The loss of a giant
Dave Anderson, 89, was as gracious as he was talented
Last Thursday, Dave Anderson, the dean of New York sportswriters – hell, the dean of ALL sports writers in the U.S. — passed away at age 89 in an assisted living facility in Cresskill, N.J. He was one of my dearest friends, a fun and delightful traveling companion to over 30 World Series, postseasons and AllStar Games. We shared the same driver, an elderly, re- tired man we called “O.K. Bud” who drove us to and from our New Jersey homes and the airports. As I write this, I’m looking at the inscription in his terrific book “Pennant Races — Baseball at its Best” in which he wrote: “To Bill, a great friend, in memory of all our trips with O.K. Bud” and I’m thinking of all those laughs we shared in press boxes and restaurants around the country.
Dave started out his career in the 1950s covering the Dodgers for the old Brooklyn Eagle. He and another writer were the last two scribes in the press box after the Dodgers played their final game in Brooklyn, Sept. 24, 1957, and on their way out of the press gate of the darkened Ebbets Field, Dave turned to the other writer and said: “After you.” He was always proud of saying he was the last person out of Ebbets Field. We both had a favorite expression when something crazy happened in our profession that upset us — a newspaper folding or laying off writers for nothing more than financial reasons: “What a business!”. Sadly it’s happened a lot — too much — since Dave retired from the New York Times in 2007.
One of my favorite times with him was at the 1989 World Series in San Francisco that was interrupted by the earthquake. After spending nearly a week no longer covering baseball but rather the victims and horrific aftermath of the devastating earthquake, Dave suggested we needed a break from all of this and should perhaps drive up to Palo Alto Sunday where the 49ers-Patriots game had been switched from Candlestick Park to Stanford Stadium. Sometime during the first half of the game 49ers safety Jeff Fuller was involved in a head first tackle of a Patriots player, suffering a severe neck injury. As they carried him off the field on a stretcher, Dave turned to me and said: “Golden west, my ass!”
I’ll use all the clichés here because they all apply: He was the consummate pro, a gentleman’s gentleman who is probably the only person I ever knew about whom nobody ever said a bad word. He was loved by all. I was part of the selected group of writers George Steinbrenner invited to his Yankee Stadium office to announce the firing of Dick Howser in 1980 — the “execution” as Dave described it, where he wrote the column that helped win him the Pulitzer Prize. As always, he picked up something none of the rest of us noticed – that, at the end of the press conference as Howser departed the Boss’ office, Steinbrenner, looking forlorn, expressed his dismay that nobody ate the bite-sized sandwiches he’d provided us.
After Dave was moved to the assisted living home because of a nerve affliction in his feet, he wasn’t able to get around much. But I called him every couple of months – most recently about three weeks ago – to check in on him and after asking ‘How ya doing?’ he’d always reply: “I’m still here.”
God, how I wish he still was. Dave Anderson, one of the finest people to ever grace the press boxes of America, is gone. What a business.