Matt McHale was a near contemporary of mine. We got into sports journalism about the same time, and we left it within a week of each other, each laid off* by the L.A. News Group earlier this year.
Matt died today in Connecticut. He had fallen ill in late May, three months or so after the L.A. Daily News dismissed him from his job as assistant sports editor. Matt had been institutionalized continuously since that first episode, as I understand it. I believe he was 50 when he died.
Matt was a good guy, patient as hell, an uncommonly decent and friendly reporter and editor who rarely had a cross word for anyone. His health had been an issue for several years, but he fought to stay on the job as best he could, perhaps even more than he should have.
We worked together face-to-face only once, at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, and I feel badly about a staffing decision he and I were involved in. But it was an episode that perhaps gives you a good sense of how engaged he wanted to be, even when he probably should have been backing off.
It was the second week of the Salt Lake Games, which Steve Dilbeck, Matt and I were covering for LANG.
Matt was the L.A. Kings beat writer for the L.A. Daily News, back then, and he got to Salt Lake City a day or three into the games, after a long Kings road trip.
By the second week, Dilbeck and I were dragging, as is typically the case at an Olympics, and Matt wanted to get out and cover something outside the hockey arena. It was the end of the day, and we were divvying up the workload for the next day, the way we usually did before catching a few hours of sleep.
Some fairly significant ski event was coming up the next day. Something the U.S. could get a medal in. We really needed to be there.
Let’s back up: Just know that covering skiing is a grueling concept, at nearly any Winter Games. It’s always out of town, up in the mountain, and you’re going to be cold, perhaps seriously cold, and you will be walking through snow, and the bus rides will be lengthy. It’s guaranteed to be a long day.
Neither Steve nor I were keen to go back up the mountain. Matt volunteered to go. He wanted to go. But I knew, Steve knew, that it would be tough for him. We knew, by then, that he was a diabetic, and he already had some issues with his feet. But we let him go, and were probably relieved he was so keen to do it.
It turned into the typically long, grueling ski-in-the-mountains day, and Matt suffered from it. He got a toe infection and, I’m ashamed to concede, I believe he had at least one toe amputated, after the Games. Apparently as a direct result of the insult that day in the mountains caused to his feet.
I talked to Steve Dilbeck this afternoon, and he said he still “feels bad for not discouraging him.” He was hoping Matt could avoid long stretches in the snow but knew (as did I) that there would be significant walking involved, including a long climb over a metal bridge that stretched over a road.
But Matt really, really wanted to get out there. He wanted to see that event. Even at the risk of injury or illness. Said Dilbeck: “Sometimes I think he was in a state of denial about his health.”
Steve and LADN colleague Ramona Shelburne visited Matt in the hospital in Connecticut before Game 2 of the NBA Finals.
“He was awake, and moving his head, and the nurse told me he had verbalized some, and they said he may have given them a high-five. but when we were there, he wasn’t moving his limbs,” he said. “You couldn’t tell how much of what you were saying was getting through to him.”
Matt apparently grew up in Connecticut, and was a pretty decent high school pitcher. He was tall enough, about 6-foot-2.
Steve remembers first coming into contact with him when Steve was working with me in San Bernardino and Matt was at the Pasadena Star-News.
Eventually, Matt went to the Daily News to cover the Dodgers, and he and Steve were among the big (eight, nine?) group of guys who traveled with the club, back in the good old days. That’s when they got to know each other well. The long season with a ballclub can generate bonds of comradeship that are unknown in other sports beats.
Steve believes Matt was introduced to his wife by another Dodgers writer, the lovably crusty Gordon Verrell, while at Vero Beach in the 1993, 1994 time frame. “The marriage didn’t last too long,” Steve recalled. There were no children, which seemed to sadden Matt.
Matt did a stint at the Orange County Register, if Steve’s memory serves, perhaps went back east for a bit, then returned to the Daily News as a deputy sports editor before returning to beat work covering the Kings, in the late 1990s.
