The enduring pain of Dick Vitale |

He’ll never forget the pain he felt standing on that pitcher’s mound.

He was a good pitcher, Richie Vitale was. A hard-throwing righty, and he was mowing ’em down that day. For a 12-year-old Jersey boy growing up in a big, sports-crazed Italian family, this was as good as it got. Richie was talented in athletics, popular in school and loved at home. He had everything going for him except one thing: He was blind in his left eye.

He was just a toddler when he stuck a pencil in that eye, leading to an infection that cost him his vision. The problem went deeper than a physical disability. Richie’s left eye tended to drift toward the outside of his face. When he spoke, people couldn’t tell where his gaze was fixed. He was teased sometimes at school, but it never really got to him until that day on the mound. That’s because the cracks didn’t come from other kids, but rather some dads in the stands. “He don’t know where he’s throwing!” they shouted. “Hey kid, can you even see the plate?”

The words cut deep. When he got home, he ran to his room, stared in the mirror and bawled. It was up to his mother, Mae, to buck him up. “Don’t let them get to you,” she told him. “You got spirit, you got talent, you got drive, you’re gonna be somebody. This is America, Richie. You can be whatever you want.”

The incident happened almost 70 years ago, but the pain endures. Dick Vitale recounts it while sitting in the den of his home in Bradenton, Fla. The 12,000-square-foot mansion has an elevator, a pool and a plush, state-of-the-art movie theater, the byproduct of Vitale’s unprecedented 40-year career broadcasting college basketball games at ESPN. He is wealthy and successful beyond his wildest dreams — and his dreams were always pretty wild — but when he describes how he felt on that pitcher’s mound he dissolves into tears. Vitale tries to compose himself, finally taking a sip of water and slamming the bottle on a desk. “Now you’re getting me, man,” he says in a hoarse whisper. “You’re getting me.”

To viewers who only see him as a two-dimensional cartoon character, the blubbering might seem incongruous. To his family, friends and colleagues, however, this is the Dick Vitale they know. “He feels things on a more primal level than most people do,” says Dan Shulman, who has worked with Vitale on ESPN broadcasts for more than 20 years. “Whether it’s joy or heartache, he just feels things incredibly deeply. Most of us aren’t wired that way, but that’s what makes him who he is.”

So no, it doesn’t take much to reopen this particular wound. One night during his early years at ESPN, Vitale was walking out of the network’s studios in Bristol, Conn., when he asked a receptionist if there were any messages. She told him a viewer had called repeatedly to complain about his crooked eye. “It was like a knife went through me,” he says. He tried to quit, but his bosses talked him out of it.

In 1984, a surgeon told Vitale he could straighten his left eye. Problem was, the procedure also involved his right eye. The surgeon was confident nothing would go wrong, but he still asked Vitale to sign a liability waiver. Vitale’s wife, Lorraine, was vehemently against it, and Vitale initially declined. A couple of weeks later, he decided it was worth the risk. The surgery was successful.

Three years later, Vitale, Lorraine and their two daughters went to dinner to celebrate his new contract with ESPN. On the way home, they were involved in a terrible crash. Vitale’s head hit the windshield, fracturing the bone below his right eye. He spent several harrowing days wearing a patch in a hospital bed, unsure whether he would be able to see again. Someone took a picture of him lying in that bed; a ghastly black bruise covers the right side of his face. The eye recovered, but Vitale still keeps that picture tucked in his wallet.

You wouldn’t know by looking at Vitale today that he can’t see out of the eye, but it’s not something he is trying to hide. Quite the contrary: He broadcasts it to the world. He even uses it as comedic foil while calling games. Awwww, c’moooon ref, that’s a fooouuuuul! I got one eye and I can see thaaaaaat!

He’s 80 now, and love him or hate him, there has never been a sportscaster who can equal Vitale’s longevity and impact on a sport. For all his awesome-baby clowning, the story of his remarkable life centers on his enduring pain. The ride has been propelled by one unhappy accident after another, beginning with that wayward pencil. If Vitale hadn’t stuck that thing in his eye, if he didn’t get heckled by those dads, if he didn’t heed his mother’s encouraging words, who knows how things might have turned out? “It made him who he is,” Lorraine says. “It was really a gift from God.”

