Bob Uecker
CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) Some thoughts today on the passing of legendary Brewers baseball broadcaster Bob Uecker.
Radio is the most intimate of the mass media. We are in the friendship business. People listen to one broadcaster or another because they identify with them. There’s a connection through the speakers. People who listen to this broadcast think they know me. If you’ve listened for years, you may have come to think of me as a friend.
For Wisconsinites, there was no greater summer friend than Bob Uecker. Each year the snow melts away and the grass turns green, and for 54 years we were reunited with our friend Bob. Oh, sure, there was a ballgame on the radio. But Bob always had the perfect touch: a legendary storyteller, encyclopedic baseball knowledge, and that famous dry humor that was always funny and never meanspirited. And his broadcasting career included something that many people behind a microphone would never have: a Milwaukeean who got to call the games for his hometown team.
Bob Uecker was an unexpected Wisconsin surprise for me. I knew who he was through his Tonight Show appearances, and the Miller Lite commercials, and Mister Belvedere. But when I moved here from the northeast I had no idea that Bob was soldiering away on the Milwaukee Brewers radio network… that he would be on my radio station. You could almost hear Bob’s heart breaking as the Brewers were eliminated from the playoffs last season on a 9th inning home run. It would turn out to be his last broadcast.
Here is something you may not know about Ueck. He was very close to his father. Gus Uecker was a double amputee, probably from undiagnosed diabetes. When his son’s baseball career brought him home to Milwaukee he’d gather his father’s wheelchair and take him to the bar… a few hours to spend with friends. Bob said during his years in the minor leagues, when ballplayers didn’t make any money, that his dad would send him a few extra bucks when he was on the road.
All of the great voices of sports broadcasting are eventually silenced: Vin Scully, Mel Allen, Jack Brickhouse, Ernie Harwell, Jack Buck. I imagine in the ballpark of the great beyond Bob Uecker and his father are settling into their seats. Batting practice and warm-ups are over, and the game is about to begin. And, as it always does during a baseball game, time will stand still from first pitch to final out.
So many of us will miss the time we spent with Bob Uecker.
Chris Conley
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