John Feinstein!

[WampusCrandle]

he is one of the great sports writers and i am actually listening to him speak about his life and his new book - i work at the Darien Library, where he is speaking. he has such an insight into sports and how fans and people interact with those teams.

[Bossanova]

he is one of the great sports writers and i am actually listening to him speak about his life and his new book - i work at the Darien Library, where he is speaking. he has such an insight into sports and how fans and people interact with those teams.

Always been a fan of his speaking and his writing

[TheMojoPin]

I'm a fan of his standing and eating.

[WampusCrandle]

i am working in the back, but i can see and hear him clearly. he is funny, witty, and quite a remarkable guy. he is telling the story of his favorite athlete, its damn funny!

[mendyweiss]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/02/AR2008050203332.html
Great Letter Today In THe Post AThe Gifts of Gordon Bradley

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Who's Blogging» Links to this article
Sunday, May 4, 2008; Page B08

This past Tuesday, surrounded by his family, Gordon Bradley passed away after a long bout with Alzheimer's disease at the age of 74.

Unless you are a soccer fan, the name Gordon Bradley may not mean much to you. And yet, he was a man who touched thousands of lives here in the Washington area and nationally during the past 35 years. Bradley was a soccer coach, a very successful one with the New York Cosmos and the Washington Diplomats of the old North American Soccer League and later at George Mason University.

But he was far more than that. He was a soccer teacher-- not just in the sense of teaching players the intricacies of a corner kick or how to set up to defend a free kick, but in the sense that he taught people about the game: how to watch it, how to understand it, how to play it and coach it, but perhaps most important, how to love it. He was never a soccer evangelist -- he never told people, as some advocates of the game do, that they should love soccer or that they needed to understand more about soccer. He was just always there to answer any question, lead any clinic, talk to any group, return any phone call. He coached the best players in the world and he coached 5-year-olds kicking a ball for the first time. And loved all of it.

"If it wasn't for this game, I would have spent my life in a coal mine," he often said. "The least I can do is try to help people over here understand why the rest of the world loves it so much."

Bradley was a coal miner's son who grew up in the English Midlands. He came to the United States when soccer was a fledgling professional sport here and coached the most popular soccer team in U.S. history: the Cosmos of the 1970s, who were led by the legendary Pelé (the Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan of soccer). He came to Washington to coach the Diplomats in 1978 and later found himself coaching the brilliant but mercurial Johan Cruyff. It was Bradley who explained to him the importance of reaching out to the American public.

"Where I come from, people are begging to get tickets for soccer," Cruyff said back then. "That's what I'm used to. Here, we have to convince the public to come. Gordon keeps telling me that. I'm amazed by his patience."

Of all his traits -- humor, smarts, love of life -- patience may have been Bradley's greatest strength. There was never a stupid question; there was always time for one more kid or one more soccer mom. Having coached at the highest level, he never flinched when he began coaching a college team.

He loved his work, and he never forgot where he came from. Which is why, when the word began to circulate in the last couple of weeks that he was in hospice care and near the end, the phone calls and e-mails came to his family in a flood. His son Paul was amazed by how many people his dad had apparently reached through the years, from young adults who remembered first learning about the game at a Bradley clinic or speech, to those he had coached and those he had worked with, to those of us in the media who had the good fortune to cover his teams.

The old cliche is that the measure of a person's life is how many other lives they touched during their lifetime. In Gordon Bradley's case, it goes beyond that. He touched lives, made lives better and helped teach what was essentially a brand-new sport to countless people. His was a life well-lived -- to say the least.


-- John Feinstein

bout Gordon Bradley

[EliSnow]

A Good Walk Spoiled was the first golf book (and maybe the first sports book) I ever read. It's still the best golf book I ever read.