The man who loved Austin Peay is dead; Farewell Sherwin Clift, devoted to school, microphone and family; That's the 3-0 mark from here for "Voice of the Govs" who sang "Folsom Prison Blues" off-key at Bear Bryant Lounge in Tuscaloosa, Alabama

 Clarksville’s oldest teenager -- a future Church of Christ deacon and benefactor/businessman -- finished off another in his long row of Budweiser drafts at the Bear Bryant Lounge at the Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Holiday Inn, when I helped coax him to get up to the small band stage and grab the microphone.

The house band had been playing Lynyrd Skynyrd covers and the like, leading the crimson-necked crowd to holler out occasional “Roll Tide” and other alarming, well-meaning, epithets professing arousal by God and gridiron in the land of cotton.

Sherwin Clift (who I sometimes called “Sherwood,” depending on beer dispensation), strode to the bandstand during the band’s break.  He was handed the microphone and he, perhaps slurring his words slightly, delivered a verbatim version of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” while the band’s bass player and at least one other musician backed him up.

He was off-key – but “on-key” was never one of my eventual friend, John R. Cash’s attributes, anyway –

so he sounded good. Lubricated, but good. And funny. The crimson-necked crowd in the Bear Bryant Lounge applauded his effort. If he’d had another song, an encore would be welcomed. But he didn’t have a follow-up, didn’t hear a train a comin’, and he gracefully climbed from the low-slung bandstand to backslaps and Bud pint drafts sent to our table.

I was sitting alone at the table during the performance, since Sherwin and I were the only media traveling with the Austin Peay State University basketball team that the next night suffered swift dispensation by the then-underappreciated Tide basketball squad. The best part of the trip – other than Sherwin’s performance – was Alabama’s Coach C.M. Newton, forever clutching pipe in teeth, giving me a tour of the athletic facilities.

Even got to see the real Bear Bryant atop the coaching tower on the football practice field. Or come to think of it, that may have been his ghost. Long time ago.

This was early in my years of covering Austin Peay State University sports. In fact, I believe I had begun that basketball season as assistant sports editor of The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper (which is the oldest continuously published paper in the state, though it now depends on press releases for survival and does not qualify as a newspaper.)

Max Moss was sports editor during the early part of that season, but he had a heart issue that required his hospitalization for a while – I visited with him every day at old Clarksville Memorial, where we smoked cigarettes and laughed. Nowadays, they generally don’t recommend heart patients or their guests fire up Winston reds in hospital rooms.  Good decision, but back then, we all figured time was on our side. And it was for a while. Not anymore. 

Anyway, the sports editor up there covered Austin Peay sports, but with Max out of commission, it fell on me to cover the Governors.  I still covered high schools, too, though I can’t remember now if Larry Schmidt – a Steely Dan fan who became a fine journalist as well as semi-scratch golfer and reverse-mortgage purveyor and bourbon aficionado --had begun his turn covering preps after graduating from the Peay.

Max came back to work and covered the Peay again, but, truly, his heart wasn’t in it. His heart ailment and desire to live, coupled with some office politics and endorsements for me from Voice of the Govs Sherwin Clift, led to me taking over as sports editor while Max was promoted to managing editor.

That meant working mostly days and not traveling and more time with his family (Merrily, Max and kids Karen and Max Jr. and their dog, Fluffy, had all but adopted me. Max Jr. and Karen are the remainders, but I still love them all).

Max gladly relinquished those long, hard and late-night and weekend hours of being a sports editor, complete with the bus rides with the teams and the generally seedy hotels where we slept in and around the Ohio Valley Conference (back then just recovering from its image as outlaw league, reeling from NCAA sanctions and abuse because of minor infractions that are all legal, encouraged even, in the modern NIL NCAA.)

Most of the motels were in exotic ports like Richmond, Kentucky, Morehead (not less!) in the Kentucky mountains and Johnson City, Tennessee.  The fanciest place to eat in Morehead (not less!) was a grits and country ham joint not far from the campus.  If you really wanted to dine in high style, there was a Shoney’s Big Boy partway down the mountain and near the freeway.

The rest of the games were day trips to Bowling Green, Kentucky; Murray, Kentucky; Murfreesboro and Cookeville, Tennessee. We did fly to Mobile for a tournament and I even sat through a practice with the Rev. Oral Roberts when we visited that shaman’s university.   

But, the trip to Tuscaloosa was special. (Forget the Groucho Marx/Captain Spaulding “elephant in my pajamas” joke in “Animal Crackers” about tusk removal. I should probably add here that, on professor’s recommendation, everyone in my film class at Iowa State had fed their heads to prepare for the showing of that film and “Duck Soup.” I was nothing if not studious. Anyway, Groucho proclaims in one of his rants that it’s easier to get an elephant’s tusk in Alabama, because the Tuscaloosa, or some such. My Uncle Moose and I had met Groucho, when he still was alive. But that’s another story and Moose and Groucho are long gone.)

Back to my tale, skewed by fading memories and years of long nights, ballgames, heartbreak, triumphs, redemption and occasional beverages.

In Tuscaloosa, I was sharing a room with Sherwin at the Holiday Inn. Normally, Martin Harmon, the briefly tenured sports information director, would have shared a room with one of us, but Martin skipped the plane flight. Neither he nor guard “Downtown Dennis” Pagan (also known as “Pogo” Pagan) wanted to fly, so they drove down there the next day.) Pogo was, by the way, the pride of Gastonia, North Carolina, and his specialty was the three-point shot from “downtown” that only counted for two points back then in the dark ages. Let’s skip the Caitlin Clark versus Pete Maravich debate here. Caitlin is a phenomenon, great for sports, Pistol Pete only had three years of varsity eligibility and no three-point shot.

I would like to talk to Sherwin about that, but he died the other day. I’ll not be going to the funeral, as I’ve spent too much time with the dead lately. But I still have spent a lot of time thinking about him lately.

