Jerry Izenberg called Sunday morning.
There are no short conversations with Jerry, but they are enduring and filled with good feelings and memories.
Jerry is the sports columnist emeritus for the The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J. He allegedly semi-retired in 2007 when he built his wife her dream home in Henderson, Nev. On Sunday, he and Aileen were in an airport waiting to fly home from his home state of New Jersey.
They would be home four days and then take off for the Kentucky Derby, where Jerry will crank out some of the best columns about the race and the people who make it exciting.
If you are from the Northeast, Jerry Izenberg is a familiar name. He started writing for The Star-Ledger in 1951 while still attending Rutgers University, took two years off to fight in the Korean War, then came back to his passion of writing about sports, becoming The Star-Ledger columnist in 1962.
If you are not from the Northeast and your local paper didn't subscribe to his syndicated column, you may recognize him and his name from literally hundreds of interviews he's done on ESPN or from one of his 13 books.
He's an expert on the NFL -- and one of only three journalists to have covered every Super Bowl -- and boxing. He's just great at all the other sports.
Sunday morning he was feeling a little sentimental. For several years we shared table H in the old Churchill Downs press box. It was Jerry, Bill Handleman, Tom Lucci, Robert Yates, Bob Summers and yours truly.
Others would come and go, mostly go because Bill and Tom would have loud and lively debates about handicapping. The first year we sat at table H it was believed Bill and Tom hated each other. That neither would have spit on the other if he were on fire.
Turned out they were best friends. Bill died a few years ago, just weeks after gathering the energy and courage to tell his wife Judy that if Zenyatta and Rachel Alexander met at Oaklawn Park, he was coming to visit me. Rachel Alexander passed on that challenge, and my last conversation with Bill was on the phone.
Bob died first while leaving a Buffalo, N.Y., casino after a night of playing poker.
Jerry talked about the guys who shared that table and how Tom was now handling publicity for Monmouth Park, a horse racetrack in New Jersey. He asked about Robert Yates, and he talked about his latest book about heavyweight boxers.
In 1995 at the Final Four, Jerry asked if we really referred to the Razorbacks as Hogs in the newspaper. He wasn't impressed.
Jerry's writing talent was just one of the things that set him apart.
Jerry was one of the first journalists to attend a Grambling State football game. He was so impressed he got the late Howard Cosell to put up the money for a documentary that Jerry wrote and produced.
Having grown up Jewish, Jerry always had a very sensitive side for racism. He was never bitter about what he suffered, but he admitted it was part of him, his life and his history.
Jerry loves to tell the story about being at a championship fight and having the promoter accuse him of being a racist.
Jerry was spitting mad until the elevator door opened and his wife stepped out, and Jerry immediately said, "Don [King], I don't think you've met my wife." She's African-American.
"Probably for the first time in his life he was speechless," Jerry said with a laugh.
Jerry is 87 now and still writing, and people are still reading because he's a legend in the world of sports writing. It was good to hear from him.
Sports on 04/24/2018