Dick Fenlon’s death won’t get the notice it deserves this week. That is both sad and understandable.
Probably half of today’s working population have never read a newspaper and most of the others have moved on to faster, more exciting (if less reliable) forms of media. For that reason, thinking about the contributions of a newspaper sports columnist who retired in 1997 might seem like recognizing the scientists who battled that deadly 1918 influenza pandemic. No way that could be relevant, right?
But when the Columbus Dispatch hired Fenlon away from the Louisville Times to become the paper’s sports columnist in 1981 it represented a sea change in the city’s sports journalism. Fenlon was not only a beautiful writer – and to be clear, Columbus has had more than its share of those –but he had the courage to write the truth about Ohio State athletics, even when it was a little messy. Trust me when I say this, this is not easy.
Fenlon knew the deal. He grew up in Columbus and worked at the Ohio State Journal before it folded into the Columbus Citizen-Journal in 1959, so he understood how difficult it could be to write anything that could be construed as criticism of the OSU program, the school or its players. The minefield a truthful columnist might have to tip-toe through often included bombs planted by the newspaper’s editors, its publisher and powerful local interests who demanded their news in a certain, uh, scrubbed way. Objectivity be damned. Truthful columnists weren’t expected to last long, if they were hired at all.
Fenlon’s didn’t use a hammer on anybody, but his delicate, humorous style could be incisive and painful. His occasional criticism also didn’t sit well with some readers, who didn’t understand that he was working for them. Would they really rather have a newspaper columnist feed their fantasies than let them know what he believed was really happening? In many cases, the answer was a loud yes. On probably a hundred occasions, I was confronted with a familiar question: Why does Fenlon hate Ohio State?
I would try to explain that he doesn’t, that he grew up in Columbus and graduated from Ohio State. I would try to explain that journalism demands objectivity and he was simply (or maybe not so simply) doing his job, but his critics were a hard lot. Some of his predecessors had a history of being more loyal to the program than to the newspaper’s readers, and a lot of readers liked it that way. In their minds, you were one of us or one of them.
I remember covering the 1986 World Series in Boston with Fenlon; on an off-day we went to Cambridge and walked around the Harvard campus. A couple of years later, he jokingly wrote something like “I went to Harvard – during the 1986 World Series,” and he received a blistering email from a reader who didn’t get the joke and obviously didn’t care for his objectivity. “I can’t believe an idiot like you went to Harvard,” the reader wrote. Fenlon just shook his head and laughed.
That was his reaction to just about everything. He didn’t take himself too seriously and didn’t sweat the small stuff. He had no ego. He was a such a good guy that the animosity toward him seemed by some of his readers seemed unfathomable to me. He wrote terrific stuff in a readable, enjoyable style that I know influenced me and others on the staff and I’m sure I unconsciously tried to emulate it.
I covered the 1983 Final Four with Fenlon in Albuquerque and we decided to drive up to Santa Fe on the day of the championship game and take in the sights for a couple of hours. We were on the square at lunchtime and I asked him where he wanted to eat. He said he didn’t care as long as it wasn’t Mexican; we had been eating Mexican food every night.
A restaurant on the square held a big sign – Mexican and American food – and Dick said that was OK. I could eat Mexican food and he could eat American. The perfect solution. After we sat down, we noticed that the waitress and all of the help were Mexicans, which should have been a tipoff, but again, he said it would be fine.
He ordered a bowl of vegetable soup and a chicken salad sandwich, which seemed like a safe selection. But when the soup came, it consisted of a brown liquid with peppers floating in it. He looked at it warily, took a sip and his eyes bugged out. He called the waitress over and politely told her that he couldn’t eat it, it was too hot (as in spicy). Her face flushed and she looked like she was ready to fight.
“Hot? What do you mean it’s too hot? That’s not hot.”
Somewhat sheepishly, he said again that it was a little too spicy for him and she grabbed the bowl, mumbled something that my two years of high school Spanish couldn’t translate, spun around like an angry ballet dancer and bolted away.
A few minutes later, his chicken salad sandwich arrived. This was chicken tossed in a generous mix of hot peppers. Fenlon laughed, took a bite, drank a half glass of water and then watched me devour my own plate of overly spicy Mexican food. He chuckled about it, paid his bill, left hungry and never complained.
He loved to encounter situations that made both him and his readers laugh so I offer one from the Minneapolis airport during the 1991 World Series. We were catching our plane to go back to Atlanta and we followed two guys into an airport McDonald’s. While we were waiting in a line about six deep, we realized that current world heavyweight boxing champ Evander Holyfield was one of the guys. The other guy looked like a teenager who might have been Holyfield’s little brother.
We were in line behind them for maybe five or ten minutes and no one said a word to them. This especially amused Dick because he had covered Muhammed Ali extensively while working in Louisville and he knew the spotlight followed Ali everywhere he went.
Holyfield? There was no spotlight, no entourage and not even a glance of recognition from those around him.
Finally, when he got to the cash register, Holyfield ordered his breakfast like any other customer and while in the midst of the order, another guy working behind the counter suddenly noticed him and yelled “Hey, Champ! Champ! Hey, this is the champ!”
The girl who had been waiting on him, stopped what she was doing, took a good look at Holyfield, and finally realized that she might be in the midst of greatness.
“What, are you a wrestler or something?”
Holyfield smiled, said that he was a boxer and unobtrusively found a table where he and his companion could eat. It was a wonderful display of humility, one that Fenlon wrote as he saw it, without approaching the champ and trying to inject himself and his experiences with Ali into the experience.
But of course, he wouldn’t. He understood Holyfield much better than I did.
For all of his talent, Fenlon had little or no ego himself.
