By Bryce Miller
San Diego Union-Tribune
To sports editors, telephones used to seem like umbilical cords for the coffee-stained tie crowd – long before cell phones paroled frazzled bosses from their desks.
There were angry coaches. Angry readers. Angry family members. There were drunk readers. That guy from prison. The reporter trapped in another country. The mumbler. Someone prepared to solve the Kennedy Assassination in the lobby.
Each ring signaled a new, ear-piercing adventure.
In 32 years at the Detroit Free Press – 22 as sports editor – Gene Myers took more calls than he can count. Myers, who accepted an early retirement offer last month, revisited some of the classics for the Associated Press Sports Editors group:
THE ANGRIEST CALL
“Bobby Ross, the old Lions coach. They lost to the Eagles and had a bunch of dumb penalties. He got tired of all the questions about the penalties and said, ‘I don’t coach that stuff’ and put in on the players. Our headline on Monday said, ‘Finger-Pointing Time.’
“He called me directly. He was probably the only coach to ever call me directly. He was just livid. He said it looked like he was blaming the players. He really laid into me for about 3 or 4 minutes. Then he calmed down and we had a good talk.
“Then he said, ‘That’s not the way I coach. They’re driving me crazy. It just that this makes me look bad with the players.’ So he did blame them, really. I think he just wanted to blow off some stream. I actually really liked Bobby Ross.”
THE UNEXPECTED CALL
“The phone rang and it was security saying, ‘There’s a young woman in our lobby who wants to talk to somebody in sports about NCAA violations at the University of Michigan.’ I’m like, ‘Um … OK … we’ll be right down.’
“It was a pissed-off former girlfriend of a player who had a car he shouldn’t have. She happened to be in the building for some reason, a tour or something, and decided she wanted to tell us that.”
THE SADDEST CALL
“That would be the one from (late voice of the Tigers) Ernie Harwell’s agent, friend and attorney, calling to say Ernie had passed away. When the words came out, it was like, ‘Wow.’ Ernie was such a legend and institution around here. He became quite friendly with the Free Press in his later years, writing some things for us and we worked on some books together.
“My job was to put the wheels in motion to tell the world. That was memorable, in a bad way.”
THE FUNNIEST CALL
“One time, one of our prep guys called to dictate from a phone booth on a really cold night. He told me to hurry, ‘I’m freezing my (pick some mid-range anatomy) off!’ I put the phone on my shoulder and told everyone in the office, ‘Hey, Rich tells me to type faster because he’s freezing his (same anatomy) off!’ Everyone laughed.”
THE CRAZIEST CALL
Columnist Mitch Albom called in dictation from the Iditarod sled-dog race in Alaska: “I got him in a crazy little diner when they were cooking whale fat. He would go outside on a bush phone and dictate for a while to a couple of us, then go back into the room and be consumed by whale-fat fumes before going back outside.”
THE CRAZIEST CALL II
“We heard that (former Pistons star) Bill Laimbeer was going to retire. I got ahold of Mitch, who was hopping on a plane to San Francisco. This was ’93, so just after planes had phones in the back of the seats. He wrote like a 40- to 50-inch column on the plane and called to dictate from the seat phone.
“We were about to miss deadline, so I told him to hurry up. Mitch said, ‘Hold on, we’re almost done – last line.’ Then he said, ‘In the future, Bill Laimbeer …’ and the phone goes dead. I’m like, ‘Bill Laimbeer will WHAT?’ Star in the next Flinstones movie? Coach a WNBA team? I had no idea how it would end, we were past deadline and I obviously couldn’t call him back over the Rockies.
“He finally called back and finished it. I called it, ‘The Column from 40,000 Feet.’ ”
THE LAST CALL
“It was from (Mitch), too. It was my last night and he called to say he filed for Sunday. I started looking at it and said, ‘Oh, man – you wrote about me. Damn you.’ He knew I would be the first person to see it.”
Thanks for manning the phones, Gene. We were all better for it.
Bryce Miller, a sports columnist at the San Diego Union-Tribune, formerly worked as columnist and sports editor at the Des Moines Register. He once spent a week pounding a keyboard at the desk next to Myers in Detroit. What he learned: Myers, the most talented gentleman (formerly) in the business, never slept.
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READ MORE ABOUT MYERS IMPACT IN DETROIT
The Detroit Free Press asked Gene Myers to chronicle his most memorable players, coaches and teams in his 32 years at the newspaper. It’s a fantastic read, hitting the Bad Boys, Fab Five, that one Kirk Gibson swing and more.
Find it here …
http://www.freep.com/story/sports/2015/11/15/freep-sports-editor-gene-myers-memories/75814442/
