05/02/2022
The work on my manuscript for How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying) reached a watershed mark this week, with a second draft with multiple fixes headed back to the editor. Here's what the last chapter might look like--it's about everyone's last chapter. (There are some references to people who show up earlier in the book, William Beford, Tony Fernandez and John Ferguson, and some stuff about Seattle Slew, so some context is missed ... all I can do is ask you to read your way around it and understand that all the pieces hold together when you have to full deal in hand.
DON'T JUST WAVE GOODBYE
Absolutely true: I once heard a 24-year-old sportswriter suggest—and I quote, “The Baseball Hall of Fame will undergo a correction when all the old sportswriters die off.”
He was speaking of a time when players wouldn’t earn their plaques in Cooperstown based on RBIs and wins and rings, but rather on the strength of their wins-above-replacement, slash lines and other new-age metrics.
If the young upstart had his way, I’m sure he’d round up all sportswriters born before 1970 and then stand them on an ice floe that is being swept out to sea.
I’ve laid out how I once longed to become a sportswriter for the right reasons. A calling, not a career, I thought. Sic transit gloria.
Sportswriters these days land in the trade because of their passion for data, their command of salary-cap economics and their contempt for sentimentality. I’m dumbfounded by their desire to look at the game as some sort of science experiment and reduce it to a stream of numbers. It sucks a lot of the joy and fun out of the whole enterprise—check that, it sucks out all the joy and fun.
*
Nothing gives me such satisfaction as writing what that twenty-four-year-old sportswriter would want to write of me: an obituary. The obituary page is the section of the newspaper that I turn to first (or, in an attempt to stay au courant, that I look for in my bookmarks). Hearing this, you’re likely ascribing some awful morbidity to my character. You’re not altogether wrong. I’m keenly interested in who’s still around and who’s out of circulation. To me that’s fundamental to our condition. We divide into human beings and human no longer beings.
I don’t read obituaries simply to keep a running score, though. Obits, when done well, are great reading. Those in a newsroom, physical or virtual, who write obits are obliged to bring their A games. That might not sound like much of a point, at least to highly motivated people. I’ll make a confession that won’t shock anyone who has made it this far into How to Succeed in Sportswriting Without Really Trying: I’ve mailed in game stories when little or nothing is on the line. I presume few will read it and no one will remember. Many in the trade are much laxer than me and mail in whole seasons. No one but the truly hopeless will mail in an obituary. An obit serves as much more than the last word, a summation of a life just ended. A day later, it becomes the first word that someone will happen on when wanting to look back on a consequential life, one most of the time led much better than the writer’s own.
In better days, major daily papers kept a staffer whose sole job was to prepare a roster of obits for people whose lives demand in-depth treatments. Lives that can’t be cobbled together a couple of hours before deadline. Few obituary specialists are around these days. Some died off and weren’t replaced, I suppose. Many were predeceased by news outfits’ ability or willingness to retain such a niche writer. The rest of the staff has to pick up the slack. I do so more than willingly—if someone noteworthy dies I often race to volunteer to take on the assignment. I’m sure this sounds utterly incongruous to those who’ve read all these mostly sorry episodes so far. “You mean sometimes he’ll actually try?” you’ll ask. Yes, true. I break form here but for a simple reason: longevity. I have reached the stage of my life when I know of nearly-all, have met many, and even befriended a few.
I never had a chance to meet my favourite sportswriter Red Smith. He died in ’82. (If you check his obituary, you’d see that, like me and William Faulkner, he was a September 25 birthday.) Smith wrote for a number of outfits, finally and most famously as a columnist with the New York Times, for whom he won a Pulitzer and should have won a whole shelfful. My favourite of Smith’s books is an anthology titled To Absent Friends. Usually, the giants in sportswriting comb their clippings and look for their best columns, features, or essays. To Absent Friends is a unique exception. For this book, Smith rounded up select columns that paid tribute to athletes after their passing. Given that he started out in the Midwest in his twenties, and was still working at the Times into his mid-seventies, he had a lot to draw from. A whole book of obituary columns might sound like morose slogging, but they read as heartfelt eulogies. They also read as something more. The deeper you read into the book, the more you get a sense of foreboding. With every remembrance, death’s shadow incrementally inches ever closer to the writer himself. To Absent Friends is not about their sporting lives but death itself.
