quote:

---

Book it: Hamilton still harried by Caray

February 9, 2006

BY RON RAPOPORT SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

It is more than 20 years later, and Milo Hamilton hasn't forgotten. Not a single minute. Not a single incident. Not a single insult. Not a single word.

And now the words are his -- more than 4,000 of them in an explosive chapter in his new autobiography that savages Harry Caray from beginning to end.

''I just felt nobody really knew him,'' Hamilton, who succeeded Jack Brickhouse as the Cubs broadcaster in 1980, said Wednesday from his home in Houston. ''I think it's time they did.''

IN HIS WORDS
''I see [the statue of Harry Caray] every time the Astros visit Wrigley Field. When I get off the bus, I say to myself, "I gotta go get some peanuts and feed the pigeons so they'll fly over the statue all day long.''
Milo Hamilton

RELATED STORY
Reaction time: Harry has lots of defenders
Friends and relatives of Harry Caray rallied to defend him Wednesday after learning that former Cubs broadcaster Milo Hamilton ripped Caray in his new book.

In Making Airwaves: 60 Years at Milo's Microphone ($24.95, Sports Publishing L.L.C.), co-authored by Dan Schlossberg and former Cubs public-relations director Bob Ibach, Hamilton describes the revered Caray as a vain and treacherous man who made Hamilton's life miserable while making a mission of running him out of Chicago.


'''Well, kid, if I were you, I'd leave town,''' Hamilton, who has been the Astros' broadcaster for the last 22 years, says Caray told him when they met shortly after Caray left the White Sox for the Cubs. ''So much for 'How's the family?' and other pleasantries.

''He rode managers. He rode players. It didn't matter. He treated everyone the same way,'' Hamilton writes. ''In short, he was a miserable human being.''

Timing just wasn't right

Hamilton worked with Caray in the television booth for a time before leaving for the radio side, where he greatly enjoyed working with Lou Boudreau. He and Caray would pass each other on the catwalk behind the booths without looking at each other, and when Caray sang during the seventh-inning stretch, ''I would immediately walk out the back door of the catwalk, facing the fans in the lower stands below,'' Hamilton writes. "It was my silent protest, I suppose. It wasn't in me to stand up and be part of his act.''

In a sense, Hamilton was a victim of bad timing. After Brickhouse retired after the 1980 season, Hamilton writes, he asked if he could hang around just a little while longer. So the transition wasn't as clear as it might have been. Then William Wrigley sold the Cubs to Tribune Co., the players went on strike, and it was like starting over.

Called to a news conference without warning, Hamilton was shocked to hear Caray announced as the Cubs' new broadcaster. ''My heart lept into my throat,'' he writes.

Most high-ranking Tribune officials, including CEO Stanton Cook and board member Andrew McKenna, were against hiring Caray, Hamilton writes. (''Mrs. Cook especially was not in favor of it,'' he says McKenna told him. ''She didn't think anybody like Caray should ever work for the Tribune. She feels it's not in their image.'')

But Tribune Broadcasting president Jim Dowdle insisted. ''It was going to be Dowdle's footprint on the Cubs,'' Hamilton writes. ''He hadn't been on the Tribune board for long, so now he was going to show everybody who was boss.''

''I think he was trying to stick it to Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn,'' Hamilton said on the phone. ''The White Sox had left WGN and gone over to Channel 32, and he was sending a message to them: Don't stick it to the Tribune.''

Hamilton's relationship with Caray and Dowdle reached its low point at the start of the 1982 season when he was hospitalized with a recurrence of leukemia. Dowdle visited him at Northwestern Memorial, ''almost as if he was dropping in to see if I was really that ill, if perhaps I was faking it,'' Hamilton writes. ''I could sense that from his body language. Can you imagine anyone being that inconsiderate?''

Caray's response to his illness, Hamilton says, was to say on the air that he never had missed any games and he ''couldn't understand how a guy can take time off during the season.'' Later, he boasted to a reporter that he never had missed an inning in his career, ''unlike some other broadcasters I know.''

''You can imagine the temptation for me later on, when that sonofa***** suffered a stroke in 1987, to say something bad about him,'' Hamilton writes. ''But I didn't. It's not in my nature.''

Others also were affected

Hamilton says he was ''stunned and saddened'' when he learned of the Caray statue, which he says was Dowdle's idea. ''The first statue put up outside Wrigley Field should have been for Ernie Banks,'' he writes. "That's a given.''

''Dowdle's retired now,'' Hamilton said on the phone, ''but I see him at the park once in a while. I make it a point to pound on the window of the booth, pretending to say something to Ron Santo or Pat Hughes. Dowdle stands in the back and won't even look at me.''

Caray's vindictiveness, and the force of his personality, affected Hamilton's relationship with others, he writes:

''It was almost like anybody who worked with Harry acted like he didn't know me. The only one who was loyal to me was [longtime WGN producer] Arne Harris.''

Caray's son, Skip, who was the Atlanta Braves' announcer, was particularly vindictive toward him, Hamilton says, and after he left the Cubs in 1984, Steve Stone ''wouldn't speak to me because Steve feared that Harry might resent him for doing so. Steve could be a politician.''

In recent years, he says, he and Stone have become friendly again and Chip Caray has ''made many attempts to repair the damage between his family and mine,'' particularly when Hamilton's wife, Arlene, who died last year, became ill.

''It was refreshing to know that the grandson had decided to bury the hatchet,'' Hamilton writes in the last lines of the chapter on his relationship with Caray. ''I can't tell you how much I appreciated that.''

---