He’ll never forget the pain he felt when he got fired.

The date is stuck in his mind: Nov. 8, 1979. A limousine carrying Bill Davidson, the owner of the Detroit Pistons, pulled up to Vitale’s house. Davidson walked inside, sat down and told Vitale sadly, “We made a coaching change today.” Vitale was so blindsided he didn’t understand at first what that meant.

It wasn’t the losing that caused Davidson to act, but rather the way those losses unraveled his coach. Vitale was constitutionally incapable of hiding his pain. He wept at postgame press conferences and repeatedly blamed himself for the team’s record, which was 30-52 in his only full season and 4-8 the day he was let go. Now he was 40 years old, married with two young daughters and out of a job. It was a frightening time.

His ascent had happened so quickly, he thought it would never abate. Vitale had always been the pride and joy of that big Italian family back east. Mae had eight brothers and sisters. His father, John, had seven. The family shared a driveway with his grandmother, and most of his aunts and uncles lived within a few miles of their home in Elmwood Park, N.J. Relatives were constantly traipsing in and out of the house, especially on Sundays, when Mae would cook from morning until night. Many of the dinner conversations turned to sports. The TV was usually tuned to a game, and the newspapers strewn around the house were opened to the sports pages.

Vitale’s parents were children of Italian immigrants. They got a grade school education, and then they went to work. John pressed coats in a clothing factory and worked nights as a mall security guard. Mae worked as a seamstress and was a devout Catholic who never missed daily Mass, even after she suffered a stroke in her 60s that hampered her ability to walk. When people would ask why she kept dragging that bad leg a mile and a half each way to church every day, Mae would reply, “People need me to pray for them.”

Many people who grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression describe being raised by parents who rarely showed affection or expressed their feelings. But in the Vitale clan, the adults hugged and kissed all the time, laughing when things were funny and crying when they felt sad. They brandished an old-world openness and bequeathed it to the next generation. “These were all uneducated people,” Vitale says. “All blue-collar. All filled with love and passion for their families, work ethic, putting food on the table. My parents barely got through elementary school, but they had a doctorate in love. That meant so much to me.” Over time they persuaded him that if he didn’t have a winsome face, he could win people over with his personality. Vitale wore thick glasses throughout high school, but he had a lot of friends and his share of girlfriends. He was described in his senior yearbook as “Everybody’s Buddy.”

Vitale earned a degree in business administration from Seton Hall and then married his high school sweetheart. After working briefly at an accounting job that he hated, he took a position teaching and coaching at Mark Twain Elementary School in Garfield, and a year later he became the varsity basketball coach at his alma mater, East Rutherford High School. One of his colleagues started calling him Dick, and the name stuck. Vitale’s aspiration was to be a college basketball coach, but the long hours he put in to chase it, combined with the night classes he took toward his master’s in education, exacted a toll on his marriage. He got divorced in 1966. Four years later, Vitale met Lorraine McGrath while he was hanging with his friends at a dinner and dancing spot called The Blue Swan Inn. They were married in 1971.

Vitale’s coaching dreams materialized faster than he could have imagined. He led East Rutherford to two state championships, which got him hired as an assistant at Rutgers. In 1973, he got his first head coaching job at the University of Detroit, leading the Titans to a 53-26 record in his first three seasons. In Year 4, he engineered a stunning breakthrough, coaching the team through a 21-game win streak and a spot in the Sweet 16. And yet, despite all that winning, Vitale could not escape that boy in the mirror. Even when he was coaching in high school, the games tore at his insides so acutely he kept a carton of milk on the bench to soothe his stomach. On multiple occasions, he was hospitalized for bleeding ulcers. His health was so bad during that historic run at Detroit that he stepped away when the season ended and became the school’s athletic director.

When the Pistons offered their head coaching position a year later, Vitale should have turned them down, but he couldn’t resist. He also should have known better than to think he could win games with inferior talent, but the losses destroyed him anyway. He would come home after games, ignore Lorraine and the couple’s two young daughters and soak in the bathtub for hours.

Alas, there was no relief on the day Davidson’s limousine rolled up. There was only despair. The firing validated all of Vitale’s worst insecurities. He was sure his career was over. Over the next few weeks, he spent long hours lying in bed, depressed and following the Luke and Laura saga on “General Hospital.”

