Sportswriter and novelist Mike Lupica shares stories that span nearly three decades of friendship with Elmore Leonard — from ballgames and book tours to long phone calls about writing and life.
They met in 1987 when Esquire sent Lupica to profile Leonard. It was the start of a bond that mixed sports and storytelling in equal measure: Tigers games at old Tiger Stadium, tennis matches in Florida (“a win’s a win,” Lupica says), and late-afternoon phone calls that often ended with Dutch reading him the day’s pages. “He was as excited as a little kid,” Lupica remembers. “If he got a good page a day, he was happy.”
There are great scenes: Leonard behind the batting cage with Detroit legend Ernie Harwell; at dinner in New York with William Goldman, talking endings and dialogue “like two old ballplayers talking shop”; and in Birmingham, still rewriting by hand on his yellow pads. “He was the coolest guy in every room,” Lupica says. “He never tried too hard.”
In one of the video’s best moments, Lupica recalls their final conversation. Leonard had just decided to bring Raylan Givens into his new novel Blue Dreams and was reading fresh pages aloud over the phone — his voice full of energy. “He didn’t sound 87,” Lupica says. “It was like every other day we’d ever talked.” Hours later came the news of the stroke that ended Leonard’s life.
Lupica ends his tribute the way he ended his eulogy that day in Birmingham:
“I leaned over and said, ‘Pal, we had an awful lot of fun.’ ”