As his health got sketchier, he gave up the Kings beat and became an assistant sports editor with the Daily News. That was the job he held until he was dismissed.
He isn’t the first good guy/Dodgers writer to die early. Steve believes he was 49, perhaps 50. Terry Johnson, another great guy who covered the Dodgers, also died too soon, of a heart attack in his early 50s.
Meanwhile, we mean guys live on. Hmmm.
One last indication of how much Matt McHale loved his job? Said Steve: “He wanted to cover the 2006 Winter Olympics!” in Turin, Italy. Even though his health clearly was too shaky by then to deal with the stress.
Steve said Matt returned to Connecticut, after LADN dismissed* him, to help take care of his mother, who is ill. Then he had his own episode.
Matt told people his ambition for this summer was to see the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium. I’m sorry Matt missed it. He meant enough to baseball and covering the game … he deserved to see it.
He was a good journalist, and a good guy. Many of us are one or the other. Not many are both.
* — This is an addition to this post, a day later. A LANG insider said McHale’s separation from the newspaper was voluntary, describing it as follow:
“While this hardly seems the time, I do want to clear up one misconception: Matt wasn’t dismissed by the Daily News.
“When it became obvious last winter that Matt’s health would no longer allow him to continue as the deputy sports editor, [he was] moved into a role of takeout writer/twice-a-week night editor. He worked on some project stories such as advancing the Dodgers’ last spring in Vero Beach and the exhibition game at the Coliseum, etc.
“In the days before we [February layoffs,] Matt offered to take the buyout. [That was rejected because] it was Matt’s health problems that were preventing him from being able to do the job to
the best of his ability.
“With [former editor] Ron Kaye’s blessing … Matt would be able to go on short-term disability for six months. It was assumed that after the six months had passed, Matt would go on permanent disability. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it that far.”
9 responses so far ↓
1 Tom Keegan // Jul 14, 2008 at 6:05 PM
Paul, Nice piece on a terrific guy. I’ll never forget one of us in the press box at Shea Stadium tapping Matt on the arm and pointing beyond the outfield fence, where the team bus he was supposed to be on had left for the airport. Matt was working for Pasadena then and took the team flights, except when he missed them. Matt took great care to write thoughtful pieces, not an easy trick in the baseball beat, which demands so much copy.
He was a really thoughtful guy, too. His father was a legendary Little League coach in Norwalk, CT, best known for always saying, “Give me all the kids with two left feet and I’d be happy to teach them baseball.” Matt’s mother is a wonderful lady as well.
Funny and smart, kind and considerate, that was Matt McHale. He was the one who told me about the job I have been working at for the past three years. He had been called about it, but was not interested.
You and Dilbeck did the right thing letting him go up the mountain. Matt would have been insulted if you didn’t let him cover what he wanted to cover.
— Tom Keegan, Lawrence Journal-World
2 David Lassen // Jul 14, 2008 at 8:24 PM
Very, very sad to hear this. I knew Matt almost entirely from crossing paths with him when he was covering the Kings, and he was always upbeat. In a profession noted for its whiners, he was a guy who had far more reason than most to complain, and yet he never did. Probably we should all learn from that.
A real loss for anyone who knew him, and for our profession.
3 Ben // Jul 14, 2008 at 9:56 PM
http://www.legacy.com/LADailyNews/Obituaries.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonID=113406211
4 Mike Morrow // Jul 16, 2008 at 3:11 PM
Sports writers cry, too, and it’s OK
A lot of us have been crying for some time now, knowing of Matt’s situation, but none of us gave up, remembering Kirk Gibson.
Matt never gave up, either, and that, among other things, always will stick with me.
Thanks, Paul, thanks David, thanks Tom, thanks Ben … and for all the others who were touched by Matt.
5 David Geary // Jul 17, 2008 at 6:40 PM
Paul:
Beautiful tribute to a great, great guy.