He was rescued by a phone call from a television executive named Scotty Connal, who had produced the telecast for Detroit’s Sweet 16 game against Michigan two years before. The announcers for that game were Curt Gowdy and John Wooden, and Connal remembered how Vitale had introduced them to his players with a pep talk about greatness. Connal was calling to invite Vitale to be the color commentator for a start-up cable network called ESPN. “I thought it was a disease,” Vitale says. “I had zero interest. I knew nothing about TV. I wanted to get back to where I belonged, college coaching.”

Lorraine, however, was tired of seeing her husband mope around the house. She all but kicked him out. So it was that on Dec. 5, 1979, ESPN went on the airwaves with its first college basketball game, DePaul versus Wisconsin, with Dick Vitale on the call.

Vitale calls a game in 1988. He quickly developed a rabid following, and found himself doing the biggest games on ESPN. (Focus on Sport / Getty Images)

As he went on to become one of the most successful broadcasters in the history of sports television, many people forgot that Vitale was ever a coach, much less that he had been fired from his last job. That is, they would have forgotten if Vitale didn’t go out of his way to remind them all the time. He has told the limousine story so many times that Lorraine can recite it by rote. For years he introduced himself to strangers as a “fired NBA coach.” To this day, when Vitale is calling a game and the final buzzer sounds, he locks his one good eye on the losing coach as he shakes hands with his counterpart and walks forlornly off the floor. “I know that feeling, man,” he says. “It’s the most empty feeling in the world.”

It was another unhappy accident that made all the difference. If Davidson’s limo hadn’t pulled up, if he hadn’t received that call from Connal, if Lorraine hadn’t pushed him to do that first game, who knows how things might have turned out? “It was the best thing that could have ever happened,” Vitale says. “It saved my life.”

He’ll never forget the pain he felt as they wheeled him into the operating room.

It was December 2007. Vitale was 68 years old and in his 28th year with ESPN. Over the previous 18 months, he had felt his voice deteriorating. Even worse, he couldn’t figure out why. Multiple doctors attributed it to all those years of shouting into microphones, but nobody could help him get better. Vitale wore out his friends, producers and broadcast partners by constantly asking, “How do I sound?” They tried to tell him he was fine, but he knew he wasn’t. He wasn’t just a broadcaster but also a highly successful (and well-paid) motivational speaker. If he lost his voice, he would lose everything.

Finally, Vitale visited a surgeon in Boston who discovered the cause: He had lesions on his vocal chords. The only way for the doctor to know whether they were cancerous would be through surgery. It was the middle of basketball season, but Vitale couldn’t wait. When he was wheeled into the operating room, he didn’t know if he was on the verge of losing his career or his life, and possibly both.

His ride as a broadcaster had been so unexpected he never quite believed it was real. He started out biding his time at $300 a game and plotting his return to coaching. The more he worked in television, however, the more he felt it suited him. If nothing else, he didn’t have to experience the pain of losing. Vitale was amazed when he attended the 1983 Final Four in Albuquerque, N.M., and was besieged by autograph seekers. When Connal saw how the public reacted, he told Vitale, “You have something special that I can’t teach. You connect.”

His announcing style was unconventional, to say the least. Vitale violated the cardinal rule of sportscasting, which holds that viewers should turn off the game not quite remembering who called it. That just wasn’t Vitale’s way. He was loud and colorful, and he talked nonstop. ESPN took a lot of flak, but it also saw the upside in having someone who was so distinct. Basketball is the city game, and Vitale brought with him phrases he had learned from city kids in the locker room. He was no soap opera star, to be sure, but he was unabashedly goofy and self-deprecating. And he worked his butt off. He’d call coaches beforehand, chat up players during shootarounds, read reams of articles and pore through statistics, bringing his work to the announcers’ table, which Shulman calls “an ungodly mess.”

