Enberg Is a Long Way From the Farm : Television: After picking apples and doing play-by-play for $1 a game, he will be calling his fifth Super Bowl for NBC.

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 paper noted that Armada Tomato was his nickname. But when another publication reprinted the story, it came out “Armada Tornado.”

“That sounded a little better,” he said.

Enberg didn’t think much about a sports broadcasting career before college, where he majored in health science.

Actually, he hated speaking in front of people and put off taking a speech course as long as he could. He did better than expected, getting an A. He later joined the debate team and also became the school’s public-address announcer at football and basketball games.

Enberg also got a job sweeping floors at the local radio station. He became a weekend disc jockey and was promoted to sports director. That led to his first play-by-play job at $1 a game.

Enberg went on to graduate school at the University of Indiana, where he got a master’s degree and then a doctorate in health science. In his first year there, a Hoosier radio network was formed, and Enberg got the play-by-play job. Now he was up to $35 a game.

After completing work on his Ph.D. in 1961, Enberg inquired about a teaching vacancy. He didn’t get the job and is glad he didn’t. “I’d probably still be there, announcing games and teaching,” he said.

Enberg noticed a note on the bulletin board in the health science building at Indiana, and that led him to San Fernando Valley State, now Cal State Northridge, where he taught health science and was assistant baseball coach.

Enberg--by then married--began looking for radio work to supplement his income. He called about two dozen stations but couldn’t get anyone to take his call.

He began identifying himself as Dr. Enberg. Suddenly, he was getting through to program directors.

His first Los Angeles broadcasting job, in 1962, was at KGIL. He started out with summer relief work and that fall did a football scoreboard show on Fridays and Saturdays for $15 a night.

He later worked part time at radio stations KLAC and KNX and at Channel 11.

Enberg credits his old friend, longtime Los Angeles sportscaster Chuck Benedict, for helping him during those early years.

“Chuck would suggest applying for jobs that he could have been trying for,” Enberg said.

In 1965, Enberg got a big break.

To fill a void left by the departed Tom Harmon, Channel 5 was using 10 Los Angeles athletes, people such as Jerry West, Merlin Olsen, Don Drysdale, Jimmy Piersall and Albie Pearson, to do the nightly sports.

That system wasn’t working, so the station began looking for a permanent sportscaster.

Enberg auditioned and got the job--but with a catch.

Enberg, who was still teaching, was hired in April. Lloyd Sigmon, the station president, suggested Enberg wait to start until summertime. That way, if he didn’t work out, he could still go back to teaching in the fall.

Enberg worked out.

The job paid $18,000, which was three times what Enberg was making as a college professor and an assistant baseball coach.

Enberg’s first night on sports at Channel 5 was also the first night for a news reporter named Hal Fishman, who is still at the station as the 10 o’clock news anchorman.

Enberg soon was calling the weekly televised fights at the Olympic Auditorium.

“Boxing isn’t what I really wanted to do, at least not right then,” Enberg said. “It wasn’t long after the Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston debacle in Lewiston, Me. (the phantom-punch fight), and a lot of people were calling for the abolishment of boxing.”

Another problem with that job was the promoter, the late Aileen Eaton, a tough woman who wanted things her way.

“She had me in tears more than once,” Enberg said, “always yelling in my earplug to read a promo or build up an upcoming fight or something. She was some lady.”

In 1966, Enberg also began doing the Angel pregame and postgame shows on radio, a job that led to his 11 seasons (1968-78) as the radio voice of the Angels.

Two more jobs came along in 1966 as well.

He became the Rams’ radio announcer after Bob Kelley died, and began working UCLA basketball telecasts on Channel 5, most of which were delayed until 11 p.m.

That was back in UCLA’s heyday. Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, was a sophomore during Enberg’s first season, and the announcer became almost as popular as the John Wooden-coached teams that were winning national championships.

“I got all four of those jobs within an 18-month span,” Enberg said. “That was quite a run.”

Not everything in his life has gone smoothly. The breakup of his first marriage to Jeri Taylor after nearly 15 years took its toll on the highly emotional Enberg.

For therapy, he and an old friend, Stan Charnofsky, the head baseball coach at Valley State when Enberg was the assistant, wrote a book about dealing with divorce that was never published.

Enberg went through some emotionally tough years before marrying Barbara, a unit manager for NBC Sports, in 1983.

Then came more trying times. Enberg’s father, who was dying of cancer, moved in with the couple while receiving treatment at a hospital in La Jolla.

In May of 1984, Dick and Barbara had their first child, Nicole.

“About the only time I ever saw my father cry was after the birth of Nicole,” Enberg said. “He had followed Barbara’s pregnancy since its inception, and he said he felt closer to the baby than to his own children.”

Four months later, the senior Enberg died.

“In a span of a few months, I went through the cycle of birth and death, and I realized all of this--houses, money--is really not very important. When we die, all we leave behind is our fine art and our children.”

Enberg was talking recently with a group of reporters from around the country during a press tour at a Santa Monica hotel. He said he might cut back on sportscasting soon, possibly eliminating everything but Wimbledon, and return to teaching. He added that he also wanted to write a book about his experiences in broadcasting.

One reporter said you could see in Enberg’s eyes that maybe he was serious.

But a few days later, Enberg admitted: “My wife hears me talk that way and she says, ‘You’ll never retire.’ And I know she’s right. I love what I do. There’s no question there is something addictive about it. It’s like a narcotic. Deep down, I know I could never give it up.”