I feel any writer can read the book and come away a little bit excited. It’s something that I feel that the book does. It is a job, it is challenging, but nevertheless, if you can smile and compliment people on their work when you get a shot because something genuinely moved you, you make them a little bit more excited about what they’re doing. (Pedro and I) were always on kind of a mission to try to get everybody excited about what they were doing. I liked that idea of maybe inspiring people a little bit to do work where they put a lot of themselves into it. It was a little bit like hosting a really cool gathering where everyone got to get up and speak. There was a feeling of letting people come together. That has definitely helped deal with the difficult, painful parts. I will say the fact that so many people were so great and so generous and gave so much really of themselves, their souls, that has been tremendously beautiful. If anything, it deepened the sense of this being an impossible life event to sort of work through. There was not a feeling of the book being therapeutic or cathartic. I’ll just be blunt and honest and say it’s something that I struggle with on a daily basis. It’s hard to be quoted on it without sounding, I don’t know, self-indulgent or something. I somewhat reluctantly realized that if I did the same kind of work that I put into that earlier collection on a Pedro book, that it would probably be something special and that it would hurt a lot do it - for me and for others - but that it was worth trying. It was like having the scenery that was all there. We did a whole book, “Now What?: The Voters Have Spoken, Essays on Life after Trump.” I was just coming off of that project - in fact, I was going on BookTV just after the Pedro news hit. When it comes to editing books, it’s a competition that you’ve been training for your whole life. I’ve done a lot of books in a bigger hurry than most people. How’d you put together this book so quickly? In this mid-September interview, which has been edited for space and clarity, Kettmann discussed the emotional strain of this project, Gomez’s personal and professional attitude, and why baseball reminds him of his dear friend. He hopes readers return to “Remember Who You Are” and leave with “some fresh inspiration or something to think about” each time. Kettmann is a veteran journalist and author who runs the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods retreat for writers - as well as Wellstone Books - in Northern California with his wife, Sarah Ringler. “All through it, he was never a guy in a role, but a warm personality people felt like they knew, a man whose take on things had to make sense since clearly this was someone whom just about everyone liked - and everyone respected,” Kettmann writes. Profits from the book go to the Pedro Gomez Foundation.Ĭontributions in the book range from family members to colleagues, admirers, and sources. The side of Gomez so many missed emerges in the vivid and bittersweet essay collection, “ Remember Who You Are: What Pedro Gomez Showed Us About Baseball and Life,” edited by Steve Kettmann, Gomez’s longtime friend and former coworker. He loved baseball but hated the stats that encroached upon the game’s humanity. He loved live music and was proud of being from Cuba. He seemingly never turned down an opportunity to speak to a class or answer an aspiring journalist’s question. He was a devoted family man who didn’t hesitate asking Greg Maddux to help his son, Rio - now a Red Sox minor league pitcher - find the right grip for a change-up. How many knew the longtime ESPN reporter beyond his short reports from America’s baseball diamonds?Īfter his death from a sudden cardiac arrest at 58 in February, Gomez was mourned by his colleagues beyond his journalistic abilities as an endlessly kind person. He was smooth, the possessor of an amazing swoop of white hair and serious eyebrows. Pedro Gomez was a nearly daily presence in sports fans’ lives, especially during Barry Bonds’ tainted chase toward the all-time home run record.
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