When The Boston Globe Had Real Sportswriters

I whiffed on this one a few days ago, but Shank actually cranked out a solid column:

Remembering our maestro of the sports department: Ray Fitzgerald

There are no games in these dark, scary days. Here in the toy department, we spend a lot of time looking back. We watch grainy footage of World Series played in 1967 and 1975. We watch Larry and Magic in their short-shorts battling in three NBA Finals in the 1980s. We watch "Malcolm, go!'' and 28-3.

We blow the dust off old books, once again savoring Roger Kahn’s "The Boys of Summer,'' David Halberstam’s “The Breaks of the Game,” and anything by the estimable Roger Angell.

Today I am here to celebrate Ray Fitzgerald, the best sports columnist to grace these Globe pages in my lifetime.

Allow me to point something out:

All of us in this business who were fortunate enough to have read him regularly feel the same way. I grew up reading the Globe and have been lucky to work with a deep roster of Hall of Fame talents, but Ray was the best of those best. Like the man, his columns were funny, thoughtful, sensitive, creative, self-deprecating, and never mean.

The lack of self-awareness in some people is astounding. If Shank was capable of dropping that one attribute from his columns, there's a very good chance this site doesn't exist. Some people are natural born assholes; we now know who one of them is not that.

With that said, I didn't read many actual columns about Ray Fitzgerald, but his reputation was redoubtable. Also, this part is laughable (at least for me):

On the Boston Marathon: "Our city’s contribution to the legend of sport, a day when all America pays homage to the shin splint . . . As someone who reaches the brink of physical exhaustion merely by driving from Boston to Springfield, I find the thought of running 100 miles a week simply inconceivable. You might as well tell me they ride a bicycle to the moon for a bottle of milk.''

Great sportswriter, but a complete driving wimp!

I love driving for the most part - my personal record for a one day drive was 1,013 miles from Sarasota, FL to just outside of Baltimore, MD. I left Sarasota at 11 AM (and I was one very pissed off man when I started the drive, hence the motivation) and got to Baltimore around 3 AM the next day. The one thing that kept me going on that last leg - there was live Van Halen on some FM station and it went on for four hours. Of course, this was a long time ago; I'm not sure I could pull that off now, but I'd give it a shot if I had to. The other good one was from Mt. Ascutney, VT to Quincy in approximately 2 hours, 11 minutes. I charged down I-91 in a 1996 Dodge Intrepid (that car was a fucking beast - really solid V-6 engine and an excellent wheelbase for handling) like no one's business, then took Rt. 2 to Rt. 128, then the Mass. Pike and finally the Southeast Expressway. Google suggests a different route but by my reasoning the more time you spend on interstate highways or something similar, the faster you get there even if total miles is greater than the alternative routes. It also helps a lot to hold 95-100 MPH on that stretch of I-91 about half the time. That car, maybe fortunately, had a governor preventing me from going over 105 MPH, but I-91 was a fantastic stretch of road, no question about it.