Ace in the Booth
ALMOST AN HOUR INTO A RAIN DELAY on what should have been a warm and pleasant May night, the infield at Guaranteed Rate Field is covered with a tarp, the White Sox and the Orioles players are in their clubhouses playing cards or video games, and the broadcasters up in the TV booth are telling stories.
Analyst Steve Stone has a lot of them, mostly about Harry Caray, with whom he broadcast Cubs games on TV for many years before coming over to the Sox to partner with the equally legendary play-by-play man Ken “Hawk” Harrelson. Eventually, the subject of on-air mistakes comes up: mistakes in pronunciation or fact or attitude that, depending on the direction of the slip, can become either a funny viral video or a humiliating, even careerending disaster. Jason Benetti, who replaced Harrelson in the booth three years ago, and who at the age of 38 has already achieved the pinnacle of his chosen profession, decides to share a story of failure.
He was broadcasting a football game at Auburn University two years ago, soon after the beloved Auburn radio announcer Rod Bramblett had died in a tragic car crash, as Jason well knew. But when the camera panned to a group of students who had painted R-O-D and a broken heart on their chests, Jason had a brain fart and turned to his broadcast partner — coincidentally and regrettably also named Rod — and said, “They’re spelling your name, Rod. They’ve got a heart for you!”
This error, which seems rather minor to me, Steve, and broadcast stage manager Joe Grube, was a terrible sin to Jason, one for which he apologized profusely as soon as he realized his mistake, both on the air and then eventually in person to Bramblett’s survivors. We all feel Jason is being too hard on himself — come on, man, it was a momentary slip — but he disagrees, more and more vehemently, until he says, “Fine, you want to hear about a mistake?” and tells us another story, one he has never shared with anyone in that room before.
“OK,” HE SAYS. “THIS IS YEARS ago — maybe 2011, I think — and I’m doing a double-header of high school basketball games in East Syracuse.” (Jason triple majored in broadcasting, economics, and psychology at Syracuse University and got his start in sports broadcasting there.) “It’s toward the end of the first game, and a kid gets off the bench wearing big plastic protective goggles, like lab safety goggles, and me and my partner — he was actually the mayor of East Syracuse — we joke about it, saying things like, ‘Hey, looks like that kid knows his way around a Bunsen burner.’
“Soon as that first game is over, my producer comes over to me and says, ‘There’s a parent here who wants to talk to you, but I told him I was going to talk to you myself about it. He’s the father of the kid with the goggles, and he wants you to know his son lost an eye in an accident months ago, and it’s taken him this long to get his confidence back to get on the court, and that’s why he’s wearing those goggles.’”
Something has changed in Jason while he’s telling the story. He’s no longer killing time during a rain delay. He is trying to get us to understand something: namely, why Jason Benetti is so hard on himself.
I ASSUMED JASON WAS DEEPLY TIRED OF BEING HELD UP AS AN INSPIRATIONAL STORY. HE IS — SORT OF. AND YET HIS DISABILITY IS A SIGNIFICANT PART OF WHAT DRIVES HIM.
“So I ask him where the father is, and he points him out, and I get up and I walk across the court to him, and he tells me he talked to his daughter at home who’s crying because I made fun of?’”
