By Bob Markus

A few days ago I received in the mail an offer from the Neptune Society to register me for a drawing for a free cremation. Since cremation is my choice for the disposal of my mortal remains, any way, I thought about it for quite awhile before depositing the invitation in the trash basket along with the remains of the other dozen or so solicitations that arrive daily.

I may be committed to the concept of cremation, but I'm not ready for the reality of the ash heap just yet. Besides, I didn't want anybody at the Neptune Society to be burdened with the guilt of a former New York Times obit writer who once famously admitted that he'd written some advance obits that were so good he could hardly wait for the subject to die so he could see his master work in print.

I've written some advance obits myself, but usually they involved people I knew so I really never had any desire to hasten their demise. Among the sports notables whose obits I wrote premortem were Jack Dempsey, Al Lopez, Harry Caray and Leo Durocher. Although I once met Dempsey in his New York restaurant, I can't claim to have really known him. But I was well acquainted with the last three, whose obituaries I wrote in the same day somewhere in the mid 1980s. All are gone now, but I was in my ninth year of retirement before Lopez, who lived to be 97, died in August of 2005. So I have no idea whether my 2o-year-old obit of El Senor, as the former catcher and White Sox manager was known, was used.

Only this morning did I learn of the passing of Don Gutteridge, the quiet--some would say, too quiet--man who succeeded Lopez as White Sox manager in 1970. Gutteridge was almost spectacularly unsuccesssful in his one year at the helm of the Sox, but he had earlier distinguished himself as a longtime coach for Lopez.

Two other deaths in the past week or so have been of more than passing interest to me. One was golfer Tommy Bolt, whom I never met, but nonetheless feel as if he were an intimate friend. My only personal contact with Bolt, the 1958 U.S. Open champion, came--where else?--on a golf course. The Tam O'Shanter Golf club in suburban Chicago to be precise.

Tam O'Shanter was the site of a yearly tournament backed by a local businessman, George S. May, and for a time it offered by far the highest payout of any tournament in the world. Think of it as the Dubai Desert Classic of its day. As a teenager, along with my best friend, Lawry Johnson, I'd go out to the tournament in the early morning and stay until the last shot was fired.

In those days, your daily pass entitled you to almost complete access to the players. You could pick out your favorite and walk right along with him down the fairway, unless your favorite was Ben Hogan, and then the size of his gallery mandated certain restraints. To be sure, I was a Ben Hogan fan, but it didn't take all day for him to play 18 holes. So one morning, Lawrey and I started following a young, good looking golfer named Tommy Bolt.

Bolt, it turned out, was not only a pretty good golfer, but a highly entertaining golfer, as well. As he strode down the fairway he'd make comments to the fans following in his wake. Over all these years I can still remember his screaming at a fan who had the temerity to talk while Tommy was lining up a shot, "put a nickel in your nose if you want to be a juke box." In addition, Bolt was prone to displaying his temper, alternately cursing and throwing his clubs whenever the gods of golf turned against him. But he was a beautiful shot maker and lots of fun being around.

The other recent death that caught my eye was that of Todd Cruz, a former utlity player for several teams, who died at the age of 52 while swimming in the pool of his Arizona apartment complex. Most of the obits focused on the fact that Cruz was the regular third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles in the 1983 World Series, won by the Orioles. I remember him for a far different reason.

I was covering the White Sox for The Chicago Tribune in 1981 while Cruz was rehabilitating an injury in Edmonton, site of the club's Triple A farm team. The Sox were playing a night game somewhere in the East--might have been Detroit or Cleveland; I can't recall. What I do recall is that after filing my story on that night's game, I called the copy desk and was told the opposition paper had a story that Cruz had been arrested in Edmonton for breaking into a department store after hours and stealing some watches.

When you are a beat reporter and hear news like that you have two immediate reactions. The first is, Damn, I've messed up. The second is, what can I do to retaliate? So I picked up the phone and called Cruz in his hotel room. To my amazement, he answered the phone and my questions with equal alacrity. As I remember it, he said he'd had too much to drink, had broken into the Hudson's Bay store, and fallen asleep. He was snoozing away when the police came and found him. He had just been released and gotten back to his room when I called.

As it happened, the White Sox were scheduled to play an exhibition game in Edmonton the next night. I'd planned to skip the exhibition game and go straight to California, site of the next regularly scheduled game, but, obviously, those plans changed. When I arrived at the hotel in Edmonton, along with the team, there was Todd Cruz in the lobby, three or four watches adorning his left wrist and forearm, asking: "Anybody wanna buy a watch?" You couldn't help admiring his sense of humor even while wondering where he'd obtained the watches. Ultimately Cruz was sentenced to nine months probation and, to my knowledge, never had any further trouble with the law.

