Maybe more than any two guys I know, Buddy Martin and Van were soulmates, each trying to do the big story bigger....Buddy sent me his column on Van ....it's to run in his paper Sunday, the 28th...I asked if I could post it here....so here it is...Buddy's the editor of the Charlotte (Fla.) Sun. ... Buddy and Van worked together in sports departments at the Ocala Star-Banner, Florida Today, The St. Petersburg Times and the New York Daily News.....with both men always available for "consultation" late of an evening....
Buddy's e-mail is
[email protected].
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A legend remembered: My friend Van
Today’s column is what we in the business call “Inside Baseball.†It’s really not about baseball at all, but rather about a person almost none of you have ever met and whose name will mean nothing to almost anybody – except to those of us in the trade.
To a good number of knowledgeable people in the sports journalism, Van McKenzie was a legend, as could be seen by the testimonies in newspapers and on the Internet since his death Friday. Many of you saw his work without realizing it, because his name never appeared anywhere on it. His influence on sports print journalism was gigantic, though, the way Andy Warhol’s was on pop art and Versace’s was on fashion – out of the box and brilliant.
Sports page design was Van’s specialty and almost every section in America today carries some component of his thinking. But to say McKenzie’s influence was only about the design of sports pages would be like remembering Laurence Olivier for his spiffy wardrobe. He loved design, but he loved stories and words – and most of all he loved sports writers. He loved it all.
In baseball lexicon, McKenzie was a five-tool journalist.
In my nearly four decades of newspapering, I would count Van among the top three sports journalists I’ve ever met or known – and one of my very best friends. He could smell a good story, knew how to motivate a writer to write it, how to edit it, how to headline it, how to play it and how to milk it to the end of its cycle. He had the head of quarterback and/or coach, but he could block and tackle like a guy in the trenches. But Van also knew how to tighten down all the nuts and bolts in the section.
Having seen him from almost every conceivable vantage point, from the time he broke in the business as a teen to his ascent as managing editor of The Dream Team at the National Sports Daily and eventually as associate managing editor/sports of the Orlando Sentinel, I can assure you that he was a self-taught editor with the courage of a bank robber and the kindness of a kindergarten teacher.
If McKenzie had been Picasso, every painting would have been like Guernica, the huge 26-foot piece of art, because he was totally a big-picture guy. He wanted every sports section to be bigger and better tomorrow than it was today.
If I were writing his epitaph, it would say: “Van McKenzie, 1945-2007. ‘I’m all in.’†Because he was all in, all the time, on everything he did.
Whether we were playing a friendly hand of low-stakes poker, or wagering a bob at the greyhound race track that we so often frequented back in The Day, Van was all in. He raised on almost every hand. And many was the night that we were tapped out going into the last dog race – in those days being “tapped out†usually meant a $50 loss – and wrote a check go play the final race and have enough to tip the parking lot attendant on the way out. Sometimes we were counting on fumes in the gas tank to get us home and fumes in our bank account to clear the check.
To think that it all started with a classified ad I placed in the Ocala Star-Banner in the late summer of 1963 upon my return from a brief stint at the Nashville Tennessean. We needed would-be sports writers to cover high school football games for $5 -- $7.50 if they had to drive out of town. Van, his brother Jay and their friend Jim Waldron showed up for the assignment. Van drew the game in Jasper, almost 100 miles away. We always laughed about the fact that his gas guzzler car took all of that just to get there and back. (Jay later became managing editor of the Ocala Star-Banner; Jim worked with us at Florida Today and later owned a weekly paper before his death.)
One day in Ocala I was laying out the next day’s sports section as Van, looking on as an unpaid observer, suddenly commented: “I can do that!†Several weeks later I hired him part-time and he was laying out the Sunday paper. From the very start he had that remarkable eye, plus a great passion for the business.
Sometimes on a Saturday night, after walking out of the Ocala newspaper office on the heels of a 14-hour day and 80-hour week (no overtime), we would boast, “tomorrow morning, nobody in America will be better than us!â€
(oops, gotta jump)...
