ST. LOUIS — The news of Whitey Herzog’s passing today brought back memories of my sportscasting days at KSDK. I covered Whitey’s first news conference when Gussie Busch introduced him as the Cardinals manager. I had the pleasure of covering the 1980s Cardinals… aka Whiteyball…one of the most exciting decades in franchise history. One of my favorite stories is attached here.
After Herzog led the 1982 Cardinals to a World Series championship over the Brewers, a year later I suggested to my sports and news managers we should do a profile of Whitey, with the hook being that we ask him to wear a wireless microphone during a game. I was naive enough to think Whitey would accept an absurd request from a weekend sportscaster he barely knew. But it turns out that KSDK Sports Director Jay Randolph was a pretty good closer; he convinced Whitey to wear a mic during a 1983 game at Busch Stadium!
The 3-part series on Whitey ended with a segment where we had to bleep much of his visit to the mound to chew out Joaquin Andujar and a multi-run rally where Whitey was the dugout maestro conducting his baseball orchestra. Fast forward to about 2010-ish when KSDK had a weekly Cardinals TV show which resurrected some of my 1983 Whitey series and people started coming up to Whitey and saying how cool it was to see it.
Because Whitey never saw the original series, his personal assistant called our newsroom to ask us to burn a DVD copy for Whitey and of course we obliged.
Several weeks later, my newsroom phone rang.
“Art…this is Whitey Herzog.” Not exactly my everyday phone call.
Whitey thanked me for the DVD and then started getting emotional because he said he sat down with his grandkids to show them what grandpa was all about as one of the game’s best managers. Whitey concluded by saying if I ever needed anything from him, all I had to do was ask.
I remember when Stan Musial got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, I called Whitey to get a quick sound bite. He was running errands but he said he would stop what he was doing and come by the tv station. One time I told Whitey he made me a better reporter because it was obvious he wasn’t a fan of ill-informed questions and I didn’t want to be the reporter to ask a dumb question and set him off.
Sad to say goodbye to a St. Louis legend.
