Glory days of The Boston Globe (cont.)

Bob Ryan (left) has become an icon as a columnist for The Boston Globe.

What do you say after you've seen the greatest game of professional basketball ever played? That there should have been two winners? That it would have been a bargain at $250 courtside?
-- Bob Ryan, June 3, 1976, on the Celtics' triple-overtime win over the Phoenix Suns in the NBA Finals

First pitch on a Sunday night in April at Fenway is 90 minutes away, but there goes Gammons, notepad in hand, pen cocked and ready behind home plate as the Yankees take batting practice. "I still think about those days," says Gammons, who is in his 21st year at ESPN, as he points to the press box. "I miss the competition, the running down to the clubhouse and back up to write."

Gammons arrived as an intern in the summer of 1968 on the same day as Ryan. He was a rising senior at North Carolina; Ryan was a recent Boston College graduate. Their first assignment was to call around to cities with major league baseball teams to gauge how Major League Baseball had reacted to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Ryan was given the American League; Gammons the National. "Ryan was pissed because my name was on top," Gammons says with a smile. Ryan, whose name appeared as "Robert" for the first and only time in his career, clarifies the reason: "The names were arranged alphabetically."

For someone who had realized that he wanted to be a sportswriter while arguing sports in a bar, Gammons could not have found a more able debate partner than Ryan. Both had attended elite prep schools (Gammons, Groton; Ryan, Lawrenceville) but were capable of rolling up their sleeves and throwing down, using encyclopedic and arcane knowledge as haymakers. Verbal jousts were a part of the eccentric Globe sports culture, along with writers who wore slippers and expensed velvet clothes hangers. One day, Tom Fitzgerald, who covered the Bruins, was writing a story when Ryan and Gammons erupted into a spirited back-and forth. "Is my typing bothering you two gentlemen?" Fitzgerald asked.

Clif Keane, an old-time, acerbic baseball scribe, once described what it would be like to assign them to the same game. "Ryan would write about umpires," said Keane, "Gammons would write about wars and symphonies, and you'd need a third f----- guy for game talk."

Ryan's passion was primordial. The son of an athletics promoter who grew up mimicking Princeton star Bill Bradley's jump shot in Trenton, N.J., he did not consider a game complete until he read about it in the next morning's paper. While at Boston College, he did play-by-play for the campus radio station, worked extra shifts in the cafeteria to follow the team to New Orleans one Christmas break and grew to be a minor league baseball junkie. To this day he keeps score at every baseball game he attends. "He's never lost that 12-year-old's enthusiasm," says Celtics legend Bob Cousy, who co-authored a book with Ryan.

Their fervor was revealed in their work habits. Gammons -- who hailed from Groton, Mass., the same small hometown as Shaughnessy -- would arrive at Fenway by noon most days and not leave until after midnight. At 23, Ryan caught on with the Celtics beat, and played catch-up until he became an authority -- perhaps the authority -- himself. Young and enthusiastic, they traveled with the teams and Gammons held a locker in the Sox clubhouse. "Jim Rice would underline a phrase," Gammons recalls, "hand it to me and say, 'Let me know if you took a shot at me.'"

While Gammons left the Globe first for a 16-month stint at Sports Illustrated and then permanently for ESPN in the late '80s, he still receives mail at the Globe and had a crateful until recent years. Over more than four decades, Ryan has remained stationed on Morrissey Blvd. for all but 19 months. Upset that he had been passed over for the columnist position sadly made available by Fitzgerald's 1982 death, Ryan was approached by Channel 5 reporter Clark Booth about shifting roles at Fitzgerald's funeral. Ryan jumped in front of the camera. "He hit me at the right time," said Ryan, who continued to write a weekly column during most of his hiatus and returned after a Thanksgiving eve talk with Winship.

Despite their divergent paths, they've reached unequalled heights. "They weren't just columnists," says retired political columnist Martin F. Nolan. "They were commissioners."

Ryan's cubicle is a reliquary. A photo of Jack Barry, the paper's original Celtics beat writer who all but adopted Ryan when he joined the staff, hangs on one wall. Pictures of Brooklyn's Ebbets Field and Boston's Braves Field appear as well. Attached to a beam nearby is a sign that reads: "Accuracy is the cornerstone of our business". Behind Ryan sits a typewriter. "We keep it as a memento," he says.

In early May, at the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame in Salisbury, N.C., Ryan received the Sportswriter of the Year honors on the same night that Montville, who left the Globe to write at SI and author four books, was inducted, joining Collins and McDonough on the 40-man writer roster. While at the podium to introduce Montville, Doria, now ESPN's director of news, said the biggest mistake he made as sports editor was not promoting Ryan in 1982. Curious whether Doria ever had made that admission to Ryan, Montville asked his longtime colleague. "No," Ryan said, "he had not."

They all fear the day is coming when there will be no front page of the sports section to commemorate a championship won, no all-scholastic contribution to schoolboy lore and no tout telling you there's more coverage inside. In recent years buyouts have gutted the staff and budget cuts have restricted its travel. The New York Times Co., which bought the paper for $1.1 billion as its "crown jewel" in 1993, threatened to close its doors last month, but later reached an agreement with the paper's unions that spared it for now.

After all the five-hour Yankee/Sox games and the triple-overtime NBA Finals contests, there has always been morning in New England. Talking to Powers about buyouts, Ryan, now 63, said he wasn't interested. Powers, who along with Shaughnessy and Dupont are the only other staffers still left from that '70s golden age, offered that even without the paper, surely Ryan would be comfortable given his television work opportunities. Ryan disagreed. He explained that when he appears on Pardon the Interruption or The Sports Reporters, the most important part of his introduction isn't "Bob Ryan." It is "of The Boston Globe."