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Vin Scully
 

Vin Scully is retired. We know he still watches baseball though, as Scully was a fixture of Dodgers home games during this past October's World Series. However, we now know he isn't watching another sport.

During an event, "An Evening With Vin Scully," at the Pasadena Civic Center Saturday, Scully said that due to national anthem protests, he is done watching the NFL.

"I have only one personal thought, really," Scully said. "And I am so disappointed. And I used to love, during the fall and winter, to watch the NFL on Sunday. And it's not that I'm some great patriot. I was in the Navy for a year -- didn't go anywhere, didn't do anything. But I have overwhelming respect and admiration for anyone who puts on a uniform and goes to war. So the only thing I can do in my little way is not to preach. I will never watch another NFL game."

Scully has long maintained an image of lovability among all sorts of sports fans. Most of Scully's words to the public have come from a broadcast booth, focused on sports between the lines. This is a rare presence of political opinion from Scully.

It's worth noting no living journalist covered Jackie Robinson as closely as Scully. Scully joined the Dodgers' broadcast team in 1950 for Robinson's fourth year in the league. Scully would broadcast the rest of Robinson's career and stayed close with the Robinson Family after Jackie's retirement. Telling Jackie Robinson stories was a staple of Scully broadcasts.

Remember the time they raced on skates?

In Robinson's 1972 memoir, I Never Had It Made, Robinson gave his input on the national anthem.

"There I was the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people," Robinson wrote. "The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made."

Scully's perspective is certainly not a unique one. But it is surprising coming from an individual who usually keeps his personal opinions reserved.

No word on how Scully, who was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, is spending his Sunday.

-- Follow Jeff Eisenband on Twitter @JeffEisenband. Like Jeff Eisenband on Facebook.