And so here we are.
It could just as easily be late December 1987, a few days after Christmas. I sit at my desk in the new house in Loveland, snow outside, swirling and dancing. I try to make some words move. “I’m the new guy . . .’’
On Friday, I sat behind the same desk, in the same suburban town, still attending to the words. “And so . . .’’ Given a little more time, I just might figure out this sports writing thing. It’s only been 35 years.
A great thing about Cincinnati and Cincinnatians is the reverence we have for the verities. Family, friends, community. Practicality and common sense. And sports. It’s no wonder the Cincinnati Reds are the oldest professional baseball team or that Elder guys still marry Seton girls or that you can be 30 miles from Loveland but never more than a few minutes from a Skyline.
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It’s just who we are. It is, thankfully, who I’ve become. All this time and I’m almost a local.
We could have left, my family and I. Chicago called. Denver. Los Angeles offered, twice. I visited those places. I owed myself that. I returned wondering what the big deal was. Ego might have nudged me to those bigger burgs. Ultimately, saying I worked for the Los Angeles Times was not worth giving up what I had here. People who’ve lived in this area their whole lives don’t understand how good they have it.
No traffic, affordable housing, good places to raise children. The verities.
The pro sports teams?
Um, ah, well . . .
Let’s just say I ran out of synonyms for the word “lousy.’’ In 1995.
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I amused myself (and protected my sanity) by writing about people and not necessarily the games they played. It was easy to find good people. A few appeared last week in these pages.
I was rarely short of inspiration. Boomer Esiason, playing one last, spectacular stretch of games here, so his young son Gunnar might remember his dad was a football player. Sean Casey, the nicest of the nice, sobbing uncontrollably that night in 1999, when the Reds lost Game 163 to the New York Mets.
Reggie Williams, courage made flesh.
These were ordinary people doing extraordinary things. So uplifting, in the big picture.
And yet, I was never a Sports Guy. Not in the capital-letters sense. “I get to watch games for free and eat free food in the press box!’’ No. I relished what I did, never considered it actually working, but the stories I loved had nothing to do with games.
George “Sugar’’ Costner was a very successful middleweight prizefighter in the 1950s, when too many hits to the eyes blinded him completely and permanently. That’s when he earned a four-year degree from Cleveland State and spent 30 years working for the state of Ohio, until he passed peacefully in his Walnut Hills apartment. No game story was ever that good.
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In the spring of 1988, Paul Brown gave me a tour of Spinney Field. Back in the day, Spinney was where the Bengals practiced. It was also where the CIA interrogated spies on weekends. Had to be. The Great Man showed me the dressing room filled with rusted, wire-mesh lockers, wet, moldy indoor-outdoor carpeting and one ugly, 20-inch television bolted to the back wall. PB hated the TV.
“Television,’’ he suggested, “never helped anyone win a football game.’’
A body had to look away sometimes. That’s where my family came in. And you. You came in. If you hadn’t been so welcoming of my columns about my family, I wouldn’t have continued to write them. They gave me joy. Your appreciation of them gave me more.
The trips to North Carolina forged for me a bond with my fragile and unaware 14-year-old son, who is now 36. Kelly is getting married this weekend. We’re going to the mountains in September. A life with my daughter has taught me beyond everything. Jillian is 32 now, working two jobs and living completely independently in an apartment she shares with her husband, the estimable Ryan Mavriplis. They celebrated their seventh wedding anniversary last week.
My wife Kerry has been the rock behind all our good. I dreamed. She worked.
I relished these stories. I’m grateful you did as well. And that The Enquirer was OK with me writing them. Part of my job was to let readers know who I was. The opinions tasted better that way. You knew where I was coming from, even if you didn’t agree.
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I don’t mind leaving the column. I’m 64. It’s time. Time for someone else to inflict their notions on you. Time for me to discover what’s left of this wonderful life. Time for me to close the laptop, before I go all Irish-weepy on you. I am practiced at the art of melancholia.
Part of me still thinks this is all just a chapter in an unpublished novel. Most of me knows novels are novels for a reason.
William Faulkner, novelist, wrote these words. My friend Skip Prosser used them often:
“Sometimes, you have to say goodbye to the things you know, and hello to the things you don’t.’’ And so, here we are.
Thank you. It has been quite a ride, hasn’t it?
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