“Only the good die young …”
Despite the wonderful Billy Joel song from the late 1970s, this probably isn’t completely true. There are certainly bad people who die young, and there are good folks who live full, long lives.
But of course we remember the good ones who predecease us.
And we miss them.
Always.
One of the very best friends I had, one of the two nicest people I have ever known, died unexpectedly in the summer of 2016, just shy of his 65th birthday. I still remember the first time I met him.
Tom Kensler lived a block and a half from me in Mosby Woods in Fairfax, Va. We met on the first day of school in September 1965. I was starting my junior year at Woodson High School and Tom was a freshman.
The bus stop was across the street from his house, and I don’t think we acknowledged each other waiting for the bus. Hey, juniors and freshmen.
But later that morning, I ran into Tom and a friend of his in the hallway. They were lost in their first morning in our massive school. I gave them directions to where they were going and that was the beginning of a half century of friendship.
By the next summer, we were playing baseball every day at an abandoned little league field. It was pretty crummy, but it had a pitcher’s mound and bases, so we used it. We played football in the street in the fall and basketball in a driveway in the winter.
Tom’s dad was a colonel in the Air Force, and his family moved away in 1968. We lost touch several times but always got in touch again. He ran across my sister Laura in the early ’70s when they were both at Ohio State, and he visited my first wife and me in 1976 when we were living in Herndon, Va.
Oddly, Tom and I wound up going into the same field — newspapers — and we each had a time we were able to help the other get ahead. He got me an interview with the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1984 and I introduced him to the incoming sports editor at the Denver Post in 1989.
He had a wonderful career. Although he downplayed it, he was honored by the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association as sportswriter of the year in THREE different states — Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado.
Even more impressive, he was elected to TWO different Halls of Fame, the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame and the College Basketball Writers Hall of Fame.
The latter of the two was posthumous. Tom was honored this Monday at the NCAA Final Four in New Orleans.
If there’s a small amount of irony there, the last time I saw Tom alive was at another Final Four, this one nine years ago here in Atlanta. I came in from the suburbs to have lunch with him the morning after Louisville beat Michigan for the title. It was very strange. We were standing maybe 25 feet apart in the hotel lobby, glancing over at each other but not quite recognizing our old friends.
I coould be wrong, but I think it was at least 10 years since we had seen each other in person.
We got a good laugh out of it and enjoyed lunch, never knowing it was the last time we would see each other.
Three years later, he suffered a brain aneurysm and it killed him.
My wife Nicole was having health problems, and the thought of going to Colorado for the funeral was problematic. I did it, though, flying from Atlanta to Denver and back in less than 24 hours.
My flight back was a redeye, and I remember sitting in an almost empty boarding area for three hours waiting.
At one point I remember crying. It’s strange. My parents died in 2008 and 2020 and I didn’t cry for either one. They were both very ill and pretty old.
But Tom wasn’t that old. I’m eight years older now than he was when he died. I can’t say I miss him every day, because he wasn’t a part of my life every day when he was alive.
Still, my world is a sadder place without him in it.
I hope I’ll see him again on the other side of … whatever.
Pretty sure he’ll be in the good place.