Sherwin, who seemed to enjoy both my company and my urging him (not a tough task) to sing the Cash tune, was “The Voice of the Govs,” the radio broadcaster for the Govs sports network (WJZM-AM in Clarksville was the “home” station, feeding the games to similarly WKRP-like broadcast destinations across small parts of the Ohio Valley).

I had been told – either by Larry Schmidt, former sports editor Frances Gene Washer or perhaps by Jeff Bibb, an APSU alum and booster – that I needed to wait until Sherwin had a few Buds and encourage him to perform.

(I want to add here a side note that Larry Schmidt and Jeff Bibb are sons of two of the men I admired most from the academia of the Peay. Drs. Leon Bibb and Aaron Schmidt were two of the most noble men I ever met.  That has nothing to do with this story, but I was proud to be able to consider those men as my friends. They were in a league with businessman Bill Shelton – father of my beloved pal Scott “Badger” Shelton -- as the city’s most-welcoming men and fans of this Italian Yankee outlaw.)

They are going to officially remember Sherwin Sunday in Clarksville.  Since I’ve been gone a long time, I contacted young Larry Schmidt for his thoughts on the passing. He dashed off a few quick notes and told me to reconstruct at my wish. I don’t need to change a thing, as these quick thoughts came straight from Larry’s heart:

“Since 1956, Sherwin Clift has been a friend of the family.

He befriended my parents when Dad came to APSU (where he was a music wizard, as band director and composer and professor.)

Norma babysat me when Dad had the band in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Sherwin took me under his wing when I went to APSU. That’s where I met (beloved sports information director) Doug Vance (now retired in the Arizona desert). I traveled with this group and Jeff Bibb with football and basketball teams. Sherwin was a dear friend. He loved his family and he loved life.

The world was a better place with him in it.”

Larry added the details of Sherwin’s painful decline due to stomach cancer and injury and pneumonia, adding “he died peacefully.” Part of Sherwin’s love of life and of Corvettes helped get him branded Clarksville’s oldest teenager. But, even in his almost-constant leisure suits (a 1970s fashion abomination), I always thought of him as being pretty old. I mean, he began his Peay career by hitchhiking up from Cornersville in 1956.

I know I’m pretty deep into my recollection of a single night in Tuscaloosa 45 years ago or so, but it was where I got my first impression of The Voice of the Govs and his good-timey road-dog, side disposition.

I’m only recalling this today because Sherwin died Tuesday after an extended illness. The full obituary is about a mile long, detailing his own sports, academic, civic and church achievements.

The pride of Cornersville (a metroplex of watermelon and feed corn and broken-down donkeys near Lewisburg), Sherwin was an accomplished man and deserves all the honors and all the inches of copy spent on his death.

I really liked the guy a lot, and during my sports editor tenure, I traveled a lot of miles with him. I covered the basketball teams coached by Ed. (don’t forget the period or he’ll get pissed… I always addressed him as “Ed Period” at the end of long nights on the road) Thompson, Ronnie Bargatze (a wonderful guy and uncle to my favorite comic after Seinfeld and Richie Pryor) and the second coming of Lake Kelly – I’d become associate editor of the paper and had to return to the sports beat for a few months after short-timer sports editor John “Street” Staed fled to  Birmingham.

Now, I’ve not kept up with Sherwin, other than to read the occasional story about his countless post-Voice of the Govs accomplishments.  (Another friend, Bill Herndon, also deceased) took the microphone when Sherwin closed his final broadcast with his trademark “And for the final time, down the line, that’s the 3-0 mark from here,” a reference to our dark ages journalism when a story’s end was marked “30” after it was deemed set for printing. Bill Herndon was the son of downtown Clarksville’s friendliest motorcycle cop, Sgt. Russ Herndon, who – after newspaper folks and Fly Williams – was the first person to welcome me to the Queen City of the Cumberland back on September 12, 1974.)

I had heard Sherwin was very ill for a long time. So, his death at age 85 April 23 didn’t really surprise me. But it hit me hard. In my heart I’m still, I guess, that young guy with the last name unpronounceable by most Clarksvillians, who enjoyed having a beer with Sherwin and also enjoyed my fairly regular role as a halftime guest during football and basketball games.

One game in particular sticks in my mind (though it is a bit hazy). Sherwin and I were in Evansville, Indiana, for a basketball game between the Govs and Purple Aces.  It was kind of an icy night and it had been a hard drive up there from Clarksville. I helped Sherwin get his gear up to the booth – that was on a catwalk high above the arena floor -- and I went down to talk with the coaches, SIDs, etc., to make sure my bases were covered for post-game interviews. I adjusted my camera lens speed and F-stops to compensate for the gloomy lighting I’d face when it came time for my award-winning sports photography.

Then the lights went out. Completely. In the arena. I went upstairs to the catwalk to see how Sherwin was handling the situation, only to find out his telephone hookup to WJZM was fine.  Commercials were cued up.  I believe there was emergency lighting up there that kept me from plunging off the catwalk.

“Stallion, can you help me fill some time?” asked Sherwin, kind and irritated by the delay and its uncertain resolution. (In Clarksville, at least, I was known in sports quarters as “The Italian Stallion,” a title which I still own, thanks to my friendships with Larry Schmidt and Jeff Bibb.)

For the next two hours-plus (and I may be exaggerating, because everybody who remembers is dead), I sat next to Sherwin, filling airtime while technicians worked to get the lights up and the balls bouncing on the darkened hardwood far below us. We talked about all sorts of things. Basketball, of course. But we talked about his Johnny Cash impression and my first taste of it at the Bear Bryant Lounge. He pumped me for my passion for The Beatles and tales from a childhood in Chicago.  I spoke about Muhammad Ali. And he threw out colorful memories of his travels for work and pleasure.  

I pushed him to recall his days in Cornersville, the same town where my buddy, government reporter Jerry Manley, had spent a chunk of his youth.

Sherwin was 13 years older, so he didn’t know Jerry. He did know of the Manleys, and if Sherwin ever entered the L-C newsroom he was sure to holler out “There’s the other pride of Cornersville” toward Jerry. Or something like that.

