Three Kings
Image credit: Joe Daly
It’s been a strange run. Three friends have passed away in the last few days. Good dudes, all very different and all from natural causes. Which speaks to one’s (my) advancing age. In my twenties and thirties, when contemporaries died, it was nearly always the result of a sudden, pulverizing tragedy like a car crash, an accidental overdose or in a couple of particularly dire cases, murder.
Now my contemporaries are all passing “after a long illness.” Tom, the author of American Junkie and a beautiful Scrooge of a man, went first. He had recovered from the most violent, soul-ravaging case of heroin addiction that I had ever seen or even heard about. Mentally, he bounced back — as much as one can under such conditions — but physically his body was in tatters. Muscles missing, atrophy…all that shit. But he passed peacefully in a hospital in Seattle and many of his close friends had the opportunity to drop by and say farewell. I wasn’t tight with Tom but we exchanged the odd text and kept more in touch over social media. He was a really good dude who loved his cat. The cat’s got a new home now.
John was a guy that I met through Zoom recovery meetings during the pandemic. We chatted infrequently and he’d regale me with tales of his career as a director and photographer, back in the proverbial day. By Covid, he had traded in his lenses and gear for an Uber job in Pittsburgh, happy in his relationship and always eager to check in with the guys in our Zoom meetings. Cancer found him a couple of years ago and what initially seemed eminently treatable proved much more serious. After a grueling year of tests, treatments and lots of nights in the hospital, he passed yesterday morning.
I met George in college when I joined the rugby club. He was two years ahead of me, but you tend to get to know people well when you play sports together — especially one like rugby, where the lines between one’s sporting life and one’s social life are blurred beyond distinction. George was someone whose company I enjoyed immensely during our shared college years. After a couple of aimless, post-graduation years, he took a flyer on a job in Japan, teaching English as a second language. He ended up learning Japanese and developed a handy fluency at a time when the rest of us liberal arts refugees were split between Spanish and French, using neither in our professional lives. In mid-1997, the New York Yankees drafted Japanese pitching sensation Hideki Irabu, who spoke zero English. A mutual friend told Yankees GM Brian Cashman about George — who had returned to New York and enrolled in Columbia’s MBA program — and a the dawn of what would become the. Yankees’ magical 1998 season, George was sitting next to Irabu at his press conference as his official translator. George stayed with the team for a couple of years, shadowing Irabu nearly everywhere except the pitcher’s mound. The Yankees won the championship in both 1998 and 1999 and when Irabu was traded to the Expos, George went back and finished his master’s degree and took a job on Wall Street. The Evil Empire called him back (sorry - I’m not going to start pretending to like the Yankees now) in 2007 as their Director of Pacific Rim operations — a role that encompassed everything from scouting to business development.
George and I reconnected a few years back when it turned out that we were both in recovery. It was not lost on either of us that the pace at which we drank in our college careers had set us both on a live-or-die trajectory and somehow we had both landed intact. There was a recovery-based Zoom meeting for guys from our college and an extended gang of east coasters who met once a week and even though it was at 5 a.m. my time, I made it a point to log in every now and then. It was great to see George and the rest of the crew. By then, George had already beaten the odds - at one point he had received something like a six-month prognosis after a terminal cancer diagnosis and he ended up pushing well through that window, surviving for a few more years. On Zoom, he went from looking hale and healthy to looking pretty banged up and then back to normal. But his upbeat spirits and oceanic spirituality belied the seriousness of his condition. It all caught up with him finally and he passed yesterday morning as well.
The tributes for George have poured in from all over the world, including this wonderful press release from the Yankees. The New York Post also published a nice article about him, containing a number of videos and photos of George in action.
All three leave behind families, friends and vibrant legacies that will continue to live on for many more years to come. Feeling pretty lucky to have known all three of them.