Seven years ago today I lived the longest day of my life.
I got up at 5 a.m., drove to Atlanta’s Hartsfield Jackson International Airport and caught a 7 a.m. flight to Denver. I spent the day in Colorado and caught a red eye flight back to Atlanta that arrived almost exactly 24 hours after I had left.
It wasn’t just a long day. It was a sad one, one of the saddest days of my life before or since. I was in Colorado for the first time since 1992, attending a funeral service for one of the best friends I ever had.
In fact, the 1992 visit, the only other time I have been in Colorado since moving away in 1988, was a weekend trip to visit that same friend.
I met Tom Kensler 58 years ago next month. He lived across the street from the school bus stop we both caught to go to Woodson High School, where I was starting my junior year and he was starting his freshman year. I think the first time we actually spoke was between classes that first day. He was having trouble getting his bearings in our massive high school, and he recognized me in the hallway and asked for directions.
To steal a line from Humphrey Bogart, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
We wound up in the same profession, the dying art of newspaper journalism. We even worked in the same state at different times. I was in Greeley, Colorado, from 1986-88, and he moved from Oklahoma to Denver in 1989 and spent a quarter of a century working for the Denver Post.
Tom was the only person I know who won Sportswriter of the Year awards in three different states — Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado — and he was named to Halls of Fame as both a golf writer and a college basketball writer. One clarification — the golf award was for the Colorado hall, not the World one.
If there was one thing wonderful about Tom’s funeral service, it was seeing how many people came long distances to say goodbye. It may not have been coast to coast and border to border, but it was close. And if there was one thing we all had in common, it was how much we would miss him.
I met Tom’s wife Pamela for the first time. She brought joy to the last 15 years of his life, and the only sad thing — other than them being separated prematurely by his death — was that they met too late in their lives to have children. Tom would have been a great dad.
He definitely loved golf, and I know one of the high points of his career was when he started covering the Masters in Augusta, Ga. Then it got even better when he had the opportunity to play 18 holes on the legendary course. I don’t recall what Tom’s golf handicap was — maybe 7 or 8 — but I know how proud he was to shoot 87 his first time out on one of the toughest courses in the world.
There isn’t much more I could say about my friend that I haven’t said before, but there was one quirky little thing I noticed for the first time today. In the first photo, the montage of Tom’s life, there’s a little red box on the lower left.
Sure, you might say. Tom loved CHEEZ-IT snacks.
OK, maybe, although I don’t ever recall seeing him eat them.
But what if someone was walking by and realized their shoelace was untied. Before bending down to tie the offending lace, they put a box they were carrying on the table. They tied the shoelace, got up and walked off, forgetting their box.
See how easy it is to change a story.