Gammons Suffers Aneurysm, Recovering From Surgery

Hall of Fame journalist Peter Gammons suffered a brain aneurysm Tuesday morning while at his home in Cape Cod. He was lifted to Boston for surgery and is reportedly resting well in an ICU. For more details, here's the link to the article on ESPN.com.

I was in Cooperstown last year for his induction into the Hall, and his speech was... well, it was a doozy. In addition to his induction speech I've included a copy of his celebrated article after Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. Here they are, courtesy of the good folks at ESPN.

Hall of Fame Induction Speech: July 31, 2005 - Cooperstown, NY

Steve Jobs' advice at that time to a graduating class of Stanford this year was 'find what you love.' I am here today because I found what I love. Understand, I grew up in a household where when I got home from school my mother greeted me with, 'Can you believe they traded Jim Piersall for Vic Wertz and Gary Geiger?'

Ned weaned me on respect and reverence for the history and texture of the game. My sister Anne hit me fungoes in a small New England town where the Red Sox home opener was an acceptable legal excuse to leave school at 10 a.m. My father found what he loved in music and teaching and the goodness of man. He and Paul Wright, my godfather, teacher and mentor, remain the two greatest men I have ever known … teachers like Juney O'Brien and Jake Congleton. By the time I was 18, I knew my role models and my life's mission statement were defined.

When this award was announced, Mike Barnicle left me a simple message. 'Tom Winship would be very proud.' Winship was the editor of the Boston Globe, a Branch Rickey of a man who changed the newspaper business in Boston and opened a world for kids who were dying for a chance. Mine came as a summer intern in 1968. It started the day Robert F. Kennedy was shot. In those days you had a morning Globe and afternoon Globe, and when I walked in, I was introduced to my fellow intern Bob Ryan, basketball Hall of Famer. We were told to call every team in business, ask them what they would do for Robert F. Kennedy and write a story. We did. The 3:30 late stocks edition came up, and there on the front page of the entire paper Mr. Ryan and Mr. Gammons had their first bylines. We went to the Erie Pub, raised a couple of 10-cent drafts and decided, you know, what we found what we loved.

My career essentially has been very simple, Boston Globe, Sports Illustrated, ESPN. I have been fortunate enough to work for extraordinary people. There are hundreds, maybe thousands who I should thank, but it was Tom Winship and Fran Rosa who stuck their neck out to hire a kid who hadn't even graduated from college … Mark Mulvoy, who hired me twice at Sports Illustrated … Vince Doria, who brought me back to the Globe and anyone who I ever worked for believes is the best sports editor, if not the best boss who ever lived … John Walsh who had the crack-brained idea to bring a sportswriter into television because, as one of the businesses most creative visionaries, he understood that information is king. I am very proud to say today much of what ESPN is today is because of John Walsh and there are hundreds of people that have gone and followed me out of the print profession to ESPN because of Walsh.

I am not here as a television personality, but as an ink-stained wretch. Publishers and new editors have no clue. They have no understanding that the baseball beat is the toughest beat in the newspaper business. It means severe personal sacrifices. A few years ago Jayson Stark and I decided that over a 25-year period we probably talked to one another more than we talked to our wives and no one has sacrificed more than my wife Gloria, who saved me in an unpredictable storm of a business that knows no holidays.

The baseball beat today is much tougher now than when I was traveling with the Red Sox for the Globe. There is far less access, 10 times the bodies in the clubhouse. The Internet, radio, television have broadened the baseball information universe. And yet our business, I am proud to say, keeps producing generation after generation of young reporters who are tireless, good and fair. Throughout my career I have tried to be guided by one principle, that because I am human I have the right to like people. But because I am professional, I have no right to dislike any one. People ask me, as a New Englander, what was it like walking out there in the field when Aaron Boone hit a home run. To be honest, my first reaction was, I was ecstatic. I have known Aaron Boone since he was 13 years old, and that's my privilege. My second reaction, I saw Tim Wakefield, head down, and I felt despondent. He's one man who did not deserve that. As I walked out on the field to try to get introduced, I turned to my producer, Charlie Moynihan, and said, 'Look around here, you know what? I just got paid to cover the greatest game ever played in the greatest sporting venue in the world. I think I'm the luckiest man on earth.'

Jerry Coleman, I am honored to be in Cooperstown with you -- war hero, World Series MVP, announcer, gentleman. Ryne Sandberg, I think of a 40-home run season, a 200-hit season, a 50-steal season and the ego of a clubhouse kid.

