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Talking with Dick Enberg is always a pleasant experience. It's much like listening to him call a game. The blend of story-telling, niceties, humility and humor is a perfect mix.
On this day, Enberg could be excused if he wasn't in the best of moods. A carpenter had just arrived at his home in Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego County to fix a shelf in his wine cellar.
The shelf had fallen, along with two cases of expensive wine.
Otherwise, he doesn't have much to complain about.
Enberg will be calling his fifth Super Bowl for NBC Sunday. He is liked and respected by his colleagues, and he lives with his second wife, Barbara, and their three children in a dream house, made possible by an annual salary estimated at $1.9 million.
Not bad for a farm boy.
Although Enberg, 58, was born in Michigan, he spent kindergarten through sixth grade in Southern California. He lived in Glendale and Venice, but mostly in Canoga Park, before moving back and settling in Armada, Mich. (Pop. 1,000).
It was during his years in the San Fernando Valley that the young Enberg batted a ball around an empty field and pretended to call an imaginary game between the Pacific Coast League Los Angeles Angels and Hollywood Stars.
Then, as a teen-ager, he found time to play quarterback on the football team and participate in other sports at tiny Armada High-there were only 33 in his graduating class-between picking and hauling apples. He likes to talk about hurrying home from postgame dances to load apples in his father's pickup for delivery to a market in Detroit.
Enberg's three older children, from his first marriage, have often heard such stories.
"They call it my Abe Lincoln speech," he said. "I tell them we had a one-room schoolhouse and a two-hole toilet. . . . I guess I overcompensated later in life. There are eight toilets in this house."
While Enberg was attending Central Michigan, he played on the freshman baseball team. How good was he? Well, teammates called him the "Armada Tomato."
In his senior year, Enberg was student body president, and the school...