Rick Cleveland

This was a Saturday in August 1981, near the beginning of Rick Cleveland’s career at The Clarion-Ledger. A passenger from Jackson could get a direct flight to Birmingham, Bear Bryant was still at the University of Alabama and the Ledger had allotted Cleveland some 50 column inches to tell the story of a much less famous football coach.

In no other world would the readers of Sports Illustrated have met Robert “Bull” “Cyclone” Sullivan, the gridiron overlord from East Mississippi Junior College whose Clarion-Ledger profile, written by Cleveland, captivated Frank Deford as he returned from interviewing Bryant. The plane Deford boarded in Birmingham had arrived from Jackson, and some previous passenger had left the paper containing the story in the seat next to his. The article became the germ of an even longer cover story, entitled “The Toughest Coach There Ever Was,” that Deford penned on Sullivan for Sports Illustrated in 1984. Three decades later, Deford calls the article the best football story he’s written. Fans occasionally ask him to autograph it, all of which causes Deford to wonder whether something more than serendipity arranged his in-flight introduction to Sullivan.

“Mrs. Sullivan called it divine intervention,” said Deford, who today contributes weekly commentaries to National Public Radio, occasional television pieces to HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel,” and the odd feature to Sports Illustrated. “I think she may have been right.”

If so, Deford acknowledges, God directed him to a particularly eloquent voice in the Mississippi wilderness.

“If this had been written by some hack writer, who just threw a bunch of facts at a page, it probably wouldn’t have captured my attention to the extent that it did,” Deford said of Cleveland’s article. “But Rick tells a beautiful story.”

Cleveland has told enough of them to occupy nearly 50 years as a sportswriter for newspapers in Hattiesburg, Monroe, Louisiana, and, finally, Jackson, where he worked, beginning in 1979, as a beat reporter, editor and columnist for The Clarion-Ledger. He took a buyout from the paper’s corporate owner in 2012, joining a small diaspora of Mississippi journalists now applying the skills of communicators to other crafts.

It’s difficult to believe that any of them experienced a more seamless transition than did Cleveland, who, as executive director of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum, is essentially responsible for preserving many of the stories he helped tell.

“What’s neat about what I’m doing is, the first week I was at the Hall of Fame I wrote a personal note to every living member of the Hall of Fame,” recalled Cleveland. “At that time, there were 153. What became clear to me was that I knew all these people. I had covered all these people. Hell, not only did I know the athletes and coaches, in most cases, I knew their families! I knew their stories. That’s when I knew I had made a good move.”

That knowledge helped Cleveland stand out among the candidates the Hall of Fame’s board of directors considered for the executive director’s post, which was left vacant with the death of Michael Rubenstein in 2011.

“He’s a natural as far as the relationships that he has and the contacts that he has,” said Jackson attorney Cal Wells, a member of the board of directors of the nonprofit that runs the Hall.

Richard Darrell Cleveland was born in Hattiesburg on Tuesday, October 7, 1952, around the time that Mickey Mantle launched a 3-1 Joe Black pitch over the Ebbets Field scoreboard to secure Game 7 of the World Series for the visiting New York Yankees.

His parents initially dubbed him “Rickey,” a partial concession to the impulse to name their firstborn for the baseball demigod who triumphed in Brooklyn that day. Rickey’s father, Robert “Ace” Cleveland, was a sportswriter who, when Rickey was 3, went to work as the sports information director for the University of Southern Mississippi.

As SID, Ace was USM’s representative to the press his son would one day join. And, as a former sportswriter, he enjoyed the company of his old colleagues. Many would gather at the Cleveland home following a Southern athletic event, rehashing the day’s happenings over libations. Young Rickey would usually be there, too, absorbing the scenes. “It just seemed like a hell of a good way to make a living,” he said.

And so Rickey contrived to acquire a byline before he could get a driver’s license. It was 1966, and Cleveland was 13. The Hattiesburg American was running advertisements for “stringers” to help the paper cover that season’s area high school football games.

