Willie Smith

The trouble with obituaries is that they sometimes come too soon, when the protagonist in the tale ought to have had more years. But, paradoxically, also too late. Roger Maris, the old baseball player, once likened obituaries to overdue credit offered after his playing career. “When you die,” he said, “they finally give you good reviews.”

Willie Smith died this month. Too soon; he was 64. I covered his track and field adventures for Newsday from high school—Uniondale on Long Island, N.Y.—and through three Olympic cycles, until he at last won the gold medal that his earlier records foretold.

Maradona died this week. Too soon; he was 60. His career as soccer’s troubled wizard already was fading when I witnessed some of his on-field magic at the 1990 World Cup in Italy, and then his embarrassing dismissal from the 1994 U.S.-based World Cup for illegal drug use.

Former New York City mayor David Dinkins was another pre-Thanksgiving death. He was 93, at least getting good reviews for a full and accomplished life. I used to bump into Dinkins during U.S. Open tennis tournaments, where he remained a suave presence for years, willing to answer a couple of nebulous questions about his favorite sport.

Hanging around the sports journalism profession for a half-century inevitably affords such glancing contacts. So reports of these deaths, while celebrating their lives, were nevertheless more sobering than, say, the recent obituary of the 79-year-old British party planner for royals and rock stars who perfected the use of a special table to seat all the boring guests.

I had never heard of that woman. But I admit a regular perusal of the newspapers’ obituaries because, done well, they are microwaved biographies, rich personal profiles boiled down to a few hundred words. They trace the just-departed’s roots and passions, influences of home and school and vocation, coincidences and relationships, twists of fate along the way to making some dent in the world.

Obituaries confer a bit of immortality on the deceased—the well-loved teacher, selfless public servant, widely-known entertainer, robber baron. Prominent athlete. They perpetuate those souls’ impact, achievements and just plain humanity.

Of the three cited above, Willie Smith was really the only one I can claim to have known a bit. He was an ebullient fellow willing to communicate what made him tick, how he went from finishing last in his first race in junior high school (“I thought, ‘Quit track. Give it up.’”) to setting national high school records at three sprint distances, which made him briefly feel “a little cocky” before he reminded himself there were plenty of fast runners out there.

Through the homestretch of big races, he said, who would have an urgent conversation with himself: “Beat him. Beat him. Beat him.”

He missed making the 1976 Olympic team by two places in the 100-meter dash and nevertheless decided, “I feel good. Of course, I could feel better, but I feel pretty good.” He technically qualified for the 1980 Olympics at 400 meters, but only after President Jimmy Carter had ordered a U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games—another close-but-no-cigar for Smith. He said he wasn’t sure if he would be more upset if he subsequently learned the eventual Moscow champion had run faster than he had—or slower.

By then, Smith had his college degree from Auburn and was mulling whether he should “get a steady job” or keep running. He kept running, a career in television work and training youth runners delayed, and at the 1984 Olympics, he at last got the gold as part of the Americans’ 4×400-meter relay team.

With Maradona, an international superstar not given to tete-a-tetes with us ink-stained wretches, the handful of crowded post-game press briefings was as close as we got to him. And even then, he hardly was interested—and possibly not able—to articulate either his soccer genius or the increasingly ruinous behavior that cut short his career.

He made no apologies for his excesses with drugs and food and women, and certainly not for a creativity that occasionally bent the soccer rules. Like the famous fisted score against England in the 1986 World Cup, what he called the “Hand of God,” Maradona’s illegal arm deflection prevented an apparent Soviet Union goal in the ’90 Cup. But if the referee missed the call that should have given the Soviets a penalty kick, Maradona said, then there simply was no infraction. And “you can’t blame the ref. The referee can make a mistake, just like we can make a mistake.” To the suggestion that his skill and stardom might have brought him special privilege, Maradona said, “No, no. Absolutely, no.”

He was such a dominate global entity, soccer’s version of folk hero/miracle worker, that L’Equipe, the French sports daily, used the farewell headline, “Dieu est Mort”—“God is dead.”

David Dinkins

Mayor Dinkins, meanwhile, radiated this humble, quiet air. He was a fairly constant figure at U.S. Open tennis tournaments. He was a friend to many of the elite players and tireless booster of diversity in the sport. He had been instrumental in the city’s negotiations to expand the National Tennis Center, which probably prevented the lucrative annual event from leaving town in the early 1990s. He had worked to arrange a change in the jet takeoff patterns at neighboring LaGuardia Airport after years of ear-splitting annoyance to fans and players.

Most recently, Dinkins could be found in the tennis center’s President’s Suite where, during the 2013 mayoral race, my wife suggested to him that he again would make an ideal candidate. That was 20 years after he left office. “I’m done with that,” he said politely. But I’m pretty sure he appreciated the thought.

Early in my decades of newspapering, I thought of the staff obituary writer as some maudlin soul, seeming to physically take on the cast of a cadaver himself while spending his days profiling dead people. But really, the good obit writer is a skilled storyteller, crafting a complete narrative that provides more than typical news articles.

And these guys deserved a good sendoff.