But, to be here the day Wade Boggs is inducted is a special thing for me. This is a guy who played seven minor-league seasons, hit three something a ridiculous six straight years, went through three Rule 5 drafts and kept saying, 'my success will be measured in terms of dealing with adversity.' In the last half-century, Wade Boggs is the oldest position player to debut in the major leagues and make the Hall of Fame. He is the model for overcoming adversity of all kinds. I remember that afternoon in the spring of '86 when you and I were driving with Ted Williams over to have that night of discussing hits with Don Mattingly. Ted leaned forward in the car and said, 'Hey Wade, did you ever smell the burn of a bat?' Well, there are very few people who have. I have never forgot that. When the All-Century Team gathered around Ted at Fenway before the '99 All-Star Game, Ted asked Mark McGwire the same question. He retold the story. He said, 'Did you ever smell the burn of the bat?' There were six National League players in the room at the time around McGwire. What is he talking about? Well, let's face it, the burning of a bat is the lexicon of the gods.

And to stand here in front of the Hall of Fame players is like standing in front of the baseball dieties, and yet I feel so fortunate to have known so many of them as humans. I think of Carlton Fisk and I think of eight to 10 hours a day of rehab in the winter of '73-'74, mostly in the Manchester YMCA, to come back from a knee injury that very few humans could have recovered from. Eddie Murray, I think of the hours he took, watching him take BP, which allowed him to know all of those thousands of clutch hits which were only by design, not chance. I think of Robin Yount and the fastest he ever got timed to first was 3.9 seconds, the slowest 4.0. And I remember that George Brett always used to say he wanted his career to end on a ground ball to second base on which he busted his hump down the line. I think of Mike Schmidt mowing and lining the field in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, so he can coach his son's high school team. Then there's Sandy Koufax telling me that I lived in L.A. the way he lived in Stonington, Maine. I think of Bob Gibson's handshake, of Tony Perez, Petuka Perez, I think he lived a quarter of mile from where I lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, and to this day not two weeks go by when someone doesn't say, you know, how are Tony and Petuka Perez? They are the greatest people who lived in this neighborhood.

I think of the hours and I thank Jim Palmer and Tom Seaver for discussing pitching with me. I will never forget the day that Orlando Cepeda hit four doubles in one game in Fenway Park and could barely walk. I think of Reggie Jackson and the two of us wandering around Kenmore Square in Boston after the Angels had lost the 1986 ALCS, outraged because Reggie Jackson's team had lost. I think of Dennis Eckersley and I think of his start in the 1978 Boston Massacre, when nearly 100 writers surrounded Frank Duffy because he made an error. He started pulling them off. He shouted, 'He didn't load the bases. He didn't hang a 0-2 slider. Get to the locker and talk to the guy who has an L next to his name.' Dennis Eckersley defines teammate.

I think of Kirby Puckett, my favorite days in baseball while the lights were still off in the Metrodome at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Game Six, the night he won the World Series, probably the only guy in the world that called me Petey, says, 'Petey, get up in your SportsCenter and tell everyone that Puck is going to jack the Twins up on his back today.' Well, four hits, a game-saving catch, and a 11th-inning home run later, Puck took us to the greatest seventh game, World Series game I will ever experience: 10 innings, 1-0, Jack Morris. These players are great players whose success is measured in overcoming adversity, but no one had to be a great person, no one had to be a great player to be a great person stored in my memory bank. So I think from John Curtis to Bill Campbell to Jerry Remy, Buckethead Schmidt to Bruce Hurst, Ellis Hurst to George Lombard, I've been lucky to know thousands of people who loved the game as much as I do.

In 1985, the Globe sent me to Meridian, Mississippi, to do a story on Dennis 'Oil Can' Boyd's background. I had dinner with his father, Willie James, who was once a Negro League pitcher and maintained the field and team in Meridian. He was telling me how he financed his life in baseball by being a landscaper.

He told me a story of a day in 1964 when he was landscaping the yard of the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. He remembered seeing the cars coming up. They all rolled up the street, up the road from Philadelphia [Miss.] to [Meridian] Mississippi to take care of some civil rights workers. Mr. Boyd looked me in the eye. He said, 'You know what? This is what makes this country great. Today that man is destitute and crippled with arthritis and my boy, Dennis Boyd, is pitching in the major leagues for the Boston Red Sox.' In my mind the Boyd family represents baseball's place in American society. Jackie Robinson was in the big leagues seven years before Brown versus the Board of Education and we should never forget it, just as we should never forget the important athletes of the 20th century, arguably one of the 10 most important Americans of the 20th century. I remember waking up to read the story of Roberto Clemente's death, a great baseball idol [who] died taking medical, food and clothing supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. I was with Dave Stewart the morning after he won the third game of the 1989 earthquake series as he crawled through the rubble of the collapsed Cypress structure to hand out coffee and donuts to volunteers searching for bodies.

