Joe Tait took comfort in Penelope the Cat and fast friend Terry Pluto

Terry Pluto/cleveland.com

Joe Tait and Terry Pluto provide many shining examples for sports broadcasters and sports columnists. Their voices, whether over the airways or on newsprint, ring loud and clear and true. But as good as their work could be in Tait’s case and continues to be in Pluto’s, it pales compared to their picture and model of what a friendship looks like.

Joe Tait, 83, died Wednesday, and part of Terry Pluto must have died, too.

Journalists are trained to observe, and for a number of years I had a seat in the proximity of their friendship, not a part of it, mind you, but a seat that allows me to bear witness to its power. If you want Pluto’s perspective, there are many examples to be found and I commend them to you, beginning with his Sunday (March 7, 2021) column in The Plain Dealer and on Cleveland.com and his farewell Thursday (March 11, 2021).

When I was the Akron Beacon Journal sports columnist during the glory years of the Mark Price-Brad Dougherty-Larry Nance Cleveland Cavaliers coached by Lenny Wilkens, I felt like the caboose on a Tait-Pluto train bound for glory. Perhaps the better metaphor would be third-wheel but Joe loved trains and so caboose it is. In any case, I made myself feel awkward, though they never did, and never tried to insinuate myself into their endless conversations, much less their abiding friendship. Instead, I listened.

Tait and Pluto informed each other both personally and professionally. Tait convinced Pluto of the value of treating Cavalier fans well and taking the time to thank them for an interest in their own work, and offered Pluto an example of the value of staying put when you have found your place of comfort and credibility. Tait, a rags-to-riches story, became the Cavaliers’ radio voice in their first year (1971) and remained so until 2011, with the exception of a couple of years when the dumbest owner in sports, Ted Stepien, fired him. The fans demanded that he return and Stepien leave and got their way.

Pluto listened to Tait more closely and better than I was able to in our too few and too brief conversations over pre-game meals in the Cavs’ media room. Tate worked for the team and became, in many ways its face as well as its voice. Players and coaches came and went, but Joe Tait, thankfully, remained. He was steadfast and brilliant, and when criticism was demanded he could deal it out with a deft hand and velvet phrase.

He reminded me of Bill King, a legendary sportscaster in Northern California, who was the voice of the Warriors, among other teams, when I moved to Sacramento during the early 1960s. The Warriors had just come from Philadelphia to San Francisco and many a night I lay awake in this strange, new place in my life and found both comfort and excitement from the voice of Bill King. He soothed a troubled Oklahoma boy’s soul.

Joe Tait did that for Cavaliers’ fans. He carried them through the low years that he claimed to have loved because a team of losers on the court bonded and became a family of friends off of it. And he lifted them to the heights during the 1976 Miracle of Richfield season and the glory years of the late 1980s and early 1990s when Cleveland could beat anyone and everyone except this guy named Michael from Chicago.

Through much of it, Pluto, who first met Tait when Pluto was writing about Cleveland baseball for The Plain Dealer, forged a bond that included side trips when they were on the road, Pluto the Beacon Journal Cavs writer, and Tait the voice and literal insider. They stopped to eat in diners, not to mention at railroad tracks where Tait would have stopped to watch the passing trains even if the law had not required it. I don’t recall ever being invited to accompany them on one of their side trips, but I traveled with the team only during the postseason so there would have been limited opportunities.

It was just as well that I was never able to invade their space or wanted to do so. I was a colleague, not a friend, but sometimes it was difficult not to envy their relationship. I had not had one similar to it since I was a kid growing up in a small town in Oklahoma. When those rare—at least for me—bonds were formed, we shared a kind of closeness that seemed so natural with our shared teams that I have found it difficult to replicate it in adulthood. Pluto wrote that he and Joe were “the kind of friends who could say almost anything to each other.” Together, they even wrote the 2011 book, It’s Been a Real Ball.

When Joe Tait went into hospice care, Pluto was there. He listened as Joe, an agnostic, talked about his curiosity concerning what happens after death and his lack of fear of the moment he knew was coming. Tait was suffering from failing kidneys, a cancerous tumor on his liver, and blood clots in his legs. Joe probably wouldn’t mind me describing his body as a train wreck. “I’ve been through a lot,” he told Pluto. Then he told Pluto a story that proved even to the end Joe Tait had not lost his sense of humor.

“In 2011,” he reminded Pluto, “I had an aortic value replacement. They put in a cow valve . . . it keeps telling me, ‘Eat More Chicken.’” This reminded me of a story that Tait had told me in 1993 when the Cavs were in Chicago and losing to the Bulls yet again. That hurt. Tate had to get away from it. He needed distance. So he climbed into his car and drove to Iowa, where his son was attending college. When he stopped for gas in Iowa City, an attendant looked at Tait’s team lapel pin and asked: “What’s a Cav?”

“It’s a baby cow,” Tait said.

The attendant didn’t even smile. “I thought it was spelled ‘l-f’,” he said.

Tait did smile. “I knew I had gone far enough,” he said.

And now, Joe Tait’s journey is ended. He came a long way in his career and he took the rest of us with him those many, many nights when we couldn’t see his baby—the Cavs—but could feel the love of them in the sound of the great Joe Tait’s voice.

“It’s been a long run,” he told Pluto, who got to ride shotgun almost all the way.