Bud Collins
I once met the pope. Got his autograph. And he signed his name, not his official title.
The name he signed wasn’t his real name. And I didn’t meet him in the Vatican, but in the press box at Foxboro Stadium, where I worked for many years as a statistician.
Pope Alvin was Pete Rozelle, the infallible autocrat who ran the National Football League for almost 30 years. He was born Alvin Ray Rozelle, and he’d been dubbed Pope Alvin by Bud Collins.
I was tempted to ask Mr. Rozelle to sign my game program “Pope Alvin,” but I chickened out. Probably a good decision. He did sign the book, but he seemed just a little affronted at the request. I rather doubt he liked the moniker from Collins, the fun-loving, nonpareil sportswriter-turned-broadcaster, who died earlier this week at age 86.
I met Bud several times over the years and had brief conversations with him, but I can’t say that I knew him. That’s my loss. What a great mentor he would have been for me, as he was with many other writers too numerous to mention here.
For Bud Collins, it seemed, writing wasn’t work at all. I was play. It was joy. He had a joie de vivre that came through on the printed page. Even if he was needling or obliquely criticizing, as was probably the case with “Pope Alvin,” I can’t imagine people staying angry with him.
A major portion of Bud Collins’ professional career was taken up with tennis, first as a writer and then as a broadcaster. He knew everyone and was revered by everyone. I’m a little sorry that his sport happened to be tennis, because tennis and its people never caught my fancy. So I didn’t seek out Bud’s stories and deprived myself of regular reading of a truly superb craftsman.
He was a master at the quick quip-in-print, the off-the-wall simile or metaphor that was just too clever for anyone else to dream up under pressure of a deadline. He was a master, and not just with his nicknames like “Bucharest Buffoon” for Ilie Nastase, and “Sisters Sledgehammer” for Venus and Serena Williams.
Once, when covering the handsome and rising tennis star Bjorn Borg, he described the Swede’s adoring female fans as experiencing “Borgasms.” If memory serves, that one got edited out before the Globe hit the streets. Of course, it would remain in the story today. Probably in the headline.
Bud loved what he did, and he loved the people he covered in their victories and their defeats. He knew that sports was the toy department of society. He enjoyed that department to the full, traveling around the world to cover it. One regular feature in the Globe was “Bud Collins: Anywhere.” And he could be reporting from just about anywhere, dressed in his trademark outlandishly patterned colored pants.
The first I met Bud Collins was back in the late 50’s or early 60’s. It was at the Corinthian Yacht Club during Marblehead Race Week. Bud was still working for the Boston Herald at the time. He came to Marblehead to find an intriguing subject for “The Collins View.” He got to talking with a bunch of us from Winthrop and told us he was a Herald sportswriter. I asked him if he was Tim Horgan. Nice try, but in any case he seemed favorably impressed that I knew somebody with a byline.
He decided to do his column on Winthrop’s own John “Mac” McDonald and his red-haired, freckle-faced Turnabout crewman, Peter “Red” Fenlon. He wrote of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, as I recall, and of girls wanting to go out in Mac’s boat, “Sea Note.” Mac and Red had their picture taken, shaking hands, to accompany the article. They had to go in to the Herald building in Boston for that, if memory serves.
The encomia for Bud Collins keep coming, as well they should. He was one of a kind. Rest in peace, Bud!
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