SALT LAKE CITY — This weekend, a mere 41 years since he began, Brad Rock is going to write one final sports column for the Deseret News, hit the send button on his laptop and call it a career.
If it seemed like it breezed by for you, well, for him, too.
I was on the D-News sports desk in 1978 when Brad arrived from a paper in New Mexico — a mustache-wearing revolutionary in the best sense of the word.
At the time, people all around the country were putting the writing back in sports writing and he was riding the top of that wave.
Like the rest of us, Brad read Jim Murray, Curry Kirkpatrick, Scott Ostler, John Schulian, Frank Deford, Mike Downey and all the rest — “guys who could hook you with the first paragraph,” journalists who showed that instead of being formulaic and dull, writing about sports could actually be lively and entertaining; literary even.
The light had first come on for him when he was the student sports editor at the University of Utah Daily Chronicle. For a report on the football team’s spring game, Brad wanted to assign the story to Richard Barnum-Reece, a former Chronicle sports editor and Ute football player who was a brilliant, if irreverent, writer. When he couldn’t get RBR on the phone, and since email and texting were yet a ways down the road, he went to his apartment and tacked a note to the front door.
Barnum-Reece saw the note, but only after the spring game had been played.
Undaunted, he filed a story anyway. Not about who won and lost and the nuts and bolts statistics, but about the prospects for the upcoming season and the fact that the Utes, mired in a long losing streak, “sucked, and they were always going to suck.”
“I realized you can write stuff that’s fun,” Brad remembers. “Stuff the coaches don’t tell you to write.”
So that was his mantra, and few have gone about it with more talent, verve and enthusiasm.
An example: Before he became a full-time columnist, one of Brad’s beat assignments was covering the Salt Lake Gulls of the Pacific Coast League. The Gulls’ pitcher one night was a ballplayer named Matt Young, whose wife was overdue with their child. Young didn’t have his best stuff and got shelled.
This was Brad’s lede:
“Despite being nine and a half months pregnant, Matt Young’s wife did not deliver Friday night.
“Neither did her husband.”
Brad recalls that Young was not particularly pleased the next time they ran into each other in the dugout, but he soon got over it, and that was the point. Sports isn’t life and death, and writing about it doesn’t need to be, either.
Besides, I don’t know of anyone in four-plus decades who ever had a problem with Brad Rock. He made friends like a cocker spaniel. He must have an ego, but no one ever saw it.
He had an uncanny knack for seeing the humor in any situation, especially if he could be the butt of the joke. One night when he was on a lengthy road trip with the Jazz I answered my phone. Brad was on the other end. He wanted to tell me that he woke up that morning in his hotel room and couldn’t remember where he was. He’d flown in with the team the night before and taken the bus to the hotel and gone to sleep but wasn’t sure the next morning if he was in Houston or Dallas or San Antonio. He was pretty sure he was somewhere in Texas. He said he called the front desk and asked, “What city is this?”
“What did they say?” I asked.
“San Antonio,” he said. “So I got that straightened out.”
His goal, first, foremost and always, was to take his readers wherever he went, let them see what he saw.
“My thinking was, I’ve got a pass, it gets me in the locker room, I want to take the reader along with me.”
His most prized email was from a reader who wrote: “I don’t consider you a sports writer; I consider you a writer who happens to write about sports.”
He saved that one.
In many ways, he’s getting out at a good time. In the online world, the sports journalism pendulum has swung back toward analytics and coach-speak — more sports than writing. And the job requires way more self-promotion than ever before. Brad’s dutifully done his blog, his Tweets and his Facebook posts, but never with unalloyed glee. From start to finish, the writing, the story-telling, was what mattered.
“I tried to write so my wife could be interested — she doesn’t like sports,” he says.
Then he laughs and adds the punch line.
“Forty years later, she still doesn’t read my column — but I gave it my best shot.”