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One of the great and regular joys of my youth I experienced for the first time in decades was last Thursday afternoon. Since nobody invited me to share a turkey supper with the rest of the family and friends because one more guest might be the tipping point and turn a gathering into a COVID spreader, I stayed hunkered down in my modest cell and feasted on a bologna sandwich, potato chips and a coke. It was a sumptuous repast.

I don't have a television and I know nothing about live streaming on the computer. I write at my card table in the tiny den next to the kitchen. On the counter I have a cheap radio that I keep tuned to a sports channel. There is nothing worth the listening time on the FM and AM bands unless your musical tastes are pedestrian.

I turned on the radio to clear the apartment of solitariness and by coincidence the Cowboys' game was starting. As a sports fan and a Texan for 45 years, I follow the Cowboys but without the fervor of a diehard. I'm familiar with their announcer Brad Sham and he calls an adequate game. He doesn't allow his natural biasness to usurp his objectivity. 

When Dallas is playing as bad as they are playing now, there is no silver lining. The offense, the defense, the special teams and the coaching are sophomoric. Only Trump could put a positive spin on these losers by accusing the refs of being Democrats and the numbers on the scoreboard of being rigged. As to reality, the Pokes were at their worse yesterday, the coaching appalling.

I was raised on four announcers: Lindsay Nelson who did the Notre Dame games; Vin Scully who did the Los Angeles Dodger games; Bill King who did the Oakland Raiders games; and Howard Cosell who did the big fights. They shared several characteristics: They were articulate, they described the action so precisely you could visualize it and they weren't homers. They respected all participants but held them accountable to professional standards.

My dad, a salesman, was a product of the eight-to-five world. He was home on the weekends. Every Saturday he dedicated himself to yardwork and repairs. Since Notre Dame was in the Mid-West and we were in California, the Irish games would be blaring from the radio at 10 a.m. because Dad was oftentimes at the other end of the house hard at work on mother's latest assignment. 

Nelson called the games in a straight-forward style with a hint of a Southern drawl. I later learned that he began his professional career as an English professor at the University of Tennessee. He had a touch of those old-time announcers who seemed to be reporting the news rather than broadcasting sports, but there was a subtle flair in his delivery that added to a game's excitement. For three hours every autumn Saturday I could hear in the background Nelson's call as Dad would whoop in delight and wallow in despair as the Irish battled for my national and religious heritages.

I became a Dodger fan when the team moved from Brooklyn in 1958. I have never lived and died so many times following one team. Scully, born in Manhattan and a graduate of Fordham University with a major in English, moved west with the team. 

To listen to Scully was to listen to a violin speaking with a human voice. He flowed. There was a melodious quality to his coverage. Nobody spoke a more perfect English. His eloquence would have caused Winston Churchill to blush. 

And yet he captured the essence of baseball in its anecdotal rhythm. His knowledge of the players past and present was inexhaustible. Between pitches as the hurler would rub the ball, crumble dirt in his fingers as he stood on the mound, toe the rubber and bend down to study the catcher's signs, Scully would launch into a short tale until the action recommenced: 

"The count's two-and-two. Koufax winds and fires. A swing and a miss. Sandy records his ninth strike out of the evening. Three up, three down. No runs, no hits, no errors. Dodgers lead, 1-0." And when the commercial ended, Scully would resume: "The centerfield flag has begun to flutter. A Santa Ana breeze is sweeping across the field as we move into the bottom of seventh with Maury Wills, Junior Gilliam and Willie Davis appearing in that order at the plate." 

I don't claim to do him justice with the preceding monologue. If our ears were mouths, Scully poured a fine wine into us with his impeccable and poetic prose.

I followed the Raiders when they were wrapped in a mystique. It was a mystique different from Terry Bradshaw and the Pittsburg Steelers, Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers and Troy Aikman and the Dallas Cowboys. For the record, Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and their New England Patriot teams didn't have a mystique. Belichick programmed the robot Brady with the rest of the players. They were nothing more than parts in a well-oiled machine.

The Raiders had their own mystique. They were criminals. They were riverboat gamblers. They were womanizers and drinkers. The most unruly individuals found a home with the Raiders where their ruthless talents were promoted rather than thwarted. They were cunning on offense and cruel on defense. They wanted to hurt you. During their heyday, these hellions in the silver-and-black reveled in their notoriety. Bill King, in language so colorful that he received a technical foul for a comment while announcing a Golden State Warrior game, exalted these anti-heroes.

To compete during the Raiders' apogee, an individual had to have a big personality. Self-educated, King was the classic Renaissance man with his a love for literature, opera, ballet and Russian history. As a product of Jack London's home town, he escaped in the off-season by sailing to distant locales. 

With his handlebar moustache and Van Dyke beard, he resembled a circus barker promoting a show featuring the most marvelous feats of mankind just inside the tent. He related the action with a controlled excitement that would fill the listener with adrenalin. This is an example of his spontaneous play-by-play describing the last down of a game between the Raiders and the San Diego Chargers: 

"The ball, flipped forward, is loose! A wild scramble, two seconds on the clock...Casper grabbing the ball...it is ruled a fumble...Casper has recovered in the end zone! The Oakland Raiders have scored on the most zany, unbelievable, absolutely impossible dream of a play! Madden is on the field. He wants to know if it's real. They said yes, get your big butt out of here! He does! There's nothing real in the world anymore! The Raiders have won the football game! The Chargers....they don't believe it. Fifty-two thousand people are stunned. This one will be relived forever!"

Because he was the foil to Muhammad Ali, he may have considered himself "The Greatest" too among other accolades. To his credit there are many pundits who consider Howard Cosell the greatest sports broadcaster of all time. A lawyer, he broke the mode. His tell-it-like-it-is approach defied tradition. He reduced stars to mere human beings with the ordinary flaws of an average person that Cosell never thought twice about pointing out.

Though he was gifted in any sport in which he cared to opine and more associated with television rather than with radio, I especially appreciated his boxing perspective told from ringside. He specialized in the "ebb and flow" of a match, a phrase that found favor with him. He didn't miss a punch and he expertly spotted the telling blows. He had no reluctance about employing his bombastic language polished from his courtroom days, but he could cut to the chase like a straight right as he did when George Foreman defeated heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, the beginning of the end rendered by Cosell as he shouted into the microphone, "Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!"

Looking back on my education, these four were my mentors. They taught me the art of telling a story, recounting an event and valuing the English language, They taught me to treat a subject with enthusiasm. They taught me that writing has to be concise. They taught me that writing has to have verve. And they taught me that if you can't write with honesty, then you are nothing more than a hack with no credibility.

They occupy a place in my life today. This afternoon I will do my hour's worth of Yankee Yoga. In order to inspire myself, I will go to YouTube and watch the first fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns in which the latter prevails with a 14th round TKO. And like Homer recording the epic struggles in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Cosell will be narrating this historical confrontation.