Sage of the North Country

Patrick Reusse's book shows the passion and humor of one of the last real sportswriters left.

The Minnesota Vikings enjoyed gentle newspaper treatment in their formative years. That changed when Patrick Reusse became a columnist in St. Paul.

Mike Lynn, the general manager whom Reusse actually liked, finally lost his patience. He asked Reusse how he came up with his philosophy of covering the Vikings.

“Well, Mike,” Reusse said, “here’s what I do. When you win, I rip the team you beat. When you lose, I rip you.”

Reusse is in his mid-70s now and still pounding it out, for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Although he carved out a bountiful side career as a talk-show host and TV peersonality, he was totally devoted to those 18 or 20 column inches that made up his column. Still is.

So is a vast array of Minnesotans who wait for his Turkey Of The Year column on Thanksgiving, his reports on the sporting feats found in the small towns that remind him of his beginnings, and his skeptical observations of the pro teams of the Twin Cities, the Vikings in particular.

He explains who he is and what he does in a book called “Reusse: Tales From The Minnesota Sports Scene.”

He includes lots of his greatest hits, but he’s also reflective and contrite about a few things, including his early dismissal of women’s sports. He almost got fired over one insensitive column and he wrote two apologies — one is never enough, you know. Then he shook himself off and did what he always does: search for the next good column.

Patrick has been one of my closest friends since we met in 1981. Mostly it’s his towering sense of humor and his great generosity, but I also admire the way he walks against, not with, the prevailing winds. Phonies and self-promoters set off his BS detector. I remember riding with him one night as a Twins’ game was on the radio, and a neophyte play-by-play man announced Bret Boone’s arrival at the plate by saying, “Here’s Boonie!”

“Son,” Reusse growled, in a voice like a bobcat encountering an electric fan, “you’re going down.”

Thus he had little use for Minnesota football coaches Lou Holtz, JimWacker, Tim Brewster and P.J. Fleck, although Fleck’s ability to win might be eroding Patrick’s resistance. He also went after Twins’ owner Carl Pohlad for being cheap. One day at spring training, he was introduced to Pohlad’s mother, who was in her late 90s. When Reusse introduced himself, she said she loved the Star-Tribune, except for one guy who kept making fun of her son. Said Patrick, “Don’t you worry about that. When I get back there, we’ll get rid of that guy.”

Mostly Patrick loves characters, particularly baseball players. In the book he includes a whole A-to-Z chapter of his favorite subjects. Fortunately, he solved one of the most difficult letters by citing Twins second baseman and manager Frank Quilici.

Before pre-game clubhouse access was curtailed, Reusse would show up at 2 p.m. and get a Twin to tell him something new and different about his life. He preferred that to sitting in the pressbox and fulminating, without information.

He loved dealing with Kent Hrbek and Gary Gaetti, the World Series heroes of 1987 and 1991. One year Hrbek showed up at spring training without much evidence of wintertime sacrifice. What did you do in the off-season, Herbie? “I bowled and ice-fished,” Hrbek said.

Thanks to Reusse, Minnesotans got to know John Gagliardi, the quirky football coach at St. John’s who won four national championships and has a record 489 wins. Gagliardi did not allow tackling in practice and discouraged weight lifting. He fretted that Grambling’s Eddie Robinson never would retire and give up his top spot on the wins list, but Gagliardi outlasted him by 15 years and has the record by a margin of 81. Nick Saban would need to win 12 games a year for 19 years to catch him. And Reusse made several trips a year to Collegeville to see him.

You don’t do that if you only want “clicks.” Reusse’s audience knows it can’t predict what he’ll think, say or write. It is always prepared to be pleasantly surprised. He doesn’t approve of “populists,” as he calls them: writers who want to be people-pleasers.

He was game for anything. In 1993, the Phillies had finished off the Braves and were awaiting the World Series. With an unexpected day off, I suggested that we should drive from Philly to Keyser, W.Va., hometown of the Phillies’ lead character, John Kruk. Reusse said, “Sure,” as routinely as if I’d asked him for a toothpick.

