GOODBYE TO A FRIEND:
Sports Editor Bud Geracie remembers Pedro Gomez in the same way everyone else does.
DEAR READER >> Pedro Gomez didn’t get his start in sports journalism at the Mercury News. He had worked at the Miami News and the San Diego Union-Tribune before coming to us as a high school sports reporter in late 1989. It was here that he found the launching pad to a career that ultimately took him to ESPN, where for the last 19 years he earned a national reputation as a tough, but fair reporter who also was liked, if not beloved, by most of his subjects.
Gomez, who died after suffering a sudden cardiac arrest at the age of 58 on Feb. 7, engendered a feeling in people that is clearly displayed in the book, “Remember Who You Are,” a collection of 62 essays from people he covered to people he competed against to people he met along the way in a life extraordinarily well-lived.
This is mine, excerpted and edited.
In my dark years, I would turn the pages of self-help books in a frenzy, desperately searching for the secret to happiness. This was like that, except it wasn’t a book I was searching, or happiness I was seeking.
Pedro was gone.
I didn’t know how he had left this world, so suddenly. But the “how” wasn’t what sent me on a desperate search through the pages of Facebook and Twitter, and into the archives of my own correspondence with him. The “how” didn’t matter much to me. Pedro was gone. Nothing was going to change that.
I had looked down at my phone in the third quarter of what forever will be the worst Super Bowl ever, and there it was: A tweet from Charles Robinson, re-tweeting the shocking news from ESPN.
“Sometimes people just choose to leave us,” an acquaintance offered at one point during the night.
She had done the math we do in journalism: sudden death + no cause given = suicide. Clearly, she did not know Pedro. Pedro loved life. Nobody I’ve known ever loved life more than Pedro. Even allowing for the many years that had passed since I knew him well... no, no way.
As the hours passed and night became dawn and dawn became day, I got reacquainted with my friend. Given his profession and his personality, I wasn’t surprised that Pedro knew so many people. But it was staggering how many of them paid tribute to him with a story about something he had done for them,
I shared this discovery with one of Pedro’s closest friends, maybe his closest friend, his “brother” Steve Kettmann. Steve said he’d been struck by the vast number of people who shared that they’d been in touch with Pedro just that week. I had noticed that too and can bet with supreme confidence