DES MOINES, Iowa — Most normal people are unaware that my alma mater Vanderbilt University in Nashville has a nickname of “Sportswriter U.” That’s because a long line of outstanding sportswriters have graduated there, going back to the legendary Grantland Rice at the beginning of the 20th century. He gave us the “Four Horsemen of Notre Dame,” as well as the great line from his poem “Alumnus Football” that you still see written on gymnasium walls: “For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He writes not whether you won or lost but how you played the game.”

Even today, more than a dozen of the nation’s most prominent sportswriters are Vandy graduates. Among the more widely known are Skip Bayless and Buster Olney of ESPN, Dave Sheinen of the Washington Post, Tyler Kepner of the New York Times, Lee Jenkins of Sports Illustrated, Dan Wolken of USA Today.

But the “dean of Vanderbilt sportswriters,” as I nicknamed him a few years ago, has most recently been my pal Bill Livingston, for 34 years the sports columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in Ohio. Since retiring in 2018, he’s been a busy author of sports books.

Bill Livingston, in an earlier photo from the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper.

“Livy,” we’ve called him, playing off his last name. But it also fit because Livy lived a whole lot.

It shocked us all to learn that early on Friday, Jan. 9, he died unexpectedly in Cleveland at the age of 77.

His son, also Bill Livingston, 39, a prominent Cleveland attorney, told me Saturday morning that his dad was hospitalized Dec. 18 with a kidney infection, was treated successfully for that and was then admitted to a rehabilitation center “to help re-build his strength.” He was scheduled to return home on Jan. 6.

Alas, he developed “some kind of stomach problem,” his son said, and was re-admitted to the hospital to get persistent vomiting under control. In the wee hours Friday, after another stomach episode, he was taken to intensive care and suffered cardiac arrest and death.

A visitation is scheduled Monday evening, with his funeral Tuesday morning, in the Cleveland area. You can read his obituary by clicking here.

Of note — and something that will not surprise those who knew him best — is that the old sportswriter “had worked up to the day before he died,” his son said, checking the final edits of a personal memoir of his grand career and life. Up to the day before he died? Well, as one line in his obituary so accurately says, the elder Bill Livingston “was proudly considered one of the best in the business at writing under deadline.”

“Livy” been working on that book for nearly a year. As his old editor back in our college times, I had been insisting for several years that it was the book he most needed to do — his own telling of how he grew from a boy sportswriter in high school in Dallas, Texas, to his career as a globe-trotting columnist writing about the biggest sports events of our era. Included, I said, should be his best stories about the close-up views and relationships he had with our best-known athletes, coaches, officials and sports media figures.

He sent me a copy of his completed manuscript last July. It’s good, in fact really good. I learned more about it on Saturday.

“Dad asked me to do the final edits, and I did,” young Bill Livingston said. “Really, all I was doing was checking for spelling and little details. But I got that done, and had just given him the completed copy of it. That’s what he was reading over right before he died, giving everything one last look.”

Did they get it titled?

“That’s kind of an interesting story,” young Bill said. “For quite a while, we were calling it something like ‘From Typewriters to Tweets — working in the golden era of sportswriting.’ We both liked that. But in recent times, I’d come across his story in the manuscript how, at the end of one of the Winter Olympics, Dad had talked one of his buddies on the U.S. sledding team to let him do a ride down one of those icy curving runs onto one of those small ice sleds. He was all pumped up about that and wrote about it.

“But then when he called Mom (Marilyn) who was back home in the States, she was furious. She reminded him how he had three little kids and a wife depending on him, and just how dangerous this had been. His answer was, ‘It was a helluva story, though.’ That seemed to me to be a pretty good description of his whole career! He agreed. So we decided to use something like that.”

Young Livingston said he expects the family will be delivering the memoir to a publisher very soon.

