There are relationships and there are working relationships. Then, there are working relationships that turn into friendships.
The latter of the two sentences would aptly define my former professional partner in crime turned friend, Garrett Whitt. To many though, he is known as “The G-Man.” My last blog entry encapsulated my ten-year stint on the Upvalley sports beat covering the Northern part of Napa Valley, CA:
http://vincedadamo.blogspot.com/2017/02/reflections-on-my-career-as-upvalley.html
This blog entry, however, will center around how the GMan and I were a sports reporting tandem version of Batman and Robin, Tonto and the Lone Ranger or Bo and Luke Duke. The analogies could go on forever.
The GMan serves as a correspondent for the Star, where he has been since 2000, but he is a correspondent in name only. I knew him in passing from afar before I took over the sports beat covering St. Helena and Calistoga. I have worked with many great people in my career such as Mitch Sherman and Trevor Parks from my college newspaper days at the University of Nebraska. After I graduated, there were people like Marty James, Andy Ward, Brian Cornelius, Chris Navalta, Randy Johnson, and Andy Wilcox. However, there is only one GMan.
We are taught in journalism school to refer to someone with first and last name on the first name but simply their surname on the second and ensuing references. With Whitt, however, I am breaking that rule and simply referring to him as the GMan.
To understand the GMan’s value, you have to appreciate the obstacles that he has overcome in his life. The GMan has had cerebral palsy since birth, which means being wheelchair bound based on no use of his legs. He also limited dexterity with his arms, which it takes him much longer to submit a story, be it games, columns or features.
However, for all of GMan’s limitations, I could think of several great qualities. He’s a very intelligent fellow. After all, anyone that graduates from the University of Southern California (USC), has to be sharp upstairs. Of course with GMan, you have to live with him making a USC reference every third sentence but that’s OK.
My biggest appreciations of the GMan, however, are his passion for sports and a loyalty that is second-to-none. In my career as a sports reporter, I dealt with many talented people but they had high maintenance personalities. Even though he cannot physically jump, in a figurative work and friendship context you could ask the GMan to jump and the answer would be, “how high and how far?” GMan’s presence was invaluable to me since I had to fly solo covering Calistoga. In St. Helena, however, we were like 1A and 1B.
When we first started working together, we had to work out a few kinks but once those matters were figured out, we were like a well-oiled machine. If I were to make a sports comparison, I had the quarterback role, the GMan had a running back/wide receiver role. Since I took over the beat in January 2004, which was the middle of the school year, things were not easy at first but by the time the start of the 2004-2005 school began, I felt like GMan and I executed our game plans the way basketball fans can appreciate watching a well-run pick-and-roll.
Our writing styles were different but our reporting styles were similar. We understood the community’s needs and desires. We understood that you can’t cover the St. Helena Saints like you cover the New Orleans Saints. Without any further equivocation, we understood that covering high school athletics was about taking the approach of celebrating the team’s success but not unprofessionally gushing over it. Equally, if not superiorly important, were about reporting failures with the sensitivity of knowing for the majority of the youngsters, high school would be the pinnacle of their athletic career.
While people did not always agree with us, I firmly believe they respected our approach. Though it was never a reflection of the GMan, when I first took over the up Valley beat, I felt the need to be changes to the sports section to make it reflect what a hometown newspaper should be. I know it frustrated the GMan under the previous regime but the newspaper did not have its own identity. The GMan was on board with the new ideas I wanted to implement.
Besides the one-on-one interviews that were known as Time Outs as well as historical snippets titled On this date, the GMan and I were lockstep in our philosophies on coverage. We both strongly believed in giving every sport at the high school their space in the newspaper from football to golf, JV and varsity. In the slower time of high school sports, we would make certain that youth sports and weekend warrior feature stories would have their time in the spotlight.
I knew in the early stages of our relationship that we would gell like a true team. The relationship before however was not simply a working relationship it's soon morphed into a friendship. Though I am two years removed from having change careers, that friendship still remains today.
Many people will come and go at that newspaper but I say without any reservation, there will never be a tandem like the GMan and I.
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