Monday was supposed to be so different for him.
Ernie Johnson Jr. comes to you as an award-winning TBS announcer. You know the face and voice. He was supposed to be here, calling Game 2 of the National League Championship Series.
He was supposed to be in the booth, with the baseball card of his father placed carefully before him. The father, Ernie Sr., who pitched for the Milwaukee Braves in the 1957 World Series, then built a legendary career as a Braves announcer.
The father who died nearly nine weeks ago.
His son always wants the card nearby when he broadcasts a game. Especially this month, when his work would be a tribute. That was the plan, anyway.
"I was looking at this postseason. … I'm always trying to live up to the standards he set," Ernie Jr. said over the phone from Atlanta.
But this was his Monday instead:
Be at the hospital by 2 p.m. Take over for wife Cheryl. Stay until 10 o'clock the next morning at the bedside of Michael, a 23-year-old special needs child, now fighting to breathe with pneumonia and muscular dystrophy.
"It's very important for him when he wakes up in the middle of the night that he sees me or my wife or one of our kids," Johnson said.
It's been that way for five weeks. This is October for Ernie Johnson.
Baseball? He might watch some of the games.
"Sometimes, it's all you can do," he said. "Those nights where you're in the hospital and you're sitting bedside. Michael really doesn't care about baseball. He's not a big sports fan. He loves cars and loves to ask people what they drive.
"So he'll fall asleep and I'll sit there and watch the games and eventually get some sleep in those very comfortable hospital folding chairs that always provide restful nights."
Occasionally, Michael will wake up and whisper, and Ernie will answer in the darkness, a loving figure nearby to help. "That," he said, "is why you're there."
It's a long, long way from Miller Park.
His father died in August at 87. Johnson's first assignment afterward happened to be in Milwaukee, and he went to his old neighborhood when his father worked for the Braves. He parked at his grammar school and jogged through the memories.
He was back to work a Brewers-Phillies game Sept. 11 when the phone rang. It was a distraught Cheryl from the hospital, and then a doctor asking permission to put a tube down Michael's throat. A matter of life or death.
So ended Johnson's baseball season. Look at all that 2011 has asked from a devout man who depends on his faith to get him through. Just as it did when he fought lymphoma five years ago.
"It's really been," he said, "a trust-God year."
The Johnsons have six children, four adopted. Michael came in 1991 when Cheryl traveled to Romania on an adoption trip.
"He was the first child they brought out of the orphanage," Johnson said. "It was obvious he couldn't speak and he had a lot of developmental delays and he couldn't walk.
"My wife's a gem and called from Bucharest and said, 'I saw a child today, and he's so much more than we can handle. But I can't go through the rest of my life wondering whatever happened to that kid.'"
She brought the little boy home. A year later, Michael was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. He has been in a wheelchair for 11 years, but Johnson calls every moment "a blessing."
And now the Brewers are playing the Cardinals, and his hometown of Milwaukee is on fire. How good would it be to take another jog past the old house, and share the games with the public, as he looks at a baseball card?
"I wish I would be able to work it," he said. "But I'm where I have to be."
They are hoping Michael can go home in two weeks. Until then, Ernie Johnson will be watching the NLCS and World Series from a hospital room. When he can.
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