John Steadman

TAMPA, Fla. - There is no cheering in the press box, but it's still a noisy place. Men and women type on portable computers and chat right through the national anthem, but any who choose to interrupt the moment of silence for John Steadman that will precede Super Bowl XXXV run the risk of getting glared at by eight gray-haired men. This will be the first Super Bowl without Steadman, the Baltimore newspaperman who died of cancer Jan. 1. With his passing,...

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. - "There's got to be a story behind that tie," someone told Ernie Accorsi Sunday before the New York Giants strangled the Minnesota Vikings, on their way to the Super Bowl. It wasn't the loud ensemble of color - green, red, a touch of navy blue - as much as it was the little golfers set vertically, nearly down to the belt. "Not the most beautiful tie," Accorsi said, and, granted, not what a football vice president and general manager customarily wears to a conference title game.

The Sun's John Eisenberg summed it up perfectly in his Jan. 2 column: Baltimore will never be the same without John F. Steadman. John was not only the heart and soul of Baltimore sports, he was the city's conscience. When I was privileged to work for John as a young reporter, he used to offer me money out of his own pocket so I could attend sports banquets. He also arranged a job for me in the press box at sold-out Colts games. He was the most caring and compassionate human being I've ever known.

He was remembered as the poet laureate of Baltimore sports. He was recalled as a benevolent boss whose eyes twinkled with delight at newsroom horseplay. And, as big names in sports, journalism and politics gathered yesterday to bid farewell to a legendary sportswriter, John Steadman was celebrated as the humblest of men of faith and a loving husband and uncle. As the kind of man who regularly gave a young niece spare change and Chuckles candies - and a model for living right. "Be it the family home, his church home, the press box, the newsroom, the football field or even Baltimore itself, he made it all his dwelling place," said the Rev. Frank Donio of St. Jude Shrine, celebrating a funeral Mass where sports metaphors played well.

HE WAS A gentle man and a gentleman. Writer John Steadman entertained sports fans with his upbeat newspaper columns for more than half a century. He covered the Baltimore athletic scene with a tenderness and appreciation of the human spirit that few have rivaled. Mr. Steadman died Monday at 73 after a long struggle with cancer. How ironic that he waited to take his final bow until Baltimore once again had a winning football playoff team to applaud. He wrote about the human side of sports, the unsung heroes and the untold stories, the adversities athletes overcame.

AND SO DEATH came yesterday to John Steadman, and maybe to an era. He was our great rememberer. He went back to a time when the ballplayers seemed to come down from Olympus instead of the accountant's office, a time when the sportswriters told of broken-field runs instead of broken relationships between adoring fans and ballclubs sneaking off for sweeter financial deals. He thought a clean conscience counted for more than anything. He saw sports as a community's great common denominator and helped create a whole era of good feeling around here, a time when the Baltimore Colts showed a city how to shake off its historic inferiority complex and the Baltimore Orioles were the best team money couldn't buy. He believed in underdogs, and he wrote about them with passion; but he cultivated characters, and he saw the world with a twinkle in his eye. When he was sports editor of a newspaper of dear memory called the News American, he assembled a team of reporters to match anybody's: Neal Eskridge and N. P. "Swami" Clark, Clem Florio and Charlie Lamb, Jim Henneman and Chuck McGeehan, George Taylor and Bill Christine, men whose bylines became household names.

BALTIMORE WITHOUT John Steadman isn't as proud and passionate, isn't as distinguished and distinctive, isn't as special and ever thus. Baltimore without John Steadman is a city that has lost a trusted conscience it can't replace. Baltimore without John Steadman is, well, hard to imagine. He spent a half-century writing gracefully, objectively and powerfully about sports on the pages of the News-Post, the News American, The Evening Sun and The Sun, his career spanning the entirety of Baltimore's modern era as a major-league sports town.

John Steadman, who chronicled the Maryland sports scene in his newspaper columns, books and commentaries in a career that spanned seven decades, died of cancer yesterday at a Towson hospice. He was 73. A one-time minor-league baseball player, Mr. Steadman rose to the top of his craft and won election to the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame last year. With a bent for the offbeat and a passion for the past, he fleshed out the seminal figures in sports, both celebrated and obscure, enlightening readers of Baltimore newspapers for more than a half-century.

"Days in the Sun" by John Steadman.(The Baltimore Sun, 252 pages, $13.95) There is no possible way for me to be objective about John Steadman, the writer and the man. He is one of the most delightful journalists and most civilized gentlemen I have been graced to know and work with. He has often written on these pages, with keen eye and strong heart. This collection of his sports writing is, for me, a treasure as well as a treasury: Sports writing in the finest tradition -- combining joy and energy, excitement and release from mundanity.