I’ve been on radio and TV quite a bit in my life. And a 10-minute halftime stint with Sherwin always was fun.

But I never had more fun on the air than when it was just the two of us, on a dark catwalk high above the arena floor, talking about whatever came into our minds.

Sherwin eventually moved on from broadcasting. But not before cutting his Austin Peay “Theme Song” that he titled “Red Fever.”

I’ve still got a copy of that old 45 rpm here someplace. It’s the voice of the Johnny Cash enthusiast singing about the thing that he loved more than anything (possibly excluding his family and wife, Norma): Austin Peay sports.

He’d recorded it after the great Boots Donnelly captured the OVC football crown for The Peay, and then was hired away to go home and coach at MTSU. 

Things still looked plenty rosy for the Govs’ football team as a young Turk named Watson Brown was brought in to take the reins for a pair of 7-4 seasons (or the like) before fleeing to eventual failure at Vanderbilt.

“It’s new, it’s hot, it’s flamin’, it’s the fashionable place to be; It’s Austin Peay Red Fever, in Clarksville, Tennessee,” Sherwin sings.

I may have a piece of lyric messed up, but you get the gist of the song that had the boom-chicka Johnny Cash-like soundtrack.

When I learned Sherwin had died, well, I was sad.  He was a good man and a long time ago, our paths crossed.

I thought about the decades that have passed since we spent hours togethers. The games we saw.  His stirring 45 rpm record. The two hours above the Purple Aces arena floor while the lights were out.  I thought of him interceding when a now long-deceased drunken Clarksville photographer threatened to physically assault me after a football game, blaming my propensity for unbiased coverage for the loss.

But I had to laugh – despite the melancholy of this latest reminder of years consumed and life diminishing -- at the memory of the night when we shared a table and some expense-account beers at the Bear Bryant Lounge in the Holiday Inn in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

And for the final time, down the line, that’s the 3-0 mark from here.

 

 

Harry Potter accompanies News Brothers as laughter takes over the Memory Care Ward and my pal, Jerry, enjoys contraband food and vague memories of pie fights and mean cops and Chico

 Jerry reaches to the stand next to his bed and retrieves a surprise.

“I’ve got this phone, but I can’t find a charger,” he says, flipping the telephone open and shut. “Somebody around this place must have a charger.”

He looks toward the hallway, where his roommate, Mr. Brown, stops in the doorway, says hello to a picture on the wall and turns to continue his morning ramble.

“I’ve really never met him,” Jerry says of his roommate since late November 2023, when Jerry was assigned his bed and dresser in the two-man room where both await their destiny.

I’ll have to say that Milford Brown seems to like me, always smiles and says “How are you?” when I encounter him either in the room or while he stalks, slowly, the long hallway in the Memory Care Ward of the nursing home.

Back to the newly discovered phone from Jerry’s stash on the nightstand.

Up until this moment -- on a really rain-spitting Friday in the town where country music rots in neon glory best exhibited when one of its biggest, racist stars thought it would be cool to toss a barstool from a sixth-floor watering hole -- that I found out my longest-tenured friend, Jerry Manley had a flip-phone squirreled away next to his autographed copy of “Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes” (the author is a pal) and a large digital clock. (I should add that drunken, racist stars of country’s new order cannot be found in that book.)

That clock, with its 3-inch-high numerals, had for months been staring right at Jerry, as he lay in his bed in the Memory Care Ward all day and all of the night.

But I’d noticed it was missing a few weeks ago. I asked him about it. He didn’t remember having a clock.

I actually thought it was stashed face-down beneath the books, but I hadn’t checked for it. I really think he took it down and hid it because time makes no difference when you are running out the clock in the Memory Care Ward.

I think he was even a bit pissed off that he’d found it.  So, he put it back at the top of the bookstack, but did not put it in a position where he could see it.  In this environment, meal-call is the way to mark a day.

“They come and get me when it’s time,” he said, admitting that the food was pretty good.  I think they roust their residents at 8, 11:45 and 5, but I could be wrong. 

A nurse came in while Jerry and I traded stories about Chico, the Monkey, the Clarksville Police who stopped our tickertape parade through the city and our fabled high-speed police chase that ended up in a pie-fight (policeman took part) and some hot stepping on the railroad tracks.

All of those events took place in the summer and fall of 1982, when The News Brothers – Flapjacks (me), Death (Rob Dollar), Chuckles (Jerry) and Flash (Jim Lindgren) spearheaded the filming of a “Hard Day’s Night”-style movie, eventually showing it in a world premiere presentation at the old Roxy Theater in downtown Clarksville.

All proceeds – somewhere close to $1,459 – was donated to local charities. While the fellows above were and remain The News Brothers, many other dissolute friends from The Leaf-Chronicle also participated when their wives would let them and the sun was shining and church had let out for the day.

Good guys like “StrawBilly Fields,” Harold “The Stranger” Lynch, Ricky “Don’t eat the paper, Dumbo” Moore, and the Rev. Larry McCormack participated when they could. StrawBilly is only in the first scene and actually has never seen the movie, as he left town shortly after his mentor Tony “Editor Tony Durr, 35, Missing” left town in the dead of night. 

None of the rest of us felt free to skip work for days on end to play golf with StrawBilly, which was Tony’s main role at The Leaf-Chronicle, so the round mound of rebound left to go become a public affairs whore for a Christian university.  After he got his fill of doing nothing for the school, StrawBilly became a government lifer in Nashville, governing laws regarding electric scooters.  He really is among the world’s nicest people, I should add, but I won’t.

John “Street” Staed also was a News Brother, with his biggest movie scene being getting out of his Volkswagen Rabbit and jumping in the air while waving his cowboy hat.  Street went on to newsroom glory throughout the Southeast, managing newsrooms … but eventually his past caught up to him, and he turned to a career in resuscitation or respiration.

It’s said he was among those best equipped to show people how to breathe, which I don’t doubt.

Around Eastertime, Street dropped in on Jerry in the Memory Care Ward. “We just talked about the stuff we used to do,” said Jerry when I inquired. He added that John “looks just like he always did.”

