“It’s ERRRN-HART! NOT EEEERNHART!”
“The National League is clearly better!”
“Miami Hurricanes. Coolest uniforms in football.”
“Oh, you’re late for the game in Laurel? Well, then, I guess we better stop cruising around Kent County.”
“Don’t lean against any of the cars while you’re in the garage. If they fire up the engine, you won’t like it.”
“Blue Hen football is overrated. All they do is play chumps every week.”
The day I was hoping would never come — losing a close friend — finally arrived last week.
When I got the call about Gene Bryson, I was stunned to the bone. Sure, I’ve lost loved ones in recent years, including my dad in 2005, but there’s something sacred about a friend, someone close to your age, someone with whom you’ve shared many special moments and shared a wild and crazy passion for sports.
I knew Gene very well for nearly 30 years. He was someone I broke in with professionally in this wacky newspaper industry, a person whom I admired and trusted greatly. Cool, calm, totally professional, a little opinionated and critical of the world but always completely on target, cutting through the fog and seeing the story clearly. That was Gene.
And suddenly, in an instant, he’s gone and isn’t coming back. It’s a blow from which I’m not sure I’ll ever fully recover.
Yet there are the memories — oh, and are there ever plenty of Gene memories, which I will cherish the rest of my life. They are the crutch upon which I will try to support myself in this difficult moment, and beyond.
Gene and I shared a love of sports that led us both to nearly 20 years of covering ball games, prominent athletic figures in Delaware and the professional sporting world for the Wilmington News Journal, where we both began our careers the very same week in April 1979. It also prepared both of us for an editing career years later “down the dual highway” at the Delaware State News, with Gene serving as my supervisor and mentor.
He was greatly helpful to me as I tried to reinvent myself as a news copy editor, when I saw a whole other side to him, possessing a depth of knowledge about the political and social landscape of lower Delaware that amazed me. I marveled at his ability to write headlines and the uncanny knack for picking the best photo out of the bunch.
It was a rather unlikely pairing in the beginning. I was the slightly cocky preppie from suburban Baltimore, an outsider who invaded the Delaware sports scene. Gene was a laid-back, Skoal-chewing, small-town Downstate native from Smyrna, a loyal hometown guy to the core. But we hit it off instantly, with the sports world as our common ground.
The priceless moments I shared with Gene have come flooding back the past few days like a tidal wave. There was the night we spent together at Veterans Stadium covering Steve Carlton’s departure from the Phillies. There was the day Earl Weaver returned as Orioles manager. There was the time we drove in a blinding snowstorm to Media, Pa., to meet Harry Kalas to go over banquet arrangements.
We saw future NFL star John Taylor, then playing for Delaware State, shake and bake his way to a lengthy punt return touchdown at Franklin Field. “Watch this,” Gene boldly predicted the second Taylor caught the ball. “He’ll take it all the way.”
There were Miami-Temple games in Philadelphia (he insisted on watching his beloved Hurricanes whenever they were even remotely in the area), or the Eagles-Colts game at The Vet, back in the Bergey-Jaws-Vermeil days when he had season tickets and when “my” Colts were still in Baltimore. More recently, there was the first Ravens game at the new stadium.
We used to argue loudly and incessantly about which league was better, the National or American. He insisted the NL and the Phillies were superior to the AL and the Orioles, and wouldn’t give in. The argument extended to Mike Schmidt (with whom he shared the same birthday, Sept. 27) vs. Brooks Robinson at third base. We never did resolve the issue, but we sure had a great time yapping about it.
One year when we were sharing a summer house in Dewey Beach, we went out to a bar to watch the All-Star Game. On the first pitch of the game, Gene made some wisecrack about the NL being a better league, and for the next three hours we argued nonstop about it. Much to my dismay, the NL won in the 13th inning on a hit by Tim Raines, which was fitting because Gene always thought Tim Raines was baseball’s best player during that era.
One of his great memories was interviewing Gaylord Perry before a game in Baltimore, when the notorious spitballer extended a friendly hand filled with Vaseline. Gene was sporting a full beard at the time and Gaylord declared, “When are ya gonna shave?”
