Clif, Claf and Me

I have no end of stories of my life in which I am the butt of the joke.  I don't have particularly low self-esteem or self-worth, but I do have an unending ability to laugh at myself.  When you have done some things like barreling over Lucille Ball on national TV, you had better be able to laugh at yourself.

So I encourage you to go up to the search box and plug in the word "anthem" and search on it.  You will find that once upon a time I was the anthem singer for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park.  You'll see a few mentions of my doing that back in the 1970s, but not how I ended up doing that, and that's today's "laugh at Bob" story.

In the summer of 1977 I was singing professionally, with the Boston Light Opera and elsewhere, and was working for the computer company Burroughs during the day.  I was also trying to get far away from Boston, to which I had moved for college in 1969 and of which I had gotten very tired -- I did not want to raise children there, for one.

However, I had an ambition that needed to get satisfied before we left the area, and that would be to sing the anthem at Fenway before an actual game, to walk on that field and enjoy the grass, that sort of thing (the real grass, the green stuff on the field you walk on ... don't get wise).

This piece would get really long if I got into what I had tried before this story picks up, so rest assured I had tried a lot of things.  All to no avail.

So let's go back to the time of the 1970s, and trust me when I say that the talk radio era, particularly sports talk, was in its infancy then.  A few cities had radio stations with show hosts talking sports, with listeners calling in, and Boston was one of them -- WITS-AM if memory serves; 1510 AM if memory really serves.

WITS's afternoon show was done by two "senior" local sportswriters from the papers, Larry Claflin and Clif Keane, one from the Herald and the other from the Globe.  They billed as "Clif and Claf", of course, talking for three hours daily with a healthy number of listeners' calls taken and answered about the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics and Bruins.  Nothing got solved, but a lot of advertisers' products were sold in those three hours.

Sometime in the summer -- according to www.baseball-reference.com, it would be the second week of July -- the Red Sox were in Cleveland playing the Indians.  Before games in Cleveland, the anthem was usually sung by a local singer, Rocco Scotti, and Scotti, it should be noted, did a great job.  He passed away last year at 95, and we'll miss him; he honored the country when he stood before the mic.

I'm listening to him on TV, and having some interesting thoughts.  Hmmm ... maybe if I ...

So sure enough, the next day I call up the old Clif and Claf show.  When I get on, I turn on a phony Boston accent of some kind (trust me, not being from anywhere near there, I definitely do not have one) and start in.  "Hey, you heard that guy Scotti singing last night before the game, right?  So they got an Italian guy singing out there in Cleveland.  This is an Irish town, right?  Shouldn't we get an Irish tenor to sing at Fenway?  And I've got just the guy ... heard him sing in Brighton the other day ..."

I took a minute or two, going on to Clif and Claf about the "real" me, in the third person, of course, and "why this guy Sutton ought to be singing at Fenway.  A real Irish tenor, just what we need.  You guys ought to figure out how to make that happen."  That sort of thing. Naturally, they start joking about it (I will not say that there might not have been a drink or two in front of one or both of them; they were Irish, after all).  I said goodbye and finished talking with them.

For about 30 minutes.

Then I called back, this time with a different local accent.  "Hey, you shouldn't knock this guy, I've heard him ... he can really sing, and it would be a great idea to get him at Fenway ...".  All of a sudden it was "An Official Topic", and every day for a few weeks there would be a couple-three calls or more about why this guy Sutton ought to be singing at Fenway.  And let the record show it was not always I calling in, although for the most part it was, varying accents constantly.  What Clif and Claf were thinking is lost for the ages; both are gone many years now.

Apparently I wore them down, because after a few weeks of this, one of them finally declared on the show that "... if this guy Bobby Sutton was out there, and anyone knew him, he should call in the show."  Which, after a courteous 45 minutes to play out the ruse, I did -- except that I called the station, not the show's dial-in number, which I figured would be what would have happened, had this person not been listening to the show, and simply had gotten called by someone who was, telling him to call the show.  Got it?

Sure enough, they patched me in to the actual program, and there are Clif and Claf, asking about my background.  Quickly affecting what I fondly believed to be an Irish accent, for some reason, I told them someone had told me I was supposed to call the station -- "How can I help you folks?", I asked them.  They said, and this was all on the air, that people had been trying to get them use their contacts to arrange for me to sing the anthem at Fenway.

"I'd certainly be happy to do that", I told them.  OK, except then they asked me, "What's your favorite Irish song?"  I did not know where this was going, so I said "Danny Boy."  (At least it was Irish, which I was not very.)  "Sing it for us!", they asked, again, still on the air.  So having dug myself a hole, but still in pursuit of my ambition, I sat down at the piano in our apartment and, accompanying myself, gave the metropolitan Boston sports-listening area, and Clif and Claf, a quick chorus of "Danny Boy."

Modesty aside, I actually could sing a bit back then, and I suppose that, even over a radio-telephone patch, they were impressed enough to where they did indeed contact the team's PR Department, and a few weeks later, I sang my very first major-league game national anthem at Fenway.  Of course, I had to keep that brogue through every subsequent dealing with the team, and had to explain to my brother why, when he would visit and see a game, he had to talk like an Irishman when he was with me, and for that matter, why I had to talk like one (he didn't mind; in fact, the first game he ever attended that I sang for, he caught a foul ball).

By the way, from the "I thought so" department, I will tell you that the mic-stand I would sing from, in the on-deck circle, had a cord that ran into the home dugout, where it was plugged into exactly nothing.  Yes, boys and girls, as with all the early stadiums, the singers had to record the anthem and lip-sync it, since the acoustics were so inhospitable that if you sang live, you would hear yourself a few seconds later and go nuts.  That lip-syncing could lead to some fun experiences, as I wrote here not long ago.
 
At any rate, however foolish I had to be, however many silly things I had to do to make it happen, I did get to achieve my ambition, many many times thereafter as it turned out, at four different major-league stadiums.  I even have a cassette of that very first time doing the anthem there, a tape of the radio broadcast that ends with the Red Sox announcer, Ned Martin, telling the audience what a great job I had done.  That was pretty neat.

I also met Clif Keane in person in the press room after that first game.  The next day he mentioned it on air during the show, wondering how such a big voice came out of such a little guy.  Apparently he was unfamiliar with the mechanism of how a sound engineer playing a tape was the one who controlled the volume in the stadium.  Just saying.

It's almost 40 years since that experience, but fun to recall.  Clif and Claf are gone, as is Ned Martin the announcer, and John Kiley the organist who accompanied that tape.  And Rocco Scotti, the inspiration of it all, who outlived all of them, is gone, too.

The story, though, is quite alive.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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