n8rngtd.topJim Caple had abibliophobia, the fear of having nothing to read, and kept three books in his computer bag as a remedy, so that no matter where he was in the world, he would never run out of words. Near the end of his remarkable life, cut short this month by dementia and Lou Gehrig’s disease, the sportswriter’s expansive vocabulary had contracted, and he seemed to lean on the same three utterances, repeated often: “Willie Mays,” “Novak Djokovic” and—in heaviest rotation at his house outside Seattle—“Sue Bird.”
But for most of his 61 years, he was never lost for words. It was in San Diego, in the press box at Jack Murphy Stadium in 1992, that Capes first asked me, “What are you reading?” and I nudged toward my fellow baseball scribe the hardcover tombstone I’d been lugging around the major leagues. It was an endless account of the ’88 presidential election by Richard Ben Cramer called , a book so long (1,047 pages) and so heavy in the hand (1.63 pounds) that some critics referred to it as .
That’s the first time I met him. The second time, a few weeks later, was in Minneapolis, at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. (In 1992, there were still stadiums named for sportswriters and politicians and other men of low public esteem.) Jim casually mentioned that he’d loved , and a few other books he’d read in the previous three weeks, because when he wasn’t writing (about the Twins for the , and later about the world at large for ESPN.com) he was reading.
By age 29, Jim knew he was destined by MLB’s relentless schedule of nights and weekends to a lifelong bachelorhood watching baseball. Or so he told his colleague Bob Sansevere in the Metrodome press box during an early-season Twins game in that team’s magical year of 1991. Sansevere, from his press seat, reached for the landline, dialed his single friend Vicki Schuman and handed the phone to Caple. That landline, it turned out, was a lifeline.
Jim and Vicki had their first date June 5, 1991, and were married during the seamhead solstice, the baseball writer’s narrow window between the winter meetings and spring training. Their wedding day was Groundhog Day—Feb. 2, 1996, the coldest day on record in Minnesota, when the temperature was -59.5 degrees. Spoiler: There would be six more weeks of winter no matter what the groundhog did. But Jim and Vicki’s marriage would be sun-kissed and eventful, governed by the sports calendar.
Most years, on Super Bowl Sunday, they flew to the Maui Marriott using Marriott points. Marriott points are to sportswriters what the doubloon was to 18th-century Spaniards—the coin of the realm. “We saw some nice Marriotts,” says Vicki with a laugh, a Minnesota native who never had to fear missing a Vikings game on Super Sunday.
Vicki worked in IT for Northwest Airlines—she flew for free—and the couple traveled the world together, to all the usual places and many of the unusual ones, 65 countries in all, many of them without Marriotts. Jim moved from the to ESPN.com, covering various Olympics, Tours de France and tennis Slams with Vicki often by his side but occasionally on his back. She clung to him like an inverted backpack—the Estonian Carry position, competitors called it—when they raced as one in the Wife Carrying World Championships in Sonkajärvi, Finland. “Everything is going fine until my wife and I hit the water hazard,” Jim wrote in his piece. “It’s 3 meters deep, about 30 feet long and there is a fireman in scuba gear standing by in case of emergency. By the time I wade its length, I’m so exhausted that we do not so much step from the pool as evolve out of it, like the first amphibians to leave the oceans and crawl onto land.”
The baseball writer who thought he would never marry had been right about one thing: His life, it turned out, was a ball.