Jim Klobuchar was 93 and Jerry Burns was 94, which means that a combined 187 years of riotous Minnesota history was taken off the books in one sad day last week. If we reach back just six months and add Sid Hartman, we are short 287 years of colossal egos, stupendous blustering and unique newspapering, the likes of which we will never see again.
Burns, the delightfully elfin Burns, coached the Vikings from 1986 through 1991. He was a sharp coach, shrewd. He had a sputtering, machine-gun style of speaking and his post-game press conferences could be raucous. It should be noted that Burns is a charter member of the Tirade Hall of Fame for his post-game remarks after a win against the Rams in 1989. Apparently, Burnsie took umbrage at the booing of his offensive coordinator, Bob Schnelker, and decided to defend him. Like all award-winning tirades, it began calmly and with a degree of rationality but soon enough erupted into an F5 twister of inventive profanity and falling-on-the-floor laughter. It lives, on YouTube.
Klobuchar so embraced the Vikings, so openly and passionately loved them, that he wrote about them almost as though they were a fictional team of his making, a team of giants and stalwarts, running backs as skittery as water bugs, swashbucklers and knights in shining armor. A fellow would never say that Kloby put words in the mouths of the players he interviewed, but by the time those players ended up in Klobuchar’s column, they sounded like candidates for the Cambridge Union Debate Society. Sammy White’s thick colloquial Louisiana accent? Not a problem for Klobuchar.
Hartman never invented anything and had the tape recorder to prove it. It was suspected that Klobuchar and Hartman didn’t get along, but I dispute that. This was a time of such intense competition, even among the people on your own paper, that any perceived animosity was more likely the fallout of beating somebody to the punch, the quote, the scoop. Those of us sitting between these two pillars of ink kept our heads down and tried not to get injured.
In the 1970s, the National Football League was just beginning its domination of American culture. There was a feeling of being in on the ground floor of something wild and dangerous and wealthy. Klobuchar sensed this better than most. He staked out a lordly position as both sage and soothsayer. His columns were a must-read even though you sometimes thought you were reading about a different game than the one you watched.
Hartman’s column was a must-read just to get the nuts and bolts and loose washers that went unnoticed, except by Sid. And while in the sports realm of his many interests Klobuchar stuck with football, Sid was everywhere, baseball, colleges, hockey and basketball, running and running and running but oblivious to mundane things like, well, food. I once saw him devour a bowl of thousand island dressing, believing it to be cold soup.
They are gone and their likes will not be seen again. It is hard to imagine that Burns could survive as a coach in today’s world or would want to. His language alone would get him fined or suspended or probably even fired by the button-down executives who believe it virtuous to be woke.
Klobuchar’s often poetic and gorgeously descriptive writing would be undone by the fact checkers and anonymous social media buzz killers.
There won’t be another Sid, ever. Nobody wants to work that hard.
