We lost some important sports people in 2022, and I’d like to say a little about a few before the scorebook softly closes.
• Ray Guy, 72. This guy named Guy made punting look like a part of ballet, like a ‘‘Swan Lake’’ pas de deux with the football as his partner. He’s in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the only punter in there. He made nailing a punt into the coffin corner a key part of the Raiders’ defensive strategy and a huge part of their offensive strategy, as well.
Offense not moving? No problem. Guy, right foot way above his head, will blast us out of here.
His coach, John Madden, said of this tall, lean fellow who also could pass, run and tackle: ‘‘Everyone said, ‘How can you draft a punter No. 1?’ We said: ‘Because he’s not only the best punter in the draft, he’s the best punter that’s ever punted a football.’ ’’
And he was.
• Bruce Sutter, 69. The former Cubs pitcher blew out his elbow and seemingly was done as a potential major-leaguer back in 1973. His 88 mph fastball was apple pie for sluggers.
Then, like Luke Skywalker getting that green lightsaber from Obi-Wan Kenobi, he got the split-fingered fastball from minor-league pitching coach Fred Martin in 1973, and batters began swinging at pitches that were two inches off the plate. He had 300 saves and was voted into the Hall of Fame in 2006, and he won a World Series with the Cardinals.
But Sutter earned the 1979 National League Cy Young Award with the Cubs, and for years he had a lot of young Chicagoans trying to stretch their fingers apart and throw that ridiculous pitch. What did we find out there in the sandlots and driveways and backyards? Impossible.
• John Clayton, 67. The longtime ESPN pro football insider was a cheerful, circumspect fellow whom everyone who cared about the NFL — say, most folks in 32 of America’s biggest cities — came across one way or another.
We scribes remember John as another ink-stained dude in the press box — he started as a writer with the Pittsburgh Press — but his rimless glasses and nerdy, professor-like appearance made him eminently notable in a TV universe full of polished, pretty humans.
Yet the way most sports fans will remember him is in the legendary ‘‘This is SportsCenter’’ commercial, in which he yanked off a faux business-suit jacket to reveal he was wearing a black, sleeveless Slayer T-shirt in his Goth-like bedroom with death-metal posters everywhere. He let down a long, blond ponytail behind his balding pate, cranked the volume on his stereo, jumped on his bed, grabbed an old box of takeout noodles and hollered, ‘‘Hey, Mom, I’m done with my segment!’’
Lord, I laugh at it yet. I hope John is chuckling now, too. He was a good and decent man.
• Earnie Shavers, 78. The former heavyweight boxer will be most remembered for three things. First, he came along during the golden age of heavyweight boxing in the 1970s, when the division overflowed with talent such as Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes, George Foreman, Ken Norton and one Muhammad Ali.
Second, Shavers lasted 15 rounds against Ali and hit the champ with blows that would have felled almost anyone else.
Which leads to the third thing: Shavers widely was considered at the time to be the hardest puncher in the history of the heavyweight division. Ali said after their bout: ‘‘ Earnie hit me so hard, it shook my kinfolk in Africa.’’
But Ali had the gift of words, and he often said clever things about his foes and himself. Indeed, he once said: ‘‘I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.’’
But Shavers and most fighters were not like Ali. Shavers was all business, and he had 70 knockouts in 76 victories to show for it. But he weighed less than 215 pounds, and when he fought Ali in their title bout, he was such an underdog that there was no betting line for the fight. Yet with his shaved head and thunderous right hand, he was a fearsome presence.
What Holmes said after his 1979 fight against Shavers was the real deal, pure observation, nothing but insight. It sticks in one’s mind.
‘‘When Earnie Shavers hit me,’’ Holmes said, ‘‘I thought people were taking my picture.’’
