For Summerall, Alcohol And Sports A Bad Mix

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - There is this big hole in the air. It is the place where Pat Summerall's voice resonated, and it has not been filled. When you stop to think about it, how could it be filled?

In the weeks since Summerall took his leave of absence from CBS Sports to go to the Betty Ford Clinic for treatment of acute alcoholism, capable men have tried his anchor chair. Jim Nantz and Verne Lundquist have been good. But they have not been good enough. And that is bad.

Because now the word is that Summerall will be back late this month, back in the tower, back on the champagne-and-caviar circuit, where a chilled vodka martini is a nod away. Putting an alcoholic in this kind of setting is almost like putting a suicidal person in a locked room with Jack Kevorkian.

This is not hyperbole. Summerall is not just an alcoholic. He is a celebrity alcoholic, and an acute one. Anyone who has spent any time around him on the golf circuit knows his drinking started early and ended late. Often he drank when he was on the air. It never seemed to impair his delivery, but it did his liver.

In order to stay alive, Summerall, 61, cannot drink anymore. That much is certain. His liver is all but gone.

"We're more worried about Pat living than about him coming back to work," said one CBS official. "We're really all sick about this."

I would love to believe that Pat Summerall could go back to work and never take another drink. The classic conversational delivery, the mellifluous voice that has for 30 years been the soothing backdrop for football, golf and tennis, made him the Walter Cronkite of sports broadcasting. I would love to believe, but I know better. So does anyone who grew up in an alcoholic home.

My father was an alcoholic. He was not the celebrity Summerall is, but he was a cruise director in Miami and something of a legend in the cruise business. Drinks were part of the gig, booze was always within reach, and his pattern was the same as Summerall's. Drink a lot, do the show, and no one can ever tell while the lights are on.

After the final hospitalization following a big bender, and after the final warning from the doctors, he retired from the cruise business. He was on the wagon. He wanted to stay on. But he had to make a last voyage.

So he took a three-day Nassau run on the Emerald Seas. The Monday he got off the cruise ship, he fell in a parking lot. His blood alcohol level was .35, three times the legal limit. It was 10 in the morning. He was dead. He was 62.

You can only pray that something like that won't happen to Summerall. Maybe if he did football and not golf, the chances would be better. The warning signs about golf are everywhere. The Washington Post recently spoke to a chemical-dependency expert about Summerall's case, and what he said should raise red flags all over the building at CBS headquarters.

"If you go back to an environment where alcohol is so accessible, it may be difficult to abstain, and that's the key," said Robert Bishop, the director of Springwood Institute in Leesburg, Va. "An alcoholic can't return to any drinking."

"Celebrities have a lot of trouble recovering because they're still around all the situations, the people and the settings in which they were using their drug of choice."

Listening to Jim Nantz do the wrap-up from Bill Glasson's victory at the Kemper Open last Sunday, I found myself thinking, "Summerall would have captured it so much better. He would have nailed it cold."

And that's the dilemma. You want Summerall back in the booth, but not back in the situation that might kill him. You want to hear the voice but not at the cost of the man. It's no simple situation.

You want Summerall to live, and that might mean living without him on golf. That seems a small price to pay, for all concerned.