Requiem for a newspaperman: Ron Green’s funeral a fitting tribute to a Charlotte legend
Ron Green’s funeral began Monday afternoon in Charlotte with the national anthem.
It was a fitting tribute for the longtime local sports columnist, and not just because he once served in the U.S. Army. The afternoon started with The Star-Spangled Banner because Green had asked long ago for it to be played at his funeral, figuring it was the song he had heard more than any other. After all, it preceded thousands of sporting events he covered in a remarkable journalism career.
Green was 95 when he died on Sept. 18, and his was a life well-lived.
Ron and his wife, Beth, were married for 68 years until she passed away on Oct. 1, 2023 at age 89.
Once you knew the two of them, it was hard to think about one without the other. And so it makes sense they were apart for less than a year after being married for nearly seven decades. They had three children (Ron Jr., Dave and Edie) and five grandchildren. The grandkids were doted on in all the ways grandchildren should be, and Ron and Beth were perfect for each other. Ron wrote about sports for a living, and Beth made everything else work.
As Ron Green Jr. mentioned in his eulogy about his father Monday, it was Beth who ran the household and its finances. Ron Sr., on the other hand, never figured out the vagaries of an ATM card. In his wallet he carried a single blank check, folded in half, in case he needed some money.
But man, could he ever write.
Green was a well-established legend by the time I started at The Charlotte Observer in 1994. His annual Thanksgiving column exuded gratitude and wonder with the purity of a 5-year-old waking up on Christmas morning. His columns from the Masters every year blessed his readers with richly evocative prose.
Nine days into my new job, I picked up the newspaper and saw these two sentences in a Green column from Augusta National: “The back nine at Augusta National is Eden with flagsticks, all pine and azaleas and dogwoods and rambling creeks and little ponds and memories and promises. This is where you go to feel the embrace of the Masters before the battle starts, to see the beauty, to know the peril, to look for ghosts, to listen for echoes.”
Those weren’t even the first two sentences. That was Green improvising deep in a column for the fun of it, just because he could. I loved reading it, and I also despaired while reading it.
Eden with flagsticks?!! If that was the standard around here, I was in big trouble.
Green, though, created his own standard. He was unique in the field — a guy who never went to college but wrote like an angel. A nice guy, too, as anyone would tell you. Dean Smith would take his calls, and so would most everyone else, because Green worked hard, didn’t take cheap shots and just plain showed up everywhere. He covered 60 Masters (all in a row!), as well as 26 Final Fours, 25 Super Bowls and just about everything else you could think of that had a sports component to it.
Green’s humility was one of his most endearing qualities. He was quick to compliment colleagues and fretted about everything he wrote, worrying it wasn’t good enough. After he retired in 1999, I ended up replacing him as an Observer sports columnist. He still wrote for us occasionally. But a couple of years after he had stopped writing his Thanksgiving column, I asked him if I could resurrect it each year in his honor, in the same “What I’m thankful for” format. He called me after that column ran to say thanks.
I still have his voicemail and listened to it again Monday.
“You aced it, buddy,” Ron said, and hearing his voice again on the day of his funeral was the one time I choked up.
In 2021, I interviewed Ron for a long feature and asked him a lot of questions. He was 92 at the time, his mind still sharp.
About Augusta, he said: “I liked going out in the morning on tournament days. Just the way it felt. And looking at all the beauty and letting it all sort of wash over me, kind of gathering you up and sending you out to work. I was in love with it. I look back now, and I was silly in love with it, like a guy in love with a girl. But I’m glad I was. I think it showed through in what I wrote.”
As for his lifelong love of his profession, he said: “I loved newspapers. I still remember the first day I walked into a newspaper office — how it smelled. The ink and the paper. Still remember it. Never got over it. I loved being a newspaperman. I loved the rush, and the crush, of a deadline. And I just never got over feeling good when I saw my byline in that paper.”
He also knew how lucky he was. Of his life, he said then: “I wouldn’t change much of anything. If somebody said, ‘I’ll give you your life all over again,’ I’d say, ‘Oh, I’ll take it.’ It’s about as good as it can get, if you ask me.”
Let’s leave the final word here about his father to Ron Green Jr., an extremely accomplished sportswriter himself. “Junior,” as we called him around the office when he worked for The Observer to differentiate him from “Senior,” finished his eulogy Monday with this. The words came from Ron Green Sr. himself, when he was interviewed by his other son, Dave, a few years back and provided one of the best eulogy endings I’ve ever heard.
Said Green Sr. in that interview: “In my life, I’m most proud of our kids and grandkids..... Like everyone else, I’ve made mistakes. I can be difficult at times. I snore, I curse my putter, I chase squirrels away from bird feeders.
“But I have said it before and I’ll say it again — I may not show up at church every Sunday. I may not volunteer at the homeless center. I may not look kindly on everyone — especially politicians, people trying to sell stuff on the phone and whoever the bad guys are in the Middle East. But if I don’t make it through the pearly gates, it’s their loss.”
Amen.
This story was originally published October 1, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