 “I didn’t realize that John looked frazzled, old, hollow-eyed and desperate 40 years ago,” I said, calling a picture of a mature Street up on my phone. None of us have aged well, I should note, but I won’t.

“I sure was glad to see John Staed,” Jerry told me, again.

Since we were talking about the Legend of the News Brothers – it does not have a happy ending – today, I turned the subject to our late and beloved friend Scott “Badger” Shelton, gone too soon 12 years ago.  The last official late-night Flapjacks Fest came 12½ years ago, when the most-loyal of us gathered at G’s Pancake House on Riverside Drive in Clarksville and feasted on memories and laughter and shared our careers’ bad endings and laughed at our disastrous personal choices.

Badger’s tale was different and sadder, as his wife, Elise, a hot chick who loves News Brothers, brought him to G’s. Beautiful Elise gave her life to helping Badger battle mortal cancer, a war entering its final skirmish. They invited us into their home for coffee and farts, laughs and fun, knowing the whole time that when the evening ended, we’d be saying farewell, forever, to our dying friend.

Mostly from that night, I remember Scott’s bold laughter as I hugged him goodbye and told him I loved him as he held the door for us. And I still feel the stunned silence that befell me and Jerry when we got into his truck to go back downtown and piss on the Roxy and swap more tales of our days of future passed with the rest of the Bros.  

In Jerry’s nursing home room, I did a little recounting of the previously mentioned tickertape parade, police chase and pie fight as he laughed. It’s hard to explain it if you weren’t in the back of Jerry’s orange Datsun mini-pickup in 1982, when the police cut us off in mid-tickertape parade.

“You can’t do these kinds of things in Clarksville,” said one of the friendly coppers who took our Diet Coke-filled whiskey bottles – props for our celebratory parade after we saved Clarksville and Jimmy Stewart – and dumped them down the sewer drain by the Royal York Hotel.

The orange pickup was our vehicle another day, when Kurt, the K-9 cop (I can’t remember his last name now), fired up his blue lights and siren and chased us at excessive speeds while Jerry piloted his Datsun and the rest of us were in the pickup bed, flipping birds and imitating masturbation, or something like that.

At the end of the chase came the pie fight, the rousing climax of the film.

“Not many people have had real pie fights,” observed Jerry when I reminded him that Kurt the Cop even got into the action by ducking just in time to avoid becoming a pie sandwich as two News Brothers closed in on him, front and back.

“We sure had fun making movies,” said Jerry.  In fact, he’s admitted that the filming of “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” is second only to the tawdry, blood-soaked tale of Chico, the Monkey in his Clarksville memories.

Jerry asked me to stick around a bit longer as I rose to leave. I sat down again, and we watched a part of a Harry Potter marathon on the television.  “I think they are showing Harry Potter movies all day,” said my friend.

“That’ll give you something to look forward to,” I said, adding that I’d neither read nor watched one of Harry’s adventures until this particular day.

“Do you want me to set up your clock?” I asked.

“Nah. All that matters is that they come down and tell me when it’s time to go eat. I do hope someone has a phone charger, though.”

Just then, a nurse came to get him for lunch, but Jerry stalled.

“Stay some more if you want to,” he told me.

The nurse gave one of those provocative smiles to me and added: “I’ll save him a plate. We like Mr. Manley.”

I watched a scene where Harry stood hapless as a woman swelled up like a balloon and floated out into the sky over the UK. I was hoping she’d burst.

Arm-over-shoulder, we walked to the dining hall. Jerry was hungry. It had been a couple of hours since he ate the 32 cheese crackers and washed them down with a Diet SunDrop that I’d had in my jacket lining.

“Come back when you can,” he said.

“Love you man,” I responded, as the nurse let me pass through the secure doors. I wish I could have taken him with me to the Waffle House.

  

"The Juice is Loose" finally ... My 'pal' Orenthal's blood-soaked legacy ends due to prostate cancer; while ungloved O.J.'s golf-playing search for Nicole and Ron's killer goes unfulfilled

 O.J. Simpson’s prostate cancer death hit me kind of hard Thursday, considering I actually had spent time with him, and we really hit it off.

I called him “Juice” or “Orenthal” – I first called him Mr. Simpson, but he, being just a

O.J. Simpson -- "It's Orenthal to you, Champo" -- and I spend bloodless time together at Clarksville Country Club.

 common, regular guy, insisted I not call him “Mr.” anything.

He called me “Tim” or “Champo” – both perfectly acceptable. I asked him to please not call me “Mr. Ghianni.” “That’s my dad,” I said, noting my pop was a Buffalo native and a huge Buffalo Bills fan. Juice, who cut his teeth as a Bills great, liked that.

I have to say, I really, really liked the guy.  Now, of course, I am worried they’ll never find the killer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

After all, wasn’t it 30 years ago or so that The Juice -- using the “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit” defense – said that search for justice was all he was going to do after he walked when found “Not Guilty” in that double-murder case.

“I’m going to spend the rest of my life tracking down the real killer,” O.J. said, or at least something similar, when he was acquitted … despite the fact some of the blood spattered all over Nicole’s residence after the brutal and animal-like carnage, was found on a glove that police eventually discovered on O.J.’s air-conditioning unit, outside Kato Kaelin's room at The Juice's lush Brentwood (rich L.A. suburb) compound.

Kato Kaelin's lay-about life as a houseguest during and after the murders has been rewarded with quiz show stardom and an occasional interview. He was a popular guest (his expertise in life) when O.J. was sent to prison later for robbery – he stole some of his own sports paraphernalia from “collectors.” The collectors said it was their stuff. In the world according to O.J., it was OK to get some gun-toting punks to help him “reclaim” that which no longer legally was his.

He went to prison for that, and he turned his life around to become a Church of Christ missionary, so when he got out, he was able to spread the Word of the Lord when he was going from golf course to golf course looking for the real killers of Ron and Nicole. I made up the missionary part. The only thing he knew about “missionary” was the position.

