Joe Christensen has a blog with some interesting baseball items today on startribune.com. The final item was this:

"WRITER AWARD: Congratulations to my esteemed colleague, La Velle E. Neal III, for winning the Sam Lacy Award (Baseball Writer of the Year) from the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. La Velle will be honored at the museum's annual banquet in Kansas City on Jan. 28. We'll be sure to toast him and roast him two nights earlier at the annual Diamond Awards banquet in Minneapolis.''

I have as much fun getting on LaVelle as anyone, knowing full well that deep in his soul, UNLV is a hell of a guy. This is a large honor for LaVelle, as he's being given an award named for one of the grander gentlemen that I had a chance to meet in the newspaper business.

Sam died in May 2003 at age 99. I interviewed him over breakfast in Baltimore six years earlier. This column appeared in the Star Tribune on Aug. 24, 1997. I was proud to write it, although not as proud as LaVelle must be to receive the Sam Lacy Award:

SAM LACY WAS ORDERING breakfast Saturday at a waterfront hotel. He
asked for scrambled eggs and bacon, then made a special request:
"Young man, would you ask your cook to burn the toast? Tell him, if
it looks too burned, it will be just fine."

Lacy returned to his early-morning conversation. "I'm in the
office on Mondays and Tuesdays . . . and sometimes Sundays,
depending on the work there is ahead of me for the week," he said.

The office to which Lacy reports is located on North Charles
Street in downtown Baltimore. The building houses the Baltimore
Afro-American - as much a tradition in this great newspaper town as
is the Baltimore Sun.

If the Sun was the newspaper of H.L. Mencken, the Afro-American
has been the newspaper of Sam Lacy, now 93, and still the national
sports editor and author of a weekly column.

"For the past number of years, I have been getting to the office
at 4:30 in the morning," Lacy said. "You can get so much work done
in the morning. The phone isn't constantly ringing. It's before
those normal distractions - co-workers coming over to the sports
desk to say, ` Sam, what did you think of that ballgame last night?'
"

Lacy has lived in the same apartment on the northeast side of
Washington, D.C., for 37 years. He makes the drive to the office on
Interstate Hwy. 95 in an old red Cougar.

"I don't fight 95 traffic too often on Saturday," Lacy said. "I
made an exception today because the city is dedicating a large park
in the name of Leon Day, a Baltimore native, and a Hall of Fame
pitcher from the Negro Leagues. They asked me to be there."

Sam Lacy has been asked to be most everywhere in 1997, the 50th
anniversary of Jackie Robinson's integration of major league
baseball. Lacy and Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier lobbied
through the 1940s with baseball to integrate, then traveled with
Robinson after he finally was signed to a contract by Branch Rickey
and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

"I've been at the Smithsonian Institute," Lacy said. "I was
the guest speaker at a seminar on Jackie at Long Island University.
I've been been on the networks and ESPN. It has put some wear and
tear on me. I am 93 years old."

The wear and tear is not evident on Lacy. He is a slight man.
He dresses immaculately (gray suit, pink shirt, tie, white summer
shoes on Saturday), walks strongly and carries on a conversation
easily. His only major health problem has been a troublesome right
eye.

"I've had cataract surgery and transplants of this eye," Lacy
said. "I do not see out of it at all. Fortunately, my other eye is
fine."

Lacy's concession to age was to start writing out his column
longhand a few years ago. In this week's edition of the
Afro-American, Lacy assured his readers that Tiger Woods'
performance in the PGA Championship was very adequate, and they
should not listen to any suggestions that the young man has less
than a brilliant future in golf.

Lacy started his journalism career in the early 1930s, serving
as a stringer for Louis Lautier, the one-man sports department of
the Washington Tribune. He worked for three years for the Chicago
Defender (1940-43) and briefly for a general-circulation newspaper -
the Chicago Times.

In 1944, Lacy returned to his home area as the sports editor at
the Afro-American. This was at a time when the Baltimore-based black
newspaper had editions along the East Coast and in Atlanta, and the
Pittsburgh Courier circulated to the West. That made Lacy and the
Courier's Smith perhaps the two most widely read black sportswriters
in the country.

"Wendell was a better writer than me," Lacy said. "I've had
people argue with me about that, but I know the truth."

Smith and Lacy threw themselves into the cause of getting the
owners to see the error of segregated major leagues. "I had played
some ball for the Bacharach Giants in Atlantic City," Lacy said. "I
had played against some of the Negro League teams and realized we
had players capable of excelling in white baseball.

"Under the old system, everybody was being cheated. The white
public was not getting a chance to see a more-exciting brand of
baseball with this mixture of talent. The owners were cheating
themselves out of a better product. And the black players were being
cheated out of better employment."

As Lacy lobbied the baseball establishment for integration of
the playing field, one owner said to him: "If you persist, Sam, the
Negro Leagues will be destroyed. You're going to put 400 blacks out
of a job."

Saturday, more than 50 years later, Lacy recalled his response
with a smile: "I said, `Yes, and Abraham Lincoln put 400,000 blacks
out of jobs.' It just sort of jumped up in my mind and I said it."

Sam talked of a cross that was burned in the front yard of a
boarding house in Macon, Ga., where he was staying with Robinson on
the way back from Jackie's first spring training in Florida. He
talked of following heavyweight champion Joe Louis on the "Bum of
the Month" tour. "I was with Joe in Omaha [Neb.] and I had to speak
Spanish - to fool the man at the counter - in order to get a cup of
coffee," he said.

Sam talked of his relationship with other black athletic
pioneers such as Arthur Ashe, Althea Gibson and Wilma Rudolph. He
talked of covering seven Summer Olympics, from Rome in 1960 through
Los Angeles in 1984. He talked of growing up a few blocks from
Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., and, years later, traveling to
see Calvin Griffith's team play a World Series in Minnesota.

And then Sam glanced toward an approaching waiter and said:
"Excuse me. My breakfast is coming. I recognize the toast."