Sporting Life

In the past three years, New York Yankee fans have been treated to the rough & ready English of Dizzy Dean and the schoolboy precision of Joe DiMaggio, who even read his interviews from scripts. Last week the fans got a new radio & TV announcer, and the gabbiest one of all: old-time Movie Comic Joe E. Brown.

Funnyman Brown, 60, takes his new job on Manhattan's station WPIX with deadly seriousness: "I love baseball, and I'm never going to make it the butt of my jokes." Joe broadcasts pre-game and post-game interviews, plus three innings of play-by-play on TV, and two innings on radio. His delivery is intensely partisan ("Come on, you Yankees, get those bats off your shoulders!"), and he sometimes drifts from the action on the diamond into patriotic outbursts ("I've seen plenty of other countries, but believe me, America is the best of the lot. America, I love you!").

Pinch-Hit Double. Joe may occasionally mispronounce the players' names (he calls Yogi Berra "Berry"), but he has an encyclopedic memory for baseball statistics and stories. He says that he did not get into show business until he was nine but he was a confirmed baseball fan at four. Though he made a living as a circus aerialist in his teens, Joe spent each summer playing semi-pro and minor-league baseball. In 1920 his friend Ed Barrow, manager of the Boston Red Sox, let Joe pinch-hit for Outfielder Harry Hooper in an exhibition game. In what may have been the happiest moment of his life, Joe hit a double.

Comic Brown, as resolute a baseball fan as ever fumbled a grounder, used to fly to Florida each spring to work out with the Yankees, and has been in & out of the locker rooms of half the teams across the nation. He has made three baseball movies (Fireman Save My Child, Elmer the Great, Alibi Ike), and his contract with

Warner Bros, allowed him to equip and run a semi-pro team at Warner's expense. He once owned 25% of the Kansas City Blues, and considered buying the Brooklyn Dodgers in the '30s. His son, Joe L., is president of the New Orleans Pelicans of the Southern Association.

Fewer Phonies. In California, Joe is a member of the State Athletic Commission, president of the Pony Baseball Leagues (for boys from 12 to 15), and the donor of a sports trophy room to U.C.L.A. containing such mementos as Babe Ruth's bat and the trunks Gene Tunney wore the night he won the championship from Jack Dempsey. Joe thinks he is the only man living to have two athletic fields named after him: one in his home town of Hoigate, Ohio, the other at U.C.L.A., which has made him an honorary undergraduate (Joe never got beyond the ninth grade).

To take the job of announcing for the Yankees, Joe this week gave up his TV Circus Hour (Tues. 8 p.m., NBC). Says he: "I wouldn't do this kind of a show if it wasn't baseball." How does he think he is going over with the fans? He admits "little mistakes each day. I still haven't found myself. It will take at least a month before I'll be where I should be." But he loves his work, because "you don't run up against so many phonies in sport. I don't know why it is, but the percentage is much lower."

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