“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.”It’s the first line of Don Dellilo’s Underworld — kicking off a novella-length prologue that in itself must be one of the best baseball stories ever written. But it comes to mind sometimes when I think of the Toronto Blue Jays broadcaster Jerry Howarth, who announced this week he was retiring after 36 years of calling the team’s games on radio.He was American, from Pennsylvania by way of California, Washington and Utah, but once he got to Toronto he seemed to speak in our voice, and managed to shine something halfway hopeful into us.Howarth has always had that reedy, nasal voice that for generations defined Canadian sports announcers — Foster Hewitt, Dick Irvin, Howie Meeker and Bob Cole on Hockey Night in Canada; Paul Morris on the Maple Leaf Gardens PA system and Joe Bowen on Leafs radio; Dave van Horne of Montreal Expos broadcasts.You can hear some of the same quality in the calls of legendary Dodgers sportscaster Vin Scully, though in my lifetime American sports has generally always seems to be narrated in thunderous baritones and southern drawls — the movie voiceover sound of masculine authority. In Canada, until recently we seemed to hear our narratives from the voice of the guy on the next barstool at the legion hall — pitchy, excitable, human voices. He speaks in your voice.It’s the voice of childhood nights in my grandmother’s living room, where a family friend we knew as “Aunt” Peg sat chewing on fat cigars and listening to games on a portable transistor radio through an earpiece — one she would turn towards me as we crowded together on the couch, cheeks pressed side by side, so we could listen to the full-count call while she blew smoke rings and the picture of a game hovered amid them in them in my imagination.It’s the voice you would hear when you put the game ...
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