Chapter 132: The Ones Who Stay With Us

Joey Meyer died last week. He was 74 and died in his sleep, surrounded by his family. I had not spoken with him in 40 years but then again, there was no expectation that I would.

The last time we talked he was preparing to replace his father, Ray, as the basketball coach at DePaul University in Chicago. Ray Meyer had coached at DePaul for 42 years and was a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame. He had won a National Invitation championship in 1945 and it was widely suggested that he had not changed the way he coached, his approach to the game or to his players in all the years since. He did not dispute this. 

Joey Meyer understood the burden that would come with following his father, the legend. But then again, he had spent a lifetime living with the burden of being Ray Meyer’s son. Joey, one of three brothers, was the son who remained behind. He had been a star in high school but spurned college recruiting offers to play instead for his father. No teammate suffered from Ray Meyer’s rages when DePaul lost like Joey Meyer, who was often seen on campus alone. 

I knew about Ray Meyer – you could not live in Chicago in the 70s and 80s and not – and about the quiet son who after graduation became his father’s assistant rather than pursue head coaching jobs elsewhere. It was Joey whom I wanted to write about. 

I do not recall how long I spent reporting the story. A week perhaps. I talked with Ray Meyer, as well as his two other sons, along with teammates of Joey Meyer, people who knew both father and son and understood something of a relationship built largely on Ray Meyer’s need to have his son closeby and Joey Meyer’s desire not to disappoint his father. I recall speaking with Joey at length. He was a thoughtful person, quiet but candid. “Knowing how I feel about my son,” he said, “I’d hate for him to go away.”

My story ran in February of 1983 – several months before Joey succeeded his father. He remained DePaul’s head coach for 13 years, enjoying some very good seasons, and some very bad ones, the worst of which – a 3-23 record in 1997– led to his resignation. From time to time I checked to see how his teams were doing, but out of little more than passing curiosity. I had written my story and had moved on to reporting on the lives of other people. 

And that should have been the end of it, or so I believed. Then, last week, I learned that Joey Meyer had died and I found myself wondering about his life in the 40 years since I had spent a week rummaging around, trying to make sense of his relationship with his loving, belligerent, and needy father.

I learned a few things: he had coached in the NBA’s development league and two of his teams won championships. He was a scout for the Los Angeles Clippers. He lived in the Chicago suburb of Hinsdale. A career after DePaul – not a stellar one but a life in the game. 

But what struck me so much more powerfully was the discovery that I could not have imagined when I wrote about him, and in decades since: that while I am confident that Joey Meyer quickly forgot about me, I had not forgotten about him. 

We journalists arrive, metaphorically, at the home of a stranger, ring the bell and ask if we can come in and ask questions that, strictly speaking, are none of our business. Sometimes we are sent packing, but not always. Sometimes, we are shown a chair across from someone who has decided that they are open to sharing parts of their lives with us. Their agendas vary – attention, setting the record straight, or perhaps flattered that someone was bothering to ask. 

I tried to go about my work in a way that felt decent and fair – no cheap shots, and maybe keeping a secret or two that I decided did not advance the story and which would only cause needless embarrassment. Still, I always felt that I was a taker – that I had come to find what I needed to write a story that readers might think well of. 

I had never assumed that those lives I’d chronicled might have an enduring impact on me.

We talk to all kinds of people in our line of work. These conversations can be ephemeral – the quick hit with the person on the street – or the slow-to-build intensity with subjects of a book with whom we can end up spending months or years. It is not surprising when bonds develop over time; I have become friends with some of the people who appeared in my books, and so too have other writer friends.

But my connection, such as it was, with Joey Meyer was different. I was not assigned the story. I had chosen to write about him and the pieces I was writing then were of a type: stories of athletes whose achievements were not necessarily all they had dreamed of, and whose lives were often filled with regret, frustration, and with them, the kind of self-awareness rare in successful athletes. Among them were Phil Sellers, the all-American basketball player who came up short in his biggest game; Tony Zale, the former middleweight boxing champion haunted by the ghost of his father; Darryl Stingley, the wide receiver paralyzed from the neck down by a savage tackle; Teddy Mann, once a ranked middleweight boxer whose ascent stalled and who became known as a stepping stone against whom younger fighters on the rise could prove themselves.

Sellers died last fall. The last time we spoke he was working as the office manager for a mortgage company and feeling proud that he had made a life for himself after the game. Zale was teaching children to box. The last time I spoke with Darryl Stingley, who died in 2007, he yelled at me for badgering with more questions. But what I remember best was him telling me about his dreams in which he was once again running.  Mann was hoping for one more payday before returning to work as a carpenter. “I’d rather say I’m a fighter,” he said. “It sounds more impressive for some reason, for some crazy reason.”

It was Joey Meyer’s death that brought them and their stories back. Perhaps that is a function of getting older; Joey Meyer was only three years older than me. Sellers had been a few years younger. I can hazard any number of guesses as to why I chose to write about them when I did: fear of what the future held for me professionally; the struggle to reconcile ambition with acceptance of what life delivers.

But here is the thing: I was lucky to know them, and luckier still that they did not turn me away when I asked if we could talk. 

Here I was assuming that my reporting was an exercise in learning all about them, never seeing until so many years later, that they were helping me see myself.

* * *

In December 2019 I flew to Cancún. I rode a bus three hours northwest to a small port town, then boarded a ferry to Isla Holbox. I sat on the upper deck and took off my cardigan, the air warm enough to let my arms feel the sun for the first time in months.

So begins the latest story from Delacorte Review, “When I Was Blind: a Story of Love and Darkness,” by Emily Stetler. But the story not about Emily’s trip to Cancun. When I Was Blind is a long and thoughtful look back at the years she spent with “C,” a vibrant man whom she had hoped would someday father her children. This was not to be. As the story examines their intense relationship, Emily wonders how she missed all the clues to the fact that C was deeply in love with something else.