Retiring columnist Mark Purdy looks back on the five best assignments in his four decades as a sports journalist.
From Olympics to Super Bowls, Fidel to Wedemeyer, it’s been a quite a career
Mark Purdy, who has been a sports columnist for this news organization since 1984, will retire from that job in August. This is the last in a series of columns recounting the most memorable experiences of his four decades as a sports journalist.
For a sportswriter, that first big assignment is really something. Your first plane flight to cover a game? So exciting. My first was to a football game in Pittsburgh. And my bosses paid for it! I felt as if I had arrived in the business.
Hundreds more flights followed. Gradually, they became more of a grind. And less exciting. Well, one still was — and ironically, it was another trip to Pittsburgh. On approach, the landing gear failed to drop. The captain walked down the aisle, peeled up the carpet to crawl inside the fuselage, then manually cranked down the wheels. He returned to the cockpit and warned us to prepare for a possible bad outcome in case the wheels didn’t hold. Emergency crews lined
the runway. We braced ourselves.
At this point, my journalist companion on the flight, a witty pro football scribe named Ray Buck, turned to me and said: “You know, Purd, if this plane goes down, they’ll list the victims alphabetically. So my name will appear before yours in the obituary.”
That’s sportswriter humor for you. I forced a laugh. We landed ... gently, safely and not alphabetically. We left by the emergency exit, took a taxi to the stadium and covered the game. Another day on the job. Assignments are assignments. I’ve had some great ones and lousy ones. Here are my five alltime favorites:
The Super Bowl
Although the Rose Bowl is my favorite annual sports event — New Year’s Day in Pasadena is a sublime sports experience, aesthetically and competitively — it was not my favorite event to cover. That would be the Super Bowl, which is the country’s most-watched sporting event and also the craziest to cover, thanks to the sponsorship circus it has become and the relentless hype drum pounded by the NFL. I knew that whatever I wrote would draw readers’ interest.
Thus, I doggedly plowed through Media Day, where cable television “reporters” from MTV or the SyFy channel wearing costumes vie to throw out the first stupid questions of the week and always succeed. Early on, the zoolike atmosphere frustrated me. Then I realized that covering the Super Bowl was really not about journalism. It was a business transaction between the NFL (which used football to sell advertisers’ products) and those of us in the media (which used stories about the Super Bowl to sell advertisements on their broadcasts or websites or newspaper pages). Once I accepted that fact, I could relax and roll with it by finding off-the-beaten path angles that didn’t involve interviewing a nose tackle.
One example: Before Super Bowl XXII in San Diego, I visited Tijuana to talk with a bullfighter there who had also played some football wide receiver at his high school. He told me that football was far tougher than bullfighting because (A) there’s only one bull as opposed to 11 tacklers and (B) bulls never blindside you.
Another example: At Super Bowl XXXV in Tampa, renowned for having the most strip clubs per capita of any American city, I decided to visit one and get some predictions from the dancers. (They also told me which players had visited their club.) The matchup that year was Ravens vs. Giants. A performer named Dawn told me she was sure the Giants would win.
“But that’s because I’m anti-Trent Dilfer,” she said, referring to the Ravens quarterback. “We trained him here when he was with the Buccaneers and then he goes off and takes another team to the Super Bowl.”
Nothing is more bitter than a bitter stripper football analyst. And of course, Dawn was incorrect. Dilfer and the Ravens did win. I eagerly covered more than 30 other Super Bowls, none more enjoyable than Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara. That day, I put down the top on my convertible and took surface streets to Levi’s Stadium with absolutely no traffic issues or tie-ups. That’s a story my grandchildren will never believe.
Anything in Australia
I’m pretty sure that I pulled off the best scam of all time in 1987 when I convinced my newspaper’s bean counters that I should be sent to Perth for the America’s Cup yacht races. Then and now, there aren’t a ton of yacht racing fans in the Bay Area.
However, my pitch was this: At a slow time of year (February), our readers would glom onto the brave story about USA skipper Dennis Conner’s attempt to wrest back the America’s Cup from the Australians who had defeated Conner four years earlier — the first-ever defeat ever for the United States in the Cup competition.
