PLUS: DANIEL BROWN ON THE FIRST COUPLE OF SPORTSWRITING.
Rivals at work, allies at home
We met covering a sporting event, of course. UC Davis beat Santa Clara 31-19 on Sept. 8, 1990. Aggies quarterback Jeff Bridewell had 402 passing yards that day, but I made the biggest catch.
Some sources decline interviews because they are not authorized to go on the record. Some decline because they don’t want to disrupt, say, a free-agent negotiation in progress.
And there are those who, like me, are just trying to avoid my wife’s bad side.
“Susan’s going to kill me,’’ Billy Beane joked when I called him for a comment at the end of the Winter Meetings last year.
Susan Slusser is the formidable, competition-crushing A’s beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. You don’t mess with The Sluss. Now in her 20th year on the beat, she patrols her territory with an iron pen. Her earned reputation as one of the game’s most diligent and trusted insiders helped her become the president of the Baseball Writers Association of America in 2011.
That would be lovely, except sometimes, because of the nature of our jobs at competing Bay Area outlets, we are forced to wage war against each other. It’s husband vs. wife, mano-a-womano, vying for the same news. It makes for terrible date nights.
Leo Durocher, the long-ago Giants manager, once said: “If I were playing third base and my mother were rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I’d trip her. Oh, I’d pick her up and brush her off and say, ‘Sorry, Mom.’ But nobody beats me.”
I am married to Leo Durocher. Except she wouldn’t say “sorry.” I know this because I’ve lived it for more than 25 years, whether in press boxes or locker rooms or in our own home. There are times when circumstances send us scrambling for the same breaking news, and we’ll be in different rooms trying to reach the same sources at the same time.
Spoiler alert: Those occasions do not end well for me. When the A’s traded for Johnny Damon in 2001, our stories varied in an alarmingly significant way. See if you can spot the difference.
His: “Damon could not be reached for comment.”
Hers: “Damon, speaking by phone from Hawaii where he is on vacation, said he was excited to come to Oakland.”
We met covering a sporting event, of course. UC Davis beat Santa Clara 31-19 on Sept. 8, 1990. Aggies quarterback Jeff Bridewell had 402 passing yards that day, but I made the biggest catch.
Susan was the luminous cub reporter for the Sacramento Bee.
I was a UCD student a month shy of my 21st birthday. We covered lots of events together in those early days, including a basketball game in San Francisco, where an opposing coach veered from his postgame interview to say: “You’re pretty cute. Since you’re writing anyway, why don’t you go ahead and put down your phone number.”
I’m almost positive he wasn’t talking to me.
Flash forward a few million words later, and Susan is still the person I most want to see after deadline. She’s also still the person I least want to see before it.
Mercifully, we rarely overlap. In my household, Susan has the territorial rights to the A’s while I focus more on the 49ers and Giants.
And when we’re not doing the dueling laptop thing, being in her aura is a perk of the job. A’s players revere Susan for her fairness, accuracy, accountability, comic timing and ferocious work ethic. If I drop her name, players bounce up. I once approached Jose Guillen at his locker and told him I was married to Susan Slusser. He sprang out of his chair to hug me.
Huston Street, Gio Gonzalez and A.J. Hinch had similar happy reactions, albeit with no hugs. Before I left for Detroit last season to cover a Giants-Tigers series, Susan said, “Say hi to Al Kaline for me.” And I did. That’s the definition of relationship goals, kids.
Her fan club can be as intimidating as she is. At a gala on the eve of the 2012 All-Star Game in Kansas City, I spotted the retired Frank Thomas at the bar and introduced myself. (Tepid reaction.) I told him we’d recently enjoyed some of his Big Hurt Beer. (Tepid reaction.) And then I told him I’m married to Susan Slusser.
“Your wife is the best,’’ the 6-foot-5, 240-pounder said, more forcefully than I expected.
Yeah, well, you know, she loves the job and ...
“THE BEST,’’ the Big Hurt said, practically jabbing me in the chest.
Even if I’d disagreed with him, I wouldn’t have said so. That’s the fun part. What’s not so fun, and what I wish I’d had the foresight to prohibit in a pre-nup, is going up against her at the Baseball Winter Meetings. The three-day MLB swap meet is a cutthroat event for baseball scribes, and this is Slussy’s jam.
She spends every waking hour in the hotel hallways staking out agents, scouts, executives and coaches. Many of them come to HER in search of the latest information.
I was there to monitor both the Giants and A’s and made the romantic decision to set up shop right next to my wife in the media workroom. That’s where, every few hours, she reduced me to smoldering ash. She’d politely tap me on the shoulder and say something like, “I just posted a
“Scooped on the Beane reaction by the hubby, who took the first flight out of town and wound up on the right airplane. Divorce proceedings imminent.”
story about the A’s getting close on a Stephen Piscotty trade. You should probably check it out.”
And then she’d move on to her next scoop while I frantically Googled the spelling of P-i-s-c-o-t-t-y.
It was during these Winter Meetings that Jose Canseco launched a bizarre and unsavory string of tweets about politicians and molestation. I was just getting wind of the controversy when I heard Susan on the phone next to me saying, “Jose, I just want to give you a chance to clarify ... “
I resisted the urge to say, “Say hi to Jose for me.”
By the time I took the first flight out of town, a 6 a.m. departure on the final day, I could fit my ego under the seatback in front of me.
But then I finally caught a break. On my bleary-eyed shuffle back to seat 26C, I spotted Billy Beane in first class. We chatted only briefly, and I sat down knowing I had a captive audience. Unless Susan had snuck into the cargo hold — the kind of thing she would totally do — I was going to have the A’s executive vice president all to myself once the plane landed.
Indeed, upon touching down at SFO, I was able to get Beane’s first comments on the Piscotty deal. Still fearing Susan, who was across the country covering the Rule 5 draft, I sat there at baggage claim and wrote the story before she could catch up.
Her tweet was quick and damning. I hadn’t heard her this annoyed since the last time I screwed up loading the dishwasher.
“Scooped on the Beane reaction by the hubby, who took the first flight out of town and wound up on the right airplane. Divorce proceedings imminent.”
Welcome to my world, honey.