I walked the streets of Manoguyabo, Dominican Republic, with Pedro Martinez and viewed the churches, school, athletic complex, day-care center and houses that he built for poor people in his hometown. I was not far from Fidel Castro when he stood for the American National Anthem at attention, his hat across his heart because baseball came to Havana in 1989. I remember George Bush strode out toward the mound at Yankee Stadium before the third game of the 2001 World Series, weeks removed from the World Trade Center attacks, and turned and said to Karl Ravech and Harold Reynolds, 'We are among the 55,000 people who just experienced one of the great chills of anyone's lifetime.' When Bud Selig asked us to embrace the World Cup, it's not T-shirts in Taiwan. It's about celebrating that baseball, more than any sport, is who we are. It is reflected in our immigration patterns, our history because we're all immigrants. We should want the world to see us not for our politics, not for our business, but for baseball as our metamorphic soul, inclusive, not exclusive, diverse, not divisive, fraternal, not fractionalized.

If any of you are familiar with the Cape Cod League you probably might have heard of Arnie Allen, a special needs gentleman who for 40 years was a batboy for the Falmouth Commodores. He was diagnosed with brain cancer in the summer of 2002. Seventy-two hours later a duffel bag of Angels paraphernalia arrived in Falmouth, courtesy of two Falmouth players, Darin Erstad and Adam Kennedy. Of course, the Angels went on to the World Series in 2002 and after winning one incredible sixth game coming from a five-nothing deficit in the eighth inning. Before Game Seven, Erstad and Kennedy pulled me aside before they went out to stretch and told me, 'We know you are going to be speaking at the Hall of Fame inductions in two weeks on the Cape.' They said in unison, 'As you speak, could you do us a favor, Arnie will be there probably for the last time. Could you just tell him that Darin and Adam Kennedy said we are thinking of him before they went out and won the World Series?'

Every day at the ball park, for me, there's been something that's great. Ozzie Smith fielding ground balls, just seeing Willie Mays, watching Tom Seaver throw a 3-1 changeup to Don Baylor in his 300th win, George, Gossage in 1980. More important, what I have taken from all of these years is the knowledge that the people who play this game inherently care so much about that game, fellow players and those who love it. I am very fortunate to have baseball as a part of my life for 35 years. I thank you, Gloria, and all my family for standing aside me and all baseball writers for their friendship, support and maintenance of a great and proud profession. The game is also about players. I thank the thousands of players that I have known for making this ride better than I ever could have imagined. Ted Williams used to tell me, 'Hey, Bush, someday you want to walk down the street and have people say you have the greatest job in America.' Ted, it happens almost every day. For that I thank all of you, every one who read or listened to me, allowed me to try to be your eyes and ears, that allowed me to find what I love and hold on to it long enough to experience this, the greatest day of my professional career.

Thank you.

"Fisk's HR In 12th Beats Reds" - Boston Globe, October 22, 1975

And all of a sudden the ball was there, like the Mystic River Bridge, suspended out in the black of the morning.

When it finally crashed off the mesh attached to the left-field foul pole, one step after another the reaction unfurled: from Carlton Fisk's convulsive leap to John Kiley's booming of the "Hallelujah Chorus'' to the wearing off of numbness to the outcry that echoed across the cold New England morning.

At 12:34 a.m., in the 12th inning, Fisk's histrionic home run brought a 7-6 end to a game that will be the pride of historians in the year 2525, a game won and lost what seemed like a dozen times, and a game that brings back summertime one more day. For the seventh game of the World Series.

For this game to end so swiftly, so definitely, was the way it had to end. An inning before, a Dwight Evans catch that Sparky Anderson claimed was as great as he's ever seen had been one turn, but in the ninth a George Foster throw ruined a bases-loaded, none-out certain victory for the Red Sox. Which followed a dramatic three-run homer in the eighth by Bernie Carbo as the obituaries had been prepared, which followed the downfall of Luis Tiant after El Tiante had begun, with the help of Fred Lynn's three-run, first-inning homer, as a hero of unmatched majesty.

