Even Players Respected Him

Jim was all heart and no ego. I was forever amazed when I first started meeting him. You know how players all run away from us now. If Jim was standing by the batting cage or the golf tee, players would always come over and say hello to him. At first, I thought it was a West Cost thing--these athletes who grew up reading him every day. But then I saw it happen on the East Coast. It was a no-coast thing. He was a treasure, and the athletes knew it.

I always felt Jim did the hardest thing to do in sportswriting, and that’s to be funny. He was funny, but he was never mean. I remember talking to players and managers he’d lampooned and they’d laugh along. They enjoyed it. The easiest thing now is to just cut a guy’s head off. Jim never did that, because it was too easy.

I remember sitting next to Jim at a big fight in Las Vegas. His computer didn’t work, he didn’t know how he was going to send his story, he was feeling lousy. I remember thinking, “My God, how is he going to write?”

I felt I wrote a pretty decent column that night. Jim was sweating bullets, running back and forth from press row to the press room. I was pretty proud of what I had written and the next day I was in L.A. to cover a ballgame, so I picked up The Times to read Jim. After three paragraphs, I put it down. I couldn’t take it anymore. With 48 things going wrong, he writes something so good I had to stop after three paragraphs--”That’s it, I can’t handle this.”

He just embarrassed us all because he had that gift. And he was as gifted out of the press box as he was on deadline. For the younger guys in the business, we wanted to be in awe of him, but he wouldn’t let us. Once he had us over for a Super Bowl party in L.A. He had his Pulitzer Prize there, all the letters from the White House and the Hall of Fame were on the wall. And here’s Jim, asking us if we wanted peanuts or potato chips. There were no airs about him at all. He was a sweetheart.

In tomorrow’s Times, they ought to run a big white space on the front page of the sports page. Because there’s a vacuum. There’s a big hole they will never be able to fill.