“Do you think they’d let me do it?” he recalls asking his father. Replied Ace: “Well, why don’t you call and ask?” Rickey called. The paper agreed to give Ace’s boy a shot. And so it came to pass that the future dean of Mississippi sportswriters arrived at his first assignment, a 12-0 victory by Lucedale over Brooklyn, in the passenger seat of his father’s automobile.

According to Cleveland, the night ended with Ace making a contribution even more valuable than transportation.

“I get back to the house. I roll that clean sheet of white paper into that Underwood typewriter. And Ace leaves the room. He comes back in about 30 minutes later. And that sheet of paper was just as blank as it was when he had left. I said, ‘I know what happened, but I don’t know how to get started.’ And he said, ‘Well, if I were you, I would write it like I would tell it.’

“And that’s still the best writing advice I’ve gotten. I still use that tool to write. There have been times during all my years as a columnist when people have said, ‘You write like you’re having a conversation.’ They tell me that I have a very conversational style of writing. I think back to what Dad said any time someone tells me that.”

Cleveland worked at the American clear through Hattiesburg High School and five years at USM, from which he graduated in 1975 with a degree in journalism. By 1978, Cleveland said, “I thought I needed to get away.” And so he landed a job as sports editor of two sister papers in Monroe, Louisiana, pulling in a salary that he remembers as 300 bucks a week to go along with responsibilities that kept him in the office on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

The following year, Cleveland was at a sports editors’ convention in Minneapolis. Tom Patterson, then a Clarion-Ledger sports editor, saw him and asked for suggestions to fill an opening for a Mississippi State beat writer. Cleveland suggested himself. A few months later, he was back in Mississippi for good.

As the kind of writer whose copy impressed Sports Illustrated scribes, Cleveland continued to entertain out-of-state opportunities. Papers in Atlanta, New Jersey, New Orleans, Orlando and St. Louis are among his suitors.

Practical considerations played a role. Cleveland’s wife, Liz, had a good job with the Mississippi Development Authority. Their kids, son Tyler and daughter Annie, liked their schools.

But Cleveland acknowledges that Mississippi itself exerted a pull.

“It’s home,” he says. “There’s nowhere I could ever go and have the knowledge about a place that I have about Mississippi.”

Cleveland’s words call to mind an observation by William Faulkner, who discovered “that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about, and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”

Faulkner, however, invented his own world and created his own characters: “I can move these people around like God,” he exulted, “not only in space but in time, too.”

The profession of journalism and the Earth-bound likes of Bull Sullivan afforded no such luxury to Cleveland. Like Faulkner and a host of other home-state literary saints, nevertheless, he has spun stories about flawed people striving against their limits, self, nature, and others, in that most notoriously flawed of places, Mississippi.

“Rick doesn’t just write about sports,” said JoAnne Prichard Morris, an editor and the widow of Mississippi author and longtime Cleveland intimate Willie Morris. “He writes about the human condition.”

“He reminds me a lot of Willie Morris,” said Langston Rogers, Ole Miss sports information director from 1981 until 2010. “Willie had tremendous recall and could tell a great story. Rick has those same qualities.”

“He has so much institutional knowledge, and, by that, I mean the entire institution of sports in Mississippi,” said Rusty Hampton, sports editor at The Clarion-Ledger from 2002 until 2013. “If someone had died who had been a star, he could just make a couple of phone calls off the top of his head and tell stories about that person. He still can. He still does.”

Cleveland spent his first two years in Jackson covering Mississippi State as a beat reporter, his next two in the same capacity at Ole Miss, a few more as editor of the sports section, and the ensuing decades as The Clarion-Ledger’s sports columnist.

That simply entailed, he said, “waking up in the morning, finding something interesting to write about and writing it.”

He wrote about Archie Manning’s most gallant defeats and stuck around long enough to describe Archie’s sons’ most satisfying victories.

He wrote about Steve McNair’s awesome rise and Steve McNair’s awful end.

He wrote about Monta Ellis when he was playing for Lanier High School in Jackson.

