The end of one year and the beginning of another invariably brings helpful if sad lists of those who have perished. America 2020 felt as if a pervasive, unremitting, darker-than-usual cloud hung over it. The coronavirus pandemic kept death in the headlines, the number of its dead rising relentlessly into the hundreds of thousands in this country and into the millions worldwide. It has been saddening, frightening, and numbing.
As many lives as COVID-19 claimed, others came to a more common conclusion. And even though these deaths also caused great grief, especially for family and friends, they did not always feel as unnatural. Perhaps they occurred sooner than we wanted but they were not the result of virus that a year ago at this time we did not know existed.
In less dark times, I like to search the various lists for those I knew personally, those I knew professionally—often personal to me—those I knew of, even those I did not know but wish I had when informed of them and having had a chance to learn about them. Let me share two obituary vignettes from the world of sports about people I admired.
Gale Sayers was just enough older than me and so wildly more talented at football, the game we shared, he a star of stars, me a writer of sports, that it seemed as if I had always known the Pro Football Hall of Famer. And, in a way, I had. Though he grew up in Omaha, Nebraska where he played at Central High School, Sayers was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1943, a city that became one stop in a peripatetic journalism career that for a time was focused on the Big Eight conference. That’s where Sayers made his name and earned a nickname that was so perfect—The Kansas Comet—it stuck.
The most beautiful runner of a football that I ever saw, Sayers All-America career at the University of Kansas included an upset of the 1964 Oklahoma Sooners, the team I grew up loving as a small-town boy in Northeastern Oklahoma. Kansas scored on the first and last plays of the game, Sayers taking the opening kickoff 93 yards but, oddly, was not in the game for the final touchdown and 2-point conversion. For years there had been confusion concerning why Sayers was not on the field. Rick Plumlee, a former colleague of mine at the Wichita Eagle, solved the mystery in a story that the Tulsa World reprinted 25 years later. Even the KU game program had gotten it wrong.
KU’s quarterback, Bobby Skahan, and others thought Sayers had been ejected, with Oklahoma’s Bill Hill, after a “brouhaha” with 15 seconds to play. “No, no,” Jack Mitchell, who had been KU coach in ’64, told Plumlee. “Never. Absolutely not. Gale wasn’t kicked out. Hell, he was worn out.” Sayers explained that after the kickoff, he had felt “winded the whole game,” which, along with the Sayers-focused OU defense, might explain why Gale had gained only 36 yards on 13 carries to go with four receptions for 58 yards.
When he went to the sidelines after the fight, Sayers told Plumlee, “I was exhausted. Mitchell asked me, ‘Gale, can you go back in?’ I told him, no, I was worn out.” It may have been the only time Sayers allowed himself to feel that way. He fought back from injuries to first his right knee and then his left that shortened his National Football League career to seven seasons that were nonetheless so spectacular that he became the youngest player, at 34, ever admitted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Despite playing only seven injury-marred seasons, Sayers was named to both the NFL’s 75th and 100th-year Anniversary teams. He may be best remembered, however, for his love and support for teammate/roommate Brian Piccolo during Piccolo’s struggle with and death from cancer. Sayers wrote the Piccolo story in his 1970 autobiography, I Am Third. The movie Brian’s Song (1971) was adapted from the book, as well as a remake.
In his abbreviated career Sayers put together unforgettable if one-day-broken records. In my eyes, he will always hold the record for being the best teammate a person could have. When George Halas, his coach, introduced Sayers for Hall of Fame induction, he spoke movingly about Sayers’s “greatest performance.” It occurred at a dinner where the New York football writers honored Sayers with its Most Courageous Player award for returning from his first knee injury to lead the NFL in rushing in 1969 with a 1,000-yard season. “When Gale was presented the trophy,” Halas told the crowd in Canton, Ohio, “he said, ‘tonight this trophy is mine, tomorrow it will be Brian’s.’ And the next day he gave the trophy to Brian Piccolo, his friend.” My throat gets impossibly tight and tears try to fight their way out of my eyes, and sometimes succeed, each time I think of that.
Don Shula, another Hall of Famer for his career as a coach (not to mention as messenger guard for Paul Brown, a coach so great that a team—sometimes embarrassingly—bears his name) may not have been as lovable as Gale Sayers, but I can tell you I loved that gruff-son-of-a-gun for the important role he played in my life. And he didn’t even know—and no doubt would not care. I was a writer, second string.
When I joined the Miami Herald to compete for the second-string columnist job—a position I was unable to earn—among my several duties was to back up Miami Dolphins beat writer Gary Long. When Gary was off, I was on. Well, at least I showed up. There was at least one occasion when that proved a success and I owe that to Don Shula.
Training camps can be a challenge to cover with players coming to win jobs (know how they felt) and going because they were not good enough to do so (know how they felt). I had the idea that I would write an in-depth narrative about final cut-down day—the day players dread and try to hide from the Turk who comes to them and delivers the most fateful message a player can hear: Coach Shula wants to see you. Bring your playbook.
The meeting is a formality. The message had already been delivered: Bring your playbook. No one staying with the team is asked to bring their playbook to a cutdown day meeting. I trailed players. I talked with The Turk. I sat with Don Shula. The carpet in his office, I noticed (how sharp am I?), was blood red. I parlayed that image (and I hope a few other pieces of the story) into a Green Eyeshade Award that honors the best stories/writing in a large hunk of the Southeast United States. It got some notice.
That later provided me opportunities with other Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Jim Batten, my other hero who died too soon, noticed. His office was floors above the Herald newsroom. He ran Knight-Ridder. He gave second-chances that Shula couldn’t give.