I don’t have so many lives to draw from as Smith, but I’ve picked up in my obits a strange phenomenon that’s evolved—maybe it’s simple chance, maybe an algorithm encoded somewhere in my medulla oblongata. In the beginning I chronicled the lives of heroes that as a kid I worshipped from a distance. Later I wrote about those who had some proximity to. And now, too often, I bury my own.
*
Another writer hero I didn’t get a chance to meet was Mark Kram, whose stories I read by the score in Sports Illustrated, and later, Esquire. If I had ever sat down with him, I doubt I’d have told him know that his profile of Lou Nova put me first on my head and then in a hospital bed. I’d have much rather discussed the most famous of the stories in the late stages of his career: “Great Men Die Twice,” an Esquire profile of Muhammad Ali, a decade after his last fight. You could hold up many examples of a man’s greatness expiring before the man does—athletic mortality is about as clear cut as mortality itself.
Ali was the standard for this passage and Kram was the ultimate storyteller in this vein, but I’ve crossed paths with more than a few in the interim between twilight and the dead of night. Some readers have accused me of jerking their emotional chains, trucking in noxious schmaltz. I proclaim innocence or at least nolo contendere—I don’t intend to manipulate readers, just to let them know how hard it is to write about those once cheered, now mourned or soon to be.
Prior to his death from cancer in 1997, I suspect that Curt Flood died several times, first, when his career as a ballplayer was put on hold because he challenged Major League Baseball’s reserve clause; next, when the Supreme Court ruled against him; then when he realized that he had lost too much over two years on the sideline to stage a comeback; later, when baseball slammed its door on him, without a meaningful job on the staff of a team; and a little bit every time the Baseball Writers Association declined to vote him into the Hall of Fame; and every time a major league star signed a multi-million dollar contract, unaware of the sacrifices that Flood had made getting ballplayers a fair shake financially.
Flood was an accomplished player in his run with the St. Louis Cardinals—two World Series rings, a bare miss for a third. Was he a Hall of Famer? On his twelve-year body of work up until 1969, probably not, and it would matter whether you’re citing the ancient slash-line—runs, RBIs and batting average RBIs—or opting for the new-fangled wins above replacement. It doesn’t matter if you’re drunk with nostalgia or data. If he had lasted longer, racked up a 500 more hits, played until he was forty or near it, like his teammate, Lou Brock, he might have come close, might have become a borderline pick, maybe one that would get serious consideration from the Veterans Committee.
By measure of influence and righteousness, however, Flood would be not just first ballot Hall of Famer. He took on the major league baseball. He lost. He set up the players to later challenge and win.
As a kid in the late ‘60s, I watched those Cardinals on Baseball Game of the Week with Curt Gowdy Saturdays on NBC. I watched the ‘67 and ’68 World Series. I rooted against the Cardinals in both. Go Red Sox! Go Tigers! I was a fan of Curt Flood, however. He made playing centre field a beautiful thing. Again, the Venn Diagram of old school aesthetics and sabermetrics overlap: for the former, Seven Gold Gloves; for the latter, one measure ranked him as the sixth best-fielding player at any position over the course of his career and four of those ahead of him are in the Hall of Fame.
My lasting image of Curt Flood was formed not his play in those World Series, though. When his name would come up, I’d remember “The Last Angry Men,” a feature written by Richard Reeves in Esquire in 1977. Reeves wrote about men who stood alone to take on the system, who paid a price and who never let go. Flood was the centrepiece of “The Last Angry Men” and it opened with him asking Reeves: “Do you know what it means to go against the grain in this country? Do you know what it's like to be called the little black son of a bitch who tried to destroy baseball, the American Pastime?"
I had a chance to speak to Flood under circumstances that were at once forgettable and lamentable. Back in December of 1994, months after a players strike led to the cancellation of the World Series, a group of businessmen, former baseball executives and at least one economist recruited Flood for an executive position with the United Baseball League, what they were proposing as an alternative to Major League Baseball. A more competitive marketplace for ballplayers: The UBL seemed a worthy idea and the motivation was unimpeachable. Having to explain what the UBL was supposed to be tells you everything you need to know. Launching a league is no small enterprise and this proposed challenge to Major League Baseball was quixotic. You’d have to bring in a new-gen sportswriter to calculate the chances of a pitch ever be thrown in UBL-despite their good intentions, their best laid plans, and Flood’s famous name attached, the probability would clock in at some fraction of one-tenth of one percent.
