Evans “Buddy” King
I have mentioned several times before that I am a frustrated sportswriter. I learned to read from my father’s copies of Sports Illustrated when I was six years old.
The first book I remember reading from cover to cover was “Pennant Race” by Jim Brosnan. I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade and asked my Dad to order it for me after it had been excerpted in SI.
Pennant Race was an early baseball journal, and, along with Brosnan’s earlier work “The Long Season,” were the first “kiss and tell” sports diaries. Brosnan was a relief pitcher with the Cincinnati Reds and his second book was a rather “salty” account of his life in the bullpen of the 1961 Reds.
Thankfully, the excerpt in SI was heavily edited. Even more thankfully, my father gave me the book when it arrived without reading it first. If he had, it might have changed the course of my life.
My love of sports might not have developed, at least as quickly or as intensely as it did. My dad would not have thought Brosnan’s language was what a 2nd grader needed to be reading.
During this period, I spent many summer nights at my aunt’s house on Junkin Street. She lived in that house for many years, caring for my grandmother, and I think my parents thought I would be a nice diversion from my aunt’s caregiver duties, dealing with her mother’s struggles with Alzheimer’s.
Or maybe my folks just enjoyed the solitude of having me across town. Regardless, my aunt enjoyed my visits, even helping me with my reading one summer by having me read Pennant Race out loud to her.
Even at age seven or eight, I was clever enough to change a lot of four letter words to milder versions, less the book be ripped from my innocent hands.
A few of them were not even words that I was familiar with, but I had good instincts and developed excellent censorship skills, unbeknownst to the adults around me.
By current standards, Brosnan’s books were tame. He offered insight to what happened in the locker room and on the road with a bunch of young professional athletes, but he spared sordid details and did not write with the bitterness and hero-destroying style of Jim Bouton, who introduced the harsher realities of Major League Baseball to sports journalism a few years later in “Ball Four.”
So I fell in love with baseball from reading about Mr. Brosnan’s travels and travails in MLB of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.
My love of the world of fun and games was further enhanced by the weekly deliveries of Sports Illustrated seasonal collections of the works of the best sports writer who have ever lived—Dan Jenkins (whose life I wanted to live), Tex Maule, Walter Leggett, Ron Fimrite, Frank Deford, etc. They were award winning journalists and accepted literary figures, notwithstanding that their medium was the world of diamonds and gridirons and courts and that they lacked the edge and skepticism of modern reporters.
I wanted nothing more as a child than to eventually live in Chicago or New York and be assigned on a weekly basis to fly around the country to cover the events in Yankee Stadium and Dodger Stadium, the goings on in South Bend and Tuscaloosa, the meanderings across the gorgeous green of Augusta.
Life could not have gotten better than where these dreams led me in my mind.
Alas, most of us don’t get to live out our dreams, at least not to the full extent of the fanciful imagination of an 8-year-old kid. But now I have an occasional opportunity in this space to comment on the world of sports. Better late than never.
I am glad that my dreams of the beauty and challenges and virtues of sports were influenced by writers and reporters of that simpler time.
What if I had grown up in the current era of investigative journalism, where every journalist looks for a conspiracy behind every door, where no icon is beyond attack, where every writer thinks he or she is just one great scoop away from the Pulitzer?
What would have happened to my love of games? Most will probably say I would be better off, less naive, more informed, not subject to false hero worship. It is right and good that evil is detected, that wrong is ousted.
But another way of looking at it—my way—is that I would have been more cynical, jaded, suspicious and judgmental. I would not have had my escape from the stark realities of illness and death of family and friends, from the daily grind of making a living, from the occasional tedium of just getting by, from a world in turmoil and out of control.
It was often said about the late, great Howard Cosell, New York lawyer turned sports commentator, that he made the world of fun and games sound like the trials of Nazi war criminals.
I preferred his sidekick Don Meredith, famous for saying after an “almost” in a Monday night football game, “if if’s and but’s were candy and nuts it would be Christmas every day”. Give me my levity, give me my escape. Leave the politics at the door before you enter.
Had my world had today’s approach to sports reporting, I would have had tarnished heroes, I would probably not care anymore. I am glad that I wasn’t told that Mickey Mantle was a womanizing alcoholic, that Paul Hornung was better known for his off the field exploits, that Bill Russell should have been better known as a social activist than as the sage leader of the Boston Celtics.
This is just to say that when I turn on the “Worldwide Leader of Sports” (ESPN for any non-sports fans), I really don’t want to hear whether some NFL quarterback is going to get $100,000,000 or $125,000,000 over the next six years.
I don’t want to hear talking heads argue over whether or not some guy should be kneeling during the national anthem. I don’t want to know how many Cincinnati Bengals have been arrested this season.
I don’t want to mix my politics and my sports. And I wonder what dreams the 8 year olds out there cling to these days?
Evans “Buddy” King grew up in Christiansburg and graduated from CHS in 1971. He lives in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he practices law with the firm of Steptoe and Johnson PLLC. He can be reached at Evans.King@steptoe-johnson.com.