My ulterior motive, of course, was to get to Australia. I’d always been fascinated by the country and wanted to see it in person. Much to my shock, the bosses bought my pitch. So I was off to the West Coast of Oz. It didn’t disappoint and neither did the event. Because of the time difference, my daily deadline was 1 p.m., so after covering each race in the morning, I filed my copy and could spend the rest of the day drinking beer and/or going to the beach.
Conner wound up sweeping the Aussies and I ended up having a blast. The story angles kept rolling in. One day there was a bomb threat on the water during the race, which made no sense. Another day, singer Jimmy Buffett showed up on Conner’s dock, which made perfect sense. On one off day, I visited a park where you could hold a koala (they’re not cuddly). Australia is a sports-loving country where Americans are mostly loved. When the 2000 Olympics were awarded to Sydney, I couldn’t wait to return.
Those Games were also a kick. The Aussie sense of humor showed itself in the Opening Ceremonies, which featured a tribute to outlaw Ned Kelly and a “lawn mower dance.” I took a train to Canberra though herds of kangaroos to cover a soccer game, then dove into the many performance-enhancing substance abuse rumors that dominated those Games. Most famously, the rumors involved USA sprinter Marion Jones. One morning at my hotel, I woke up to find a news conference taking place downstairs that involved an “expert” who debunked any notion that Jones was juicing. That was the first time I met Victor Conte, who would later become Barry Bonds’ cream and clear provider. Jones was later stripped of her five Sydney medals after admitting to steroid use.
Mainly, I just enjoyed the Aussie days and nights, feeling fortunate to be there for the nation’s biggest moments in the sun. New Orleans is my favorite American road city and Sydney tops that. I’d go back anytime. If only they’d move the Rose Bowl game down under.
1991 Cuba Pan American Games
More than once over the years, I have told the tale of how I wound up coming face-to-face with Fidel Castro at a bowling alley in Havana. The details were so preposterous, you couldn’t make them up.
The 1991 Pan Am Games — basically the western hemisphere Olympics — were a chance for Cuba to show off itself to the world as the event’s host. Except the country was in a profound recession/depression. The sports venues were not first rate with the exception of a brand new bowling alley that had been built for the Games. Castro was famous for not announcing his daily schedule in advance (so that no one could be in waiting to harm him) and one day he decided to take in the bowling competition. He wanted the best seats, which happened to be in the press row.
As applause broke out at Fidel’s entrance, we were ordered to move. As I made my way to the end of the aisle, there he was. I made meaningful eye contact as he passed me and plopped down in my exact spot. That became the lead of my column: “Fidel took my seat.” With a Havana dateline, I figured that would get people to the second paragraph.
The Castro encounter was hardly my only Havana adventure. This was in the era when Cuba was officially closed to Americans, so it was a fascinating time to be there. As journalists, we were trailed almost everywhere we went by “security people” on scooters. But one day, myself and a friend from the Los Angeles Times rented bicycles and purposely headed the wrong way down oneway streets to successfully evade our followers and talk to some average Cubans without monitors nearby. We also tracked down the home where A’s slugger Jose Canseco and his brother lived as toddlers before their parents took them to America. Across the street was a woman who was married to Jose’s cousin.
“Yes, I remember Jose and his twin brother, Osvaldo,” she told us. “They were cute. I hear Jose is very famous now. That’s great. I’m glad, because he has done me no harm. But we haven’t been interested in him and he hasn’t been interested in us. There’s been no communication between us.”
Her words made me sad. I’m not sure if, with the new USA-Cuba diplomatic initiatives, the Canseco family has reconnected. I’m hoping so.