Livy and I meeting in Omaha in 2017 when he was on his way to cover the Ohio State-at-Nebraska football game in Lincoln, Neb. I was wearing the Ohio State ball cap he had delivered to me in 2010 in Iowa City, when I was undergoing a stem cells transplant at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics. Livy, who was covering that fall’s Ohio State-at-Iowa football game, had persuaded OSU coach Jim Tressel to autograph the bill of the cap for me.

Can I tell you, or re-tell you, a few more Livy stories here?

Let me take you back to 2015 and ’16, when he was finishing an earlier book — this one about how Cleveland native George Steinbrenner, later the legendary owner of the New York Yankees, had started into the sports business by buying and operating a pro-level AAU basketball team in Cleveland.

As he was finishing that tale — with great yarns about some of the most colorful characters in early pro basketball in America —I asked Livingston how he felt, after he’d done all his research, and was sitting with a huge stash of information about so many people. Many of them were reaching their prime in the late ’50s and early ’60s, an era when interest in sports was mushrooming in America – and has never stopped growing. Was it difficult to turn all that into a cogent story?

“Well, I felt a little like I did back when I was covering the Masters Golf Tournament for the first time, and I thought I had all this great stuff for my story,” Livingston said. “I was there in the press tent with one of my real mentors, Bill Millsaps, who was the sports editor and columnist then for the Richmond Times Dispatch. I said I didn’t quite know what to do with all the material I had. ‘Saps,’ as we call him, said, ‘Well, Livy, the biggest problem here is that you don’t want to overwrite it. So, just say the Old Sportswriter’s Prayer for when you have a great story situation: ‘Oh Lord, please don’t let me (screw) this up!’ ”

He didn’t screw up that story then, and seldom ever did.

And I was not a bit surprised. From the first time I met Livingston, in 1967 or ’68, I had radar for what a fine reporter and writer he would become, and that he was destined for journalism stardom.

Like most of the well-known Vanderbilt sportswriters, Livingston came to the school on what back then was a full-ride journalism scholarship, endowed in the name and memory of Grantland Rice by the Thoroughbred Racing Association. It is now named the Grantland Rice-Fred Russell Scholarship, to include the Vandy grad Russell who was sports editor for decades of the old Nashville Banner. It is still awarded every year to a high school senior who is “a promising sportswriter.” (For the record, I was runner-up in 1965, and decided to go to Vandy anyway when they offered me a consolation scholarship.)

In 2022, we RicheBurgers (my wife Mary Riche and I) met Livy for breakfast in Cleveland when we were traveling through on our honeymoon trip to New England and back.

Livingston arrived at the university in Nashville from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, Texas.

His interest in sportswriting had been inspired early.

“The Dallas Times Herald’s sports columnist when I was growing up was a real legend, Blackie Sherrod,” Livingston said. “We never missed reading him at our house. My dad was a St. Louis Cardinals fan then. Across the South, people would listen to Cardinals games on KMOX radio. Dad never considered a game really completed until he read what Blackie had to say about it. From that time on, I knew I wanted to be a guy like Blackie.”

In high school, he ran into English and journalism teacher Albert Sidney Johnston, namesake and relative of a famous Texas military general. Johnston groomed not only Livingston, but also Lenny Goldstein, who was two years older and also was a Grantland Rice Scholarship winner at Vanderbilt.

“Mr. Johnston was a wonderful teacher,” Livingston recalled, “and I’ve got a story that will tell you just how cool he was. In my sophomore year, he gave us an assignment to write a parody of some piece of literature. I had read Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and liked it. So for a parody, I wrote ‘The Tell-Tale Fart’ about a guy who was uncontrollably flatulent.

“So as Mr. J is handing back the papers to us, he says, ‘Mr. Livingston, come to my desk after class.’ I thought I was probably in trouble. But he was so cool, he pulled out a copy of Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ and from what’s called ‘The Miller’s Tale,’ he read the scene about farting. Then he said, ‘I just wanted you to know that you are hardly the first person to write about farts.’ Right then, I thought, ‘I really do want to be a writer!’ ”

In his senior year, the Dallas Morning News decided to create a “High School Sports” page and asked journalism teachers to recommend a student to report and write for each school. Teacher Johnston picked Livingston to write for “Woodrow,” as Wilson High School is known in Dallas. He did well enough that at the end of that school year, when he needed a letter of recommendation for the scholarship at Vanderbilt, the Morning News’ sports editor wrote one.