We went up and back in one day, 255 miles each way. It was worth it when someone at a Keyser bar told us why Kruk always hit the ball to left field. His mom Lena had her garden in the equivalent of right field, and you didn’t dare walk in there. And it was worth it when someone told us about the cold night when Kruk was in the backyard hot tub. Kruk noticed a deer had walked into the yard, rose up with nothing but his swim trunks on….and shot the deer. “Who can we call to come over and clean this thing?” Kruk said, before he crawled back into the Jacuzzi. Mission accomplished for two guys looking for untold stories; the trip back to Philly flew by.

Patrick’s dad Richard was the source of the devilment. He ran a funeral home, was the general manager of the “town ball” team, and once shot a deer and painted his nose red, while he decorated it with Christmas bells. He stopped at a friend’s house and got one of his sons to come out. “Sorry, son, I just shot Rudolph,” Richard told him.

Richard was a huge Vikings’ fan. When the Rams made one of their many playoff trips to the frozen tundra, Richard somehow got the home address of Rams’ quarterback Roman Gabriel and sent him postcards of snowbound cars and assorted blizzard complications. The Vikings won, but then were blown out at the Super Bowl. The next week Richard got a letter from L.A., with a newspaper picture of quarterback Joe Kapp getting beaten up. “What happened to your Vikings, Dick?” wrote Gabriel’s wife.

Another book, or maybe a TV series, could be written about Patrick’s complicated relationship with Sid Hartman, who was the Star Tribune’s lead columnist until he died at 100. Long before that, they built a statue of Sid outside Target Center.

Sid was famous for scoops, and his ability to ingratiate himself to the powerful. That wasn’t Patrick’s approach, of course, so they clashed almost daily, sometimes at high volume.

But when Sid wanted someone to ghost-write his autobiography (think about that for a second), he called Patrick. When it was time for an author’s note, the publisher wanted to know Sid’s age. Sid balked at that.

“When were you born, Sid?” Patrick asked him.

“Just tell ‘em I was born,” Sid said.

“That’s good to know,” Patrick said. “Most people think you were hatched.”

Patrick went to the Kentucky Derby and was dining alone at a barbecue joint. Suddenly here came Bobby Knight, followed by some sportswriters. Patrick wasn’t in that club. He had ridiculed Knight, one of Sid’s “close personal friends,” for years. But the lunch went peacefully.

On his next radio show, Patrick announced he’d had “lunch with Bobby Knight” in Louisville, and that Sid’s name never came up. “In fact, there’s some doubt as to whether Sid has even met the man,” Patrick said, correctly anticipating how it would rattle Sid.

The radio show was a gag-fest worthy of the National Lampoon. It had phenomenal guests like Seve Ballesteros, Ben Crenshaw, Dean Smith, Moses Malone and actor Billy Bob Thornton, or at least their imitators. One summertime day, Patrick did the show from his swimming pool, which was a notorious money pit, and positioned the phone so it could transmit the full force of his cannonball dive, which was formidable. But then Patrick was known to do the radio show during his golfing rounds, putting as he craned his neck to the mouthpiece.

Two of my favorite vicarious moments:

The Vikings had an unfortunate habit of racking up DUI arrests in the days Tommy Kramer was quarterbacking. Patrick carefully traced the locations of all those incidents, worked up a graphic with small Viking logos, and wrote a column warning the readers to stay away from “the Purple Triangle.”

Another was in his baseball-writing days, when Patrick noticed play-by-play man Halsey Hall packing liquor bottles for a Twins’ trip. Patrick pointed out that Hall could get a drink most places on the road.

“Son,” Hall said, “you never know when you’re going to run into a local election.”

Patrick seems to be in remarkable health for someone with his nonstop work ethic and nutritional habits. But I’m sure he wrote this book with the knowledge that everyone has to go sometime. If he wasn’t here, all these stories would be lying around and someone else would have to tell them. That wasn’t happening.