Erik Brady: Tom Weir had a lot to say about Buffalo – and Oakland

Gertrude Stein said that about Oakland, Calif., her hometown. She wasn’t talking about sports. The poet wrote that line in 1937, before Oakland had any big-league teams. In the decades since, Oakland has had – and lost – NFL, NBA and NHL teams. Now its MLB team, too, is engaged in a slow-motion desertion.

So today there is only “where” there. As in: Where did all the teams go?

It so happens that I’ve been thinking of Oakland a lot lately. My friend Tom Weir came from there. We were sportswriters at USA Today for more than 30 years. He liked to say both of us came from second-class cities: Buffalo as No. 2 to New York, and Oakland to San Francisco.

We lost Tom to the agonies of ALS two weeks ago. He had mostly lost use of his voice in recent years, so we texted instead. And he was fiercely funny to the end.

This text arrived in June: “The clue for 73 Down in Sunday’s NYT crossword: Newspaper debut of 9/15/82.”

The answer, of course, was USA Today. (It opened the same week that the Courier-Express closed.) “Finally,” Tom wrote, “the Times acknowledges us.”

That clue was so easy, I wrote back, that he could have done it in pen.

Tom answered: “Not to be arrogant, but I do them all in pen. It’s about the only thing I’m still good at, aside from napping.”

It was a rare reference to his disease. Tom did not dwell on death, at least when texting his old colleagues. Recently, though, he had texted David Leon Moore, another of our retired USA Today brethren: “I don’t know if it is the top or the bottom, but I’m definitely in the ninth.”

Tom traveled to Buffalo for USA Today many times over the years. Once, in 1985, when the 0-11 Bills upset the Dallas Cowboys, he led his column with this:

“Every dog has its day. Say woof, Buffalo.”

Soon after, he got a sheaf of letters from students in a local grade school. Most began with the same sentence, apparently from a…