Today is Father’s Day, and just as everyone else, I have one. My father, Robert Hayes “Ace” Cleveland, died just over 31 years ago.
And still, not day goes by I don’t think of him. Not a day goes by I don’t want to pick up the phone and call him. Sometimes, I’d like his advice about something important. But most times, I’d just like his company. Maybe I can’t get “44 across” in the New York Times crossword puzzle. Maybe I can’t think of the right word for something I am writing. Or perhaps I want to make sure he saw the home run some Atlanta Brave just slammed on TV.
Rick ClevelandTrust me, Ace Cleveland was a character. He was great fun to be around. He came from humble beginnings. His father was a dairy farmer who cared little if any about sports, but Dad played everything. He was a four-sport letterman in high school who earned his nickname in football. The Hattiesburg American once referred to him as Hattiesburg High’s “ace kicker.” And from then on, Robert Cleveland was Ace Cleveland. The only people I knew who called him Robert were his parents.
Funny thing: The newspaper that gave his nickname was the paper that years later made him a professional journalist. There’s a story there.
This was years after high school, and a couple years after Ace had served his country in the Navy during World War II. He was still playing semipro baseball and was being interviewed post-game by the newspaper’s executive editor, Leonard Lowrey. Ace asked Mr. Lowrey how come Lowrey was covering the game instead of the sports editor. Lowry said the sports editor had quit.
“I’d be interested in that job. You hiring?” Ace asked
“Can you type?” Lowrey asked back
“Yes,” was the answer
“Can you write?” was the next question.
“At least as well as that other guy,” Ace answered.
The job was his. He had the three other essentials for the job: 1) he could spell, 2) he could breathe, and 3) he was willing to work for next to nothing. (About 25 years later, I got the same job for the same reasons.)
Turns out, Ace could really write. He knew sports inside and out. He was really, really smart, and he was a natural storyteller.
Ace and Rick Cleveland at Manuel’s Tavern in Atlanta, circa 1994. Credit: Rick ClevelandA marriage and two sons later, Ace needed to make more money. The Jackson Daily News called offering a job. He took it. A couple years later, Mississippi Southern College offered a slightly higher paying job that also came with campus housing in his hometown. As much as he loved writing sports, he couldn’t turn it down.
So it was that my formative years – and those of my younger brother, Bobby – were spent on a college campus. In fact, for three years, my parents were proctors of the Southern’s East Stadium dormitory, known as the Old Rock, which housed the jocks. Our backyard was the football field. Directly across the street was the gymnasium. Just to the north was the baseball field. Our playmates and babysitters were the school’s athletes. We learned to love sports. We also learned words we had no business knowing.
Quick story: Once we were sitting down to a dinner of my mama’s fried chicken. I was 6, brother Bobby was 5. We both preferred drumsticks. I got one and Bobby got one. While Ace was telling a story after saying grace, Bobby quickly ate his and snatched mine off my plate.
My reaction was to say what I thought my friends down the hallway might say: “Bobby, you S.O.B., you take a bite of that drumstick, and I’ll kick the shit out your scrawny ass.”
The next thing I knew, Mama was about to cry and Ace was trying, without success, not to chuckle. My memory of that evening is made all the more poignant by the unforgettable taste of Ivory soap that has lingered for nearly seven decades. A couple months later, we moved off campus.
At age 13, I told Ace I wanted to the a sports writer. He told me I was nuts. He said if I was smart enough to do that and do it well, I could make a lot more money doing something else. As usual, he was right. But he also told me to call the newspaper and volunteer to cover games. I did. And he drove me to most of the games I covered before I was old enough drive myself.
Ace gave me the best writing advice I ever received when I couldn’t get started on my very first game story. “If I was you,” he said, “I’d write it the way I’d tell it.”
And so I did. And so I do.
One last story on Dad. This was near his end. He had suffered a series of evilly debilitating strokes. He was in the hospital’s intensive care unit, hanging on.
Bobby and I went for one of the few short visits we were allowed. Ace asked if we had the newspaper. We did. He asked if we had worked the crossword. We had not. This was a Friday, and then, as now, Friday’s New York Times crossword was a bugger.
“Read ‘em out to me,” Ace said, and so we read the clues. He worked the puzzle without opening his eyes. The nurse on duty stopped what she was doing.with all those machines and just listened.
Later, she asked us: “What does he do for a living?”
Bobby, who became Ace made over as he aged, had the perfect answer. “He’s just an old retired sports writer,” Bobby proudly said.
Happy Father’s Day.
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