[Home Game, Kingston Life magazine, September 2020]
In a piece he wrote in The Whig last summer about a local baseball legend (Big Joe Devine), sportswriter Patrick Kennedy coined a phrase to describe Devine’s Bunyanesque dimensions – even as a 12-year-old. To make the point that the kid had already reached adult weight, the writer didn’t just cite a number, he said that Devine “tipped the Toledos” at 200-plus pounds.
Many things can trigger a column. That phrase – which seemed to capture in one go both the writer and his subject — triggered this one.
Not every reader will get the reference to Toledo, the company that started making weigh scales in 1901. But I sure did. I got thinking about the affection over the years that Kennedy has showered on his chosen profile subjects, the playfully stylized and often witty writing, and the deep knowledge of sports (especially baseball, which he played at a fairly high level) that informs it all. Patrick is old school, and I mean that as a compliment. His grin seems to conjure old black and white movies, the pop of glass flashbulbs and brown fedoras with the word “Press” stuck in the hatband.
With the world of athletics mired in a virus-induced hiatus, I thought I would dwell on the ink-stained wretches who cover that world. Not just the semi-retired Patrick Kennedy, my colleague at the aforementioned newspaper back in the 1980s, but other high practitioners of the art – such as Cathal Kelly in The Globe and Mail and others who have come and gone.
Patrick Kennedy has a list of scribes he admired and devoured back in the day, and it’s a revealing one, for it includes some heavyweights: Trent Frayne (whom he interviewed here in Kingston), Grantland Rice, Red Smith, Jimmy Breslin, and, maybe his favorite, Milt Dunnell. Patrick remembered the latter writing of George Chuvalo (after Muhammed Ali had pummeled him in their first bout in 1966) that the Canadian boxer’s face “looked like a bucket of golf balls.” The image stuck and it remains in Kennedy’s 67-year-old cranium.
Over a beer in my backyard a hockey stick distance apart, he talked about sportswriting. Not one to toot his own horn, he had earlier declined my invitation to chat about the art (he quoted Yogi Berra’s line, “Include me out”) but then changed his mind when he realized he wasn’t the sole subject of my column but part of a wider consideration.
“I was born to do something with words,” Kennedy told me. “I like to make others feel good.” He still writes profiles, usually sports-related, every two weeks in The Whig and if someone on the street says, “I liked your story . . .,” he’ll reply, “Oh you’re the one.”
I feel an affinity for Patrick Kennedy but maybe it’s to be expected. He is the youngest of seven in a mostly sports-mad Irish-Catholic family lightly peppered with priests and nuns; I’m the oldest of eight in a mostly sports-mad Irish-Catholic family likewise lightly peppered. He has a tip for aspiring sportswriters: “You have to get past the clichés. Avoid flattery. The athlete doesn’t need to be reminded he’s having a good year. He knows he’s having a good year.” Ask your subject about childhood and blood lines, Kennedy advises. That’s how to get a person talking. And do many interviews, with many sources. “The nugget might come,” Kennedy says, “in that last interview.”
Like all small town reporters, Kennedy is a generalist – one who can make sense of a game, write features and obits or cover the news. Not many reporters get hung in effigy for doing the job but Kennedy was. Early on in his 30 years at The Whig, in 1988, he was sent out to cover the Westport winter carnival, which turned wild – with a near deadly bar fight that featured a broken beer bottle as weapon and a police cruiser’s window kicked in. Pat’s lead read, “One might say that the good news about this year’s Westport winter carnival is that it’ll be 12 months before the next one.” The villagers were not amused. But the editor, the late Neil Reynolds, who hailed from Westport, issued a rare compliment to one of his staff writers.
In a summer column in The Globe, Cathal Kelly talked about what it’s like being a sportswriter. “My working life ended 13 years ago when I began writing sports,” he began. “Because while sportswriting is a job, it isn’t work.” He then tempered that statement, saying that while the job is mostly fun and his perennial ringside seats are hugely envied, it’s not easy writing well and bravely to deadline. Imagine a high-wire act, with no safety net and a long plummet to the ground after a misstep. I hope Kelly doesn’t read the on-line comments, for readers can be cruel.
It seems, though, that he was born to the task. In his lively memoir, Boy Wonders, Kelly describes getting into an argument with his younger brother, a Wayne Gretzky fan, on why 215 points in one season is not so impressive after all. In that moment, he first realized that he was “totally full of shit. I wouldn’t become a newspaper columnist for another quarter-century but that may have been where the instinct was discovered. Twelve years old and arguing the inarguable.”
In his novel, The Sportswriter, the acclaimed American writer Richard Ford (the Pulitzer, the PEN/Faulkner, etc.) presents his protagonist, Frank Bascombe, a failed fiction writer who toils for a sports magazine. Ford’s character disses sports (“a good distraction from life at its dreariest”) and sportswriters (“cynics looking only for false drama in the germs of human defeat.”) Hockey, meanwhile, is “an uninteresting game played by Canadians.” Bascombe would write short fiction if he could — but he can’t. “It seems enough,” he says, “to go out to the park . . . get the sun on my face while somewhere nearby I hear the hiss and pop of ball on glove leather. That may be a sportswriter’s dream life.”
To which I say, what’s wrong with that? On the other hand, sports and sportswriting don’t seem to matter much these days. Some professional athletes balked at rushing back into play while the virus, racism and inequality all wreaked havoc. Some sportswriters (Pat Kennedy among them) were saying that to play games now is both disrespectful and reckless, and they were right.
Recently I plucked from my shelf an unread classic from 1982, How Life Imitates the World Series, by Thomas Boswell — a writer with a curious mind, a knack for metaphor, and a fearlessness rooted in a keen understanding of a complex game. That last quality, the gutsiness, is the one that most shines through. William Nack, who wrote for Sports Illustrated about Thoroughbred racing, had the same courage and willingness to declare his vulnerability. The death of Secretariat brought him to tears, and his sublime description of that horse’s passing brought me to the same state.
Great writers, whether they write about sports or forensic accounting or astrophysics, leave me breathless. The thing about sportswriters is that they write to punishing deadlines (“Please God,” Kelly prays in the press box, “No overtime!”) and as someone who left a daily newspaper for a bimonthly magazine and from there to books – in pursuit of ever more distant deadlines – I do not know how sportswriters, especially daily newspaper columnists, do it.
This I do know. Great writers are necessarily great readers. I don’t fully understand the process but when you read at a high level, and you’re lucky, the craft enters your bloodstream and you’re able, under duress, to conjure the telling image. Holy tip the Toledos!