The New York Times has a fascinating article today about the recovery of Dick Vitale from his throat surgery with all sorts of things that I never knew. And that was a horrible senence and tease, anyway here it is.
For the past three seasons, as lesions on his vocal cords rendered each “dipsy-do-dunk-a-roo” painful, he tried to focus on the games. But all he could think about, he said, was “my throat — how does it sound? What about my throat? It’s killing me.”
He called his wife, Lorraine, during halftimes so frequently for her opinion about his increasing hoarseness that “it got annoying,” she said.
Vitale needed surgery but tried to duck it briefly by clinging to a diagnosis by specialists in Florida who said acid reflux was a leading cause of his raspy, strained voice.
Even after he agreed to travel to Boston for the operation, he feared that surgery might change his voice, that the lesions would be cancerous and that his second career of being synonymous with college basketball at ESPN, of being Dickie V, would end.
“After 29 years, having a blast, I’d have to go out like this wimp,” he said.
Lorraine Vitale, as calm as her husband is outrageously impassioned, said: “We both had the fear. It was a lot of stress and worry” because his voice “is his whole career.”
Vitale wept with his bosses at ESPN when he thought he might have cancer.
“I cried for three hours straight on the plane coming home,” he said, referring to an evaluation at Massachusetts General Hospital by Dr. Steven M. Zeitels, who said he needed to perform surgery to rule out cancer in the lesions.
But Vitale’s health concerns are fading. He is preparing to call Wednesday night’s Duke-North Carolina game in Chapel Hill, his first broadcast in two months.
The lesions are gone, baby, and they were benign.
Zeitels also infused saline through a specialized needle into Vitale’s vocal-cord tissue to improve the cords’ pliability and the sound they produce when they vibrate.
To shift some of the heavy workload from his vocal cords to his diaphragm, Vitale, 68, is being tutored by a vocal coach.
In his 17,500-square-foot Sarasota estate last Friday, he offered a sampler of his exercises:
“Ko-kay-kee,” he said, standing behind his massive desk. “To-tay-tee. So-say-see. Ro-ray-ree. Lo-lay-lee.” Then, “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.”
In his off-key Jersey twang, he sang: “My country ’tis of thee. Sweet land of liberty.”
Later, he sought to demonstrate that despite a buildup of phlegm in the back of his throat (don’t cough, he admonished himself, swallow it), his voice was fit for action; the raspiness was gone, and so was the strain evident in his last game, on Dec. 4.
He tried once but kept clearing his throat. He waited a couple of seconds.
“I can feel it coming back clear again,” he said, then shifted to a faster rhythm.
“Hi, everybody, I’m Dick Vitale,” he said. “Tonight we’ve got North Carolina against Duke. We’ve got the transition game. We’ve got the unbelievable spirit of the Dookies against the Carolina Tar Heels.” He quickly added, “See, I’m ready.”
Vitale said he never believed that he was abusing his voice by calling games, making speeches, doing interviews, taping commercials or simply talking to nearly everybody he met, at his typically passionate, high-decibel volume.
“I just always thought I had this loud way about me, you know, the throat became my sound, whether it was clear or not,” he said. “It’s helped me make my living.”
Zeitels, who had barely heard of Vitale before treating him, said the vocal-cord damage was “commensurate and reflective of his career; nothing out of the ordinary.”
But Vitale could not be certain what would come out of his mouth after surgery.
Zeitels ordered him not to speak for three and a half weeks, accomplishing by medical fiat what his critics have wished he would do for years.
“It was very, very weird,” Lorraine Vitale said. “He was never without his dry erase board. He wrote the way he talks. Very urgently.” She mimicked his impatient gestures as she sat beside him at his daily breakfast spot here, The Broken Egg.
At the restaurant, which sells Vitale’s books and motivational DVDs from a packed display case at the entrance, he posted a sign at his table, apologizing in advance to the many customers who wanted to chat about Michigan or Duke or Florida State.
“I cannot talk,” it read. “I just had throat surgery.”
Vitale slipped only once during his monk’s silence, his wife said.
“He woke up in the morning, came out of a dream and forgot and said, ‘Oh, where’s the —?’ like it was the worst crime in the world,” she said. “I said: ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine. But you know what, I heard your voice. I’m happy and it sounds good.’ ”
He returned to voicelessness until Zeitels said it was safe to speak on Jan. 13.
But Vitale froze. Nothing came out whence verbosity once flowed unimpeded.
“It was like stage fright,” his wife said. “And the doctor said: ‘Count to 10. Just relax.’ ”
Vitale added: “So many people told me after surgery, you don’t know, your voice might change. I was afraid to hear it. I had tears. I was afraid.”
When that familiar trumpet of a voice finally awakened, it sounded healthy again.
“With the emotion of it all, Dick just broke down,” Lorraine Vitale said.
But he had relatively little time to celebrate.
An enlarged prostate required laser surgery four days after Vitale’s speech returned and led him to use a catheter for four days.
Vitale is back to his usual routines now, working out and playing tennis in the morning; planning his annual cancer research fund-raiser to benefit the V Foundation, named for Jim Valvano; recording his ESPN.com podcasts (“It’s time to act 12 again!” he said last week, after a couple of months of acting old); and visiting his daughters, Sherri and Terri, who live in the same planned community with their husbands and children.
Last Friday, he talked to fans (“Hey, you look like a young Lou Holtz!” he said to one) while signing books as he ate his breakfast in a banquette. Later on, he stopped his Mercedes sports car (one of three vehicles he gets in an endorsement deal) on a street near his house to chat with neighbors glad that his voice is healing.
“We were praying for you,” one man said. “When are you back?”
“Wednesday,” he said. “Don’t forget to watch.”
But now that he is back at work, can Vitale preserve his restored voice? Can he back away from a schedule born of a bottomless well of enthusiasm?
“I’m really going to try,” Vitale said. “It’s something I’ve never been good at.”
Dan Steir, an ESPN senior coordinating producer, said: “In retrospect, we’ve learned that we want to make sure we maximize Dick on our big events and be smart about it.”
Zeitels has advised him to avoid doubleheaders (he received the go-ahead only for the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament semifinals next month) and games on back-to-back nights, to speak as little as he can before games and to eliminate doing interviews that are not crucial.
“My guess is if he regulates himself, he’ll be fine for years to come,” said Zeitels, who has treated Julie Andrews and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler. “His old ways are O.K., just modified. How he uses his voice is part of his charm.”
The intensity of that charm will be quantified at a future ESPN game when Vitale will be connected to a minicomputer that will measure his vocal cords’ vibrations and “provide us with objective metrics of Dick’s extreme vocal performance,” Zeitels said.
Imagine ESPN’s graphics that night: time, score and Dickie V’s vocal vibrations.
It really is good to have you back Dick. And everyone should definitely check out the audio slide show; his voice has come back pretty nicely
(though that ESPN shirt he's wearing is too much like Carolina Blue for my taste)
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