As for the murders, police and the district attorneys’ office did their best to botch what really seemed to us uneducated folks as a completely obvious case of double-murder committed by the one-time football great. Until the "try on the dry, bloody glove" miscue by the prosecution, the case seemed cut-and-dried.

I remember a couple decades before when I sat in the dormitory television room with my pal, Jocko, and other friends, Carpy, Nardholm and maybe even Titzy, as we watched O.J. finish up his record-setting 2,003-yard season for the Buffalo Bills, a franchise that always has enjoyed losing Super Bowls and critical games in general.

We all cheered for O.J.  As a Southern Cal fan, I’d been cheering for him for years. As far as I know there weren’t a lot of unsolved murders around USC or in Buffalo as the seemingly charming, everyman of a star went about his business. 

It is said he “cut through the defense” like a sharp knife. Using his amazing strength, he chopped away at linebackers and safeties.  He sliced his way to the end zone.

Back when Nicole and Ron were slaughtered, the inept investigators likely let their hormones fly -- this sharp-dressed man was a football hero, and the friendly coppers sighed and moaned and peed themselves --when they got to the compound in Brentwood, where O.J. was likely a very good neighbor.

It is said he always returned the hedge-trimmers and lawnmowers to his neighbors after he spent his days manicuring his estate.

All kinds of nasty and dirty things and people supposedly had converged around good old Juice. But, even so, most of us thought of him as a funny fellow in the “Naked Gun” series of movies, a nice guy who sat on Johnny Carson’s couch and ran through the airport in Hertz commercials.

Just an all-American guy, good neighbor with a lot of money, a Heisman Trophy and a white Ford Bronco. I did make up the lawnmower stuff above. I think Al Cowlings and Kato had to cut the grass.

To the world at large, Orenthal was the normal sort of guy you might find at the local Ace Hardware, picking up fertilizer, getting keys cut or perhaps eyeing, and drooling through that bleached movie-star’s smile, at the new stuff in the knife case.

All of this is to say I knew O.J.

I had the opportunity to meet him and spend one-on-one time with him when he was chosen as spokesman for Acme Boot Company’s Dingo Boots line.  Previous spokespeople included June and John Cash and Joe Montana, the best quarterback to ever play the game (I’m throwing that in there for no reason, other than it is the plain truth.)

Anyway, Acme (since deported or deceased) had its international HQ and factories in Clarksville, Tennessee, where I was the sports editor of “The Leaf-Chronicle” – Tennessee’s oldest continuously published paper then, a worthless pile of unintelligible press releases now.

The first year O.J. was the spokesman, there was a hurried press conference for him out at the Acme building. All the sports hotshots from Nashville, Bowling Green, even Louisville, I believe, were there. It was a throng of B.O. and bad breath and redundant questions. I had no private time, so I used a tape recorder -- held over the sea of bald, fat, beer-soaked white guys -- and hollered out a question or two to Juice.

Eventually, the Acme guys, who liked me for my footwear, helped me get a few minutes with O.J., and I had a lot of fun.

O.J. liked me enough that the next time he came for an Acme function, he agreed to what basically became one-on-one time for an afternoon and into the evening.

He was as kind and humble as can be imagined.

Here’s a brief summation of my encounters with O.J. in those glorious days in Clarksville, before that wonderful city decided to grow like a mini-Nashville 40 miles away. Like Nashville, most of the charm now is gone, but the real estate brokers are happy.

Enough on that. I’m still stunned by the news of Orenthal’s death.

I’m borrowing a few paragraphs here from the nationally honored book “When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers & their Shades of Glory,” available on amazon.

My writing partner in that 2012 book and one about alien invaders in Kelly, Kentucky, was Rob Dollar.

We alternated chapters. In one chapter, I brought up my O.J. visits:     

I spent a couple of afternoons with O.J. Simpson, the great college and professional football running back, when he was spokesman for the local Acme Boot Company.  Actually, I kinda liked the guy.

Best interview I did with O.J. was when he was the first black person to play tennis at the Clarksville Country Club.  The boot company held their national gathering there and “The Juice” was there to play tennis with the big shots.

He thought it was interesting that people of his color had only previously come onto the club property as laborers, cooks, caddies and the like. But it didn’t bother him much.  Still I focused a part of my story on that fact.

The best afternoon we spent together included an interview at the country club and dessert afterward at one of my favorite downtown restaurants, Austin’s, owned by my good friend Jerry Uetz.

Interesting thing, though. O.J. had ordered ice cream ... and he kept fingering the steak knife that was on the table while we talked.

Later, in June 1994, when he was the prime suspect in the murders of his ex-wife and her friend, I thought a lot about that knife-wielding good guy.  By the way, when they charged him in the case and he took off for the low-speed chase on the interstate in Los Angeles, well, I was the only Nashville Banner ranking editor around—I never took lunch—who could authorize going late for news. So while my staff put together a new front page, streaming about O.J. on the run, I ran downstairs to the press room and shouted “Stop the Presses!”

That’s from the book.

I’d like to add that the “stop the presses” thing was cool. I’d done it before in Clarksville, when Rob (a police reporter) or Harold “The Stranger” Lynch (a government reporter and rodeo cowboy) came in with breaking news stories about kidnapped, raped and dissected teenagers or perhaps a mayor’s night on the town swilling his favorite beverage of lemonade and vodka, without the lemonade, and the fool he made of himself. The mayor -- who didn't hold that coverage against me -- was a friend of mine, by the way, and until his death a few years ago, he was one of my favorite sources of information about Clarksville or Fort Campbell, where he had been a colonel who flew helicopters and played golf and drank vodka and was known as “Wild Turkey.”

All of this is beside the point of my involvement with Orenthal, aka The Juice.

When I stopped the Banner presses, I composed a home edition headline over the story of O.J.’s failure to report to jail and instead going on the low-speed chase with his pal Al Cowlings at the wheel.

“The Juice Is Loose” screamed the headline.  There was another part of the headline, a kicker or “drop hed” that read something like “O.J. on the run.”

