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Holy Toledo
Lessons From Bill King, Renaissance Man of the Mic
by Ken Korach

There is a dilemma that lives somewhere behind this book, one that I have experienced many a time with regards to various things in my own life: when you find something great, do you want to share it with everyone else in the world, or do you prefer to keep this great joy all to yourself?

Holy Toledo by Ken Korach

The answer depends, of course, upon the nature of the great thing. If it’s the music of some hugely talented performer, you’re bound to want to share, since there’s no real way in which your own enjoyment of a song or a musician can be diminished by others enjoying the same work. The same applies, to an extent, with a restaurant that serves great food; certainly, you want others to patronize the place, lest it should otherwise go out of business; yet, you also don’t want the joint to be too crowded during those times when you want a meal for yourself.

And then again, there are those great things that you want to keep all to yourself--or, at least, you don’t particularly care if others get to experience their share of that greatness. You’ll be perfectly happy to keep that personal favorite truly personal, to let that secret joy be your own little oasis in an otherwise desert landscape.

For many sports fans in the Bay Area, that latter sentiment surely holds true for their appreciation of the late Bill King.
Few outside Northern California know King’s work--or at least they don’t knowingly know it. Millions heard King’s voice on a regular basis, thanks to his work calling games for the Oakland Raiders in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, and the use of those calls by NFL Films in their celebrated work documenting football’s greatest games. Others may have caught pieces of King’s output when he served as the voice of the Golden State Warriors during the decades concurrent with his Raiders work. Perhaps there are even a few baseballs fans across the country who got a taste of King through his time with the Oakland A’s, from 1981 on through to his death in 2005. King’s call of Rickey Henderson’s record-breaking stolen base in 1991 still pops up every so often on MLB Network’s promotional pieces, and his call of Oakland’s walk-off win to cap the team’s record 20th straight win in 2002 got some screen time in the Moneyball movie.

All of that is natural, of course; there’s no way that a career as long and diverse and successful as Bill King’s could truly be confined to just one sports market without at least some highlights leaking out to the wider world. But King is not a national figure like many of his contemporaries and equals (not to mention inferiors). He is not in any sport’s Hall of Fame. Though he remains revered within the broadcasting community, King means little to the average fan outside San Francisco’s orbit. Thus, King’s former partner with the A’s, Ken Korach, decided to shoulder the burden of crafting a fitting remembrance for the late legend, one that would preserve his memory and perhaps expand the range of his fans. The result of that effort is Holy Toledo: Lessons from Bill King: Renaissance Man of the Mic.

Korach paints for the reader the most complete picture possible of King’s life: from his earliest days growing up in pre-war Illinois farm country, to his days in the service at the tail end of the conflict (King was just young enough to miss the worst of the action), to his days as a nascent broadcaster, creating games off a telex tape with a few sound effects items and little else but his imagination, and onward. Those wartime experiences were what brought King to his eventual permanent home in the Bay Area, where his career developed along with the birth of West Coast pro sports; even among those fans who remember King, few probably realize that he was there from the start of San Francisco’s career as a home for big time sports. Korach reveals King’s “origin story” from when he was a junior partner on the Giants broadcasts not long after their move west, when Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons ruled the local sports broadcasting roost. (The latter memorably paired up with King on radio for the A’s in the ‘80s.) The author also recalls his own introduction to King, when in the early ‘60s he would pick up Warriors broadcasts all the way down in L.A.; in doing so, Korach found both a broadcaster who could rival the legendary Chick Hearn for skill in calling a game, and an early influence who affected from the very start his own career as an announcer.

That influence is a key element to Korach’s requiem for his late partner, and how he lays out that relationship serves as one of Holy Toledo’s great strengths. The reverence Korach has for King is clear, and it is presented in these pages with enough clarity and sincerity that any reader who ever heard King, and even a few who didn’t, can get a sense that the respect is truly deserved. That sentiment is backed up by a chorus of authoritative voices; not just longtime Bay Area announcers like Simmons, Hank Greenwald, Jon Miller, and Greg Papa, but also names from across the landscape of broadcasting, and the wider sports world, offer their heartfelt admiration of King and share their stories about what made the man so special to them. Clearly, Korach put in a lot of hours compiling these odes to Bill King the man and broadcaster, and the cumulative effect is impressive.

What also works, and impresses the reader with the sincerity of Korach’s tribute to King, is the author’s willingness to lay bare his own self in the process. Korach, in relating the outlines of King’s life and the influence on him by his longtime partner, exposes personal details about his own life that both reinforce the picture of King as a father figure, and also vouch for the depth of Korach’s respect. Even uncomfortable details, like the author losing his mother early to suicide, are fair game here. Korach lays bare his feelings, his life, and how Bill King fit into them. The pictures Korach paints about himself and King are unvarnished, and it stands to their great credit that each man comes out looking like men in full, and mostly to the good.

That is not to say that Holy Toledo is without flaws. Korach is not a writer by trade, and his prose is sometimes less than elegant; this is no Roger Angel-like hymn to a baseball life. Korach’s interviews with numerous subjects come up again and again throughout the book, almost always with the “so-and-so told me for this book” construction needlessly repeated. One citation of a personal interview is enough; if the interviewee who personally told you something 100 pages ago comes up again, the reader can do the math that these quotes all come from the same place, same time. The flaws on display here are exactly the kind you would expect from a novice writer on his first trip through a manuscript; that, perhaps, is what makes those flaws mostly forgivable.

On the whole, Holy Toledo serves its purpose, and does so admirably. It stands as a testament to Bill King by one who knew him well, and as a window into that man’s life for the many who admired him but didn’t have the chance to know him like Ken Korach did. Longtime King fans can be thankful that Korach went to the trouble of producing this book, and can hope that in doing so he may spread King’s fame beyond the bounds of the Bay Area--if those fans can bear to share the almost private joy they derived from the late broadcaster’s rich body of work.