Wiley’s Work Ethic Elevated an Entire Field

Ralph Wiley dedicated his adult life to this art, science and nemesis that we call writing, fully aware that he would never reach perfection. Well, damn if he didn’t get close.

This is how he went out, with a lead sentence to his final column that was so good it proved to be his epitaph: “All a man’s got is the integrity of his work.”

It was widely quoted in the days after Wiley had died of a heart attack June 13, then was printed on the front of the program for his memorial service last weekend.

We did not gather to celebrate the quality of his work, we gathered to celebrate the man who produced it. Even so, each time his sentences and passages were read and the words flowed down across the rows at the National Presbyterian church in Washington D.C., it reminded us of how magical he could be with a pen or keyboard.

Eventually, it became impossible to separate the man from his work. Oh, we heard about Ralph Wiley the man. Much of it was new to me. So often, as the Rev. Sterling Morse told us, we can know the vehicle but not the kinetic force that moves it.

I learned, that day, of Wiley’s passion for cinema, which rivaled or even surpassed his love of sports. I heard about his days at Knoxville College in the early ‘70s, when his buddies called him “Sly Wiley” and he walked around in multicolored platform shoes. Most of all, I learned about his commitment to being the finest parent possible, which we saw manifested in his incredibly poised son, Cole.

Even so, the topic kept coming back to Wiley’s work, to the skill that took him from copy boy to columnist at the Oakland Tribune, to Sports Illustrated, the skill that produced eight books, the skill he displayed over the last 3 1/2 years on espn.com.

Perhaps a job doesn’t define who we are, but the way we do it sure does.

To call him a sportswriter would at first seem to diminish the complexity of this well-read man, who was so educated and so passionate, who loved to debate and attack society’s ills, racism in particular.

But to call him a sportswriter elevated all of his peers, because he brought so much dignity to the trade. So we went there, because of him. You could argue that most of us got to where we are because of him.

He was one of the first African American sports columnists at a major metropolitan newspaper. He opened the door, and if he hadn’t been so good it might have shut behind him. That’s why people such as David Aldridge of ESPN, Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Roy S. Johnson of Sports Illustrated and Stephen A. Smith of the Philadelphia Inquirer felt they had to be there.

Ralph also was one of the first sportswriters to cross the divide into television. He helped make it possible for Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser to take their arguments from the Washington Post offices to ESPN. He made it possible for people to get paid to sit in front of a camera and talk about a man hitting a costumed sausage mascot with a baseball bat. Thank you, Ralph.

John Thompson, the former Georgetown basketball coach, looked around at the gathering of sportswriters -- “All the guys I cursed out,” he said proudly -- and beamed at the display of brotherhood.

I looked at Thompson in the back of the church and thought about the piece Ralph wrote on him a year ago that perfectly captured the hope and hatred Thompson’s Georgetown teams inspired in the 1980s. It reminded me that no sports figures, not even the 6-foot-10 Thompson, would seem as large without sportswriters to build the myths and create the villains.

So what good did a man like Ralph do to use this talent in the sports section, the so-called toy section of journalism? Plenty.

Sad as it may be, most of America’s exposure to successful black people comes through sports and entertainment. That’s where Ralph did his shouting, and maybe, he figured, if he was loud enough the people could hear him in the buildings next door.

During the eulogy, Morse quoted from a note Ralph had written to him while signing a copy of Ralph’s book, “Dark Witness,” in 1997.

“Remember,” Ralph wrote, “all one can do is be true to one’s craft; everything else is fleeting, changeable; only by being the best craftsman one can be, be it as a minister, a writer, a deliverer of goods and services, it is only by the honest day-to-day application of effort in the craft itself that one achieves self-respect.”

That’s a quote worth hanging on a wall, and it was just a little thought written to a friend on the inside of a paperback. But Ralph was so good at what he did, his talent infused everything else.

That was his message. Don’t work at the expense of the rest of your life, let the rest of your life profit from your work. Achieve excellence in your field and you will achieve satisfaction. Keep work in its place, but also recognize that sometimes, as he once wrote, work comes before love.

He always had 100 things going on. The last time I saw him, in the United terminal at LAX in February, Ralph made a couple of deals on his cellphone while we waited for our plane.

Spike Lee, with whom Ralph collaborated on several projects and had another going at the time of his death, relayed Ralph’s last words to him, in a phone conversation the morning of Ralph’s death: “Spike, do good work.”

Do good work. And see the good that work can do.

J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.