Joe Brucia

Joe Brucia has gone over, and following his spirit outbound is a sad exhalation from newspapermen who covered sports, particularly on the West Coast, and especially in San Diego.

Joe was a communications man. His job was to make sure the word – our words – got out, from press tents at sporting events, mainly golf and tennis tournaments. Joe was beloved by the greats and the grunts, whom he treated the same. I was a grunt, a lowly desk man in The San Diego Union sports department sent occasionally to cover the pro tennis circuits as they passed through town. Joe took care of me like he would Jack Murphy or Red Smith or Ring Lardner, whom Joe probably knew.

Joe was happy, and he was enthusiastic, and he was infectious. As far as I saw, nothing ever got him down. He is only the second man (Otto Bos was the first) I have ever said this about: Joe Brucia had a very low threshold of pleasure. His silver linings were a mile wide. He was there before you got there, and he was there when you left. He appeared to love it, every minute.

I don’t know what it’s like on the sports ramble anymore. I hope it’s as loose and collegial as it used to be, but I doubt it. Too many bottom-liners running newsrooms now. The old movies about newspapermen and women over-play the fun part. Not many I knew could ever be that quick or sassy, but I knew quite a few who were slow and sassy. Inside the press tent was a group as professional – sometimes more – than the athletes on the courts. They certainly were more interesting. Being a newspaperman fills up your head with history, and there’s no camaraderie quite like it, when guys sitting around the press tent start playing it back.

History? Joe Brucia was a Western Union operator for 48 years. He started out in the business taking sheets of copy from this or that famous writer at a golf tournament, and sending it out in Morse Code. His obit in The San Diego Union started out with a story, told by obit writer Jack Williams: “It was just a $33.33 check, presented to a promising young golfer at the 1962 Los Angeles Open. But Joe Brucia could see history written all over it. So he photocopied the check – the first of Jack Nicklaus’ storied professional career.”

Nicklaus will exhale at the news of Joe’s passing. Out goes another light in a fading world, so vibrant in its day that they made movies about it. Somebody should make a movie about Joe Brucia. It would start with his fingers tapping a telegraph key, and the camera pulling back and up from the room and the building, RKO-style, following telegraph lines, but faster, faster than speeding locomotives, to tell the speed of Joe’s dots and dashes traveling through the lines, then, appearing out of the air, floating towards us, newspaper pages, and all the dots and dashes morphed by linotypes into words again, words and sentences and paragraphs telling the distant cities what happened on a course or on a court or in a ring.

Nobody out there ever heard of Joe Brucia. Joe’s name never appeared on any of those stories, sent in Morse Code or teletypes or the machine-from-hell Trash 80s into which Joe fed pages when I knew him. But Joe was the story, really, of 20th-century newspapers. I wish I had had the sense to talk to him, get his stories down on paper. Maybe somebody did. Maybe the book is already started. Makes me mad. It would be such a fun book to write.