00:00The best thing I can say about John, he didn't have a mean bone in his body.
00:03I always described to the people that he had an absence of ballast.
00:07He had a pursuit of happiness and he didn't want to hurt anybody.
00:11And I got a phone call yesterday, right before I went on the air, from Buck Showalter.
00:15And he said, you know what, John, wasn't, I said, what?
00:19He goes, he wasn't mean.
00:20He goes, he would criticize us on the air, but he wasn't mean.
00:24He says, I've been the manager of teams where broadcasters were mean
00:27and they took great pleasure in being mean.
00:31He goes, that wasn't John.
00:32And John wasn't mean.
00:34And I think that that's why when he got criticized from the radio and television columnists in our city,
00:40because he wasn't like the classic broadcaster, it hurt him.
00:44And he didn't know how to fight back because he wasn't mean.
00:47And that really bothered him a lot.
00:49And, you know, I said this yesterday, I wish that John was alive yesterday,
00:55but the whole world had found out he had passed because all the accolades and the love
01:03and the Yankees having his initials on the back of the hat,
01:07that would have meant such a great deal to him that people did like me.
01:12You know, I was different, but people liked me.
01:15And, you know, that's what got him through the mean reviews
01:19and the fact that he never really got a real shot at the Baseball Hall of Fame
01:24because those people that are voting, they're not going to vote for John Sterling
01:28because they're classics.
01:30You know, they look for the, you know, the Red Barbers of the world.
01:33And, you know, John would call, not, he loved Red Barber,
01:36but John said, I'm not a cookie cutter.
01:38I'm just not a cookie cutter.
01:40And boy, in every walk of life in broadcasting
01:42and the way he lived his life, guys, he was not a cookie cutter.
01:46You don't know.
01:46You don't know.
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