Remembering Earle

Long enough time has passed since I lost one of my first sports colleagues from my first real job, the Ocean County Observer, on May 21, 2020, at the age of 65, cancer taking him away from us.

Well, not all of it has been spent in deep thought -- during these days that the COVID-19 pandemic has sidelined those with jobs, I'm still having to do mine at my current employer, the Palatka Daily News, while playing radio hero one hour each morning, five hours a day, at another outlet. So I've been a bit busy and there are chores that need to be done, too.

But I'm prepared. Or at least I think I am.

Was John Earle Livingston the best sports writer I ever came across in my lifetime? No. I've come across numerous award-winning sports writers in my career who I admire for their work. But was Earle the most colorful writer I ever came across? That one is a resounding, "Yes." Before you could get into the first two or three paragraphs of the story, he had painted a picture so vivid that you were already there.

Of course, he painted it for you without giving you much of the "what actually happened" detail. Many an editor I worked for -- Ken, Mike, Al, Tom, Greg, Dave, even me -- were driven nuts by his storytelling from a journalistic aspect. Even if you told Earle yourself that the story might be a tad bit better if you had kinda, sorta put the main details in those first three paragraphs as they taught you in journalism school, it would've been fruitless.

Earle painted pictures without "who, what, when, where and why within 90 words" journalistic rules. That was not his style. If you tried to ruin what he had painted for public consumption because journalism meant everything, all you were doing in the process was ruining what local wrestling and football fans looked at was the latest Monet, Picasso, Rembrandt or Van Gogh.

Again, he drove us editors crazy!!

Still, the truth was no one was more passionate about the sports he reported on in all my career than John Earle Livingston. And he saved his best for wrestling. Every year during my 15 winters at the Observer and in years before and after I wasn't there, Earle would regale the viewing audience with match stories and previews that made you sit up and read. even if you weren't a wrestling fan. He knew everything about the good wrestler as well as the future state champion like Damian Hahn of Lakewood or Maurice Worthy of Central Regional or Bobby Martin from Brick Memorial.

Earle knew 'em all. A key matchup involving an Ocean County team could be broken down individual match by individual match. Those 13 or 14 individual matches were dissected like a high school biology class frog. Many times, he was correct. And if he couldn't be at a match himself, you could almost be assured he would have had something in a roundup he took from a phone conversation that made it sound like he was there, sometimes making you believe he was at two matches at the same time if he was covering a match himself.

As for myself, I had a very good working knowledge of wrestling going into the paper. I went to Toms River High School East -- we had a kick-ass wrestling program that included standouts such as Joe Hadge, Denis Thesing, Chris Sierchio and Eric Priest, coached by a great coach and one of the nicer people you will ever come across, Warren Reid. My parents regularly went to East wrestling matches because they knew people in our Georgetown neighborhood who wrestled for the Raiders. It was second nature, really.

My first year at the newspaper had me covering a couple of wrestling matches, but they weren't of "great" note compared to what Earle got to cover. I didn't know the technicalities of the sport like he did, but I did know how to describe the action to Earle for which he could understand -- and that would be the tone of our conversations for years until I got to become an assistant sports editor and had my own girls basketball beat to cover in 1993, which kept me away from wrestling.

And if I had anything to ask about a certain match he was at, Earle would explain it as if I was there. If I close my eyes now, I can still hear him that first winter explain how Brick Memorial's Dean Kanabrocki caught Toms River East's Tim Rioux in the right position with a memorable bear hug, would not let him go and eventually pinned him in the heavyweight class to score Brick Memorial's memorable first Shore Conference Tournament championship over East. Ultimately, I saw Clear Cable-8's replay of the match ... yup, exactly how Earle described it.

There were other matches along the way he wanted to know about that I covered -- that February night in 1986 when Lacey stunned host Point Pleasant Boro in the Shore Conference Tournament quarterfinals or the night in February 1987 when defending state Group III champion Brick Memorial lost to coach Ralph Ross' Highland Regional Tartans in Blackwood and how the place became a near-riot when Tod Narwid took his Highland opponent down hard and eventually got disqualified for a slam that I personally thought the kid was not hurt enough to stop wrestling. Narwid was dominating him and if he won, there was no doubt Brick Memorial would have won that match. I can still hear coach Tony Caravella's voice cracking to the point of near soprano as he broke into tears over the loss and slammed the locker room door behind him to have to deal with his unhappy Mustangs wrestlers.

Earle knew the nuances of the world of wrestling because he, too, was a wrestler back in the day at Toms River High School North for the legendary John Nemetz. Wrestling wasn't just a sport Earle wrote about ... it was a way of life, too, though his other way of life were both the Seaside Heights boardwalk stands and memorabilia businesses he owned.

And it's because of that passion and love he won many over as fans. It also made it easier for the wrestling coaches to warm up to the non-wrestling writers. Some of my favorite coaches over the years were Ed Gilmore at Point Boro, Mike Baldi at Toms River North, Al Aires at Jackson Memorial, the late Don Burstein at Lacey, Steve Sasse at Point Pleasant Beach, Bill Savage at Pinelands Regional as well as the venerable Warren Reid and Tony Caravella.

