Rhune
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Take me out to the...
« on: Sep 4th, 2003, 10:31am » |
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Mike Ditka mangled it. Bea Arthur smoked it. Mel Gibson risked his life trying to do it. *NSync asked to do it. Oprah refuses to do it. On a 90° day Joe Frazier froze in the middle of it.
What is it?
It's Singin' the Stretch at Wrigley Field -- standing in the broadcast booth after the top of the seventh inning and leading more than 35,000 people in Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
Astronauts to Little League champs have done it, Miss America to George Will, Bozo to Barney and back again. Jeannie (Barbara Eden), Mary Ann (Dawn Wells) and the Beaver (Jerry Mathers) have all taken a whack at it. So did Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, whose ham-fisted rendition was introduced by Michael Buffer. Let's get rrrrrready to mumble!!!
Nearly all of them have one thing in common: They butchered the song.
One hockey coach (the Cubs can't remember which one) began this way: "Bring me out to the ball game." Ditka yelled the whole thing in 15 seconds, turning the lyrics into a kind of overcaffeinated halftime screech. He was so bad that when former Bears linebacker Dick Butkus tried it, he started by saying, "Well, I can't be worse than Ditka." And, then, sadly, he started singing. Blackhawks star Denis Savard got so flustered he resorted to French.
But they're all off the hook now, thanks to Ozzy Osbourne.
He tried Singin' the Stretch recently and sounded like a surgical patient in the last moments before the anesthesia takes hold. He was not just awful. He was 42 exits past awful. He had the words right in front of him, but, well.... "Mr. Osbourne has obviously lived a very full life," explains Joe Rios, the Cubs' marketing assistant who handles the celebs, "and the moment kind of consumed him."
According to the Chicago Tribune, here is exactly what Mr. Osbourne, er, emitted:
One. Two. Three. Let's go out to the ball game. Let's go out to the bluhhhhhn. Take me a ee-yan eeya [humming] the field. I don't care if I ahh-uhn ack. Da da da da duh da da da eam. Duh ee, da da da da dahhh. For a fee, two, three strikes you're out at the old ball game!
The original idea came up five years ago as a way to honor Caray, the late Cubs announcer who had made the seventh-inning sing-along at Wrigley famous. The team decided to play a tape of Caray singing the song, but the crowd just couldn't get into it. So Cubs marketing director John McDonough hit on this idea: Each game invite a different celebrity to come watch the Cubs and sing. For one day the celeb could eat, drink and be Harry.
The idea was a smash hit. If Wrigley is baseball's time capsule, Singin' the Stretch is its warbling soundtrack. Thus, Dick Clark has done it, as have KC and the Sunshine Band, and Eddie Vedder. Not to mention Vanna White and Cyndi Lauper, Chuck Berry and Kenny Rogers, Roger Ebert and Macho Man Randy Savage.
And not one of them was paid a dime or expenses to do it. Most of the time their performances were worth every penny. "Right now," says McDonough, "we're at abysmal. We're trying to move up to bad."
It's just that as the seventh inning approaches, the gravity of the situation starts hitting the poor celeb. "With two outs in the top of the seventh inning, some of the greatest athletes of our time turn white sitting next to me," McDonough says. They're handed the mike, the countdown begins, and suddenly 35,000 people are turning, as McDonough says, "to watch you do something you can't do."
Frazier froze so badly his security guard had to take over. KC gagged. "My heart was beating so fast," he admitted. NYPD Blue tough guy Dennis Franz melted into a puddle. "The moral of the story," says McDonough, "is that Harry wasn't as bad as we thought."
Some, though, chew up the ivy. Gibson got so into it, he was hanging out of the booth with only his legs braced against the windowsill to keep him from falling. ESPN's Chris Berman sang, "I don't care if I never go back-back-back!" Former Bears defensive tackle Steve McMichael used the forum to berate the home plate ump for a controversial call the inning before. The umps wanted him ejected. My God, where were they halfway through Ozzy?
The Ozzy thing has some people's boxers in a bunch. The Tribune called for an end to the use of celebrities, basically saying it was embarrassingly painful. Uh, hello? We're talking about Cubs fans here! Highest pain threshold in the majors, 95 years in a row!
Anyway, next time you're in Chicago, take the day off and go watch the carnage at Wrigley. You won't care if you ever ahh-uhn ack.
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