I was proud of myself and my staff.  

Like everyone else, I hated the murders and despised the murderer, an obvious knifes man who wore gloves that shrank when the blood dried (or something like that.)

He really was a charming fellow. I liked him a lot. He enjoyed my company, too. We laughed until we cried.

Just a couple of guys enjoying an afternoon and evening.

Too bad he didn’t live long enough to track down Nicole and Ron’s killer.

And I wonder if Orenthal ever bought a new pair of gloves? After all, the blood-soaked ones had shrunk so much they didn’t fit anymore.

 

My brother, Eric, a bigger-than-life and sweet man, left his mark on the world by the way he loved his family; And I will miss him always, while his memory lives in my heart and soul

Just like any little fellows in the 1950s, my big brother, right, and I wanted to be cowboys. He also liked to pick on me.
 

Eric, who I never will see again, is lying in a private family-viewing room in the bowels of a funeral home in the middle of Nashville.

Dead four days, Eric is dressed as he would if he was alive. His wife, Ann, had chosen a pair of sweatpants and his favorite, dressiest T-shirt for him to wear at this viewing.

Standing by that beautiful man’s body, I think of our last phone conversation, the night before he died, when he was still conscious in the ICU. He complained about the food they’d given him and then whispered, incomprehensibly, through his pain. “I love you, Brother,” I answered. “Get some rest. Love you.”

Upstairs in the funeral parlor, people are beginning to gather for the visitation that begins at 10 and runs until the High Noon service time. I uppercase High Noon because it is appropriate for Eric, an enthusiast of classic black-and-white movie Westerns and technicolor war tales.  “Do not forsake me, o my darling,” as Tex Ritter sang to preface Gary Cooper’s showdown.

Eric enjoyed talking about those cowboy and war films, the actors’ other work, hidden meanings, the reality versus the fiction of a movie “based on fact.” That, even during his mortal, four-week hospital stint, invariably led to a history lesson for those of us lucky enough to visit or even phone him. 

One topic we addressed thoroughly was the streaming WWII Spielberg miniseries, “Masters of the Air.”

It is a great, based-on-fact tale of B-17 bomber crews delivering payloads from their base in Britain and gradually deeper into the heart of Hitler’s Europe.

“I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the last two episodes are grim and moving at the same time,” I told him, since the series was not available on hospital TV.

“No, don’t tell me,” Eric said, correctly guessing that the Tuskegee Airmen would become involved.

 “I’ll watch the rest of it when I get home. I’m going to be in rehab for a while, I imagine. Maybe I’ll go straight home. I hope I can get out of here soon.”

During rehab or recovery, my brother would be, as he would say “sitting here taking up space,” so he’d have plenty of time to watch television.

I wish now he’d allowed me to tell him the ending of the series. Who knows, maybe they’ve got streaming media at St. Pete’s place. Though he had expressed, at times, doubts that such existed, he also had his Methodist deacon’s bright beliefs that it did. I’m hoping the old deacon’s right now getting the Flying Fortress pilots to tell him the straight truth. 

Eric loved to tell stories, make pun-filled "dad jokes" and sing commercial jingles to whoever would listen. Daughters Maria and Ana were his favorite audience. 

“What do you think about heaven and that stuff, Tim?”

“I’ll find out, and somehow I’ll get word back to you,” I told him, sure that – because of my earlier decades of running like I was running out of time – I’d be the first of these two siblings to tag up in the angels’ infield. 

Now, Eric’s gone ahead of me in line. He’s, as he’d say, “taking up space” with the spirit in the sky.

“What’s new in the world of high adventure?” he’d always inquire when phone conversations began.

 “I’ve been writing a lot, but don’t know if I’m working on another book or just writing to keep my brain un-fogged,” I’d say. “I write every day and see where my fingers take me.”

Then I’d ask: “What have you been up to?”

“Oh, just sitting here, taking up space,” he’d say. He would follow it with that booming laughter that he has shared with me for the 72½ years he was my big brother.

Big, indeed.  Eric was a big, big man, so I’d gently joke him “Taking up space is something you are really good at.”

He’d laugh, and for likely an hour, we would be on the telephone, discussing everything that came into his mind, likely when he was toiling away on his beloved yard and garden, storing up things to talk about, while singing commercial jingles in his head. He liked cereal, especially Cheerios, but he was “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” and believed “Trix are for kids.” He’d also tell you “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent” and say “Mabel, Black Label” or whatever other commercial jingles he could fish from his big, big brain. “When you’ve said Bud, you’ve said it all.”

Eric, our Dad, Em J., and I were a close trio of Ghiannis for many years. I am now The Godfather or Don Ghianni, likely the last Ghianni of my generation in America. 

The most common recipients of his commercial jingle songs were his true love, Ann, and daughters, Maria and Ana. Their husbands, Michael and Joshua, heard them too.

As did Josh and Ana’s boys, Sabatino and Emilio – named for our grandfather and father.  Eric was a great father. He was a fine husband, according to Ann who said “Eric’s my Superman” as she prayed in vain for his survival. “I guess that sounds silly,” she added. She was embarrassed by her Man of Steel analogy. But I was the only one who heard it. And she was right.  (And if there’s a Superwoman in this tale, it is Ann, who was sitting at her husband’s bedside even when drained from chemo for her breast cancer.)  

But the little boys, nicknamed Tony and Leo, both just toddlers, were really what this Superman lived for.   

“Eric was a kind man, but even he surprised himself and his family by how quickly and completely his grandsons captured his heart and filled his soul,” I wrote in the obit I composed for the Woodlawn-Roesch-Patton funeral home website.

The boys – I believe they wore “I Love My Papa” sweaters -- were still looking for him on the Saturday of the service. Of course, they weren’t at the viewing in the quiet room in the basement at Woodlawn.  They were clutching onto their father, Josh, upstairs.  Their last visions of their Papa forever will be of him playing with them just days before he was rushed to the hospital. He’ll always be the giant-of-heart-and-body fellow who loved being with them more than anything ever in his life.

