A Time That Will Never Happen Again

Remembering Bill Livingston — and a vanished world when sports columnists traveled the world and told stories to their cities.

We’d see each other a few times every year. At Super Bowls. At World Series. At Masters. At the Olympics. At random games, when our cities happened to cross paths.

We’d greet each other the same way every time.

“When did you get in?”

“Where are you staying?”

“How about dinner on Saturday?”

We’d sit next to each other in press boxes overlooking fields. We’d crowd together on hard metal chairs in stuffy, small rooms where coaches and managers and quarterbacks and golfers stood behind a lectern and spoke into cameras and tape recorders. We’d laugh until we were crying on shuttle buses stuck in traffic. We’d munch snacks and drink warm beer together in hotel hospitality rooms that, paradoxically, closed too early and stayed open way too late.

We’d complain to each other about editors and athletes and public relations people and, mostly, each other.

We’d tell each other horror stories about endless airport delays, and 27 degree hotel rooms, and players who never showed up to answer questions, and that time we got food poisoning at that restaurant in Jacksonville.

We’d laugh together about that time Bob Knight yelled at us, or the time someone in the press box jinxed us all by talking out loud about how fast the game was going, or the time a game ended and we had nothing but a blank computer screen and three minutes to fill it.

We’d ask each other, “What’d you end up writing?”

We’d tell each other our story angles and hope for confirmation that it wasn’t the worst thing ever written.

We’d cancel plans at the last minute because the writing was taking longer than we expected.

We were a club. Sort of. We didn’t all know each other. But we all knew each other. Edwin and Dan in Miami. Bill in Los Angeles. Bernie in St. Louis. Sally and Tony and Michael in Washington. Paul and Tim in Cincinnati. Ann and Scott and Gwen and Bud and Ray in the Bay. Gary in St. Pete. Martin in Tampa. Chuck in Lexington. Pat in Louisville. Dave in Atlanta. Rick in Chicago. Bob and Jackie and Leigh and Dan in Boston. The whole New York contingent, there were a million of ‘em, Vac and Mike and Ian and Dave and George and Adrian and Jerry and all of ‘em. Tom in Omaha. Ken in Charleston. Patrick and Sid in Minneapolis. Woody and Mark and Bob in Denver. Mark in Orange County. Mitch and Joe and Michael in Detroit. Jim from the AP. Christine from USA Today. Randy in Fort Worth. David in Dallas. Bill and Ray in Philadelphia. Bud and Terry and Bill in Cleveland.

Dozens more. Legends like Jim. Characters like Art. Heroes like Dan. Stars like Rick. We’d see each other more than we saw our parents. We’d see each other on weekends and holidays, in Augusta and Beijing, South Bend, Johannesburg and New Orleans, Sydney and Pasadena and St. Andrews, and also Pittsburgh. We’d share quotes with each other and catch each other up on scorecards after bathroom breaks. We’d ask athletes and coaches the same questions. What was the thinking …? Did you expect …? How disappointing is it …?

We were like a traveling band, all us sports columnists across America, only we weren’t traveling together, and we weren’t a band at all.

We were just living in a time that will never happen again.

We lost Bill Livingston over the weekend. He was 77 years old.

Bill was sports columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer back when that newspaper — all big city newspapers and quite a few smaller city newspapers too — believed in covering the sports world for their own community. It isn’t an easy thing to explain today. There was just a feeling, no, more than a feeling, a deep-seated belief that the people who lived in Chagrin Falls deserved to read their very own story from the Final Four, told by Bill Livingston, the columnist they read four times a week.

There was a feeling, no, more than a feeling, that a family in Mahwah deserved to wake up in the morning after the Olympics and read their very own figure skating story told by Adrian Wojnarowski, the columnist they read four times a week.

There was a feeling, no, more than a feeling that a baseball fan in Menlo Park deserved to hear about the World Series from Ann Killion, even if the Giants or Athletics didn’t even come close to making it.

Does any of this make sense in today’s homogenized world? Maybe not. Maybe it didn’t make sense then either. But that was our world. We’d see each other a few times every year, and you could always count on Bill Livingston — Livvy, we called him — to make some sort of hard-bitten wisecrack that broke up the room. We’ll miss him a lot. We’ll miss those days.