Evan Grant: What it’s like to lose my childhood favorite player, Phil Niekro - The Dallas Morning News

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I didn’t expect to face an existential sports question at White Rock Lake, but, hey, it’s as good place as any to ponder things. Isn’t it? Wasn’t that kind of Thoreau’s point?

I forget. It was 11th grade American lit. I was preoccupied with other stuff, like the Atlanta Braves and how long they could carry their season-opening winning streak. The important stuff.

Which brings us back to that existential sports question I confronted Sunday afternoon after perfectly lovely walk at the lake. Namely this: What is it like to lose the last vestiges of childhood innocence, of the things that made you a sports fan in the first place? What’s it like to lose your childhood favorite?

In this case, it came via an email notification waiting in the car. The commissioner of baseball was sending a condolence statement on the death of another Hall of Famer in what has become a year unyielding in tragedy and sorrow. Another sad day. I just didn’t expect the subject would be my particular sports hero: Phil Niekro, who died at 81 after a long cancer battle on Saturday.

Courtesy National Baseball Hall of Fame.(National Baseball Hall of Fame)

I gasped loud enough to startle my wife and have spent not an insignificant amount of time since wandering through memories. For two decades, the whole of my childhood, Niekro was the lone constant in an otherwise bleak Atlanta landscape. That has led down a couple of time-consuming rabbit holes, which, come to think of it, isn’t the worst way to spend a day in the 10th month of a world-stopping pandemic.

There was a flashback to being seven and a first real experience with baseball fandom. And 10 years later to the first real conscious memory of a playoff race. Such was – really still is – life for an Atlanta sports fan. Bad as the drought maybe in Dallas-Fort Worth: There’s always Atlanta.

Anyway: Niekro.

Baseball-reference provided a stroll through the data. He played 24 years, 18 in Atlanta.. There is a ton of it. Comprehensive as the website is, it only opened a portal to other more personal memories, like the time he stopped out front of West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium to sign a program for a far-too-precocious 11-year-old and of the replica of his jersey in the Hall of Fame museum made entirely of Braves baseball cards which mesmerized a far-too-cynical reporter for a time-stopping afternoon.

Unfortunately, I’m not alone in these doleful walks through the past. It’s been a most catastrophic year around the world, of course. Sports are no exception. Baseball, alone, has lost seven Hall of Famers alone this year. And virtually all of them were solely identified as a single community’s treasure. Of the seven, five played at least 16 years in a single city. Like Niekro, most of them set up roots there, too.

He came to Atlanta in 1966 with Braves as part of the first professional sports team in the city. For the next two decades, there were three constants to Atlanta sports: Mediocre on-field performance, the magnificence of Niekro’s knuckleball and the magnanimity of his personality. Atlanta sports had some great, dazzling moments – Henry Aaron’s determined, graceful pursuit of Babe Ruth’s homer record and the electricity of a young Pete Maravich – but team success was fleeting. Yet, even when we had nothing, we had Niekro.

He began children’s charities and showed up for every fund-raising golf tournament and civic affair in town. He seemed to relish being the city’s sports ambassador. It didn’t stop when his career stopped either or after he was elected to the Hall of Fame.

He was Roger Staubach to a generation of Atlanta fans. Or perhaps Dirk Nowitzki. And those comps led down another rabbit hole: Wondering if Dallas fans of a certain age had ever experienced something similar in the loss of their local childhood sports icons and how it impacted them. Tom Landry was a coach; kids didn’t grow up hoping to wear a fedora. The closest, according to our Tim Cowlishaw and Kevin Sherrington, might be the loss of Don Meredith, but as both noted, Meredith gained more popularity locally after joining Monday Night Football than perhaps as the Cowboys quarterback. In other words: Dallas fans have been pretty fortunate.

The other rabbit hole: Getting somebody to put what Niekro meant to the city into perspective. Here, Facebook – surprise, surprise – was an asset. It led to Niekro’s former teammate Darrel Chaney, a bench player with good Cincinnati teams and a more prominent infielder with four dreadful ones in Atlanta. He and Niekro were close as players, closer as retirees.

They raised their children in the same neighborhood. They built, by hand, the high school field for those kids. They both had charity events. Each showed up for the other’s. Even in October, frail and withered after electing to stop cancer treatments, Niekro showed up at his own golf tournament in a mask and greeted those who attended to raise money for charity.

“He did embrace that role,” Chaney said by phone Monday. “He was humble and grateful for what he could do. People come through sports and they can have an impact on people in different ways. Phil had impact on more than anybody I know.”

Chaney thought the golf tournament would be the last time he spoke with Niekro. Then, last Thursday, his phone rang. Niekro wanted to say goodbye.

“I said ‘Oh, man, I don’t know if I can handle this’,” Chaney related. “But he got on the phone and said, ‘I love you.’ My jaw dropped. I just couldn’t believe he would think to call to say goodbye. But he said he was ready to see Joe [Niekro’s brother, also a knuckleballer, who spent 22 years in the majors before dying of a brain aneurysm in 2006] and his mom and dad again. We cried together for 20 minutes.

“My grandson is playing in the Angels system and he asked about him,” Chaney added. “He told me I was his favorite shortstop that ever played behind him. On that, I don’t know if it was the drugs talking or not. I told him someday we’d see each other again. I’d show him the knuckleball I was working on. He laughed.”

Charlie Hough, the Rangers own knuckleballer, shared stories of Niekro offering him a hand when he was just converting to the pitch and how he – and Niekro – passed that on to the generation of Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey.

“He couldn’t have been any better when I was young,” Hough said. “Thing is, I didn’t think that much of it when I was young except that it was a help. I watched him and admired him. But as I got older and I started to pass it on, it really dawned on me what he did. It made me want to help that next generation. So many players want to do that. Hand something down to the next generation. You want to leave something that lasts.”

And therein may lie the answer to that existential question. A childhood favorite may be gone, but through him has passed a love for a game. That love, along with his memory, endures.

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