Vision Circle

Ralph Wiley

Ralph Wiley died over the weekend.

Of heart failure. Of HEART FAILURE. He was only 52 years old, and according to his fiance "worked like a madman."

I'm going to Baltimore to study health disparities, as a number of foundations have not only recognized the severe disparities between men and women of color and their white counterparts, they have also recognized that in order to grapple with this issue we not only need MDs and Public Health specialists, but also political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and economists on the case as well. But for Wiley this all comes too late.

This hits me pretty hard. As I've written here, here , and here, Wiley was a tremendous writer. Nope.

Make that the best fucking writer I have encountered over the last five years. Not just on baseball, basketball, boxing, and football, but on issues of race and American life. Absolutely brilliant. Every day his column would come out on Page 2, I'd be on it like a fiend...just looking for snatches of text that I could jack use, or insight that I could apply here or to my scholarship.

I was just waiting to here him talk about the Lakers/Pistons series--he was one of the first writers I was aware of to get it right (he figured that if the Pistons brought their A game it'd be a full on series and very tough for the Lakers). And I figured that soon enough I'd blow up enough to be able to meet him personally and shoot the shit with him.

This hurts. Like a fucking punch to the stomach.

DAMN.

I cannot believe this.

If you are at all interested in the life of the mind, sports, writing, or general excellence, please check out his archive at ESPN's Page 2. Wiley was old school.