Tour Day 4: Ohtani Steals the Show

Remembering the great Ron Green Sr., plus the latest tour news.

This day is dedicated to a hero of mine, Ron Green Sr., who passed away on Thursday at the age of 95. Senior was a graceful and beloved sportswriter/editor/columnist/you-name-it at The Charlotte News and The Charlotte Observer for more than 50 years, 1948 to 1999. He was already the legendary columnist at the paper when I was 19 years old, and somehow convinced the paper to let me go to high school games and write short stories. Ron Green was the biggest person I knew.

There’s a funny thing about journalists: People often think we must be extroverts since we’re so eager to introduce ourselves to strangers and cold-call people and ask questions. The truth is often the exact opposite. It was, and is, in my case. I am terribly shy. For us, the job is simply our excuse to do all those things. I was desperate to meet Mr. Green when I was a kid, desperate to talk with him and ask him about his life and his job, desperate for any advice he might offer.

But just going up to him and talking to him was never an option.

So I decided to write a story about him for a college class. That was my excuse. It was, I imagine, the first profile I ever wrote. I don’t remember much, but what I do remember is vivid. I remember talking to him in his glass office (he had his own office!). I remember him telling me stories about Arnold Palmer and Choo Choo Justice and Harmon Killebrew and Phil Ford and some of his other favorite subjects. And I remember what he told me when I said that my biggest dream was to someday be a newspaper columnist like him.

He said: “It’s a good and happy life.”

Senior was an elegant writer. In the Charlotte paper, during my formative years, the two sports columnists were Tom Sorensen, who was funny and unconventional, and Ron Green, who was graceful and personal. Senior was famous for his Thanksgiving Day column, where he would write about his family and friends and what he loved about sports. When I was lucky enough to become a sports columnist myself, I wrote my own version of Ron Green’s Thanksgiving column. Mine was a lot longer. I never did have Senior’s succinctness.

There are countless stories I could tell you about Ron Green Sr.—he was the nicest of folks and so kind to me through the years—but the one that hits me today comes from a Saturday when I was working in the office as a clerk. I was told that Senior’s computer was failing him, and I would have to take dictation of his column. He was at a college football game that day—I recall it being a North Carolina-Wake Forest game, but I’m not certain about that—so I got on the phone with Senior and nervously typed the words that Charlotte sports fans would rip open the paper on Sunday morning to read.

We went along until he read this line: “Records fell like the leaves on this fall afternoon.”

At which point, he stopped and uncharacteristically said, “Ah, that’s nice.”

Maybe he was joking; Senior had this wonderful, dry sense of humor. But I prefer to think he wasn’t. I prefer to think he was pleased with the words that had come to him on a fall afternoon in Winston-Salem or Chapel Hill or wherever he happened to be. All I’ve ever really wanted was to be Ron Green Sr. He lived a good and happy life.

So let me tell you how I found out about Shohei’s 50-50 season. On Thursday, I was at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Day 3 of the WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL tour, great time had by all. And before Andrew Maraniss and I took the stage, I saw that Ohtani was 4-for-4 with a homer and two stolen bases. That left him at 49-51. I turned off my phone and went out to talk about football.