9101010787 DETROIT FREE PRESS 910107 Monday, January 07, 1991 METRO EDITION

SPT

1B Photo : Tigers president Bo Schembechler: "Everyone thinks I'm indestructible. Everyone figures I'm a big guy, I can take it. Let them beat on me for a while. . . . Hey. I'm bothered by this stuff. Come on. Who wouldn't be?" Veteran Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell (left) and his partner, Paul Carey, will bow out after the 1991 season. MITCH ALBOM SEE ALSO METRO FINAL EDITION, Page 1B Copyright (c) 1991, Detroit Free Press DEFUSING EMOTIONAL TIME BOMB EVERYONE'S TO BLAME, NO ONE LOOKS CLEAN AS FACTS OF FIRING COME OUT Last week a package came to Bo Schembechler's house. His wife, Millie, began to open it. Lifting a flap, she saw a wire. She froze. She thought about the mountain of hate mail they had received since Ernie Harwell was fired. She thought about the phone calls and even death threats. She stopped opening the box. "I hate to admit it," she said Sunday, "but I actually thought it might be a bomb." Wait a minute. Hasn't this gone a little too far? It's one thing to be outraged at the dismissal of Harwell, a beloved Tigers announcer for 31 years. It's another thing to fear for your life. There has been an enormous amount of misinformation about this story, misinformation that has spread like cancer. Some of the fault lies with Harwell and Schembechler, two decent men caught in uncomfortable positions. Much of it lies with the media -- this newspaper included -- which, admittedly, saw one of its own bleeding and rushed to his defense. And an enormous amount of fault lies with one man, the president of WJR radio, Jim Long, a timid executive who pushed the idea of ousting Harwell, without a nickel of severance pay, without a single year to say good-bye -- and then, when the news broke, decided to crawl into a hole and let someone else take the bullets. Enough. It's time to clear this up -- and, just as importantly, explain how it got so muddled in the first place. Schembechler is not some lone assassin, as earlier reports made him out to be. And Harwell is not some ungrateful wretch who should worry about his relationship with Sparky Anderson, as a Detroit News account suggested over the weekend. This is an emotional issue. All sides feel strongly. And there is no right or wrong; that's the kicker. You may feel that any man who gives us 31 years of baseball magic should have the right to call his own farewell party, or you may feel that any man who gets to hold his job for 31 years should be grateful for the chance, and retire quietly. No one can dissuade you. There is no right or wrong. But there are the facts. I hardly know Ernie Harwell," Bo Schembechler said Sunday, sitting in his living room at his home in Ann Arbor. "I've listened to him for years, but I never really knew him. And I had no idea the reaction would be like this. I mean, no idea. . . . " We begin with Schembechler because, more than anyone, he got the slime dumped on him when the story broke. This was largely because he was available to be interviewed. Had he crawled into a hole, like Long, critics would have lacked a visible target. Blame would have been spread. Instead, Schembechler stood up, he's used to that, and instantly became the magnet for abuse. The questions he was asked could be summed up simply: 1) Why this terrible decision? 2) Are you the jerk to blame? Now. You have to know Schembechler. If you swing at him, he swings back, sometimes irrationally. So instead of telling people the whole truth -- which was that Long and WJR had decided that Harwell was going downhill as an announcer, that they wanted to get rid of him this year, not next year, that Schembechler had fought for an extra season for Harwell and had gotten it -- instead of saying that, he got defensive. He said, "Yes, I made the decision." Here you have a guy, an ex- football coach, who is used to taking the bullet for his team, he figured he was defending the Tigers, it was part of the job. He also figured that maybe, somewhere across town, Long was answering the same questions. Only he wasn't. Long disappeared. He wouldn't talk to anyone. And the next thing you knew, there were bumper stickers saying "BO-ZO." "The truth is, I wanted to talk with Ernie before this contract stuff started," said Schembechler. "I asked him to meet with me, alone, just for an informal conversation. He said he didn't want to do that without his agent. If I'd had a chance to talk with him privately, and if he had told me of his situation, if he had financial problems or whatever, well, hey, I think you know me well enough, I'd have tried to do something. . . . "Instead, I had a meeting with him and his agent, just us three, and the first thing, his agent begins to talk about how Ernie hasn't been appreciated for all these years, and something should be done about it. It was confrontational from the start. "Now, at that meeting, I told Ernie we at least wanted him for one more year -- but the truth of the matter is, I hadn't even told Long about that. Long and WJR didn't want him back at all. They felt his skills were diminishing. And I'll be honest, I listened to him for much of last year, and I felt, who knows? Maybe they were right. I'm not a radio expert. "But I did know this: I knew we had to give him at least another year at the highest pay possible, that it wasn't right to just let him go. So I committed another year to him without WJR even knowing about it. I figured I would talk them into it." He obviously did. Could he have talked them into more? Two years? Three years? This is a gray area. Schembechler said if he banged his fist and demanded three years for Ernie, he might not have gotten it anyhow. Remember, Bo is new to the Tigers job. And WJR does give his team millions of dollars in broadcast rights. How much would he be willing to push? This much is certain. Once the news broke -- via a press conference called by Harwell -- doing Ernie any favors was the last thing on Schembechler's mind. He felt betrayed. He resented Ernie's media blitz, which seemed to him to be "calculated." He thought that if a man signs a contract, as Harwell did, then he should stick by it and not complain. "Otherwise, why sign it?" said Schembechler. "Don't sign