Habib: Boca Raton's retiring sportscaster Dick Stockton shined by letting games be the real stars

For 55 years, Dick Stockton managed to defy logic, if not the changing times. He was going to be on national television, part of the show but never letting himself believe he was the star of the show. Blessed with a quintessential sportscaster’s voice, he had a knack for knowing what to say when the occasion called for it and, just as importantly, when not to speak when the occasion called for that.

That’s the irony of where Stockton finds himself now, at age 78, as he reveals he’s retiring from the games and the grind. Except he can’t be allowed to fade out to his Boca Raton home as if going to commercial. To allow that, with only perhaps Al Michaels left from that era and style of sportscasters, wouldn’t seem right. Like it or not.

“I never looked at my career as anything that I did or I achieved, or ‘I did this World Series’ or ‘I did this playoff game,’ ” Stockton told The Post on Friday. “I never thought about that. My goal always has been, for every game I ever broadcast, is that there is a guy out there who worked 9 to 5 in a job, and now comes the weekend or the nighttime and he’s home and he wants to sit back and have a beer and wings or pizza and sit back and enjoy and relax and escape and watch a game. If I can enhance the broadcast enjoyment without getting in the way and make it a little more enjoyable for him, then I’ve done my job.

“That’s all I ever cared about. So to be remembered? I hope that people said, ‘You know what? I enjoyed the time watching Dick do games because it was relaxing and it filled my time.’ ”

If you’re a sports fan, you’ve invited him into your living room maybe more than you realize. Stockton has called the World Series, the NBA Finals and the Super Bowl, the Olympic Games and the Pan Am Games. For Fox and NBC. For CBS and TBS. He called Magic vs. Larry. Eric Heiden won speed skating gold as Stockton called the action; Eric Heiden called the action with Stockton as Dan Jansen ended his run of hard luck by winning gold.

And for the past decade, Stockton has been the voice of Dolphins preseason telecasts.

As the voice of the anthology series “CBS Sports Spectacular,” Stockton called events that slipped under the purview of the better-known “Wide World of Sports” on ABC: world kick boxing championships, world team surfing, you name it, from Beijing and Kenya and Tokyo.

His greatest thrill and greatest test came early in his career when he was calling the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds and Carlton Fisk hit his historic 12th-inning home run to win Game 6.

“There it goes! A long drive! If it stays fair … home run!” he said.

Then, he clammed up for 36 seconds, letting the crowd noise and the moment speak for itself before saying, “We will have a seventh game in this 1975 World Series!”

It’s no wonder that, if Stockton could relive one day on the job, that would be it.

“My pivotal call and my No. 1 moment,” he said. “What it means to me is that instinctively, I did what I should do. And I wasn’t thinking about it. You can’t think about it in advance. That’s what play by play is. It’s a blank canvas and you just fill it in with the words and you hope it all fits. Instinctively, I called what I saw, and what was happening. It had to be done in a split second. I didn’t have any time to embellish any calls. It had to be done quickly and it was just one of the things that worked. I’ve been blessed with having that ability over the years. And I can’t say why.”

He can explain it in part, though. Stockton grew up in a home in Queens, N.Y., where his father brought home eight newspapers every night. They’d comb the sports sections, comparing Red Smith’s columns to Jimmy Cannon’s and Arthur Daley’s. Someday, young Dick figured, he’d be filing those columns.

But by the mid-1960s, he landed a gig at the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia, where the GM of the station said people would trip over his family name, Stokvis. For whatever reason, the name Stockton just came to Dick. So, Stockton it was.

That wasn’t all that fell in place. In 1977, after calling games for the Red Sox, Stockton found himself at a golf tournament in Palm Springs with Carl Yastrzemski. He mentioned that Palm Springs seemed so nice, he was thinking of moving out there.

“Why don’t you come to Boca?” said Yastrzemski, who already had a home there.

“What’s Boca?” Stockton said.

“Boca Raton.”

“What’s Boca Raton?”

Once Stockton figured that out, he bought a condo at the under-construction Yacht and Racquet Club of Boca Raton, then stuck around. His long list of hangouts includes Arturo Ristorante, New York Prime, The Capital Grille, Kathy's Gazebo and Houston's.

If his job helped him land a home, it also played a role in helping meet his wife, Jamie Drinkwater Stockton. A mutual friend suggested they get together, but she was out in Arizona, where her father was a mayor. As luck would have it, Dick was assigned to call an Arizona Cardinals game. This year, they’ll celebrate their seventh anniversary.

When the Dolphins called, asking if he could shoot a half hour down the highway to call their exhibition games, he accepted and stuck with it for 11 summers.

“I loved it,” he said. “The people couldn’t have been nicer, the entire organization.”

Come this August, he won’t have a homework assignment of deciphering which hopefuls in a field of about 90 will land one of Brian Flores’ roster spots. This fall, Stockton instead will be reading, playing chess or the piano and “enjoying life,” he said.

“It’ll be a great time for me, I’ll tell you that,” he said. “I’ll be able to travel. Hopefully, if Europe is open, I can travel overseas. I haven’t traveled in the fall in 50 years. Half a century. I have a lot of interests. I do a lot of things and I’m not tied to all that stuff (calling games). It’s not anything I needed to do anymore, let me put it that way. I could have done it for several more years, but what’s the point?

“I didn’t need to do it anymore and that’s what led me to say, ‘Hey, that’s it.’ ”