Flood knew as much when I spoke to him. He tried vainly to muster enthusiasm for the UBL, so instead I leaned into his life story. I had assumed that the UBL was a swing in retaliation for being so wronged more than two decades before. Instead, he was he was the antithesis of the tragic figure so often portrayed.
"I hope I don't seem bitter," he said. "I was an angry young man, or at least the public perceived that I was going to ruin the baseball that they knew. Since my case, the opposite has been true. Since free agency, since players became eligible to move, not at will, but in a reasonable length of time, baseball has grown. Baseball never made more money, never drew more people, never has been more successful than it has been over the last twenty years or so.
"I played fifteen years in baseball. I had a wonderful life because of it. I made wonderful friends in the game. When I left the major leagues, the major leagues didn't leave me. Teammates, roommates have been my friends for thirty, going on forty years. Orlando Cepeda called me to ask me about a car. Ozzie Smith gave me a call because he was coming to town. My friends, guys like Bob Gibson or Joe Torre, are still in the game. They're more than names to me. You have to understand how much [the strike and labour disputes in 1994] hurt me. But I wouldn't do or conspire to do anything that would do harm to my friends and to something that I love as much as baseball."
I laid that out in my obituary for Curt Flood. Until the news of his death, he was vaguely remembered as, in his words, "the little black son of a bitch who tried to destroy baseball, the American Pastime." If the UBL accomplished nothing else (and really it didn’t), at least it gave him a chance to speak about something many had overlooked or not even noticed: his love of the game.
*
As I’ve mentioned, I was a Red Sox fan. That dates back to Toronto’s old Triple A team in the International League, a Red Sox affiliate for a stretch, and the Impossible Dream season in ’67. Though I didn’t start to follow the game until after Ted Williams’s retirement, he occupied a treasured place in my psychic shrine of lore. Even for a child fan of the franchise, there were two historical pillars: Babe Ruth on the mound for the team until he was dispatched to the hated Yankees for $100,000 and a curse to be named later; and Williams, the last .400 hitter, the greatest hitter in game’s history, one who would have set career records that would never be matched, were it not for his five years of service when America went to war.
I didn’t get a chance to ever talk to Ted Williams. Not a great loss, really. He made a point of expressing little other than his contempt for reporters back in his day and never truly mellowed. That wasn’t a point I made much of when I had to write his obituary in July of 2002. Though he worked with ghostwriters on a few books about hitting and fishing, he never wrote an autobiography, never told the story of his life in his own words. He was the subject of biographies, a dozen or so, and if I wanted to mail it in, I could have hit the library and culled a gallery of anecdotes. That though would have been stenography, transparently so, and not writing. On deadline of a couple of hours, I had to figure out a way to do some original reporting on a player who had retired more than four decades ago.
Bobby Doerr, the Red Sox second baseman back in Williams’s early days, had served for a stretch as the Toronto Blue Jays’ hitting coach. On one broadcast, I’d heard that he’d retired to a remote hamlet in his native Oregon, where he wiled his days away fishing. I was able to track him down by directory assistance, and call him at his home—yes, that 24-year-old sportswriter might find it hard to believe that people had listed numbers and phones in their home. After a few minutes, it was clear to me that Bobby Doerr should have been writing his friend’s tribute, not me. His bona fides: he would in time be the last living major league alum to have place against Lou Gehrig; he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, albeit thirty-six years after he played his last game in 1950.
Doerr figured Williams had often got a raw deal from the media and from fans, neither of them able to a fathom how someone who placed no value in the social graces and thus wouldn’t acknowledge their cheers, not even when he hit a home run in his final at bat at Fenway Park.
“Ted had been burned so many times by the media and he had been booed more than any of the great ballplayers. He took a lot more pride in the things that he did than the things people gave him. And what Ted did better than anyone else was hit. It gave him more pleasure than anything else in life. He was absolutely obsessed with it, and it would be what he wanted to be measured by.
“He re-invented hitting and was years ahead of his time. When everyone else was using 34-ounce bats he had 32-ounce bats made especially for him. ‘What’s the use of having all that wood if you can’t swing it,’ he’d say. If he picked up a bat, he could tell right away whether it was a quarter of an ounce too heavy or too light. He made a study of other pitchers and seemed to always know what they were going to do next. And his senses were so acute that he could pick up the seams of a ball coming out of a pitcher’s hand. He was so aware of things I saw him step out of the batter’s box to wait for a cloud to move.”
