It is high, it is far, it is gone!
By now, probably all Yankees fans know that the team’s astoundingly forever announcer, John Sterling, died.
He called more games for the Yankees than anyone else — astonishingly, 5,420 regular season and 211 postseason games, and 5,060 of them were consecutive. He created names and noises and was entirely beloved. His death, at 87, left silence.
But not everyone knew two facts about Mr. Sterling that made him particularly relevant to us.
He lived in Edgewater, and he was Jewish. (He was born John Sloss, itself probably a name shortened from something else.)
Thurmon Sutcliffe of Teaneck was a fan of Mr. Sterling’s basically forever; he admired the announcer so much that when he watched the Yankees on TV, he would turn the sound off so he could hear Mr. Sterling on the radio.
Thurmon (and full disclosure — we can call him by his first name because we know him; he’s the husband of our indefatigable, irreplaceable sales rep Brenda Sutcliffe) had the surprising pleasure of running into Mr. Sterling many times in the IHop in Englewood. “But I never approached him,” he said.
But last summer, Thurmon, who had just had triple bypass surgery, and Brenda were going to his cardiologist at Englewood Health when they stopped at the IHop, and there was Mr. Sterling.
“Why don’t you say something to him?” Brenda asked her husband, and then she did it for him. “She said, ‘Mr. Sterling, my husband just had bypass surgery, and he’d love to talk to you.’” And he did.
They talked, and then Brenda asked if she could photograph the two of them together. “And he said, ‘You know what would make a better picture?’ and he took off his 1996 World Series Yankees championship ring and said, ‘Put it on.’”
It does make a very good picture.
“He had such an eloquent voice,” Thurmon said. “And such good diction and grammar.” In fact, Mr. Sterling was known for dressing formally, in a suit, with a tie, before broadcasting, even though his medium was radio, and his listeners could not see him. He knew what he was wearing.
“At the end of a game, he’d shake his body and vibrate his voice,” Thurmon said. “The Yankees winnnnnnnnn! They did that at the end of the game the other night. I hope that for the rest of the season, the Yankees put his picture up on the scoreboards when the Yankees get a hit, and play a clip of his saying ‘The Yankees winnnnnnnn!’ whenever the Yankees win.”