On Friday, April 9th, 2004, Royce Clayton of the Colorado Rockies—his new dreadlocks cascading out from under his helmet—strode to the plate at Dodger Stadium to lead off the top of the 8th. Far above him, broadcasting perhaps his 8,500th ballgame, Vincent Edward Scully thought of something.

“You see Clayton’s hair and you think of Johnny Damon,” Scully said, pausing, to let the mental image form of how Damon had that season added a long flowing brown beard to his long flowing brown hair. “You seen pictures of Johnny Damon in the papers? Red Sox outfielder?” This kind of aside had long been a standard Scully ploy: utilize an endearing anachronism to help the viewer or listener live up to Scully’s subtle-but-powerful demand that they work hard at multi-tasking and follow not just his broadcast of the game but also his sidebars, which flow like the Mississippi—and he’s Mark Twain, piloting the riverboat while he’s telling you stories about life deep in the woods behind the banks. “Two-and-oh. Holy Mackerel! I tell you who he reminds me of. Only me, now.”

There was no actual pause before what came next. But to all of us watching Vin Scully do just another Dodger regular season game, time stopped to allow us to try to guess where Vin was going with this. One of his viewers—me—at home and under the covers, well past midnight in New York (and thank you baseball satellite package), assumed he would make the obvious, but perfect, analogy between the hair and beard of Johnny Damon and the hair and beard of Jesus Christ. In that split second I was wondering how in the hell he’d do it without leaving the possibility of offense, because in broadcasting today if you’ve gone 67 days without offending anybody you’re either a dreadful bore or a master of collegial decorum, and Vin Scully has gone 67 years without being a dreadful bore or offending anybody.

Forgive me the self-conscious writing conceit of returning to the start of what Scully said during that otherwise forgotten April game twelve years ago, so you get the flavor of the thing and the full impact of him not invoking Jesus: “You see Clayton’s hair and you think of Johnny Damon. You seen pictures of Johnny Damon in the papers? Red Sox outfielder? Two-and-oh. Holy mackerel! I tell you who he reminds me of. Only me, now. Charles Manson!”

Scully cracks himself up for a second and there’s a welcoming cough-like grunt subsuming part of the next consonant. “How’d you like to have somebody say you look like Charles Manson? I’ve got his bubble gum card, right? Gee whiz! Oh well.” The self-deprecating laugh vanishes suddenly now in the one-second pause, and Mark Twain is back focused on the riverboat’s wheel. “Five-one Dodgers in the eighth…”

The recording of The Night Vin Scully Talked About Charles Manson has been with me ever since, and to those I meet who have not heard it, it now, in 2016, provides even more of a happy shock than it did twelve years ago. Because now, as Scully’s retirement looms, he has seemingly been so buried in deserved praise and honest gratitude that one almost visualizes him having to wade his way through it to get to his broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium. As the years have piled up he has gone from being Brooklyn Boy Wonder Announcer to Inventor of Los Angeles Baseball to The Game’s Greatest to Icon to Saint Sportscaster to, this year, something approaching Living Deity.

This is not to say Vin Scully is not a terrific and endlessly patient human being, nor that anyone who has treated him with reverence, nor that the succession of ballplayers and managers who have bestowed the ultimate role-reversal praise by making the pilgrimage in full uniform to him in the press box are being insincere or overdoing it. It’s just that the real Scully—the one who once made us think not of Christ but of Manson—is far more human and far more capable of the unexpected. And thus far more praiseworthy.

He’s not as good as everybody’s making him out to be—he’s better.

Of course, I can write that now, 29 years after I first met him. It should be 31 years after I first met him, but honest-to-God, the first two years I worked in Los Angeles as a full-time sportscaster on a top-rated local TV newscast and on all-news radio, I could not manage to screw up the courage to introduce myself to him. At fourteen or so, required in a composition class in a suburban New York prep school to write an essay on what I would do if I knew I had six months to live, I had included in my farewell tour going to Los Angeles to meet Vin Scully. So when I finally dismissed the element of Final Wish to the thing and made that same pilgrimage to him before a game—with my heart beating in my ears—he responded with something so kind and self-deprecating that I was certain I wasn’t the first professional to have been that flummoxed in his presence. “I’m glad you said hello! I thought I had done something to offend you!” Before I could sputter any kind of reassurance, he began to quiz me about anniversaries of obscure but interesting baseball events which I used to drop into my sportscasts. I explained I had found a perfect book that sorted them not by year but by month and date. “Goodness! Really? By date? Could I borrow it? Would you mind if I did something like it during the telecasts? Just Dodger anniversaries?” I remember stifling an instinct to look around to make sure he wasn’t talking to somebody of actual importance standing behind me, and shortly afterwards getting a thorough physical to make sure I didn’t actually have just six months to live.