Celebrating a brilliant sportswriting colleague and devoted friend
Sportswriters measure their lives in seasons and big games. So, it made sense that — to honor a colleague who died far too early and with far too many big moments left to witness — we had to find a slice of time after the Super Bowl and before spring training began.
A group of Bay Area writers gathered Monday night at Perry’s on Union Street to raise a glass to Gwen Knapp. A day after the NFL’s big game. The day before the baseball writers headed to Arizona.
Gwen, a former standout columnist for both the San Francisco Examiner and The Chronicle, would have perfectly understood the timing and smiled about it. After all, in her final column for The Chronicle in 2012 she joked that the 49ers’ chances of winning another Super Bowl had improved greatly with her departure, as they had last won one six months before she arrived in the Bay Area.
We’re still waiting, Gwen. They haven’t done it without you.
We lost Gwen on Jan. 20 and her death, at age 61, is still shocking. As former Chronicle writer Mark Fainaru-Wada said Monday, “I just can’t believe I won’t talk to her anymore.” Mark and investigative writer Lance Williams and Gwen spent countless hours talking through the BALCO story beginning in the early 2000s, and their conversations continued for decades.
There weren’t many short conversations with Gwen. She was interested in everything and wanted to probe every topic — the Giants’ new regime, Stephen Curry, your kids’ latest adventure and cats (especially cats) — in depth. The last conversation I had with her lasted
well over an hour, deep into the next day in her Eastern time zone.
She was in a hospital room then, where she had spent too much of the last 14 months of her life. She was dealing with lymphoma and had family nearby to support her (Gwen grew up in Delaware, studied at Harvard and is survived by her father and three sisters).
Her sports family here on the West Coast stood by helplessly, connecting through texts and phone calls. Most of us were in full denial of how serious her illness was, how in danger we were of losing her.
Whenever we did connect, she directed the conversation away from herself. She wanted to talk about us, about what was going on in our worlds, in our lives. That was Gwen. The phrase most often used during our Monday gathering was “the biggest heart.”
Because we were a group of, primarily, sportswriters, our remembrances involved a lot of profanity and laughter. And always, always, those moments that mark our lives: at the World Series in Anaheim in 2002, at the NFC playoff game in Tampa, Fla., in 2003, at an NCAA Tournament in Birmingham, Ala. Most of the stories were set in Marriott hotels or around pints of beer at a bar. Most can’t be repeated and, even if they could be, they wouldn’t be understood by the general public: They are told in the illegible shorthand of sportswriters, people who understand the weird dynamic of both competing against and carousing with our colleagues, who share the burden of trying to capture the big moments and the crunch of deadline pressure.
Deadline pressure is how I will most often remember Gwen. She was almost too smart for the job, out-thinking her own argument and countering it before she could set it down on a computer screen. She would find an isolated spot in a chaotic press box, fiddling nervously with her hair and talking to herself, creating a column like passing a kidney stone. But in the end, the result was brilliant.
Any gathering of sportswriters these days is a tale of the changing world of media. Some in Monday’s group were retired, others work for digital sites, many have exited for media relations, some of us are still hanging in. Gwen came to San Francisco to work for an afternoon newspaper and left her editors waiting until long after bars closed for her copy to land. She finished working for a morning newspaper that still got full game stories into print the next day, no matter how late they ended. She left The Chronicle for a digital site that didn’t last long. In recent years, she was an editor at the New York Times and I can only imagine how great it would be to have Gwen’s eye and brain invested in one’s copy.
She took the Chronicle/ Examiner baton from Joan Ryan and, 17 years later, passed it to me (I had been a columnist at the Mercury News for many years before replacing Gwen at The Chronicle). Our friendship included countless arguments and laughs, travel all over the United States, plus to Olympics in Australia, Japan and Italy. Joan and I raised a glass Monday, the brackets to the missing Gwen.
When she moved to New York, she encouraged everyone to come visit. One night, thanks to a delay out of San Francisco, I missed my connection to Buffalo for a 49ers game. I thought I was stranded in Newark for the night until I called Gwen. She invited me, of course, to spend the night in her upper West Side apartment. When I arrived, she had on hand Jack Daniels, which she knew I liked, and Benadryl, which she knew I needed, thanks to her feline roommates. I cuddled her cat, the aptly named Sport, sipped Jack and we talked late into the night.
As Mark said, I just can’t believe I’m not going to talk to Gwen anymore.