Carl Yastrzemski once nastily turned me down for an interview in person, then the next year Gene got the Red Sox P.R. department to set up a phone interview with himself and the retiring superstar. “See how easy it is?” Gene joked.
Gene used to criticize me for the way I pronounced Dale Earnhardt’s last name. “It’s Errrn–hart, not Eeeern-hart!” he would scold me. He loved to relate the tale about how he got the modest Intimidator on the phone for an interview. “Gene? This is Earnhardt,” was how the legendary racer would introduce himself in unassuming fashion, like he was talking to his next-door neighbor.
NASCAR, the 20th century version, was Gene’s obvious first love, which led to his authoring a superb book on the history of Dover’s speedway. He took me in the garage one time the day before a Dover race and warned me about getting too close to the cars. Sure enough, someone started up an engine and I jumped a Monster Mile. I looked at Gene and he had that typical “I told ya” grin on his face.
He wore that same grin after getting a dirty look from Salesianum’s football coach when he decided to ask me what angle I was going to take in my game story. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, but the team was conducting its postgame prayer at that moment and we were standing only a few feet away.
I used to arrive late to every Downstate high school football game I ever covered for the News Journal, because Gene and I would go out to dinner beforehand and we’d end up cruising around in his IROC across half of Kent County. I didn’t mind the late arrivals, though, because I greatly enjoyed those drives, and, ever the Downstate native, he always pointed out some interesting place or historic tidbit that I was unaware of, maybe near the waves at Woodland Beach, perhaps in Clayton or by the tracks in Wyoming.
Then we’d go out and have a few beers after we pounded out our stories on deadline, and finally would stop by a closed mini-mart in the wee hours, rip open the papers that had been delivered for the next morning, and critique each other’s stories and complain about the headlines in the freezing cold. “Hey, you misspelled Bob Cuthrell’s name!” would be a likely comment from him.
We were headed to the beach one hot summer day and, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, he rear-ended the car in front of him and caused extensive damage to his Camaro. He certainly was upset, but not so much about the car. He was about to miss a good day at the beach.
He was a great journalist but wouldn’t have made a great meteorologist. He simply despised cold weather, and I can trace that hatred to a high school football state tournament game played at his alma mater of Smyrna High, circa 1980. Gene woke up to balmy 60-degree temperatures that morning, but failed to realize the forecast called for frigid and wind-whipped conditions to come rolling in by early afternoon. While the rest of us arrived wearing heavy coats, hats and gloves, Gene was stuck in the miserable press box with just a light sweater and had to sit and suffer in the bitter cold all afternoon, not to mention do interviews and write an extensive story afterwards.
All of us who knew him are well aware of the things he loved, which included Skoal, the “old” NASCAR, license tag No. 29, his swimming pool, Coca-Cola (only the giant bottles), Miami Hurricanes football and the color orange, Bruce Springsteen (who he once saw for five concerts in a six-day span), Pink Floyd, Richie Hebner (touted by Gene as the ultimate cool baseball player), Johnny Callison (his favorite Phillie as a kid), “The Rockford Files” (the intro of which he taped to use on his answering machine at home), Bob Newhart and “M.A.S.H.” (taped every episode).
His passion for the Hurricanes (which wore out several of his VCRs) stemmed from an unlikely assignment to Penn State to cover the Nittany Lions vs. Miami around 1981. Gene saw what the rest of the nation was about to see, a South Florida football program that was prepared to dominate the national spotlight for the next couple of decades. And he just loved those uniforms.
Things he hated: New Castle County (“would never live there”); Delaware football (an unsolved riddle in my mind, because I never could quite figure out his source of Blue Hen dislike); suntan lotion (not forbidden by him at poolside but almost); wintertime (he often expressed a desire to live in Florida).
Gene, I miss you. I wish you were back here right now, arguing with me about baseball, critiquing a story or headline, discussing “The Sopranos” or whatever, casting a giant presence over those around you.
I won’t get over your loss easily. But I have gained greatly from you being part of my life.
Editor’s note: Dave Hughes is a copy editor for the Delaware State News.
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