Much of ESPN’s growth in its early years was built on college basketball. As the network got bigger, so too did Vitale’s profile. Oftentimes, ESPN executives would switch him onto a big game, which meant shelving a previously assigned announcer. Behind the scenes at ESPN, this was known as getting “Dicked,” but you rarely heard sniping from Vitale’s colleagues, who recognized a pure heart when they saw one. Because everyone knew Vitale worked the biggest assignments, his very presence made the game feel like an important event. He entered arenas trailed by kids, fans and cameras, a merry mix of P.T. Barnum and the Pied Piper. He invited students to pass him around the crowd, he danced with cheerleaders, he fired up jump shots, he signed autographs, he posed for pictures … and then he sat down to call the game.

It was not hard to see those antics as insecurity writ large. Vitale evinced an unsettling neediness that fairly screamed, Hey everyone! Look at me! After a game, he called friends, colleagues, agents and executives to ask how he had done. He wasn’t looking for constructive feedback. He was looking for affirmation.

All of this made Vitale subject to withering criticism from writers. He felt every unkind word. If someone published a negative article, he would call the person and then send boxes of books and gear in hopes of changing his mind. Vitale developed a habit of working the press room and schmoozing with the beat writers, then mentioning them on air during the broadcasts. In his mind, he was being a mensch, but there was an obvious calculation at play. If he made nice with the guys and gals on press row, perhaps they would be less inclined to take shots at him.

It was quite the paradox. Vitale was highly sensitive to criticism, yet he behaved in a way that all but begged for it. Of all the verbal grenades lobbed his way, the one that missed the mark the most was the claim that he was a phony. If anything, he’s authentic to a fault. “A lot of people think it’s schtick, but I don’t think he could have done it any other way,” Lorraine says. “That’s just who he is. Everything he’s ever done has been bigger than life.”

Vitale has made his very presence at a game a big deal, including his eagerness to mix it up with the student sections. (Reinhold Matay / USA Today Sports)

Most admirably, he made Lorraine and the girls feel as if they came first. In 1986, he moved the family to Florida so his daughters could pursue competitive tennis careers at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. During basketball season, he made the effort to get home as much as he could, even if it was only for 24 hours. When his daughters had a big test, he knew to ask them about it. When they had a big tennis match, he knew more about their opponent than they did. “He’s always been the person who wants to elevate you when you’re down. He likes being that cheerleader,” his daughter Terri says. “My dad was on the road quite a bit, but he was still so present. Conversely, I had friends whose parents were around a lot and didn’t know half of what was going on.”

It was truly a dream life, which is why he panicked so badly when his voice started to fade.

The possibility it might be cancer shook him to his core. As he was getting ready to go into surgery, Vitale received two unexpected visitors — John Saunders, his broadcast partner for many years at ESPN, and Sandy Montag, his longtime agent. Vitale told Saunders he would look his way when he came out of surgery. If it was good news, Vitale wanted Saunders to give him a thumbs up. If it was bad, he shouldn’t say anything. The last thing Vitale did was tape a card of St. Jude, the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes, to the inside of his hospital gown.

Five hours later, Vitale, groggy and sore, saw Saunders as he was coming out of surgery. Saunders gave the thumbs up. The lesions were only pre-cancerous, and now they had been removed. Vitale was understandably relieved, but he faced a rough recovery. For six weeks, he didn’t speak a word, scrawling his thoughts on a grease board when he wanted to communicate something. Then he returned to his surgeon’s office in Boston. When the doctor asked him to speak, Vitale was afraid. He started to cry. The doctor encouraged him to count slowly to 10. Vitale did.

On Feb. 6, 2008, he returned to the sideline for a Duke-North Carolina game. He was 69 years old and felt reborn. It wasn’t just the chance to announce games again that excited him. It was the chance to lend his voice to a higher calling.

He’ll never forget the pain he felt watching that little girl die.

Her name was Payton Wright. She lived in Vitale’s community of Lakewood Ranch with her parents and two older sisters. One day when she was 4, Payton complained of aches in her knees. Her parents took her to multiple doctors who figured she was just experiencing growth spurts. When they were getting her checked for juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a doctor pressed on Payton’s back. She wailed in agony. A CAT scan revealed a large tumor on her spine. When the doctor delivered the news, her father, Patrick, dropped to his knees in the emergency room.