So Fisk had put the exclamation mark at the end of what he called "the most emotional game I've ever played in.'' The home run came off Pat Darcy and made a winner of Rick Wise, who had become the record 12th pitcher in this 241-minute war that seemed like four score and seven years.

But the place one must begin is the bottom of the eighth, Cincinnati leading, 6-3, and the end so clear. El Tiante had left in the top of the inning to what apparently was to be the last of his 1975 ovations; he who had become the conquering king had been found to be just a man, and it seemed so certain. Autumn had been postponed for the last time.

Only out came an Implausible Hero, to a two-out, two-on situation against Rawlins J. Eastwick III, and Carbo did what he had done in Cincinnati. Pinch hitting, he sent a line drive into the center-field bleachers, and the chill of lachrymose had become mad, sensuous Fenway again. Followed by the point and counterpoint.

In the ninth, a Denny Doyle walk and Carl Yastrzemski single had put runners at first and third, which sent Eastwick away and brought in lefthander Will McEnaney, who walked Fisk to load the bases and pitch to Lynn.

Lynn got the ball to the outfield, but only a high, twisting fly ball down the left-field line that George Foster grabbed at the line and maybe 80 feet in back of third base. Third-base coach Don Zimmer said he told Doyle not to go, but he went anyway, and Foster's throw got to Johnny Bench in time for the double play. As the Red Sox shook their heads, mumbling "bases loaded, nobody out in the ninth,'' the Reds had their hero in Foster, who had put them ahead in the seventh with a two-run double.

Then in the 11th, the Reds had it taken away from them by Dwight Evans. With Ken Griffey at first, one out, Joe Morgan crashed a line drive toward the seats in right. Evans made his racing, web-of-the-glove, staggering catch as he crossed the warning track ("It would have been two rows in'' -- Reds bullpen catcher Bill Plummer), then as Griffey in disbelief stopped halfway between second and third, Evans spun and fired in. Yastrzemski, who had moved to first for Carbo's entrance to left, retrieved it if to the right of the coach's box, looked up, and guess who was standing on first base, waiting for the ball? Rick Burleson, who had raced over from shortstop. So Dick Drago, who worked three scoreless innings, the Red Sox, and a seventh game all had been saved.

When it was over, it was almost incomprehensible that it had begun with Tiant trying to crank out one more miracle. But it had, and for four innings, the evening was all his. They had merchandized "El Tiante'' tee shirts on the streets, they hung a banner that read "Loo-Eee For President'' and everything the man did, from taking batting practice to walking to the bullpen to warm up to the rhumbas and tangos that screwed the Reds into the ground for four innings brought standing ovations and the carol, "Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee ...''

El Tiante had a 3-0 lead from the first inning, when Lynn had followed Yastrzemski and Fisk singles by driving a Gary Nolan kumquat into the bleachers over the pitching mound of the Boston bullpen. Nolan did not last long, followed by a succession of seven, but the Billinghams, Carrolls, and Borbons had apparently done what they had to do.

And the abracadabra that had blinded the Reds before began to smudge. In the fifth, after Boston had lost two scoring opportunites, Luis walked Designated Bunter Ed Armbrister, and before he could hear his father incant Grande Olde Game No. 56 ("Walks ...''), Pete Rose singled and Griffey became the first player in three games here to hit The Wall. Not only was it the first time anyone had scored off Tiant in Fenway in 40 innings, but as the ball caromed away to be retrieved by Evans, the park went silent. In his running, leaping try for the ball at the 379-foot mark, Lynn had crashed into the wall and slid down to the ground, his back hurt.

Lynn eventually was able to stay in the game, but by the time the inning was over Bench had become the second to tickle The Wall, with a single, and it was 3-3. Then when Foster sent his drive off the center-field fence in the seventh, it was 5-3, and when Tiant was left to start the eighth, Cesar Geronimo angled a leadoff home inside the right-field pole, El Tiante left to his chant and his ovations. And in the press box, Sport Magazine editor Dick Schaap began collecting the ballots that determined which Red got the World Series hero's automobile.

So, if the honey and lemon works on the throat and the Alka-Seltzer does the same for the heads, Fenway will not be alone tonight. She has one drama, and it is perhaps sport's classic drama.

Bill Lee and Don Gullett, the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox, and a long night's journey into morning, a game suspended in time as Fisk's home run was suspended beyond the skyline, a game that perhaps required the four-day buildup it got.

Summertime has been called back for just one more day -- for the seventh game of the World Series.