Barcelona 1992 Olympics
When people ask which of the 14 Olympic Games that I covered were the best, I never hesitate to name this one. Barcelona was the perfect location for the Games, with the venues integrated throughout the city. You would pass by an amazing cathedral or art museum on the way to track and field or weightlifting. In subsequent years, the preferred model has been an “Olympic Park,” usually on the outskirts of town, that contains seven or eight or more stadiums or arenas situated around a giant plaza and surrounded by a high fence to ensure greater security. But inside that fence, shut off from the city, you could be anywhere. In Barcelona, you always knew you were in Barcelona.
Also, from Day One, the Games of 1992 rolled out column topics on a conveyer belt. At the Opening Ceremonies, the Olympic torch was ignited by a paralympic archer who shot a flaming arrow from the ground level up to the six-story high structure that housed the cauldron. It’s still the coolest torchlighting method I’ve ever witnessed.
When the competition began, South Bay swimmer Pablo Morales won a gold medal and female athletes such as Gail Devers in track and field and a 13-year-old Chinese diver named Fu Mingzia were dazzling. The original basketball Dream Team from the USA with Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson and Larry Bird — and Chris Mullin — wowed the European crowds who treated them like rock stars.
But I’ll also remember a Cal swimmer named Ron Karnaugh, who experienced a horrible tragedy when his father had a heart attack at the Opening Ceremonies and died in the stadium as his son was marching around the track. Karnaugh decided to compete anyway and walked to the starting block wearing a large floppy hat. After an emotionally drained Karnaugh finished sixth in his race, a more than acceptable result under the circumstances, I asked him about the hat.
“It’s the hat that my dad was wearing in the stadium the other night,” Karnaugh said, then spoke about how much his bluecollar father had given up so Ron could take swimming lessons.
I’ll admit I was blinking my eyes, trying to hold back wetness. The Olympic grind can wear you down during 17 consecutive days of 14-hour work shifts, But the grind also gives you the opportunity to tell readers the story of Ron Karnaugh, who is now a physician in New Jersey. And the grind thoughts vanish completely.
Charlie Wedemeyer
I guess it’s kind of cheating to put him in this category, because no boss ever technically “assigned” me to write about Wedemeyer. I would just assign it to myself when I wanted to be inspired.
In 1977 when Wedemeyer was a young high school football coach in Los Gatos, a doctor diagnosed his amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease. The doctor told Charlie he had less than three years to live. Wedemeyer beat that prognosis 10 times over. He died in 2010 at age 64. As I wrote in a column that day, he was atop my rankings for the most remarkable person I’ve ever met. And everyone else was in eighth place.
I still can’t fathom how Charlie and his wife, Lucy, persevered through all those years with his disease. They were simply determined to keep living and do whatever they could to make other people feel better about their own lives. By 1983, the ALS had taken away Charlie’s ability to speak. But the Wedemeyers worked out an arrangement for Charlie to coach his Los Gatos team from a golf cart and relay his play calls through Lucy to the field.
The unique method worked, with the cooperation of his assistant coaches. Los Gatos won a sectional championship. The victory served as the climax of a television movie made about Wedemeyer’s life. The principal told Wedemeyer he could stay as head coach as long as he wished — except that three years later, the principal changed his mind and gave the job to one of Charlie’s assistants. I went out to visit the Wedemeyers and write about it but was surprised to find that Charlie wasn’t angry.
“I am disappointed,” he told me with Lucy reading his lips.”But you have to accept it, grow with it and move on.”
So he did. The Wedemeyers began raising money that awarded scholarships to students who had overcome challenges. They flew to Europe where Charlie gave motivational speeches. They became involved with a local high school all-star football game that still bears Charlie’s name. I could usually find a pretext to write a column about him based on one of those efforts, but I primarily enjoyed visiting with Charlie when we could gab about football — the 49ers or Raiders or the instant replay rule. He hated it.
“They should just play the game,” Charlie told me.
No one played the game of life better than him, right up until his death. He’s not the only inspirational person I’ve interviewed. There have been Special Olympians, athletes who have survived cancer or persevered through personal tragedies. Charlie, though, was always there when I wanted to feel better about humanity. I covered a lot of unforgettable stuff over the years in this job I’m soon exiting. But the best part about that job was meeting people like Charlie. It was the best assignment of all.