The community rallied around the little girl. Word reached Vitale, who had just held an event at his house for the Jimmy V Foundation, the charity named for Jim Valvano, Vitale’s close friend. Vitale contacted the Wrights and held a fundraiser at his house that brought in more than $100,000 to help with medical expenses. A couple of days after the event, Payton became paralyzed from the waist down. She was transported to Duke University hospital.

Vitale was with his family in the Bahamas over Thanksgiving when Patrick called to report that the doctors said he could take Payton to visit a butterfly museum. When Vitale hung up the phone, he broke down in tears. “I said to my wife, how unfair is life?” he says. “We’re sitting here on a beach chair watching our grandkids and they’re having a ball. He’s excited because his daughter’s getting out of bed. She’s leaving the hospital for a couple hours. He’s taking her to breakfast. Are you kidding me?”

Vitale tracked Payton’s fight closely. When she returned to Florida, she would come over to his house with her parents to visit. If they were in the same restaurant, Vitale would stand and make a speech about her. Payton died on May 29, 2007, barely three weeks past her fifth birthday. At her funeral, Vitale promised her parents he would hold another event and raise $1 million for pediatric cancer.

He has held on to that promise, dedicating his life to this cause. He raised the money he said he would, and he kept going. In the 14 years since, the annual Dick Vitale Gala has generated more than $30 million. “I’m obsessed with it because I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” he says. “I’ve seen the emotion. I’ve felt the hugs, man. So I try to use my celebrity, because at no time in my life did I think I’d be in position to do the things I can. I love doing it, and I will do it til my last breath.”

All of the painful experiences in Vitale’s life have given him a deep sense of empathy. He doesn’t just donate his time and money, which would be generous enough. He gets to know the families. He takes on their pain. He sits with the parents as they watch their child suffer, and then he hugs them at the funeral. A few families have asked him to speak at their children’s memorials. Vitale invites a handful of kids and families to his gala each year, rattling off details of their struggles without looking at a single note.

He has visited more hospitals than he can count. Most of the time the kids don’t even know who he is. He struts in and out of the rooms, bringing balloons and books, signing autographs, posing for pictures, cracking corny jokes. Then he gets into the car and cries his eyes out. “I worry about the emotional toll,” Terri says. “He becomes genuinely attached to these kids and their families. Loss is hard for anybody, and he experiences loss in a really hard and personal way.”

When Vitale is making speeches and doing his many guest spots on radio shows, he tells Payton’s story as if it happened yesterday, jabbing his finger into the air and spitting out familiar lines. For everyone who’s listening, I pray that you will never be one of the 40 to 50 people each day who hear the four words no parent wants to hear: Your child has cancer. He is still a Pied Piper when he walks through arenas, but now he hands out hundreds of flyers promoting his gala. He devotes his website to the cause and talks about it during games. Lorraine has turned their home into an activity hub devoted to answering requests for autographed merchandise, all in hopes of squeezing out a few more bucks. Along the way, Vitale has become a one-man referral service, taking calls from friends and strangers whose loved ones have gotten that awful diagnosis and want his advice on the best places to get treatment.

It is noble work, but Vitale gets a lot out of it too. At a time when most people his age are easing into the winter of their lives, his own has been infused with enormous purpose. That’s why he spends an hour each morning pumping iron on the Nautilus machines on the top floor of his house, even though he hates working out. It’s also why he’s not nearly as bothered by criticism as he used to be, even though it has never been easier to find thanks to his active Twitter account. “They don’t take shots at nobodies. Reggie Jackson said that,” Vitale says. “I can’t allow some guy I don’t know who’s hiding behind his computer get the best of me when I’m fighting for kids who are battling cancer. I learned that in life you can’t please everyone. Took me a while.”

As Vitale speaks, he is sitting on the patio of his favorite dining spot, Another Broken Egg Cafe, on a sun-dappled Florida morning. He says he enjoys the lifestyle here because the locals leave him alone, but the truth is he doesn’t want to be left alone. His house has more kitchens than some residences have bedrooms, but he and Lorraine go out for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. “If you look in my refrigerator, you’ll see there’s ketchup, milk, mustard,” Lorraine says. “It looks like a bachelor’s refrigerator.” Vitale shows up at Another Broken Egg nearly every morning and sits for a while, giving away autographed books and memorabilia and then posing for pictures that he publishes on his social media channels. Detractors see these posts as an all-too-familiar plea for attention, but Vitale uses social media adeptly to proselytize about his cause and his gala.