it, then you can criticize all you want." The former coach, who has always honored his contracts, saw this as disloyal. Right or wrong, he became, in two words, ticked off. And you know what Bo can be like when he's ticked off. The night this all happened, I called him at home and asked him to explain what was really going on. I told him the next day's newspapers would not be kind. Knowing Bo the way I do, I found it hard to believe that he was the only one to blame here. "Tell me the truth," I said. And maybe, under calmer circumstances, he would have. Instead, angry as he was, he defended the team's actions. I wrote my story, along with everyone else in this town, and the avalanche began. And the next morning, Jim Long picked up the papers, and listened to the TV, and saw Bo being crucified. And he stayed in his hole. The hatred that followed has been unmatched in Schembechler's time in Michigan. "Everyone thinks I'm indestructible," said Schembechler, who was admittedly upset that Long did not come forth. "Everyone figures I'm a big guy, I can take it. Let them beat on me for a while. . . . "Hey. I'm bothered by this stuff. Come on. Who wouldn't be? People think I'm the worst guy on earth. What bothers me is that people knew me better than this, and they still said it. . . . " I spoke with Jim Long Sunday night. He confessed to guilt. He said he felt bad that Schembechler had to take all the heat himself. "That wasn't my intention," he said. "I wasn't at the initial press conference, and I felt saying anything after it would have been inappropriate." Long admitted that not renewing Harwell's contract was "my call." He said, "Ernie's broadcasts were not what they used to be. We wanted to get someone new in there." He admitted that Schembechler did indeed convince him to offer Harwell one more year. He also said he had no idea the reaction would be this strong. I asked whether Long realized the fan value of Harwell, whose voice has been indistinguishable from the Tigers since the late '60s when they won the World Series and people fell in love with him. Isn't this worth whatever shortcomings he might have sensed in Harwell's broadcasts? "Absolutely, in retrospect," he said. In retrospect. Sure. Everyone is smart in retrospect. While I admire Long for finally coming to the forefront and speaking, I will say here that it is too little, too late. It didn't help anyone. Like saying things in retrospect. Long's actions -- or lack of them -- were nothing short of cowardly. First he was willing to snip Harwell out of the Tigers after 31 years of service. Next, when the dirt started flying, he let Schembechler dangle in the wind. In retrospect, Jim Long looks pretty bad. In retrospect, he looks worse than anyone in this story. The crazy thing is, this all could have been avoided. And it wouldn't have meant letting Ernie broadcast until the day he died. According to Gary Spicer, Harwell's agent, Ernie and he were willing to accept the suggestion by the Tigers and WJR that he give it up after this year. They were willing to do it jointly, a sort of "let's hold hands" thing, if the Tigers and WJR would give on one point: a severance package. It has been widely reported that Harwell received little pension for his years of service in Detroit. He did collect a small pension when he was 65 -- "He was told to cash it in; he didn't elect to as the Detroit News reported," said Spicer. Spicer said the amount came to roughly $36,000 after taxes for the 31 years Harwell put in. Obviously, with a wife and family to support, Harwell needed more than that for his future. Spicer suggested a severance package of "something around one year's salary. If we had gotten that, I honestly think everyone would have been happy. Ernie would have agreed to stepping aside, he would have welcomed whoever they'd chosen to replace him with open arms. This whole thing could have been avoided. We didn't think one year would have been asking so much, for all the time he'd put in." The answer: no. Now. It is not my place to decide what is and isn't within some company's budget. After all, I am not the treasurer. I am not a corporate expert. I tend to try to use common sense. Common sense tells me that if a guy works for you for 31 years, and he doesn't complain, and he does a decent job, and some years, you haven't given him a raise at all, sometimes for six or seven years in a row -- then a one-year severance package isn't all that expensive, especially considering the public relations disaster that could have been averted. "Maybe it would have been a good thing to do," Long admitted. "Maybe I could even check with (Cap Cities, which owns WJR) to see if it would be possible. I'm not saying it would be, but I could check." Why not do this earlier? But then, why not do a lot of things earlier? The mistakes in this story seem largely to do with emotion: Everyone reacted on emotion. The fans' initial reaction was to explode in outrage -- how dare they fire the man who, in many minds, was the Tigers. The media's initial reaction was to explode in outrage -- they immediately went looking for a scapegoat. Schembechler's initial reaction was to explode in outrage -- how dare someone turn on him like that, how dare the media, which had known him all these years, think he was an unfeeling, insensitive jerk? Long's initial reaction was to cower in fear -- which is actually understandable, considering the volcano he'd just helped to erupt. But outrage doesn't last. Facts do. And the facts suggest that this was not a case of Bo Schembechler firing a gun at a blindfolded Ernie Harwell. It was much more complicated than that. My opinion? The Tigers and WJR made a big mistake by letting Harwell go after next year, both from a public relations point of view and a broadcast point of view. They should have been smarter. So should many of us. As for Ernie? I called him at home Sunday night as well. "I'm really sorry this has all turned out the way it has," he said. "I never said I was unhappy here. I never meant for Bo to take the abuse he has. And if he stuck up for me the way he explained -- which I didn't know -- then I owe him some thanks. I wasn't told any of this." Sadly, neither were most of us. ERNIE HARWELL; DTIGERS; BASEBALL; CONTROVERSY