Roger Angell and Enduring Words

I didn’t know Roger Angell, which was verifiably my loss, though an unintentional one. The esteemed baseball writer and editor for The New Yorker died on May 20 at the age of 101. Much deserved praise has been shared in the days since, none more eloquent – none close, really – than the one written my former Newsday and Sports Illustrated colleague, Tom Verducci, himself a magnificent baseball writer and a friend of Angell’s as well as the closest thing to his literary descendent in his ability to create a painting that both explains the present and endures across time, although in different ways. Just give it a read.

My not knowing Angell is a quirk – one of many, trust me – of our shared profession (both “shared” and “profession” defined broadly here). I have been a sports journalist for 44 years, 47 if you include some dreadful bylines earned and paid for (not much, but beer was cheap back then) while I was a college student and summer intern. More on that to come. I have hundreds of acquaintances, colleagues, friends, close friends and very close friends from those decades, not an insignificant number of them who are, sadly, no longer vertical. But in this business of ours, friendships tend to align by sports, a truth that has hardened as writers specialize further. Thus I have many more friends who covered Olympic sports or college football and basketball or horse racing than who cover baseball, which I have written about relatively infrequently, and never as a beat writer.

Yet it is the beauty of words that one needn’t know an author – or a reader – to benefit from shared prose. There’s this: In the winter of 2014, while I was covering the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, The New Yorker published a stunningly