They don’t make them like him anymore

It’s Saturday evening on the sports desk, and Harry Missildine is calling from the 19th hole, phoning in a few paragraphs and punctuation on a golf tournament in which, not coincidentally, he’s a participant.

“Gary Floan added a no-bogey 68 to his opening 67 Saturday,” he dictates to the desk man, “and chased away all rivals at the annual Manito Pow Wow. (Period, para-giraffe).

“At a most distant second is Jerry Neal (comma), 10 strokes back after a scatter-shot 76 (period). Behind Neal’s 145 were Steve Storey and Harry … hell, I shoot me a 68 tomorrow and I can still finish second in this damned thing.

“Hey – you want a quote from a contender? Hrgh, hrgh, hrgh!”

They say never be the guy who follows The Guy.

Gene Bartow. George Selkirk. George Lazenby. Never be those guys.

Who? Exactly.

Now, maybe it wasn’t as self-destructive as following John Wooden at UCLA or Babe Ruth in right field or following Sean Connery as James Bond, but I didn’t do myself any favors being the guy who followed Harry Missildine at The Spokesman-Review.

Not as a storyteller, certainly. As a story subject, well, even literary inventions were unlikely to keep up with Harry.

For example, there is the tale of Washington State’s football trip to Minnesota in 1971, when the Cougars ended an 11-game losing streak with a 31-20 upset. The charter flight home is waiting on the tarmac – and waiting, and waiting. Bulky players are fidgeting in their seats, grousing about the delay. Eventually, they see a wheelchair being pushed toward the plane and the buzz begins – Who got hurt? – except that the passenger turns out to be … Harry.

After negotiating the stairs, he braces himself on two seats, looks down the aisle and proclaims, “We kicked their ass, didn’t we?” – and the laughter of the players has barely subsided when the plane lifts off.

The wheelchair? Who knows? The record shows that Harry filed both his game story and column that day, but it’s suspected that the effort required in doing so after a cocktail decathlon the night before would have hospitalized lesser men.

If revealing this seems indiscreet upon his death last week at the age of 85, then you either didn’t know or didn’t have a full appreciation of Harry Missildine, whose S-R column “Twice Over Lightly” was the sports reference of choice for 25 years for a readership that stretched from the Cascades to the middle of Montana.

The man enjoyed the legend and was comfortable in it.

“Harry,” explained Bill Moos, the University of Oregon athletic director and former Coug lineman who tells the Minnesota story and any other Missildine legends on request, “was a scotch-drinking, cigar-smoking guy’s guy who could really write.”

He could also surprise the hell out of you.

I recall a wonderful dinner with Harry and his wife, Helen, 24 years ago on an off-day between games of the NCAA basketball tournament in Pullman. In the middle of it, he was explaining the high-low offense with the help of a pen and a paper napkin and when he invited us over to his house afterward, I expected more of the same. Except that the rest of the night consisted of him refilling my glass and playing Tom Lehrer records, Harry singing along in his gravelly bass to “Oedipus Rex” and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”

Likewise, it was revealing to learn that over the last four days of his life, Helen read to him from Shakespeare’s sonnets. Which just happened to be the subject of his master’s thesis.

“Harry was a very bright guy,” said his friend, former Seattle sportscaster Rod Belcher, “who could be a little over the top sometimes.”

Or over the side. Just a few years ago, Belcher joined Harry for a fishing float down the Grand Ronde River – “the Ground Round, as Harry called it,” Belcher said.

“He had a little boat he was very proud of, a light thing, but he overestimated his abilities as a boat handler. We hit a rock in the rapids and the boat got dumped and here we were, two 80-year-old guys bobbing down the Grand Ronde. We were lucky to come out alive. Harry always called it ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’ “

As much as he loved to flex his football knowledge in print, Harry’s most evocative work was born from his fishing adventures, especially those with his mother, Helene Campbell. His unwritten memoirs were going to be titled “She Taught Her Son to Fish,” and he found a delicate thread connecting his twin loves of golf and fishing.

“(They) share the quality of realization almost never matching high, wild anticipation,” he wrote. “But the misses are fun, too, in proper company.”

Yet he’ll be forever associated with his writings on the Cougars, whose fans loved him for his silver-lining touch in an era when the clouds could get pretty dark.

“You’ve got to remember,” said Jim Sweeney, a Missildine favorite who coached the Cougs from 1968-75, “Harry would stay at my place after games and we’d close up shop. Then I’d get up at 4 a.m. to drive to Spokane and cut the highlights show with Bob Robertson, but Harry would stay and have ham and eggs with my wife, watch football on TV and have a few drinks before going home about noon.”

Such a thing, of course, gets a columnist fired today, not that there’s a college coach out there now who’d let a writer bivouac on the sofa. This is for the best but also highly lamentable, not unlike the contradiction that makes it necessary not to romanticize happy hour but also crave the laughs that ensue from it.

It’s why there aren’t characters like Harry Missildine anymore – in this business or any other.

But after his retirement from the S-R in 1982, Harry continued to write for the Moscow-Pullman Daily News on a weekly basis until two months shy of his death – evidence enough of both his love for the written word and the community of sports which allowed him to laugh, sometimes at himself.

“After I was done as a player,” Moos recalled, “Harry used to stay with me when he’d come down for a game. Swank Swenson was my roommate and for Swank, this is a big-time celebrity.

“He goes, ‘Harry Missildine – you’re my hero! Every morning the past 10 years I’ve gotten up and read your column – My Nickel’s Worth.’ “

Except that was Bob Johnson’s column in the rival Spokane Chronicle.

“Harry loved that story,” Moos said.

Fact is, Harry loved them all.