FALMOUTH – Four of the greatest sportswriters in America for the last five decades appeared together at Tuesday’s Falmouth Commodores game. (SLIDE SHOW AT BOTTOM)
Peter Gammons, Leigh Montville, Bob Ryan and Dan Shaughnessy threw out ceremonial first pitches at Guv Fuller Field, and they also caught up with former Red Sox player Jarrod Saltalamacchia, now the manager of the Commodores.
Later in the game, which the Commodores lost to Cotuit Kettleers by a score of 6-2, the four, who at one time all wrote for The Boston Globe, signed autographs and mingled with the crowd. Below is a slide show.
But first…
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It’s hard to describe how incredibly cool it was to see these four sports journalism legends together in this small town at a baseball game.
We on Cape Cod are, of course, blessed to live where we get to see the best summer baseball league of college stars in the country. That is, of course, why these four came to Falmouth.
But we have also been blessed to live within the circulation range of The Boston Globe, which has long had the best sports section in the America. That Globe sports section was where all four, who have each written books, first made their name.
When I first moved to Cape Cod from Cleveland, Ohio in 1982, having been raised when Ohio legend Hal Lebovitz was writing, I thought I knew what a good sports page looked like.
But the Globe sports section was a different animal.
Peter Gammons, by that point, had invented his Sunday baseball notes column, which was a formula that would be copied far and wide.
Bob Ryan was doing for basketball journalism what Gammons did for baseball. It was all must-read stuff. Ryan and Gammons especially seemed plugged in to decision makers and players, probably better than any other writer covering their respective sports. (Will McDonough, who covered the NFL for the Globe, was also as plugged in.)
Dan Shaughnessy at the time was the baseball beat writer covering the Red Sox, having learned his craft very young while covering the greatest and most crass manager I ever saw, Earl Weaver of the Baltimore Orioles.
And Leigh Montville, who went on to write for Sports Illustrated, was probably the funniest sports columnist I ever read, who later wrote one of my favorite sports books, his biography of Ted Williams (which begins in Falmouth!).
When Montville moved to Sports Illustrated, Shaughnessy became a columnist and then he became my favorite sportswriter ever. He now writes a Sunday column in the Globe. (The only sports media in Boston I enjoy more than Shaughnessy’s column is sports radio if the Red Sox lose the first game of the season, because then the line to jump off the Tobin Bridge already forms. But I digress.)
So yes, this is a total fanboy ode. It is, frankly, a bit embarrassing. But you don’t often get to meet your heroes.
All four have written books. All four have been on national and local television and radio, and are known nationwide. I have been reading, watching and listening for decades.
The first image that came to mind when I heard they were coming to Falmouth was that this was the Mount Rushmore of sportswriters, which is how they were then announced at the game.
But then I began leaning more towards describing the four of them as The Beatles before settling on, I think, The Rolling Stones. After all, these writers are on the classic rock, older side and one of the founding members, the great football writer Will McDonough, like drummer Charlie Watt, has passed away.
Okay, it’s a strained metaphor. But the point is, the Rolling Stones have long been considered the greatest rock and roll band in history. The Globe Sports section, when these four were all there, was the greatest sports section in America. And these four are, in fact, rock stars of their profession.
Gammons, Montville, Ryan and Shaughnessy were all in Falmouth on Tuesday night. Pretty, pretty cool, as a certain Martha’s Vineyard resident might say.
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