“I hope Papa gets better so he can play with us,” Sabatino told his Nonna in the weeks my brother fought for his life at Saint Thomas Midtown.

Eric brought Irish tweed hats home from Ireland for his grandsons, Leo, left, and Tony. They liked having hats like Papa's.

Eric spared no expense when it came to time and money spent to keep his grandsons happy.  When they climb behind the wheel of the battery-operated Gator truck Papa and Nonna gave them for Christmas, they’ll think of him. Perhaps the most-expensive gift he’d ever purchased, the money didn’t matter when weighed against the giggling delight of his grandsons.

The little boys were like fragile dolls in the hands of my brother.  He would melt on contact with them.  All 5-foot-10, 350 pounds of the muscular and massive body that made him a great football player -- the sport that tore his body apart and even, perhaps, killed him – suddenly would become a cuddly, big Teddy Bear.

I’ve jumped around here, but since I’ve raised the football damage and its part in a surprising mortal ending, Eric (who used to be just 250-260 during playing days), began having to have knees and hips replaced shortly after his collegiate football days at Iowa State University. Hands, arms, discs, knees, hips, ankles, feet, elbows all required repair and, when needed, artificial replacement in his post-football life. He’d joke he was a bionic man, kind of like Lee Majors in the old, pre-inflation “Six-Million-Dollar Man” TV series.

Early in his monthlong hospital stay, they removed one of his artificial knees, because it and the calf below it were badly infected.  They were going to wait until that infection went away before putting a new knee in.  During that wait, more infections, organ failures, heart issues, ulcers and a host of other woes turned up on an almost every-other-day basis.

“I’m really pissed at myself,” he’d tell me, admitting to being discouraged by the almost constant “downgrades” in his conditions. He added perhaps he’d overlooked his own health’s diminishing.  Life simply got in the way. “I’m never going to go through this again. I can’t. I need to do better when I get out of here.”

“Don’t be mad at yourself,” I’d say. “Just get better. Let the doctors fix you and get that new artificial knee.

“Then make sure you always get to the doctor if you feel this sick. I need you around. It’s just you and me, Brother.” I generally addressed him simply as “Brother,” a habit I began probably in the 1960s. He called me “Tim” or sometimes even “Timmy,” the name our parents taught him when they brought me home from Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Pontiac, Michigan, and told their 26-month-old son that I was there for the duration, his only-child-existence crashing around him.

“I’m thinking that Ann and I should move down near where Josh and Ana and the boys live,” Eric said. “I don’t think I’m healthy enough to take care of my yard anymore.”

We likely threw in a few expletives, but you get the idea.

An avid landscaper, he knew he no longer could be toting bags of concrete and rocks, large root balls, gravel and the like. He had spent the last four or five summers building an oasis of fountain-waterfall, plants, grass, outdoor furniture and a firepit beneath his deck and across the crown of his hilly backyard.

He realized he no longer could build fences and sink fenceposts or topple giant trees. The produce garden he and Ann had farmed each summer for the last 38 years no longer, suddenly, was a possibility.  He’d have to get the tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic for his stew-like spaghetti sauce at the store, or more likely from Ana.

“I bought all sorts of special seeds for this spring,” he said of the varieties of okra, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers and melons he’d been planning. “I’ll see if Ana wants them.”

His annual sweet-corn harvest was suddenly no more.

My brother loved his family more than anything. From left, Michael and Maria, Ann and Eric and Ana and Josh with Eric's grandsons.

Ana and Josh have a small farm out in Rutherford County, a beautiful place for the boys to grow up. And Eric was thinking of the joy he could get if he and Ann would live within walking distance rather than three-quarters of an hour away. Eric loved his time out there with the boys, but also with Ana and Josh. He always helped with Ana’s garden-planning and execution, though I don’t think he ever cleaned out the stalls for the three horses. (That was a talent he and I acquired in the stalls at Dudley Dewey’s Day Camp, a sizeable farm surrounded by Chicago suburbia, where we worked successive summers. Eric, as you’d expect, referred to the camp owner as “Dudley Do-Right,” for the cartoon Mountie on “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.”)

Maria and Ana pose with their mom and pop, Ann and Eric. Eric was an artist, and that's one of his works on the wall.  

The travel camper he bought over the winter, a deluxe job big enough even for him, is parked down at Josh and Ana’s. All sorts of adventures were planned for the warmer weather. Land Between the Lakes was the planned shakedown adventure.  But he wanted to get back up to Traverse City, Michigan, his favorite place in the state where we both were born. He loved to stand at the edge of Lake Michigan and belch. He loved the local wineries and breweries. That day’s catch from the Lake. Laughing into the night with his wife.

His dreams were to go West, as well. To places I’d described to him from my own bouncing and bounding across America: Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Great Salt Lake and – as Boomers might accidentally call it, “Jellystone Park.”  Maybe, just maybe, he and his Tacoma pickup, camper on the hitch, would bounce all the way to California, so he and Ann could visit my daughter’s family. He only met Emily’s children once – last Christmas – and he wanted to see them more.

That unused camper is still destined for the road.  “We’re going to take Mommy to all the places you talked about going,” Ana told him, as she stood at his deathbed. During the memorial service, she said plans are now to take his ashes along for those journeys.

I should note here that he also loved, without boundaries, Maria and her husband, Michael, who work in the clergy and social services fields in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

They are wonderful young people, and they FaceTimed him often, even as he lay dying.

Eric and Ann took their first-ever trans-Atlantic flight last summer to visit them. Typically, Eric launched into preparing the soil and planting, generally landscaping Maria’s weed-and-dirt yard.

Eric and Ann spent three weeks last summer visiting daughter Maria in Belfast and hitting historic sites and breweries and "The Quiet Man" locations in the Irish Republic.

They also went down “into the Republic” to see sights. He had, highlighted in his travel itinerary, a few days in south County Mayo and in Galway.  He knew the bridges, farms, buildings, pubs and the like he wanted to see.  His favorite movie, fittingly, was the John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara film “The Quiet Man,” about a boxer, shaken by ring tragedy, who retires to his homeland, replacing a life of violence for love of the soil and pubs and peace.