He wrote about Super Bowls, Master’s golf tournaments and nationally televised college football showdowns. But he also traveled to the sorts of high school stadiums where he began his career.

“He would attack a column about a game between Ruleville and some other small school the same way he would Ole Miss-Alabama,” said David Brandt, a colleague of Cleveland at The Clarion-Ledger who now covers Mississippi sports for The Associated Press. “I always thought that was cool.”

“I’ll go further than that,” said Tyler Cleveland, Rick’s son and now the sports editor of the Madison County Journal. “I think he’d rather cover the 1A or 2A high school game. That’s where he can find stories that are more interesting and stories that wouldn’t be told.”

Obscure but remarkable figures are stock characters for Cleveland columns.

Bull Sullivan, the football coach whose story got retold by Sports Illustrated, is an example. So is former Delta State baseball coach and Boston Red Sox pitcher Dave “Boo” Ferriss, the subject of Cleveland’s 2008 book Boo: A Life in Baseball, Well-Lived.

Ferriss, from Shaw in Bolivar County, had won 46 games over his first two seasons for the Red Sox. Only one pitcher, Grover Cleveland Alexander, has done better. But, one 1947 night in Cleveland, Ferriss’ shoulder “popped” while he threw a curve ball for a strike. Under the relatively lax medical standards of the day, Ferriss kept pitching, and never returned to his record-setting form. Cleveland’s book celebrates Ferriss as a player and a person, “the best human,” he says, “I’ve ever known.”

As the tale of an amazingly talented small-town Mississippi boy confronting defeat, the story is a familiar one to longtime Cleveland readers.

“Rick can do investigative stories, and he has done investigative stories well,” says Larry Templeton, athletic director at Mississippi State from 1987 until 2008. “But that was never really what he did best. His strength is looking at a game or a player and bringing out the human interest.”

Though Cleveland credits his father with teaching him how to write, he says the example of his mother, Carrie Cleveland, helped him understand what to write about.

“My mother, she loved sports,” he says. “She loved it. But she didn’t care about X’s and O’s. She didn’t care anything about that. But she cared about the people. She cared about the pageantry. She cared about the emotion. And so that’s what I tried to keep in mind.”

The Sports Hall of Fame’s Jackson home itself has roots in Cleveland’s columns.

There has been such thing as a Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame since 1961, but, for years, its members were honored only by plaques displayed between a bathroom and a storage area on the first floor of the Mississippi Coliseum. Cleveland noticed them while covering a state high school basketball tournament for The Clarion-Ledger in the early 1990s, and he immediately started devoting ink to the necessity of a permanent museum for the state’s sports heroes.

His first one attracted a call from Jim Buck Ross, the state’s Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce since 1968. Ross’ bailiwick included the Mississippi State Fair, Dixie National Rodeo and the (not coincidentally named) Jim Buck Ross Agriculture and Forestry Museum off Lakeland. Ross also happened to be an avid sports fan.

He outlined a plan to Cleveland. He’d re-bid the right to sell soft drinks at all those venues and the proposed Hall of Fame, and he’d get a million dollars. Then Ross would lean on the Legislature to match it. “That’ll be your seed money,” Cleveland remembers Ross saying.

“I said, ‘Commissioner, I love that idea, but there’s one problem. I go to all those places, and Coca-Cola already has the rights.’ He said, ‘Yeah, son, but they’re about to pay a whole lot more for it.’”

As a group including Cleveland began fleshing out the museum idea, Coca-Cola came through with a little more than $1 million in 1993 to secure the drink rights for 12 years. By 1994, the Legislature had outdone even Ross’ expectations, authorizing a total of $3.5 million in state-issued bonds to fund the facility. Operated by the nonprofit Mississippi Sports Foundation, it opened in 1996 in its current home off Lakeland Drive between Smith-Wills Stadium and the Agriculture and Forestry Museum.

The Hall of Fame’s first director was Michael Rubenstein, the former sports director at Jackson’s WLBT. He kept the job until 2011, when he died at age 60 of complications from a blood clot.