Most major newspapers have their own obituary writers, the most famous having been Alden Whitman, the New York Timesman who pioneered the concept of interviewing living people for their own future obituaries. This takes a modicum of Chutzpah as I found out when I rather uncomfortably interviewed Harry Caray for what I described to him as "a feature story."

The majority of sports related obits, however, are handled in the sports department. The master of the genre at The Tribune was David Condon, conductor of the In The Wake of The News column, which for years was the only sports column in the paper. Condon was a gifted writer who sent his subjects into the great beyond with loving care and beautiful prose. I always said that when I died I wanted Dave Condon to write my obit. In one of life's ironies I ended up writing his.

When I wrote a column, I found the obit page a useful source of column ideas. One I recall was of Don McCafferty, who succeeded Don Shula as head coach of the Baltimore Colts and led them to the Super Bowl title in his first year. Less than four years later he was dead. Although I had covered that Super bowl victory over the Dallas Cowboys, I didn't get to know McCafferty until training camp the next year.

One of my assignments during this period was to cover the pro champions' training camp as they prepared to play the College All-Stars in the annual exhibition game, sponsored by The Tribune, that kicked off the new season. The Colts' training camp at the time was at Western Maryland university in Westminster, Md. I had only been in camp a few hours when Ernie Accorsi, then the Colts' public relations director and later, as New York Giants general manager, the man who traded for Eli Manning, proposed we go out to Os & Ginnys, the local gin joint, for beer and pizza.

The saloon served as post-practice meeting hall for both players and coaches, an unusual arrangement necessitated by the fact it was the only joint in town. Players had use of the facility until the 11 o'clock curfew, when the coaches, having had their fill of film study and game plan adjustments, would take over.

On this night McCafferty had engaged in a shuffle board contest with a local hotshot. I don't recall who won but I'll never forget the reaction to the column I wrote about the evening. That Sunday night I was having dinner with Accorsi and his wife when the phone rang and Ernie went to pick it up. I could hear him say, "Yes, he's here," and a short time later Accorsi returned to the table and said, "That was Freddie Schubach (the Colts' longtime equipment manager.) He asked if you were here and I said you were. Then he said, 'keep him there because Os is sitting on the steps of the dormitory with a shotgun and says he's going to kill him.'"

It wasn't until much later that I discovered it was Don McCafferty who talked Os into going home. Os had stormed into McCafferty's room, gun in hand, demanding to know where that s.o.b. columnist from Chicago was hiding, because he, by God, was going to kill him if he ever found him. He showed McCafferty the offending column and at that point there are some coaches in the NFL who would have said, "Wait a minute. I'll get my gun and we'll shoot the s.o.b. together."

Not McCafferty. Instead, Big Mac spent two hours of his evening off talking the irate saloon keeper out of his mission of mayhem. McCafferty never said anything to me about the incident. Except at breakfast the next morning he called me over and scolded: "You'll get along better around here if you remember what the coaching staff does outside of coaching hours is its own business." Seeing I was properly chastized, he added: "Now sit down and have some breakfast."

I think the best obit I ever wrote was about Bill Stern, a long forgotten radio sports announcer who was a giant in his day. Younger readers probably never heard of him but to kids of my generation he was our window to the sports world. We didn't have television back then so we'd sit in front of the big floor model radio on a Saturday afternoon and listen to Bill Stern's description of a football game.

He was our eyes and it's no secret to report that he often gave us a distorted view. He ws famous for calling the wrong ball carrier on a long touchdown run and attempting to correct his error by inventing a lateral at the 5-yard line that put the ball back in the hands of the guy who had it all the time. A football game described by Bill Stern was often much more exciting than the one people were watching from the stands.

Once, when Stern was about to call a big horse race, a colleague reminded him: "Remember, Bill, you can't lateral a horse." When television came, Bill Stern was finished, of course. Not only can't you lateral a horse, you can't get away with distorted or sloppy reporting of an event the viewer can see with his own eyes. A 3-yard plunge into the line is only that, not a meeting of the gods at Valhalla.

But Bill Stern was more than a play-by-play announcer. He had a sports show every night right after supper--which is what we called it at our house--and I would no more have missed that than a modern kid would miss the Saturday morning cartoons. Stern's show consisted of stories about famous people, all of them relating to sports and all of them complete fabrications. We didn't know that then of course. It was a long time before I found out that Thomas Edison's deafness was not caused by his being hit by a fastball thrown by--Jesse James!

The Bill Stern story that has stuck with me all these years is about the little boy in the southern state of Georgia who loved to play football. I couldn't recount for you a single detail of the story, which had something to do with the kid eventually going into politics, but I'll never forget Stern's kicker: . ...." for this was not the Georgia in the southern part of the United States, but the Georgia in the southern part of Russia, and the boy's name was (pause for emphasis)--Josef Stalin. "

So long, Bill, and if you happen to run into Abe Lincoln up there, ask him about the time he won the state wrestling championship.