Bill Lyon

This was my final project for one of my classes. Since I haven't been working much on the blog because of a heavy finals course load, I thought it might be prudent to share some of my work with you readers. Enjoy

Like many young children, I was never true to one sports franchise or even a city. I bounced back and forth depending on what uniform colors I liked best, the players’ names that rolled off my tongue most refreshingly and who dominated the standings in a particular year. But I will not soon forget when my love affair began with the Philadelphia Philles, an undying one to this day.

Thinking back on it now, my sports polygamy was fueled by my parents refusal to purchase cable television, which enabled me to only watch nationally televised games, and therefore, the best teams during that given year. But around the age of 12, I discovered I could listen to my hometown Phillies on a radio all the way down in Washington, D.C. It seems as though the distance could not contain the loquacious voice that poured from those ancient speakers each evening into the dimly lit, chilly basement I would inhabit for three hours a night to hear about the latest Fighten’s loss.

The voice was of Hall of Famer Harry Kalas, whose signature call of “Watch this baby fly!” hooked me, because the mediocre play of the team he covered certainly didn’t. And when the Phillies finally broke through and ended the city’s 25 year championship drought with a World Series title, I couldn’t sleep until I had scoured the internet to hear Harry’s call of the final out and subsequent dog pile at home plate.

And while Harry pulled me in each night, it was the written word that captivated me all the next day. I devoured the Philadelphia Inquirer each morning (thankfully my parents did have internet), and my favorite read quickly became Bill Lyon. When the stereo was on the fritz or the signal would not come through, I could always rely on Lyon to capture the emotion and beauty of the game and hone it so succinctly that a 13-year old boy could read it, yet still capture the complexity so that a now 21-year old student of the writing craft can study and learn from it.

So, naturally, when the man that got me in love with the Phillies passed away last month, I turned to the man who got me in love with writing to chronicle the sad day. And Mr. Lyon did not disappoint.

“Every time you heard that distinctive baritone, deepened by a million smokes and marinated like fine bourbon aging in oak casks, you felt something soothing and reassuring. God's in His heaven, Harry the K's in the booth, and all's right with the world. He was, for generations of Phillies fans, The Voice. If Harry said it, it must be so.”

The great writers, particularly sports writers, have a way of adding something to their copy. Sports fans have already seen the game, heard the news and talked about the trade before they get the next day’s paper. Lyon never bludgeons his readers over the head; rather, he adds a distinctive flavor to every column he writes. His words place the reader on the stitching of the ball, helps them feel the impact of a collision and even to appreciate the smell that hangs in the air.

Mostly though, he has chronicled over his long career the infuriating, exciting and exhausting teams that play in the 215 area code. The South Philly four have the ability to enchant as easily as they do to anger, to captivate but still to bore, and to win even when it feels like they’ve lost. And, he writes for an audience that is never satisfied and is not shy about their “What have you done for us lately?” attitude.

The fans do not save their famous frustration for the players only. The town’s writers face the same scorn as the athletes they cover, and unlike in many sports cities, the readers do not merely want to read rah-rah fluff pieces. Rather, they expect the writers to criticize when the team stinks it up, and when they are not objective enough, the fans let them have it on the message boards.

Lyon’s scathing tongue is perfect for Philadelphia. He brings his language to the breakfast table, and no bread knife is needed to slice a morning bagel. But to captivate such a fickle audience, the words cannot be so simplistic. He must go the extra mile when the athlete didn’t. He must entertain and encourage the fans when the team made them shut the game off before the timer said it was over, because the score already had. And he must capture the unique Philly ‘tude, and place it expertly in each day’s story.

Since he retired from the Inquirer in Nov. 2005, he occasionally returns to the bankrupt paper’s pages to brighten up a sports section that often struggles from mediocre commentary. Many of the columnists that call Southeastern Pennsylvania home today suffer from a style best described as bland and ideas that rarely challenge the paying customers. But every so often, the Delaware valley’s day starts right when they are treated to a virtuoso performance by Lyon.