Matt and I worked together at the Star-News in Pasadena long ago. We drank at some of the worst bars in the Los Angeles area: Dusty’s in Eagle Rock, Gus’s in South Pass, the Rancho BB&H is Altadena, the Frolic Room on Hollywood Boulevard. We ate in even worse places. He was a good friend.
Trent Roberts, lately of The Charlotte Observer and a mutual friend from L.A., emailed me about a month ago to say that Matt had had a heart attack and a stroke in Norwalk and wasn,t doing well.
When i went to see him, Matt was messed up, but coherent and doing much better than I had been led to believe. When i announced myself, he said: “Holy shit!,” in the slurred way stroke victims usually talk, and gave me and my wife a huge smile. Of course, I did most of the talking, but Matt was really receptive and smiled and laughed during our visit of about an hour. (I had lived in a neighboring town when we were teenage contempories and we had a few laughs about the old Esquire pool room and the fascist Norwalk cops.) He seemed very much on the mend, and his nurse, a total babe named Katie, assured us he that was making progress.
I meant to see him last Friday, but I was late coming back to New York from up north, and did not.
His mom told me that pneumonia got hold of him over the weekend and killed him on Monday. I cried.
You all the know the lines at the end of “Charlotte’s Web,” where it says: “It’s not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” So was Matt.
I’ll miss him a lot.
David Geary
The New York Times
6 Doug Padilla // Jul 19, 2008 at 5:35 PM
Here’s how good of a guy Matt was: When I was an agate clerk in Orange County, around 1991 I want to say, I asked Matt if he could get me a pass to observe a game from the Dodger Stadium press box. He not only got one for me but for another agate clerk Mike McNiff. I’d be nervous about doing the same thing today, but he didn’t give it a second thought. In recent years he had been of valuable assistance for guidance on baseball stories.
The day Matt passed away, I talked to Mike Scioscia about him. Some of this got in Kevin Modesti’s story. Here is the rest:
MIKE SCIOSCIA:
Wow, what a shame. I just saw him a year ago. I got along great with Matt. I remember him way back in my early days.
I liked when he was playing in those media games at Dodger Stadium. He was a pretty good player. He would talk about how good he was and we would crack up, so we stuck around to watch him. And he really was good. But more importantly he was just a great guy with a real passion for baseball. He got along with everybody. I don’t know anybody that didn’t get along with Matty.
It wasn’t even like he was coming at you as a member of the media. He was very professional when you talked to him, but the way he engaged you in conversation it was also like you were talking to a friend. Whether the subject was good or bad you trusted him to give a fair representation of what was happening.
He really cared about the game. He loved the game and you could see that in any conversation you would have with him.
7 Bruce Schoenfeld // Jul 22, 2008 at 8:55 PM
I’m just coming across this blog and wanted to express my deep sadness about Matt’s passing. I hadn’t seen him in several years and didn’t know he’d taken a turn for the worse.
We covered baseball together in the ’80s. I always thought he was one of the most decent people I’d ever had the privilege to meet. We kept in touch second-hand, through Kevin Modesti, but when we’d occasionally see each other in a press box somewhere he never failed to make me smile. So sad. I already miss him.
8 Jim Alexander // Jul 23, 2008 at 2:01 PM
Such a damn shame.
I don’t have any specific stories about Matty. I just remember him as maybe the best guy I’ve ever run into in this business — always upbeat, passionate about his work and willing to help a new guy. (Attributes that are sometimes in short supply in the press box.)
I’m glad so many people have paid him tribute.
9 ashley scharge // Feb 4, 2009 at 10:16 AM
I didnt know. I just found out. Nine months later. A bubbly man, who I help get quotes at Madison Square Garden covering Ranger games. Sometimes It would just im and I. I knew the other players. Would always help him. Im sad I didn’t know till now. I wish someone would have let me know,
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