Jim Caple had abibliophobia, the fear of having nothing to read, and kept three books in his computer bag as a remedy, so that no matter where he was in the world, he would never run out of words. Near the end of his remarkable life, cut short this month by dementia and Lou Gehrig’s disease, the sportswriter’s expansive vocabulary had contracted, and he seemed to lean on the same three utterances, repeated often: “Willie Mays,” “Novak Djokovic” and—in heaviest rotation at his house outside Seattle—“Sue Bird.”
But for most of his 61 years, he was never lost for words. It was in San Diego, in the press box at Jack Murphy Stadium in 1992, that Capes first asked me, “What are you reading?” and I nudged toward my fellow baseball scribe the hardcover tombstone I’d been lugging around the major leagues. It was an endless account of the ’88 presidential election by Richard Ben Cramer called What It Takes, a book so long (1,047 pages) and so heavy in the hand (1.63 pounds) that some critics referred to it as What It Weighs.
Courtesy of Vicki Schuman
