How About That!: The Life Of Mel Allen

by Stephen Borelli

"There's a fly ball out to right field...that ball is going, going...it is gone!" The voice was unmistakable. From the 1930s until his death in 1996, Mel Allen riveted generations of sports fans with his resonant Southern tones on radio and television. His signature calls of "How about that!" (after a spectacular play) and "Going... going... gone!" (to frame a home run) made him an American icon. How About That! The Life of Mel Allen is the first biography on perhaps the most famous sports broadcaster. Author Stephen Borelli, who, like his father and grandfather, attentively followed Allen's on-air accounts, traces the announcer from tiny towns in Alabama to the glares of Yankee Stadium and the Rose Bowl. You brush shoulders with legendary college football coach Bear Bryant, famous radio host Ralph Edwards, and a lineup of New York Yankees legends that includes Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Casey Stengel. Allen had a fan following as frantic as theirs, including legions of female admirers. You experience baseball's glorious radio days, when announcers like Allen and his Brooklyn rival Red Barber gave listeners sight and sound and their depictions made ballplayers seem larger than life. Through Allen's folksy words, you follow a Yankees dynasty at its height, from the intensity on the field during a feverish 1949 pennant race with the Boston Red Sox and numerous "Subway Series" to the camaraderie in the clubhouse and on overnight train rides. You learn about Allen's fade from the national eye after the Yankees mysteriously dismissed him in 1964 and his second broadcasting life in the late 1970s through mid-1990s as host of the groundbreaking television show This Week in Baseball. During this period, a unique friendship with George Steinbrenner allowed Allen to call one last no-hitter as he became the voice of baseball again. How About That! is the story of the American dream. A boy raised by Russian Jewish immigrants who face Ku Klux Klan persecution and Depression-era hardship rises to national fame with a magical voice and a touch of chance. He stays on top with a relentless drive to succeed that leaves him a lifelong bachelor, though always a devoted family man.

257 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2005

Reviews

[Hugh Centerville · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baseball and Ballantine

Mel Allen was tall, dark and handsome. He was suave and debonair. He was gracious. The women and kids loved him, the men, too. He was a man who had it all, including a gig as the Voice of the Yankees in the glory years of New York baseball. From 1946 to 1964, with Mel behind the microphone, at least one NY team and sometimes two were in the World Series every year except one, putting Mel into what fellow sportscaster Red Barber called the “catbird’s seat.” And by the way, the year NY wasn’t represented in the Fall Classic, 1959, the Dodgers, only recently removed from Brooklyn, were there.

Mel knew everybody, including Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle, movie stars and presidents, the cabdrivers, the delivery men. He was the consummate family man, taking care of his extended family in every way possible, even ensconcing Mom and Dad in an estate in ritzy Westchester, NY. He insisted every fan letter be answered, either by himself personally or his secretary, even when the letters came in at over five hundred a week. He did a ton of charity work, flying all over the country. He had it all and was grateful for it.

Sounds like it was easy, but as Mel once told a struggling young sportscaster named Curt Gowdy, the trick was to work so hard it looked as if you weren’t working at all.

The first section of the book, before we get anywhere close to New York, is terrific. Mel’s early years are the immigrant’s tale, told many times before and told well here, a story that never grows old.

Early in the twentieth century, Mel’s dad, Julius Israel, brings his family to America in search of a better life. For Julius, it was about more than economics. It was survival. The family was Jewish, living along the Russo-Polish border. The family settled in Alabama, and it’s the older generation clinging to their Old World traditions, the first-generation kids fully embracing life as Americans. For Mel, like so many of those kids, it was sports, American-style. It’s football first, not ordinary football but Alabama football, Mel as an undergraduate writing and broadcasting for the Crimson Tide and good enough at it to wrangle an invite to the Big Apple, not to the Yankees, at least not right away, but into the world of radio, just getting started.

Then come the Yankee years and Mel’s place in it, and toward the end of the book, when the reader is maybe feeling exhausted by all of Mel’s and the Yankee’s triumphs, we get a dash of conflict, the animosity between Red Barber and Mel. The two titans of New York sportscasting, crosstown rivals, get stuffed into one booth where their styles and personalities clash, but one thing they can agree on is an aversion to a new type of sportscaster, the ex-ballplayer. Mel’s generation of sportscasters had arrived with a different, more refined skill set than the ex-ballplayers, who came without much preparation at all, and the older guys didn’t think having played the game warranted an instant ticket into the booth. Mel felt it belittled his profession and he sometimes focused his ire on one of the first ex-ballplayers to tread on his domain, Phil Rizzuto.

Phil, live on the air: “I sure would like a pizza pie.”

Mel, also live, “Pizza means pie.”

It was Mel, though, who dubbed Phil “the Scooter.” And tagged two other Yankees with immortal nicknames, Joltin’ Joe and Old Reliable.

Mel’s strengths as a baseball broadcaster included setting what Vin Scully called the “word picture,” but what Mel was best at was schmoozing, that mellifluous voice drifting across the airwaves on a hot summer night or an October afternoon. Baseball and Ballantine.

[Anup Sinha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I truly enjoyed Stephen Borelli's biography of Mel Allen and strongly recommend for all Mel Allen fans!

I loved Mel Allen, knowing him as the grandfatherly narrator of This Week in Baseball and a voice from a more innocent time. What this book did was bring him to life and explain all the other incredible accomplishments and talents.

This is a man who grew up very poor, going to four different high schools in four different states, who was hyper-motivated as a youngster to make good. He graduated from high school at 15, college at 19, and was on his way to becoming a lawyer before his sports passion led him elsewhere.

All kinds of great tidbits and stories with other legends. I didn't know he was the voice and the written word for Alabama Crimson Tide Football, mentored by a Coach Frank Thomas and a teacher and mentor to Bear Bryant. He actually gave Coach Bryant his signature fedora! He broke in Curt Gowdy and helped get him the Red Sox job. He was avidly Jewish growing up in the Deep South in a much less tolerant time. It goes on and on.

The stories from the glory days of the Yankees are priceless. And of course, I enjoyed reading about the genesis of TWIB.

I truly understand the man and his life now, with a broader perspective than from just his voice. When I picked up the book and saw it was an authorized biography written by a fan of his with the cooperation of Allen's family and friends, I was concerned it would be overly fawning. It was definitely flattering but balanced enough to give a feel for the good and the bad of him.

Not that there was much bad....... I still see him as a great man, even greater after having read this book.

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book about a great man.