Larry Whiteside, a man of firsts
LARRY WHITESIDE knew I was shaken. I was a 17-year-old, part-time sportswriter at the Milwaukee Journal in 1972, recruited from the black weeklies as a college freshman. My first story was on a season opener between two top high school basketball teams.
No one told me how many words to write. So I wrote 3,000. It was slashed to 300. At the top of my original copy was a message in blood -red ink. I conservatively recollect that it said, "You will never make it with work like this."
This put water in my eyes and a hole in my gut. I was told not to worry because the sports editor was a crusty throwback. But a throwback was intimidating for a teenage black reporter in a sports department with only one full-time African-American.
Thank goodness that black man was baseball writer Larry Whiteside, who died last week at age 69. He called me to his desk. He opened his drawer. It was filled with hate mail. Larry told me that some his first interactions with the sports editor also made him want to cry.
"He's testing you, just like he and all these people here [ who sent the hate mail] tested me," Larry said. "He senses how strong you are and wants to see if you'll crack. The stronger you are, the more they test. That's just the way it is. Don't let anyone break you."
I saw water well in Larry's eyes. I was watching, simultaneously, incredible pain and the victory over pain.
On another day, Larry pulled something else out of his drawer. He called it the " Black List." It had the names of African-Americans covering sports in the media. He started it in 1971, when the number was nine.
The list always went with him on the road. With a gap-toothed smile and a gentleman's polish, he used his perch in the press box to ask sports editors why they had no one on the list. There was no calculating the strength I drew from seeing Larry type a new name on the list, using his typewriter as an African drum for others. Each tap on his keyboard hit me as powerfully as the footsteps of any civil rights march.
Larry went to the Globe, becoming its first African-American beat sportswriter and the only African-American in a big city covering a major league baseball team on a daily basis. He still had some crusty throwbacks he sometimes had to tell where to go. Yet he never took himself too seriously.
One time, in Kansas City during a 1970s American League pennant series between the Royals and the New York Yankees, we went to a restaurant. We were told that the eatery had stopped seating for lunch.
Larry calmly said, "Oh, but we're with the Yankees." I gulped as they whisked us in. When we sat down, I said, "But Larry, who are we if they ask?" He told me, "You're Willie Randolph." We howled. Randolph was as skinny as I was fat at the time. Luckily, they never asked.
By 1983, the Black List was up to 85 people, many of whom remain successful today and in memorial e-mails called Larry their "hero," "godfather," and "prince." New York Post sports columnist George Willis recounted the time he thanked Larry for his encouragement in the days he covered minor league baseball in Memphis.
Willis said Larry simply smiled and said, "Just look out for those who come after you."
Larry once wrote that he started at the Kansas City Kansan newspaper in 1959 with "one suitcase, one record player, one portable typewriter, and $40 in my pocket for a return trip home" in case things did not work out. His firsts never stopped. In 1987, he was the first sportswriter to win a journalism fellowship at Stanford University. He went on to write about baseball in Japan.
Ron Thomas, an early member of the Black List, and now director of a new sports journalism program at Morehouse College, told me how he roomed with Larry in Phoenix at the 2000 National Association of Black Journalists convention. Larry was in charge of ordering plaques for the NABJ Sports Task Force Pioneer awards.
Despite crippling illnesses that had him on 20 pills a day, Thomas said Larry flew 2,700 miles solely to sign for the plaques. After that, Thomas said, Larry "then spent the next few days in the hotel because it was more than 100 degrees and he couldn't walk the two blocks to the convention center."
When pioneering black men die of long ailments at 69, we speculate if they were quietly battered from the toll of being first. I suspect Larry would tell us it was worth the sacrifice. Many people fondly cite his gap-toothed smile. To me, the teeth represented the joy he felt for everyone he put on the Black List. The gap symbolized the holes that remain in newsrooms and his never-ending search to fill them.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. 
