Tales From the Newsroom: RIP, Bryce Miller
San Diego loses a sportswriter for sports fans, far too soon
“Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible — and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.”
— Donald Hall, “Fathers Playing Catch With Sons: Essays on Sport (Mostly Baseball)”
There was a time in the recent past that the lead sports columnist at a daily newspaper was equal in social standing to the mayor, bank president or chief of police.
Maybe higher.
Even a halfway decent sports columnist pulled a city together, rallying in support of the local teams — not just the pro outfits, but the small colleges and even high schools.
The great ones are still remembered years after their passing: Furman Bisher in Atlanta. Jim Murray in Los Angeles. Si Burick and Ritter Collett in Dayton. Dave Anderson in New York City. Shirley Povich in Washington, D.C.
And the legends are still read in anthologies and collections of their columns: Grantland Rice. Thomas Boswell. Damon Runyon. Red Smith.
The true giants have statues outside the local ballpark or stadium — we’re looking at you, Jack Murphy, and your faithful sidekick, Abe of Spoon River.
Bryce Miller didn’t live long enough to have that kind of impact on San Diego, passing away Saturday from cancer at the age of 56 — only 10 years after he arrived here.
But for those of us who live here in San Diego and follow sports, he was already cultivating that kind of reputation, earning a loyal following in a too-short decade of writing for the local daily.
Not only were the tools in place — a deft ability to find just the right word in any situation, an ear for capturing other people’s stories — so was the bedside manner: a warm persona that invited you in to his space without ever trespassing in yours.
The thing about Bryce that endeared him to readers was that he never took his position for granted, and never took himself too seriously. Both in print and in our private correspondence, it became clear that he understood how special his role was. He had the one thing that most sports fans can only dream of: Access. And he used that access — to players, to coaches, to team owners and college administrators — to ask the questions average sports fans would ask if given the chance.
He was our stand-in — and he relished it.
Bryce never wrote a column arguing a coach should be fired or a player demoted. There was no talk of politics, and religion only made an appearance when it was an important part of a subject’s life.
In a media landscape awash in outrage, his column was an island of, as his colleague Ryan Finley put it in the Union-Tribune’s obituary, understanding.
When he first wrote about his cancer diagnosis, the column was as much about the doctors, nurses and other caregivers as it was about him.
But that was typical. Miller was fascinated by the lives of others, much more, it seemed, than his own.
In some ways, Miller was a throwback to earlier generations: He wrote about the outdoors, about hunting and fishing. And he wrote about them organically, the way his predecessor Jack Murphy had.
Readers came to look forward to Miller’s annual camping and fishing trips to Ontario, Canada perhaps as much as he did.
I never got to meet Bryce in person — I knew him only as one of his many loyal readers, and as an email friend.
I was out of the newspaper racket by the time he arrived in town from Des Moines; the daily I worked at as an opinion columnist and features editor having been shut down several years before.
When his first column ran, with his email appended, I wrote and welcomed him to town, suggested a few folks he might want to meet as he began settling into a new city and learning about our traditions, our culture, and our sad sports history of mostly coming up short of a championship, or losing our professional teams to a bigger market.
When he emailed me back, thanking me for my note, a nascent online friendship was born. We corresponded fairly often over the years. A couple years ago I made online introductions to the family of PGA golfer Sahith Theegala — whose father Miller met and profiled at the Farmer’s Open last year. My boss, who is distant cousins with Theegala (although I gather that in Indian culture, no relations are ever truly distant), sent me a selfie from Torrey Pines with Miller waving to me through the phone.
When college baseball schedules were released last fall, we tentatively planned to catch a Point Loma Nazarene University baseball game together later this spring.
But then word came through mutual friends that the cancer had come back while he was covering the Padres at spring training. That he was back in the hospital.
And then Saturday came the news that no one wanted.
San Diego has a strong history of great newspaper columnists, from the trailblazing Max Miller at the Sun back in the 1930s to Neil Morgan at the Evening Trib from the 1950s though the ’70s, to sports columnists Jack Murphy and Jerry Magee, Tom Cushman to the still-active Nick Canepa.
Had he gotten the chance to live longer, Bryce Miller would undoubtedly have joined those ranks as a beloved chronicler of our local landscape.
That he didn’t get to is all our loss.
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