Cleveland’s arrival has coincided with an uptick in Mississippi Sports Foundation fundraising, according to tax documents. The museum has not received “a dime” of tax money since the initial infusion of cash, Cleveland says. It relies on special events, often corporate-sponsored, for funding, as well as on rentals of its facilities. That includes, Cleveland says, “everything from weddings to business seminars. We host team banquets and team parties. We get lots of lots of school groups.” More funding arrives from admission fees and museum memberships.

Cleveland has supervised exterior and interior renovations at the museum and updated the electronic kiosks on which visitors can touch a screen and call up stories, audio and videos of Hall of Famers.

“When I got there, it was still 1996 technology,” Cleveland said. “Now it’s 2013 technology.”

And the Hall is about to begin construction of a “badly, badly needed” 2,000-square-foot storage facility, said Cleveland. “We basically have no storage right now,” said Cleveland, whose office is now occupied by a game-worn Steve McNair helmet and other memorabilia. “We have to store the chairs that we use for events in the gift shop area.” He’d also like to update one of the Hall’s chief video presentations.

“When we bring groups in, that’s the first thing they do, is watch a 12-minute theater presentation on the history of Mississippi sports,” he said. “It’s 16 years old. A lot has happened in Mississippi sports in the last 16 years. And not only have we had three NFL MVPs, three Super Bowl MVPs, and I don’t know how many Olympic gold medalists in that time, we’ve also had the advent of high-definition. So, we need to replace the camera equipment, we need to replace the projector, and we need to have a high-definition film. I’ve gotten estimates, and it’s a $250,000 project.”

The Hall has also revamped its website, msfame.com, under Cleveland’s watch. It features bios of Hall of Famers, as well as a platform for Cleveland to blog and share the weekly column he writes for syndication by the Mississippi Press Association.

Cleveland has the confidence of the Sports Foundation board “to a person,” said Cal Wells. “People love Rick and want to help him in his job. And that’s great for the museum.”

It is indeed difficult to find a Cleveland enemy, at least outside of anonymous Internet sports message boards.

“I don’t think you can find anyone who’s more congenial than Rick,” said Curtis Wilkie, a Mississippi native and former Boston Globe reporter who now teaches journalism at Ole Miss.

“There is nothing that he does not do well socially,” says Brandt, the AP sportswriter.

“He’s a guy who is very comfortable to be around,” said Ed Ellington, a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge in Jackson and longtime Cleveland friend. “He is great at making other people comfortable.”

Kyle Veazey, a Clarion-Ledger sportswriter from 2006 until 2011, nicknamed Cleveland “the Governor.”

“Any room he walked in, someone knew him,” Veazey said. “You would just be with Rick, and you couldn’t walk to your table, because someone there had known him in 1984 or something. And I guess one day I just thought, on name recognition alone you could run for governor in this state hands down.”

This would be an especially impressive accomplishment given that Cleveland spent decades writing about sports in a state riven by passionate sports rivalries. And, like virtually every Mississippi sportswriter in history, Cleveland received mail, phone calls and, later, e-mails blasting his alleged bias toward Ole Miss…or Mississippi State…or Southern Miss.

But, says Veazey, that criticism was always invalid: “I think Mississippians who wanted to rip him would be stunned at how many times after a game we’d be walking out, and the Mississippi team had lost, maybe fumbled at the goal line or something. I don’t know that he’d say, ‘Gosh, I wish they’d have won!’ But you could tell he just wanted good things to happen to Mississippi teams. Period.”

This urge is reflected in Cleveland’s latest project, a coffee table book called Mississippi’s Greatest Athletes. It will include stories about every Hall of Famer and is set to come out on October 23, Ole Miss legend Bruiser Kinard’s 100th birthday. All proceeds will benefit the Hall of Fame.

Editing the book recently, Cleveland noted that the entry for another Ole Miss legend, Archie Manning, appears on the same page and below one for former Mississippi State Athletic Director Carl Maddox.

“That’s what I like about the Hall,” says Cleveland. “It brings us all together.”

STORY Ben Bryant
PHOTOGRAPHY Melanie Thortis