Bobby Doerr had seen Williams at work up close and appreciated him in a way that a layman couldn’t—and as it turned out, half a century later, he remained in a state of wonderment, as if he had seen not a hitter but a magician. Williams was at once Doerr’s friend and a mystery to him. Nothing that Williams ever said in self-explanation could have defined him better than that.
*
Among the subjects of memorial pieces, only one ever cost me money, that being Seattle Slew, who died the same summer as Ted Williams and would have been in his day a more co-operative if no more productive interview than the Splendid Splinter. I didn’t personalize my reminiscence, although I made sure to work in mentions of “Slew’s 1 and ¾ length victory over Run Dusty Run in the 1977 Kentucky Derby” and “Jean Cruget standing in the stirrups” without having to refer to the wire story or secondary sources. I resisted the temptation to drop “Houyhnhnm” into the copy—it was really the first thing that popped into my head upon hearing of the champion’s death, but 35 years later, there’d have been no fading in the purple of the prose. Sitting at the keyboard, memories flooded back—or at least memories of those 15 golden seconds, witnessing the aftermath of a race that I’d only really see on a replay. Likewise, I was travelling back to a time when I thought I might never print a solitary word about sports.
A few years later another obit transported me back in time when I thought that I might never print another word about sports—when I feared I might not live to print another word. I had known John Ferguson had been sick for at least a couple of years and we talked a couple of times on the phone over that stretch. He had never expressed any pessimism or fear, and it was hard for me to imagine cancer cells taking him down at sixty-eight. I didn’t work into my tribute to Ferguson the fact that he had saved me from, at best, a charge of vagrancy and a cot in a cell, and, at worst, hypothermia in Norway. I went a straighter route to deliver the same message—Ferguson was far from the stereotype.
I wrote, “These days the role Ferguson perfected goes by many names: policeman, enforcer, goon. For Ferguson, "goon" might have been a verb, but not a noun. His face, all malevolence and sangfroid, features that would chill a mug shot photographer, tipped you to his game but not the man. He was more than a noble savage.”
I then leaned into the fact that at a micro- and macro- level, he saw much that others in the game missed. As a scout, Ferguson had an uncanny eye for skills and skating ability that he did not possess and launched the career of dozens of stars who emerged from under the radar. As an executive, he understood that Europe, and Scandinavia in particular, was rich in talent, long before it became a destination for his peers. And finally, cutting closest to home, I made note of how he could be a ruthless warrior in the arena but a good friend away from it. I didn’t cite the loan of his sweats and his covering the cost of my room for a night, but I did give an account that was of the same piece: How he resigned from the Ottawa Senators management staff after the franchise’s shaky finances led ownership to cut loose staffers, including the secretary who worked for him.
I wrote, “After Ferguson retired, hundreds of tough guys have made their way into the NHL, none better, none smarter and none more principled in hockey's own way.”
*
Over time I’ve become less reluctant to include myself more directly in these tributes, as was the case in 2020 with the death of Tony Fernandez. I included how I had first met him—it wasn’t at the Blue Jays fantasy camp, as you might have guessed. Actually, on Epy Guerrero’s diamond, Fernandez and I were renewing our acquaintance from a couple of years before. We first chatted in an interview in the clubhouse of los Tigres de Licey in Santo Domingo after a Dominican winter league game in 1985. We settled into a routine—I asked questions in my pidgin Spanish, and he’d answer in English as best he could. We talked about the standard-issue baseball stuff: his youth; his signing with the Blue Jays; his minor-league apprenticeship; his injuries; his goals for the future. At the end of the interview, I thanked him. It seemed the story of the night was ending. It was, in fact, just beginning.
By the time I left Estadio Quisqueya, it was approaching midnight. I was enough of a neophyte and optimist, I assumed that I could stand on the street easily hail a taxi. That wasn’t how it played out. No taxis passed by for half an hour, probably no more than a dozen cars in all. I had no idea how to get back to my hotel and crisis loomed. The neighbourhood was pretty sketchy.
At that point, an old wreck with a perforated muffler pulled up in front of me and I thought I was about to ask a total stranger for a ride—I don’t recommend it anywhere but certainly not in Santo Domingo after midnight—I realized that the car was being driven by Fernandez. He offered me a ride back to the hotel and maybe saved my life. The idea of a pro athlete offering kindness to a stranger is not without precedent, but still, he revealed himself through deed and not just prayerful word.
