Before a sportswriter becomes one, it’s understood you don’t get too close to the people you write about, because it can affect your objectivity. Well, I got that one out of the way before my occupation became official.
His name was Walt Williams. Our friendship, which began about this time of year, was an unlikely one. He was 19, I was 17. He was a professional baseball player, I was a wannabe sportswriter. He was as black as I was white. He was charismatic, I was not. He was a scratch snooker player who took great joy in beating up somebody who consistently put the cue ball in the nearest pocket.
Walt played one season with the Winnipeg Goldeyes. Perhaps because he was the youngest player, he befriended a fellow teenager from outside that baseball bubble. It was a short summer, the Goldeyes’ last in the Northern League, and left behind was this unusual friendship.
A year later, Walt was playing Triple A in Oklahoma and I was, officially, a sportswriter in Manitoba. Walt never saw Winnipeg again, but he saw plenty of me. The next year, with a friend who sometimes relieved me as Walt’s pool hall victim, I saw him in Tulsa during a previously planned driving vacation. He won the league batting championship and Chicago wanted him to play for the White Sox, the team I’d been following from age eight. For me, that was baseball destiny.
Walt became a decent major leaguer for almost a decade, batting .304 one season. His personality was such that he was popular wherever he played, and widely known by his nickname — “No Neck” — because, well, he didn’t really have one.
Chicago has been THE American city in our household, for many reasons. I drove my first new car there, a year after the Tulsa trip, and stayed with Walt and his wife for a week. My passenger some days, on the streets of Chicago’s south side, was their two-year-old son Deron. Just the two of us — the driver perhaps the only white person in sight. Imagine the heads that must have turned.
That week, Deron’s Dad and I regularly drove to the original Comiskey Park, where I saw my first major-league no-hitter (Joel Horlen). Five years later, my wife and I made our first post-wedding vacation to Chicago — no, not the honeymoon — and were their house guests. They had a second son then, Tyrus, a baby with spinal meningitis that would soon end his life.
Within three years, Walt’s big-league career was over. He moved (to play in Japan) and we moved to live in Montreal. The common ground and the friendship dissipated. Many years later, in San Antonio on vacation, we drove to the Texas town where he lived — Brownwood — and met again. By then he had another son, and another wife. After spending a day together, it just wasn’t the same.
The only story I wrote about Walt Williams before this one was in the Goldeye News Bulletin, a four-page newsletter I created to convince the team’s brass I deserved a free ticket.
It’s nine years since Walt’s fatal heart attack. Never once did I regret breaking sportswriting’s rules, by becoming his friend.