But in his first two years at Vandy, Livingston did nothing for the student newspaper, the Vanderbilt Hustler.

“My freshman year, I was concentrating on making sure I could keep my grades up,” he recalled. “My sophomore year, I just hadn’t gotten drawn into anything. Then that spring, there was a knock on my dorm room door. I opened it up and there you were – mop of hair, glasses, saddle shoes and all, saying, ‘Why aren’t you writing for the Hustler?’ ”

I had been going over the list of Grantland Rice Scholarship winners on campus, and realized Livingston had been a no-show at the newspaper office. As the rising editor-in-chief, I tabbed him to be sports editor and demanded that he start writing a regular column.

“I’ve got a problem,” Livingston confessed. “I don’t know how to type.” I told him we’d work around that, and we did.

Eventually, we told him to focus just on his column writing, and we made my classmate Henry Hecht the sports editor. Hecht, by the way, went on to an outstanding sportswriting and editing career with the New York Post, Sports Illustrated, The National, Long Island Newsday and is now a writing coach in New York City.

After graduating from Vanderbilt in 1970, Livingston went to the University of Texas where he started graduate school – thinking he wanted to teach – then thought better of it and took a sports job with the Dallas Morning News.

“Those were kind of crazy, fun years, to be young and on a good newspaper’s sports staff like that,” he said. “There was a lot of alcohol and partying, too much for some. I loved all the guys. A writer Bob St. John did this book then, ‘Texas Sports Writers: The Wild & Wacky Years,’ and I’ve always been proud that there are two or three pages in it about me.”

In 1973, the Philadelphia Inquirer – on the recommendation of a Vandy grad on its staff – hired Livingston. For 11 years, he covered the “Big Five” Philadelphia-area colleges in basketball, some Penn State football, and the Philadelphia Sixers in professional basketball. “That meant I got to cover ‘Dr. J,’ Julius Erving, my favorite athlete ever,” he said. “Later in Cleveland I covered LeBron James. That’s a lot of good basketball.”

The move to Cleveland came in 1984, when one of his Philadelphia Inquirer sports colleagues, Thom Greer, became sports editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and then summoned Livingston to become the paper’s chief sports columnist. He did that until he turned 70 and retired.

His writing late in his newspaper career, and afterward, has reflected the great volume of sports knowledge and maturity that you’d expect a veteran like Livingston to have. And it’s also loaded with fun. Occasionally, I think you can see evidence peeking through that besides being an English major at Vanderbilt, he also had a minor in “classics.” But he was never snooty about it, and he could make a wide range of topics very readable.

Bill and Marilyn Livingston, married 47 years.

“What I’ve always loved about Cleveland is that here, I get to write about almost every sport,” he told me. “In fact, I think the only one I haven’t written about is horseracing.”

He was a great admirer of the late Bob Feller, the Iowa native who became a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, and he wrote about Feller extensively.

In autumn, he always focused primarily on Ohio State football, both home and on the road, and tried to get back for Cleveland Browns professional games the next day.

Most of his career at the Plain Dealer, he wrote four columns per week, “but in the digital era, it became pretty much 24/7 – writing whenever there’s something to write, although I don’t have to make them all column-length.”

Like most journalism professionals in recent years, he also posted regularly on Twitter and Facebook, and he was a frequent guest on national radio and TV sports shows.

He and Marilyn have raised three children – teacher Sondra, medical clinic administrator Julianne, young Bill the attorney.

Oh, how we’ll miss him!

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Chuck Offenburger writes as a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Learn more about the group and consider becoming subscribers — for free or for modest fees, your choice — by using the link below here. Your support keeps them all writing for you!

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