On the ride, he talked more openly about what weighed on his mind—his mother was ill, terminally as it turned out, with kidney and liver disease. She would die less than three months later. “I am playing in Toronto but my head and my heart are somewhere else,” he said. His siblings had assured him that, while he was in Toronto, they would make sure that she went to the doctor regularly and received treatment, but she refused. She died just weeks after we talked. Thirty-five years later, after being on dialysis for years and while waiting for a kidney transplant, Tony Fernandez died at age fifty-seven. On getting the news, I didn’t think of any magic he flashed on the field, but rather that conversation with a sad and pre-occupied twenty-three-year-old who drove me through the streets of Santo Domingo. I had reached out to Fernandez a few times after he retired, like I had Luther Bedford, but I never managed to connect with him.
*
Tony Fernandez and Luther Bedford were class acts whom I met through work, but it was hardest to process the death of someone I had first read in the journalism-school library, and later, had the occasional honor to work beside, Red Fisher, columnist for the Montreal Gazette. Just like I had called Tony Fernandez and Bedford, I had tried to contact Red after his retirement—he had written his column and had taken his seat in the press box until the age of eighty-five. Just like Fernandez and Bedford, Red never did call back.
I couldn’t take it personally. After he retired from covering the Montreal Canadiens beat, he never even glanced back. Though the arena was always open to him, he never dropped by to relive old times, nor to take a victory lap. Many sent him invitations to events, and from what I heard, he accepted none of them. He cut off himself almost utterly. He only ever surfaced when he’d file a story to the Gazette, a poetic, heartfelt obit for a past great that he had written about as a young man, maybe one he considered a friend, another one he had outlived.
I did meet Red for coffee in Montreal the summer before he retired. I wanted to talk to him for a book I was writing about hockey in the 1960s and suggested that we could do it over lunch. I’d have sprung for a five-star place, but I thought he’d opt for a deli. Red agreed to meet, but he told me to swing by the sports department at the Gazette and bring the coffees. It struck me as odd for someone who was spending so much time in the arena, mornings for practice, nights for games, and so much time on the road, a week or more at a time, mostly on his own. I couldn’t understand why he came into the office when he could have handled his summer workload easily from his home or, like so many in the business, from a cottage on a lake. Given all the overtime he’d logged over the course of the season—and decades—I figured he would have had the entire summer off.
The Gazette newsroom was practically vacant and Red was reading out-of-town papers spread on his desk when I arrived. It looked like he was killing time and he seemed to be happy enough to kill it with me. After a small bit of catching up, I got down to business. I mined his memory for stories of bygone days for my book, probably an hour or so. After he filled my notebook with a stream of anecdotes, we talked the future—the business’, which we agreed was bleak, and his, which he was non-committal about. I wasn’t prying about his private life, but he volunteered a story that took my breath away, one that made me re-examine everything.
Red told me that, one day a few years before, his wife Tillie had left the house on an errand and then come home. Nothing of note, nothing out of the ordinary. Yet, she never left the house again. She never told him what had happened. No reason given. No clues. As much as I knew Red, how much did I know him not to have known this? How much can any of us know anyone else, even those we’re closest to?
I later found out Red came into the office on days when one of his kids could come over to cover for him for a few hours. His job as a sportswriter, even into his 80s, was relief if not escape from his role as Tillie’s caregiver. When he retired from the Gazette, he spent the following six years full-time with his wife, until her death. Red died the following week at age ninety-one.
*
I made a point of alerting the young hotshot every time an old-sportswriter, friend of mine or not, passed away. I let him know about Red Fisher’s death but also how Red spent the last years of his life. I wanted to take a shot at the kid for being tone-deaf to the point of indecency, although it was more for my grim amusement rather than his censure. I doubt it registered at all. No, the kid probably logged each death into his actuarial tables, calculating the demographic shift in the Baseball Writers Association of America, projecting a date for the death of the last veteran to ever lug a typewriter into the press box. The greatest test for his objectivity probably came every time I took a sick day.
A footnote about the other Red: I’m not sure it’s irony or symmetry but Red Smith’s To Absent Friends was published posthumously. He died just weeks after he had finished his collection’s foreword. The best available obituary of Red Smith could be read between the lines on every page.
