How Vin Scully helped improve the Super Bowl experience for fans

Everybody knows that Vin Scully was a wonderful fixture of Dodgers baseball.

But did you know he played a part in changing the Super Bowl?

In early 1983, when the NFL played its marquee game at the Rose Bowl — the Miami Dolphins versus the Washington Redskins — the league for the first time piped the play-by-play sound into the stadium tunnels and restrooms, and set up TVs at the concession stands.

That stemmed from something NFL executive Jim Steeg witnessed at Dodger Stadium months earlier.

“It's funny because a lot of things come back to Dodger Stadium,” said Steeg, who for years oversaw the Super Bowl. “I remember going to a Dodger game and I was in the restroom and I'm hearing Vin Scully's voice in the restroom. And I'm going, `Wow, this is incredible. The Dodgers are so smart they put sound in all the restrooms.’

"What better place for that? The worst thing you ever have is when you've got to go in and go to the bathroom, something happens and you don't know what the hell's going on. What a brilliant idea it was to put sound in there.

“But they didn't have sound. It was everybody carrying their little transistor radios. So my idea was, OK, let's put sound in there. So we did that, we put sound on the elevators, we put it in the concourses. We put monitors in the concession stands.”

Scully, who died Tuesday at 94, famously called “The Catch,” the historic Joe Montana-to-Dwight Clark touchdown that allowed the San Francisco 49ers to beat the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC Championship Game on Jan. 10, 1982.

And he’s also part of the reason we still catch the NFL games no matter where we are in a stadium.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.