The Vitales have devoted themselves to raising money to fight pediatric cancer. (Leon Bennett / Getty Images)

There really is no difference between this Vitale and the one you see — and hear — on television. Whether he’s giving a visitor a tour of his magnificent house, watching his grandsons’ tennis practice, walking into his daughter’s home to say hello to another grandson or just driving around, Vitale is in constant motion and perpetual chatter. Any hint of a quiet moment must be filled with funny stories, heartfelt thoughts, bemusing digressions. The man views human interaction as a contact sport. He’s relentlessly shaking hands, slapping backs, grabbing biceps, rubbing shoulders and laying his fingers on his listener’s forearm to underscore his point. His energy would be impressive for a man of any age, let alone someone who will turn 81 in early June.

His parents are long gone, but he remains extremely close with his brother, John, and his sister, Terry. When his daughters got married and started families, Vitale bought them properties in his development. In 2005, he started paying for access to private planes, which has drastically cut the number of nights he sleeps in a hotel room. He sees his five grandchildren almost every day when he is in town. “We always joke that I live a mile from my parents and my sister, and my dad thinks we’re too far away,” Terri says.

He still can’t believe how good he has it. Vitale has been on TV longer than some of his producers have been alive, but you never hear about him big-timing anyone. Nor does he resort to calling players by their jersey numbers or using vague expressions like “the big kid.” He knows their names, their stats and their stories, and he’s not afraid to call people out when they screw up. You might not like the way he announces a game, but give Richie Vitale this much: The kid hasn’t lost his fastball. “I probably work harder now on preparation than I ever did,” he says. “Because as you get older, if I make a mistake on a player’s name, they’ll say, ‘He’s senile, he’s old, he’s washed up.’ A young guy makes a mistake, he made a mistake. I’ve seen it happen to other guys, and I swore I ain’t goin’ out like that.”

Vitale says one of his biggest regrets is that he was never one for consuming books, which suggests the possibility he has some form of Attention Deficit Disorder. All of the signs are there: the impatience, the inability to sit still or let a quiet moment settle, the meandering speech patterns, the disinclination toward reading. When Vitale moved to Florida, he tried to get into golf, but the game moved too slowly for him so he quit. He apparently has never considered the possibility he has ADD, and he playfully rolls his eyes at the suggestion. “Tell you what, whatever I have, some people better get it,” he says. “My life has exceeded my dreams. It really has. I know that day’s coming when I have to pick up the phone and tell my bosses, ‘Party’s over, man.’ They’ve told me I got a contract for life, but I’m 80 years old. I don’t feel it, but you can’t hide the number. When that day comes, it’s going to tear my heart apart because it’s been an incredible journey.”

In the years since Payton Wright died, Vitale has remained close with her family, helping them grow the foundation they started in her name. He has taken Patrick to dozens of games. One day a few months ago, they were flying home on a private plane Vitale had rented. As Patrick watched Vitale snoozing in his seat, he spoke to Lorraine about his concerns over what will happen when her husband is no longer able to fight this fight. “Who’s going to carry his torch?” Patrick says. “I don’t know anyone who has his passion and commitment and his audience, who has the ability to bring a thousand people to his gala every year. He does it so selflessly. That’s why I get so mad when I hear someone take shots at him. I’m like, you don’t even know him. You have no idea what this man does every day to battle and fight and claw for kids battling cancer. I’ve told him, ‘You can just ride into the sunset. Enjoy your golden years.’ He told me, ‘Never. I’ll never stop.’ ”

The work continues. The pain endures. Vitale may feel as if his life has been one big accident, but when you look back on it, it’s almost like the whole thing was preordained. Not that he spends much time looking back. “I have a very simple philosophy. I want to be better today than I was yesterday,” he says. “I tell people all the time, at the end of the day, can you look in the mirror and say, whatever you did, whether it’s music or dance or sports or whatever, that you got a little bit better? If you could do that every day of your life, be a little better each and every day? My God, you’re heading for an unbelievable story.”

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The enduring pain of Dick Vitale

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