Vin Scully and Bill Russell: Essential voices lost

Over a duration of roughly 48 hours from Sunday evening until Tuesday evening, the voices of first, Bill Russell, and then Vin Scully, were stilled for eternity. This does not mean that we will never hear them again; we surely will. Search, click, listen. ‘Little roller up along first…‘ Search, click, listen. ‘I would kick your ass…’ But those voices will no longer evolve with the world around them, as they once did splendidly and importantly, though very differently – Scully’s mellifluously and comfortably, Russell’s stridently and relentlessly – across lives that lasted 182 years in total. They were voices that carried the weight of history in very different receptacles, but imprinted themselves on generations.

The swift unfolding and discarding of information in our time will quickly and efficiently hasten both men from concurrently celebrated and mourned to concurrently shuffled to the broad expanse of history, where the elegantly faded relevance of a long life shifts inexorably to the hazy equity of legacy. Because this is what the present does to the past, and always has, although more ruthlessly nowadays, where delivery systems pass today’s news into yesterday’s more efficiently than ever. (A process that will only become more efficient).

They were born seven years apart, Scully in 1927 – the peak year of the Ruth-Gehrig Murderers’ Row Yankees – in the Bronx; Russell in the Jim Crow South (Monroe, Louisiana) in 1934, before moving to Oakland at age nine. Their lives would in many ways be tethered to their beginnings (as are all of ours), likely in ways they didn’t comprehend until well into adulthood (same) but embraced both gently (Scully) and forcefully (Russell). They were products of their beginnings, their