means I'll get to see a lot of movies with the words 'enchanted' and 'princesses' in the titles."
Pete Van Wieren's dream job was to be the play-by-play voice of the Rochester Red Wings, his hometown minor-league team. He never got to do that, but the Red Wings did, he said, "give me a brick in their Walk of Fame. So that was nice."
The Red Wings were not, however, one of the three entities that called within two hours of his announcement to offer work. "If I'd known that would happen, maybe I'd have done this 10 years ago," Pete said.
But Pete doesn't want a job. He wants to stop doing the job he did so seamlessly — that's a John Schuerholz word, and here it fits seamlessly — for 33 years.
"I never wanted to get to the point where I couldn't do this anymore," Pete said, "because if you can't do this you can't do anything — all you're doing is sitting and talking."
We who sat and listened will miss him every bit as much as we've missed Skip, maybe even more. See, Pete's was always the harder part. He had to do the homework and make sense of everything. He had to tell us how many outs there were when Skip was cracking jokes about alimony. Pete had to be the professional, and that's the only real way to remember him.
Pete the pro's pro. Pete the Professor. Pete Van Wieren — another great Atlanta voice gone but not forgotten. Never ever forgotten.
Mark Bradley writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: mbradley AT ajc.com.
