The Joe Starkey Hero System

In 1980 I am thirteen and I want to be a voice. Not a player. A voice. I write a letter to Joe Starkey (b. 1941), the sports director at KGO in San Francisco, and I ask him how a boy becomes a sportscaster. A week later a postcard comes back. He has filled every white space on it, top to bottom, margin to margin, with tips (such as that I should learn as many sports as possible and I should go to games and record myself doing the call) and he apologizes to me for writing too much! A stranger’s child writes him and he answers with a card jammed full.
I keep thinking about that card. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives me the way to read it.
In The Denial of Death (1973) Becker says a man knows he will die and cannot bear the knowledge, so he builds a hero system, a set of roles and values that lets him feel he counts against the dark, that his life adds up to something the grave cannot cancel. Every people hands its young a formula for this kind of heroism. Self-esteem is the feeling that the formula works, that a man is a hero inside the cosmic story his people tell. Take the formula away and he comes apart.
Starkey grows up in Chicago and earns a business degree and a graduate degree at Loyola. He becomes a vice president at Union Bank in San Francisco, then changes course, recording games on his own tape recorder and applying for play-by-play work until Charles O. Finley (1918-1996), owner of the California Golden Seals, hires him to call hockey in 1972. On the bourgeois ladder he wins. Title, salary, the climb. The bank gives him security and nothing to set against death. So he calls games into a recorder, alone, in a living room, practicing a heroism the bank cannot give him, and then he walks off the safe ladder for the booth. A man trades one immortality project for another when the first stops making him feel like a hero.
Here is the broadcaster’s odd place in Becker’s scheme. Most hero systems let a man be the hero of his own story. The broadcaster builds his deathlessness out of other men’s bodies. The athlete’s body fails by thirty-five. The play lasts four seconds and then dies, the way every play dies. What survives is the call. Starkey takes the thing that dies the instant it happens and makes it deathless. He denies death by occupation.
In 1982 Cal returns a kickoff against Stanford with five laterals while the Stanford band pours onto the grass, sure the game has ended. “The band is out on the field,” Starkey says, and his voice breaks, and he says he has never seen anything like it in his life. The kickoff happened once and would have vanished like all kickoffs vanish. A man in a booth fixed it in sound. Now you cannot replay the play without replaying Starkey. He smuggles himself into immortality through the side door of witness. The athletes ran. He stayed.
The year of my postcard is also the year of Lake Placid. Starkey is there for KGO but not assigned to the United States and Soviet hockey game, so he goes as a fan, and as the thing builds he telephones the station, tells his bosses he will risk the job to call the third period live with no authorization, and they let him, and other West Coast stations pick up his feed. To stand present at the great moment and stay silent is, in his hero system, death. He will lose the job before he loses the call. That is a man who believes his own formula.
His trademark is “What a bonanza.” A bonanza is found wealth, the strike no man earned. Luck is holy to him because the witness does not make the moment. He stands present and names it. Presence at grace is the sacred thing, and so he must be there.
Watch the word call do its work in him. He hears a call and leaves the bank. He makes the call that fixes the play. He places the call to KGO that puts him on the air for the miracle. Vocation, broadcast, telephone. One word, one man.
The same word organizes other men and means something foreign in each.
The cloistered monk hears a call, and his summons him away from speech into silence, toward a God who will not be described. He earns his place by disappearing. Starkey’s call pulls him toward the microphone. The monk’s call pulls him away from it. One word, opposite directions.
The floor trader buys a call and means a contract, the right to a rising price, a wager laid on tomorrow. His heroism is to be right about the future and to carry the cost of being wrong. Starkey lays no bet. He describes the thing that already happened. The trader’s call faces forward into what might come. The broadcaster’s call faces the instant that just died.
The auctioneer calls, and he is Starkey’s near cousin, a mouth that turns a room toward a single point and sets a price by speed. But the auctioneer’s chant assigns worth in dollars and ends in a sale. Starkey’s call assigns worth in memory and ends in nothing a man can hold.
The obstetric resident is on call, and his call is the page at three in the morning that drags him to the room where a life begins. He stands at the threshold of a body entering the world, as Starkey stands at the play, but he works in blood and his witness saves a life instead of fixing a moment.
The duck hunter in the tule fog works a call cut from wood and reed, and his call is a lie that brings the living bird down to the gun. The voice summons to kill. Starkey’s voice summons nothing and kills nothing. It comes after the fact and keeps the thing alive.
The revival preacher gives the altar call, and his call summons the sinner down the aisle to be saved before the body fails. His immortality is literal, a soul that outlasts the grave, and the call is the door to it. Starkey promises no soul and no afterlife. His immortality is the cheap and sufficient human kind, a voice lodged in a stranger’s head.
Which returns me to the card. A man who doubts his hero system hoards it. A man who lives inside his hero system hands it down. Becker says a culture survives by handing the young its formula for heroism, and the handing down is the system reproducing itself. Starkey fills a postcard for a boy he will never meet because the boy is continuity, another mouth that might carry the voice forward. He had smuggled himself into permanence by then. He could afford to give the formula away free.
I still have the voice in my head. That was the gift. The play dies. The athlete ages. The card yellows. The call stays.