Lit Du Nord: Minnesota Books and Authors

By Nick Healy

The storyteller of Minnesota sportsMinnesota

“Tales from the Minnesota Sports Beat” by Patrick Reusse with Chip Scoggins

If you’re going to be a sports fan in Minnesota, you’ll have to lean on your sense of humor, and you’ll want a writer like Patrick Reusse around. In more than four decades as a sports columnist in the pages of Twin Cities newspapers, Reusse has been making readers laugh even as their favorite teams disappoint them again and again.

In his new book “Tales from the Minnesota Sports Beat,” written with his Minneapolis Star Tribune colleague Chip Scoggins, Reusse begins at the very beginning, sharing stories from his youth in the southwestern Minnesota town of Fulda, where his father owned a funeral home and was an energetic organizer of the local townball team.

“A typical year would be 40 funerals,” Reusse explains. “For each funeral, he’d pick up the body and embalm it — that’s one day. The next day is the wake, and the burial is the day after. That’s three days per funeral. Multiply by 40, and that’s 120 days of working, which means my dad had 245 days to hunt, fish, worry about baseball, and think up other schemes.”

Reusse lost his mother to breast cancer when he was in high school. His father sold the funeral home and moved to Prior Lake, where Patrick attended his senior year. At age 17, he was hired as a copyboy at the Minneapolis Morning Tribune. That was in 1963, and it started the sort of newspaper career that became impossible soon thereafter, as the newspaper industry evolved and professionalized (and, eventually, declined).

A college student who married young and became a father, Reusse couldn’t stick around to get a degree at the University of Minnesota before going to work full time.

He took a job covering sports at the Duluth paper late in 1965, and less than a year later accepted an offer to be a sportswriter for the St. Cloud Times. He landed at the St. Paul paper in 1968, covering prep sports at first but eventually taking over as the Twins beat.

Reusse calls baseball his first love, and he had great times covering teams that featured some A-list players — Rod Carew, Larry Hisle and Lyman Bostock, to name a few — but also had the lowest payroll and lowest attendance in the American League.

“The Twins were a screwed up operation, but the characters made covering it fun,” Reusse says.

The book, subtitled “A Lifetime on Deadline,” is built of short chapters that are devoted to memorable teams, players and times in Reusse’s long career. A quick read, it’s full of laughs, and it demonstrates what helped Reusse stand out — his affection for good yarns and oddball characters.

He has crossed paths with towering figures in sports and the media over the years, yet in his recollections, Reusse never seems to take himself too seriously. Perhaps he never has. In the book, he shares a story from the Vikings’ third Super Bowl, the one they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

“I had a seat in the press box between Jim Murray and Red Smith — two legends in the business. I was 29 years old, hungover to the teeth, and wearing an ugly sports coat,” Reusse recalls.

“Red Smith was to my right. Jim Murray was on my left. I sat down and said, ‘Here we are, boys. Three of the greatest sportswriters that ever lived.’”

Having become a columnist for the St. Paul Dispatch in 1979, he jumped to the west side of the river in 1988, and he continues to write columns for the Star Tribune. In his career, he also became a fixture in Twin Cities talk radio and television.

Writing his way through memories of decade after decade, Reusse hits the high points (the 1960 Gophers football team, the Twins in 1987 and 1991, the Gophers women’s basketball Final Four run in 2004, etc.) and he recalls the personalities who blew life into the local sports scene (Torii Hunter, Bobby Jackson, Lindsay Whalen, the wonderful Glen Sonmor, etc.).

For all the disappointment and agony the state’s big-time sports teams have caused, Reusse’s perspective is shaped by amusement and appreciation for the athletes, coaches, and others he has covered and gotten to know.

He even shares fond recollections of Mike Lynn, the Vikings executive who built winning teams and somehow got the NFL to hold a Super Bowl at the Metrodome but who is remembered for engineering a disastrous trade for Herschel Walker.

Reusse enjoyed Lynn, often referring to him as Remarkable Mike, but that didn’t stop him from naming Lynn the Turkey of the Year in 1989, part of a long-running gag in Reusse’s column.

“I got along with Mike for some reason,” Reusse explains. “He’s the only guy to win Turkey of the Year and call me on Thanksgiving morning and say, ‘It’s about time.’”