Bookend stories about two friends of mine, former colleagues both, one ends in heartbreak and the other with a mended heart.
Let me begin with tears, but in doing so lead with a laugh.
Sitting in a press box alongside Stu Mathews, a gifted sportswriter for The Star for seven years in the 1990s, was like being in a comedy club on Open Mic Nite. His quirky humor routinely put me in stitches.
Of a million quips, this one stands out in my mind. It was in the newsroom and a know-it-all editor started pontificating about polar bears, describing their VW bus-like size and Bowie-knife claws and ten-mile sense of smell. He concluded his impromptu lecture by saying polar bears can charge “faster than a racehorse at 50 mph!” or some such made-up speed. (In truth, thoroughbreds top out at around 40 mph; polar bears at about 25 mph — I just looked it up.)
Stu, from across the room, asked deadpan: “Is that running on ice? Or tundra?”
That was more than a quarter of a century ago, and for the past 20 years rarely did I have an exchange with Stu — in person, phone, text — when one of us, or both, did not find a way to slip “ice or tundra?” into the conversation.
Now I have no one to share the inside joke with: Stuart Glenn Matthews died on June 22, far too young having just turned 62, after a five-year war with cancer.
When he was first diagnosed, Stu told me with the same sure confidence he displayed at the keyboard: “I’m going to beat it.”
It wasn’t a fair fight: Oral cancer, a stage IV tumor in his jaw, required a 12-hour operation to remove. The surgeons thought they got all of it, but the margins were “razor-thin” so six weeks of torturous radiation therapy followed.
The cancer eventually came back, as the heinous beast is wont to do, this time in his throat.
“I want to fight it bravely,” Stu texted me, sounding like Hemingway, whom he loved, and brave he was to the very end.
Six days before Stu passed away, our shared friend Ed Zintel very nearly died — and would have had a TV episode of “Baywatch” not played out in real life.
On June 16, on a sunny day on Strand Beach in Dana Point, Ed — a splendid sportswriter for The Star for five years through 2000 — suffered sudden cardiac arrest, at age 71, and collapsed unconscious in the parking lot.
Some might say a guardian angel was watching over him, but Ed thinks otherwise: he says five were. First, a woman who drives a shuttle golf cart transporting people to and from the beach, spotted Ed and administered CPR.
In a second godwink, two Orange County Park Rangers happened to be working nearby and rushed over with an Automated External Defibrillator — two separate shocks to Ed’s chest failed, but the third try restored a heartbeat.
Next, two firefighters arrived at the scene minutes after receiving a 911 call. They assisted the Park Rangers in stabilizing Ed and cared for him on the drive to the hospital.
Amazingly, remarkably, blessedly, Ed, now with a defibrillator/pacemaker, was discharged from the hospital after 10 days.
Against all odds, he has already attended a Dodgers home game and will soon make a road trip to see them play the Giants in San Francisco.
“It’s a wonderful life,” Ed says, adding knowingly, “especially when you get a second chance at it.”
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.