He never begins a column shyly, attempting to quietly lede before dropping a hammer in the nut graph to hook readers. Rather, he leads with his strongest prose, not afraid to waste his good metaphor because he knows he has a few to call off the bench. Take, for example, this one, written about Phillies’ slugger Ryan Howard.

“At the plate, he paws at the dirt, takes root like an oak and, holding the bat like Thor's hammer, points it, one-handed, out toward some distant dot on the horizon, where soon he will mash yet another home run,” he wrote Sept. 6, 2006. His allusions are so powerful, yet so obvious you almost feel bad you didn’t think of them yourself. He watches what we all watch, but we cannot see as he does. Lyon’s greatest strength is his similes, taking the larger-than-life athletes we watch and idolize each day and stripping them down to something we can all digest.

Describing Howard’s brute size and muscle, he called his might “stronger than garlic.” He called the deceased Kalas an “oasis of calm in a roiling sea of nastiness and raging negativity.”

But his most fitting piece to study when heaping praise on the man’s skill might be the last he penned as a staff member of the Inquirer. Departing pieces are hard, because there is a trap to heap them full of memories and emotion. But Lyon avoided those issues; he did what he always did, paying tribute to the language and bending the minds of all those that picked up the paper that morning. And, fittingly, he did it his own way, with a unique style not often duplicated successfully. He called his career to a close with a conversation that only took place in his head, until he graciously let us all in on the secret.

He summed up the Philly psyche, something he was forced to cope with each day when he turned in his column.

“One thing we do really well in this town is suffer. We have a threshold of pain that extends into the heavens. Our capacity for hurt is matched only by our capacity for loyalty. We keep standing there on the street corner certain that one day, some day, just you wait and see, there'll be another parade to happen along. Like the man said: "I bleed Eagles green... I just wish I didn't have to bleed so much." This town endures, you see, and its people keep coming back for more. How can you not fall in love with that?”

But his final gift to all was a walk down memory lane, something even I could appreciate, even though I had only heard of many of them through lore.

“Mike Schmidt's silken stroke... Doc walking among the clouds... Bernie Parent utterly impregnable in goal... Bill Bergey's slobberknocker hits... Randall Cunningham performing a 31/2 gainer on the goal line... Allen Iverson, with every important body part either strained, sprained, bruised or busted, continuing to drive fearlessly to the hoop.

“Villanova and the perfect game against Georgetown. St. Joe's and the perfect season, and that marvelous little passion pit of a gym on Hawk Hill. Smarty Jones and the run for the Triple Crown.”

“And the venues. The Palestra, that great gray cathedral of basketball. Franklin Field, where the wind still whispers about the glory days. Happy Valley and the drive there - go to Harrisburg, they said, turn right and swing through the trees for 90 miles. And yes, I confess, a perverse part of me even misses the Vet. A little.”

And while I might not have witnessed every story he reminisced about, I teared up nonetheless, because they were familiar to me from his words. I may have only known about them from second-hand sources, but the passion with which they were told made me the fan I am today, the fan of the Phillies, the Eagles, the Sixers, the Flyers, and, most importantly, of journalism. Lyon is the reason I know the history behind the franchises I love, and he is the reason I root with a fervor and a feeling of pain I’ve never experienced. Being a fan of a sports franchise transcends the current product on the field, it encompasses the history of every player who has ever worn the uniform, and without the words of Lyon, I would never know that history, and never have the appreciation I do for the teams I love.

I couldn’t know every game, or every athlete or every play, but with Bill Lyon, it sure felt like I did. His column drew on past and present, literary and non-fiction, whimsical and serious. His words spoke of his passion and love for the game, and because of it, his columns never seemed like work. They seemed like the culmination of a day spent soaking in the nuances of the game only a connoisseur could appreciate, and packaging it all so that a novice could marvel at it. Bill Lyon was a true savant of the written word and of sports, and the world was privileged to have his services full-time for more than 40 years.

I will forever be changed as a writer and fan because of his work. I will never merely sit down and watch the game; rather, I always search for the quiet beauty’s that make sports such a unique enterprise. An athlete in competition is like poetry in motion, and a writer that can capture that essence captures the hearts and minds of all that pick up his story.