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By the way, something very much like this did happen to Howard Cossell once…
I remember when Cosell was announcing at Earl Weavers last game before retirement. The Orioles lost the game, but the fans stayed to give Earl a standing ovation. Cosell thought they cut away to commercial and started screaming at the director “This is one of the greatest moments in sports and you cut away to commercial???” It turned out the whole rant was broadcast live coast to coast. I remember seeing this, no F.O.A.F.
BTW, this is as good a thread to ask this as any: Has anyone else heard that if a baby is born in a Volkswagen, VW will pay to send the kid to college? This is a fairly well known story among VW fans, but it sounds suspiciously like UL material to me.
I have a video collection, and a couple of audio cassettes, and a few books, of Kermit Schafer’s “Blooper” collections. According to Schafer, it was the late “Uncle Don” Carney who said this on the air when he thought the mike was dead. Then again, I’ve listened to Schafer’s recorded Blooper collections a number of times, and it sounds like some of the voices–especially women’s voices–are heard more than once. Either Schafer was making the whole thing up, or some of the recordings were so poor they would not survive the duplication necessary in mass-production of recordings. Gary Owens once produced an album of dialog from the Marx Brothers’ movies in which an unknown voice was substituted for that of Kay Francis’ in the movie “The Cocoanuts”–possibly because of technical problems arising from the then-recent advent of sound in movies.
I have a few of Schafer’s albums, at least one of which contains the incident in question. He disticntly says that what is on the album is a recreation. Problem is, what he is recreating probably never happened, at least not involving Uncle Don.
“Age is mind over matter; if you don’t mind, it don’t matter.” -Leroy “Satchel” Paige
When I was taking a college English class in 1984, at El Camino College in Torrance, CA, the instructor spoke a blooper I was there to hear. He was stalking about student unrest in colleges during the Vietnam era. He sai, “In 1968, at Berkeley, at the time of the herpes revo–er, hippe revolution–” The class broke up laughing.
Now that I think of it, if push really were to come to shove we could probably put Schafer’s “bastards” item through a voice printer and compare it with any extant recordings accepted to be made by Uncle Don Carney. If it IS his, it is…if it isn’t, it isn’t. I would certainly like to use a voiced-printer to identify the voice in the Giants-Dodgers playoff game in 1951, when Bobby Thomson hit that famous homer (“The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pannant!”) I found out that Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell claimed HE made that recording, not Giants broadcaster Russ Hodges!