Was I as passionate about covering wrestling as Earle? Hell, no! I did it, though, because it was a continuing growing sport, even though a boys basketball match between Lakewood and CBA or Lakewood against anyone was more appealing. But knowing Earle could tell you things you needed to know before you headed out to a wrestling match made it that much easier to cover.

Individual stories about Earle? Well, I have three in particular.

The first one came at the NJSIAA wrestling championships in 1987 at Jadwin Gymnasium. I was at the Dillon Pool facility on the Princeton University campus that March 14 to see if Toms River South standout swimmer Terence Donnelly could win a state championship in either the 50 or the 100. He did not, but he got a medal for his efforts. When I got done dictating my story to Chris Christopher, our fastest typist in the sports department, I headed over to where the state wrestling championships were. I had my press pass so I could easily walk in and find my way to press row. I found Earle. He was getting into each match, so I found a spot sitting next to him. For the next hour, he was going over what each individual wrestler was doing right and wrong with me or anyone else willing to listen -- whether he was an area wrestler or not. You could get a quick education listening to Earle talk about these wrestlers.

The second one came in a more contentious time for us at the paper. It was February 1993. Pinelands Regional High School had some big-time wrestlers who suddenly weren't on the lineup sheet for the district tournament. Earle, obviously, was inquisitive. He pressed Savage on the matter. Most coaches wouldn't pry the "real" reason out of themselves for protection purposes. But Bill Savage was not one to hold back. Turns out, he told Earle that those wrestlers had been suspended for an incident involving the egging of another coach's car at the school. Earle reported what Savage told him. Let's just say that time was not fun because Savage spent an entire day having to explain himself to higher-ups for his comments in the paper and, to top that, the once-affable athletic director at the school refused to talk to any of us in the sports department ever again. I know, I know ... what a freakin' cry baby! But Earle had no fear to report something that involved a key member or members of the team, good or bad. He proved his worth.

The last of the three came in a more sentimental time. Now I was not around Toms River at the time -- I was up in Bristol, Conn., covering the Toms River East American Little League All-Stars ride to the East Region championship and ultimately, their first trip to the Little League World Series in 1995. It was during this trip to Bristol that two iconic figures of a generation or two ago -- baseball star Mickey Mantle and Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia -- passed away. Mickey Mantle died on a Sunday morning, August 13, 1995. Earle was working his boardwalk stand that morning in Seaside Heights and one of his young workers at the stand, a young lady who had just graduated from North named Renee Larson, has no idea who Mickey Mantle was when he brought up his death to her. He had to take initiative -- after he got done with his work at the stands, he headed over to the paper's 8 Robbins Street location and told our boss, Mike Lazorchak, he wanted to write a column on Mickey Mantle and who he was to a generation of kids growing up. And so Mike gave him the green light to do so.

It was, in my opinion, the best column Earle ever wrote.

As the assistant sports editor from 1993-99, then sports editor for the last winter I was there, I understood the frustration of other editors before me who had to deal with Earle's personal touch in writing stories. The one thing I could never understand was the three-dot statement in his stories -- the ..., which drove me crazy! The ellipsis, I came to find out, meant leaving a word or a whole phrase or sentence out of the text of the story. It left me wondering what the heck else Earle had to say in his story that was missing.

But years later, I came to appreciate that three-dot interlude. Now ... because of Earle ... I regularly use the ellipsis in stories and on my Facebook page. It's ... helpful.

So there! There's the Earle influence on me journalistic-wise! I can't paint pictures in five or six paragraphs to start a story like he did, but hey, I can take something from him!

The only times I saw Earle after I left the Observer in the summer of 1999 would be at either his boardwalk stands or in the Ocean County Mall at his sports souvenir and memorabilia kiosk. In 2003, he, my former boss, Al Ditzel, and photographer, Pete Picknally at the paper, and some others went to what was the final opening day at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia between the Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates during the time I was in between my jobs in Key West and Palatka. It was 43 degrees that day. God, it was cold!

The last time I saw Earle was the Summer of 2014 while I was up in Toms River for my 30th class reunion and got to see my old Little League, Toms River, win a state championship. It was just a passing "Hi!" and to catch up on things.

And so with his passing, so much thought comes to mind. I think to my former Observer compatriot, Steve Falk, who has taken what Earle passed down to him in my later years at the paper, and run with the wrestling baton as the main man in covering that sport at the Asbury Park Press. And believe Steve when he said how much he hated wrestling -- I was there to hear it back then!

Wrestling was already a top sport in Ocean County, the Shore area, the state of New Jersey when Earle began writing about it in 1983 -- he helped elevate it to a point no one had seen it, especially in a time period when the newspaper was the only way to find out how matches went in detail if you could not be there yourself. And if you were there, you just wanted to read Earle's take on the match just to see if he and you were thinking the same thing about that match and its key moments.

Being at the Observer was a lot of work, but I could not have picked a better time to be working at the newspaper, which I did from 1984-99. We elevated all local high school and college sports to a new level not quite seen before. But no sport in Ocean County got elevated the way wrestling was.

That was all Earle, colorful writing and all, even if it took him a number of paragraphs to get to the main point.

R.I.P. Earle. It was always knowledgeable what you wrote ... entertaining, too.