All Hail the King.

Tony Gwynn, 10 years ago today

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I’ve shared this with some people before, and my sons (Happy Father’s Day, by the way) have heard roughly 100,000 Tony Gwynn stories through their long-suffering years as the offspring of a reformed baseball writer. I plead your indulgence.

It was either Christmas or the day after, early 2000s, I’m pretty sure. I had long since moved away from San Diego, where I cut my teeth in journalism as a beat writer covering Gwynn and the Padres, and on this day I was on my way from Northern California to Minneapolis to cover an NFL game between the 49ers and Vikings, because no matter what else happens on the holidays, football will be played.

So — dead late at night, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. The place had an eerie glow, long hallways and blue lights and closed storefronts and no people. I had taken the last flight out of California in order to spend more time with family, and let me just tell you, if you want to feel alone in the world, travel late on a holiday night.

I was hoofing it to my connecting flight, utterly unimpeded. A golf cart went whizzing past in the opposite direction, but I paid no attention. Within a few seconds I heard someone shouting my name.

By the time I looked up, Tony had already goaded his diver into turning the cart around — you could do this on a holiday night with nobody walking through the terminal besides a lost sports columnist — and was headed back my way. He was en route to some card show, Oklahoma City, I believe, where he would go sign autographs for a few hours and get paid a very nice amount of money.

It was family money. That’s how he joked about it. “Gotta pay for Christmas,” he said, or something like that.

It had been a few years, and I was seriously nobody in Tony Gwynn’s vast constellation of friends, acquaintances, business people, sports people, hangers-on. But, you know, baseball — Tony and I had a connection that went back to some of his earliest years in the majors, and those kinds of things don’t go away.

It was just a minute. There was a third guy in the golf cart whose job it was to make sure Mr. Gwynn got on the right flight, and it pretty quickly became that time. Tony just wanted to say hi. He asked how everything was going. I’m pretty sure I remember a dig about the fact that I’d had the idiotic judgment to move away from San Diego, but when I threw down the family card — we have many of our people up in NorCal — he nodded and smiled. “Yep,” he said.

He was an astounding baseball player. He batted .338 — for his career. He went through a stretch in which he struck out fewer than 20 times in a season eight times in nine years. He was ridiculous, crazy, insane good. And he was exactly the person who would stop everything while rushing to a flight to say hi. He was the least self-possessed superstar I ever knew.

Gwynn died 10 years ago today, the sixteenth of June, age 54, and it is still staggering to think he’s gone. He was both great and kind. Pure proof: It can be done.