Senior
A sportswriting legend, plus my weekly shareables: Politics at the yard sale, sadness in a sports town, and a pineapple in your buggy
One quick event reminder: We’re now just a week (and a day) away from my appearance with Wright Thompson on Sept. 29 at Park Road Books in Charlotte … we’ll be talking about his stunning book THE BARN, which centers on the place where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. It’s a 2 p.m. event, which means you won’t have to watch the Panthers game that day! We are looking out for you over here.
Sportswriters don’t come to the office much. They do their work at ballparks and stadiums and arenas. So when Ron Green Sr. showed up in the Charlotte Observer newsroom, it was always a treat. He’d stroll over to the sports department and find a desk and start opening the stacks of mail that had accumulated since the last time he was there. And while he did that, other folks from the newsroom would come by in a steady stream to visit. It was like an appearance from the pope. A shy, friendly pope.
We all called him Senior, because his son, Ron Green Jr., also wrote sports for the paper. Junior was (and is) an excellent sportswriter himself. But by the time I met Senior, in the early ‘90s, he had already been working for the Charlotte newspapers—first the News, then the Observer—for 45 years. He ended up pushing on past a half-century, and even after he retired, he’d file a few columns every year. He died on Wednesday at 95 as the undisputed dean of sportswriters in North Carolina, and one of the most beloved members of his profession anywhere.
Senior would never have made it on one of those ESPN hot-take shows. He could sting when he felt like he had to, but mostly he wrote love letters. He loved Dean Smith, the legendary basketball coach at North Carolina. He loved Saturday afternoons at college football stadiums with the bands playing and the smell of the tailgates outside.
More than anything, he loved the Masters. He covered 60 consecutive Masters. He famously had breakfast with Arnold Palmer the morning Palmer won his first Masters in 1958. Senior would joke that he deserved partial credit for the win. But he really does get credit for helping make the Masters into the biggest golf event in the world. He wrote hundreds of columns about the tournament, and his words made you want to watch.
This morning I went back and looked at what he wrote in the Masters’ biggest moment, when Jack Nicklaus, at the sports-ancient age of 46, won the Masters in 1986. Here’s how Senior closed his column from Augusta:
It was all so perfect, this grand day for Jack Nicklaus and for us.
As darkness fell over Augusta National Golf Club, Nicklaus mentioned the
fast greens, tough pin placements and emotion and said, “This is a young
man’s golf course.”
Sunday, he was young again. And so were we.
People have different tastes. Some people want a columnist to be full of vinegar, agitating for the coach to be fired or holding the star player’s feet to the fire. That’s fine. I enjoy that sometimes, too.
But I think, as I age, I enjoy the love letters more. It’s easy to fire a poison dart at someone or something you don’t like. Social media, some days, is just one massive dartboard. It’s harder to say you love something and mean it.
Every Thanksgiving, for decades, Senior would write a simple column listing the things he was thankful for. His wife, Beth, was always in there; they were married 68 years before she died last fall. He always thanked the place he got his hair cut. The rest of it was sunshine and rainbows. It was refreshing, in a newspaper full of death and conflict and corruption, to see sunshine and rainbows. I think Senior understood that better than the rest of us.
I want to close with one quick story that I hope is an inspiration of sorts. The Observer threw a party for Senior to celebrate his 50th anniversary with the paper. At the party we ended up talking for a while, and I asked him the obvious question: How had he kept doing the job so long and so well?
“Well,” he said quietly. “Every day I walked in here, I thought that was the day they were going to fire me.”
So many of us are so insecure in our work. We always think we’re about to get discovered as frauds. Ron Green was the opposite of a fraud. He had more job security than anyone in the room. But he had that fear inside him, too. And yet he was able to work through it and keep going and build a monumental career, and a wonderful life.
That’s one of the many lessons Senior taught. Every day there is a new chance to make ourselves young again.
10 things I wanted to share this week:
The Canine Chronicle, one of the big trade magazines in the dog-show world, did a fair and even-handed review of DOGLAND. Very much enjoyed seeing it there.
My weekly for WFAE was about moving a historic building to save it—not something we’ve done a lot of in this city.
Such a smart idea: My former colleague Paige Williams followed the trail of the world’s longest yard sale to take America’s political temperature (and maybe buy some junk along the way). (New Yorker)
I have to link, here in The Writing Shed, to a story about an actual writing shed—the place where the legend Robert Caro works. (This is from Curbed, part of New York magazine, and it might throw up a paywall if you’ve read something else from New York this month. A tip: If you have a “reader mode” in your browser, you can often read paywalled stories that way. It worked for me with this one.)
A miserable—but somehow, still wonderful?—slog through the Maine part of the Appalachian Trail. (Washington Post)
I heard a rumor years ago about a grocery store in the Charlotte area where swingers would advertise themselves by going around with a pineapple in their shopping cart. I laughed it off. But it turns out … it might be true? And not just here? (Fast Company)
My buddy Tom Haberstroh does the math to prove something I already knew emotionally: Charlotte is the saddest sports city. (The Finder)
Very much identified with the brilliant baker and writer Keia Mastrianni and the chaos of a working home. (Pleasant Living)
Another old newspaper colleague, Ted Williams, knows how to make a splash with his new newsletter: He offers to buy the Charlotte Observer for $5 million cash. (Tiny Money)
It’s not the full song, but this clip of Sturgill Simpson covering “Purple Rain” lifted my heart this week.
Have a great week, everybody.
—TT
Wonderful salute to Ron Green!❤️
What she said.