Leading OFF
Coming of age in a profession under one of its greats
His was a boyish face that defied his age but reflected the giddiness toward sports he never lost from his youth.
His handshakes revealed soft hands, but his keystrokes were even softer. They produced stories that started on the front page and jumped inside the beefy sports section and onto full inside pages during an era when print media dominated, and into an era when it didn’t.
When his byline – “William Gildea” – ran in The Washington Post, it was an event. His former editor, George Solomon, said his stories made the section better. His written words were elegant and styled, yet somehow didn’t contain any pomp. The throws of Johnny Unitas from an arm cocked high above the ear or the silky passes of Italian soccer sensation Roberto Baggio just came alive.
To him, ours was not a profession, but a way of life, a ritual of not only illustrating what was before us with the written word but showing up early at racetracks and staying late in locker rooms to fill out the details of narratives. Yes, the scores were essential, but the stories behind them were far more important.
Bill, as he was known to friends, died last week at 81 of complications from Parkinson’s disease, but his contributions will live on forever in digital archives and print and Kindle books. And they will live in the mind of this writer who was lucky enough to be mentored by him during the formative years of my career.
“Steve!” he would say when I’d call him at his desk at The Post after a hearty “Hello.” His deep voice was softened by the homey sounds of his Baltimore roots. The voice would have sounded natural drifting onto the field from the publicaddress booths at old Memorial Stadium or Camden Yards in his hometown.
While his written word transfixed fans in the D.C. region and across the country, that voice became a sound of affirmation and comfort to me.
Living a boy’s dream
I met Bill Gildea (pronounced gil-DAY) in early 1994 through a relative, Glen Elsasser, who covered the Supreme Court for the Chicago Tribune. I was a sophomore at Georgetown (Bill’s alma mater) and Glen had taken an interest in my desire to be a sportswriter. Bill and Glen had attended journalism school together at Columbia in the early 1960s and had kept up over the years.
Bill met me with a smile in his corner cubicle inside The Washington Post’s sports department at 15th and L Streets Northwest. He had just finished writing “When the Colts Belonged to Baltimore: A Father and a Son, a Team and a time.” It’s a poetic tribute to a childhood of football and fantasy watching his beloved team with “Pop.”
Bill told me that day it was a book “about Baltimore and the Colts.” This is how his newspaper described it: “It is a hymn, or perhaps an old fight song, for a city, a childhood, a whole simpler way of life that is gone from America as the Colts are gone from Baltimore.”
Gildea’s writing, which led to a decorated yet understated career, can be described in a similar way, the product of a bygone era when his paper’s circulation numbers would pass 1 million on Sundays.
FAMILY PHOTO
For 40-plus years, his heartfelt narratives described how a former Olympic champion was patiently yet firmly teaching blind children to swim during 1965 – his first year at The Post – and how an aging fighter took a beating for a $1,000 profit yet finished “on his feet, dignity intact” in 2005 – the year Bill retired.
As a boy, Bill lived in a modest apartment in the Forest Park section of Baltimore. When he grew up, he found himself in the back of Sugar Ray Leonard’s limo and high on a cliff overlooking the French Riviera, where the Dutch stayed during the 1998 World Cup. “There is nothing up here except the azure sky and a panorama no photograph could do justice – because you have to feel the soft breeze and the kiss of warmth of the sun to understand it,” he wrote from Roquebrune, France.
Back in his early days in Baltimore, where it would have been unimaginable to be in such a place, he covered the walls of the one bedroom in his childhood home with a Colts pennant and those of their opponents in the old All-American Conference. A friend brought Bill his homework one day when he was home sick and wanted to know what his parents thought of all of those pennants in their bedroom. “I’d thought of it as my bedroom,” he wrote in his book. “I’d say that’s how they wanted me to feel.”
I learned Bill was a lot like his parents when I called him one summer Friday night in 1994. He had gotten me an interview with Neil Greenberger, The Post’s high school sports editor, for a part-time position and given me his home telephone number in case I couldn’t reach him in the office. When his wife, Mary Fran, picked up the phone, I heard a lot of commotion in the background.
“Am I interrupting something?” I asked when he came to the phone.
“Oh, only a dinner party for 10, Steve,” he said with a laugh, which was echoed by laughter in the background.
He then talked to me for what seemed like 10 minutes. He assured me he had spoken with Neil and put in a good word for me. This time, it was Bill making me feel at home.
Learning from the master
“How do you know, Bill?” was one of the first things Greenberger asked me when I came in for my interview.
I got the job and found myself walking past the figureheads of a glorious era of Washington Post sports: Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, David Aldridge, Christine Brennan, John Feinstein. I was in awe of all of them. But not Bill. He wouldn’t allow it. He never much liked being on TV, where many of these figures would become fixtures. Kornheiser, probably the most famous of these talking heads, said Bill was the best writer on the staff.
I heartily agreed. I read everything he wrote in newsprint, including an excerpt of his latest book, “Where the Game Matters Most,” that appeared in the Sports section on Christmas morning 1997.
“Basketball in Indiana, particularly high school basketball, is as universal as the freight whistle there,” he wrote. “The game binds diverse people and places. They’re all Hoosiers, a term that defies derivation but may stem from a slang expression – “Who’s Here” is one of countless possible etymologies.”
The book journeys deep into the back roads and traditions of the state during