This is not what I expected to write this week. For what I expected to write, you can consult the footnote1. But something far more important needs to be discussed.
My friend Brady died on Monday.
I met Brady McAtamney when he came to Clarksville to cover Austin Peay and local prep sports while I was still working in the APSU athletic communications office. A thing about Clarksville is that it is very insular; it’s not so much that outsiders aren’t liked or trusted but they have to earn it, in a way that’s not just transferred over from local beat writer to local beat writer, passed through the years. The people that care about what’s happening on the local scene kinda want to know whether or not you have a clue as to what you’re talking about before they trust what you have to say. And if you don’t want to do the legwork? You’re just gonna be hollering into the void.
What endeared Brady to so many people was how gleefully he jumped straight into the work of getting people to trust him. He connected with the community; he connected with the people he worked alongside. We in the comms office liked him immediately. He didn’t take himself too seriously, which was nice because sportswriting is, at its essence, watching people chase a ball and describing what happened. Brady was really good at the watching people and describing thing, but he was even better at keeping things in perspective. He liked shooting the shit after games, comparing what he saw with what we saw. He liked to learn more about why certain things happened, and more to the point he could be trusted to keep things in the notebook until he could ask direct questions about it, both so he could better understand it and so he could do as good a job as possible explaining it to his audience; he didn’t have to rush with a nugget the moment he got it. You could keep confidence with Brady in a way that athletic comms people rarely find in a journalist. We’re trained to be skeptical of their intentions and assume that anything you say around them is subject to a headline the next day.
We quickly learned Brady was someone we could trust.
It wasn’t long before Brady was just another one of the boys in the press box, and it wasn’t long before he was taking other young journalists under his wing, providing guidance and support to young writers in his orbit. That always impressed me; Brady wasn’t some 40-year veteran who’d made his bones in the business and could let his body of work speak for itself. He was still growing in the job too, still competing with these people for stories and scoops, yet he became invested in them becoming good journalists, encouraging them to raise their game because then he’d be forced to step up in response. That’s rare, rare and precious and a gift I hope those young writers appreciate more deeply the further they go in their respective careers. How rare is it to have a peer pour into you and encourage you to be your best self?
Time went on; I left athletics in a full-time capacity and Brady moved home a few years later. We kept up a regular text correspondence—him to make fun of the Kansas City Royals and me to ask him just what in the hell Michigan State happened to be doing at any given point. It was an actual friendship, one I didn’t know was going to be coming to its abrupt conclusion when last we texted just a few days ago.
Had I known, maybe we would’ve talked about something other than Kaleb Glenn’s torn patellar tendon napalming Tom Izzo’s roster this year. Of course, as much as Brady loved the Spartans, we probably would’ve circled back around to them at some point anyway.
He was 28 years old. That’s the part that will never make sense, never not hurt when I remember him, never. Twenty-eight is nothing; 28 is a blink-and-a-half. It serves as a reminder that nothing is given, nothing guaranteed, that we can all be here one day and gone the next and what we all need to live accordingly. I just wish the horribly sudden and untimely passing of my friend hadn’t been necessary to reinforce this point.
My grief pales in comparison to that of his family; they had a brother, a son, a cousin ripped from their lives. Those wounds heal; they don’t go away though. They’ll be there, lurking, popping up when they least expect it—at a song, when the Lions manage to not suck for longer than a couple of years, when the Pistons are celebrating a Finals win in four seasons and Cade Cunningham is the toast of the league like SGA is right now. I hope that with time, those moments will go from unspeakably painful to simply bittersweet, that to have that small part of his life and personality flutter back to them in moments of joy will provide a good memory of a good man liked and loved by so many people who had the privilege to know him.
Good-bye, my friend. I hope we can continue our conversations someday on the other side.
Not to go all Bilbo Baggins, but this is the end. I’m going now. I bid you all a very fond farewell. Good-bye. I am actually serious: this was supposed to be the column to announce that this whole thing is coming to a close as a regular concern, and the only reason this is even a footnote right now is because I owe the people who have supported the endeavor that much. I’m going back to school in the fall, I have many other irons in many other fires and quite simply, something had to go. This is neither my family nor the way I make most of my living, so it had to be this. Thank you all for reading over the years; I will try to unlock all previous posts so everyone can read them. I encourage paying subscribers to cancel, but also I will continue to take your money if not? Every great so often, I’m sure something will happen to make me log back in here and rant and rave, but twice a week? Come fall, I simply won’t have the hours for twice a week anymore and this seemed a logical jumping-off point. But a few days ago, that all kinda ceased to matter to me. Go back to the top and read more about that part.