Eric called me from Ireland last August to describe what he had seen each day. So much enthusiasm in his voice propelled me and Suzanne to watch the film and look for what he was seeing.

“He was at that bridge today,” I’d say, smiling at the thought of my big brother getting to see that as well as other things: Ancient forts, the remains of an apparent Roman-built bridge to Scotland, miniature Stonehenge-type mysteries, ancient castles and pubs. Man, did he love the pubs. He may have sang to me that “Budweiser is the best reason in the world to drink beer,” but the fresh Guinness at the pubs was something he never got over.

He and Ann were planning a return trip in a couple of summers. He needed to get a knee replacement (again) and make sure his general maladies and diabetes were under control. He wore his Irish paddy cap – a flattop tweed with a stiff brim – wherever he went. Unlike his baby brother, he was not gifted with a full head of hair as he aged, so the paddy cap warmed his head and heart.

I have promised Maria and Michael that Suzanne and I will make that trek sometime, not much consolation, but I am now the last Ghianni of my generation I know of, at least on this side of the Atlantic. My wife told me I am now the Don, The Godfather. True enough. Mostly, right now, I’m still Eric’s baby brother. I cannot yet visualize him dead.

As noted earlier, I always was sure he would be the one to precede me. I had told him so. As a young man, I lived life hard and fast, slowing down when I married Suzanne and we adopted Emily, then Joe.

Up until then were newspaper nights and days, fueled by nicotine and caffeine and put to bed with alcohol. The newspaperman’s life of B-movies and real-life, until the lifestyle died with industry.

It only made sense to both of us that he’d be there for my eulogy. He could tell people about his “crazy” younger brother’s dances on the razor’s edge of life, how he loved to write. And lived for his family.

Eric loved to visit the shores of Lake Michigan, especially in the wine and beer and cherry-tree area in and around Traverse City. This photo was used with his obituary and on the funeral program. He's wearing a stocking cap demonstrating his love for Iowa State University, where he played football and I chased the dawn. 

I wouldn’t lecture Eric about his own health, other than to remind him to take his medicines and listen to the doctors. I would remind him he was too big.  But, in truth, his girth was hidden behind hard shields of muscle and strength. His mammoth hands had a lumberman’s grip, the biceps rippling at his too-thick exterior layer.

Like our father, Eric planned on living to 110. I really didn’t doubt him.

He was my big brother, after all. He never disappointed me … until he died.

Eric always told me he got “A’s” from his doctors at his annual physicals. I didn’t believe him. If he was telling the truth, I am angry with his doctors for not insisting he lose weight and for telling him his heart and body were great.

That heart was the last thing to fail. Liver, kidneys, lungs, stomach, bladder already were faltering –as I think back to that day, as we all circled his bed, urging him to keep that heart beating. Three times he flatlined. Only twice did he return.

The death haunts me.  I’ve got no one to call or hang out with who remembers our youth as the sons of parents who helped create the Beaver Cleaver middle-class after Dad and his comrades stood on the throats of Hitler and Hirohito. During those years, women made massive forays into the domestic workforce. My mother began as a cops and courts newspaper reporter on Chicago’s Southside while her husband was cleaning up the Philippines.

I’ve got no one who remembers our not-so-chummy young years, in which he violently demonstrated his distaste for the baby brother his parents brought home.

I spoke a lot about those years in the eulogy I delivered at the funeral home while his body awaited cremation one floor below.

Basically, my brother took every opportunity to bruise me and humiliate me up until I was in my mid-teens, and one day I challenged him to a fistfight. It was a long and bloody, spit-filled battle on the front lawn of our home in the Chicago suburbs.

I beat him into submission.  “Uncle!” he cried. Then he laughed as he climbed to his feet. Instead of angering him by finally whipping him, he became my biggest advocate.

Eric was my best friend regardless of the mess I left in my wake in the years before I married Suzanne. She became my best friend then, but Eric was always there to talk about life, regrets, admire my writing, love me, my wife and my kids.

Eric truly was my best man. And I’m so proud I was his.

Eric thought I was crazy for the way I lived in my single, party-from-presstime-till-dawn newspaperman days. But he loved me always. He loved our memories. He loved talking about history and educating me on battles and heroes as opposed to the myths and legends. He liked my tales of blood and gore news stories, interviews with Muhammad Ali and O.J. And he even accompanied me and serious journalist pals to see The Lone Ranger when I was “on assignment” 40-some years ago.

I thought about a lot of this while I stood in the viewing room, where my brother’s mammoth, though stilled, body lay, a blanket covering his sweatpants and favorite “dress” T-shirt.

I knew this would be the last time I’d see him. Ashes replace the body. But Eric’s large life goes on in memories, mine and those of the many who loved him.

“I love you, Eric,” I said.

In a few minutes, I would be upstairs at the podium, eulogizing him, raising laughter when describing the old Super 8 movie footage that Dad was taking of my first steps when Eric pushed me to the sidewalk.

I had told that story to Eric as he prepared for his final battle in the ICU. I also told him I loved him, as I ended all conversations over the years.

We all took our time with the big man on the table in the family-viewing room.

It was time to leave him, to take one long, last look at the earthly remains of a wonderfully sweet man.

Before we all went upstairs, I turned to kiss the forehead I’d never see again.

“Goodbye, Brother. I love you.”

Today, a week-plus after that service, I was sorting through my phone. There was a voice message from Eric.

“Hi. It’s Eric. I’ll just call you later or tomorrow.”

It was an old message. But I’m waiting for that call. Just in case.

Eric adopted all varieties of cats over the decades. Here, one of them helps him compose some artwork on his computer.

 

 Eric was and always will be my Best Man. Here he and the Rev. Phil Ross and I share some funny comments before I wed Suzanne.

 Eric here takes time to teach Maria how to be goofy. He always was just a huge little kid when around those he loved. This isn't a great picture, but he'd hate I got so serious here, so this is one he'd like me to close with.