ALL FRIENDS ARE BEST FRIENDS

By Keith Olbermann

The business of being a “best friend” implies an element of exclusivity.

Unless you do it right.

Unless you do it the way Pedro did it.

He always treated me as if I were his best friend, and as is testified to by the outpouring of grief at his passing, and by this book itself, I was anything but alone. There were certainly dozens of us. There were probably hundreds.

I also have no recollection of how our friendship built to that level. Because here, too, Pedro dispensed with unnecessary delays and forms. I thus have no historical milestones to even confirm when we met. My clear memory—and it is the clear memory of everybody I communicated with after he was taken from us—is that as soon as some beachhead of comity was established, he moved immediately to trusting you with his confidences, his uncertainties, his life. I imagine if you didn’t live up to a certain standard (or if somehow he didn’t) the beachhead was retreated from. I have yet to hear of that having happened with him.

It was a singular way to live a life. It really should be a model for—well, for the world.

I have eight years’ worth of Pedro’s texts in my phone and eleven years’ worth of Pedro’s emails in my laptop. They are all collegial, commiserative, even conspiratorial. Because he was emphatically dedicated to the truth rather than the scoop, he constantly sent me stuff he stumbled across that he couldn’t report, but maybe I could. If I had attributed any of them to him—or even if I had lost my phone, or mistakenly forwarded his emails—it could have gotten him in trouble at ESPN. This not only didn’t faze him, but he would follow up these secrets with texts to make sure I got the theoretically dangerous emails. He sent these when he worked for ESPN and I didn’t. He sent them when we both worked there. He sent them after I left. He sent them after I got back.

Trust. Trust. Trust.

Then there was all the personal stuff. If somebody I didn’t like, or he didn’t like, or we didn’t like, made a fool of himself, in would come the Pedro Gomez email with the cut-and-paste or the link. A good sidebar story that might have fit somewhere into my show on MSNBC or the one on ESPN2 or GQ or SportsCenter? In would come the Pedro Gomez text. A compliment about me? A text, an email, and another text.

I look at his messages and they describe most of my life for the last dozen years. Politics. Bad World Cup refereeing. Nominations for “Worst Person In The World.” Nomination for “Worst Person In The Sports World.” The passing of a sportswriting legend from New York. The passing of a sportswriting legend from Boston. An owner mocking a reporter who was being carried out of a stadium by EMTs. Why Mark McGwire was a historical comparison for Charles Van Doren. Fox News mistaking the NCAA for the NAACP. How his son was doing in the minors. More politics. How he noticed my name was written on the wall near the press elevator at Dodger Stadium. Fabulous typos on Twitter. Some off-the-record stuff from players that might improve the live shot he heard I was doing from Yankee Stadium that night. Me leaving MSNBC. Even more politics. Me rejoining ESPN. Me re-rejoining ESPN. Covid spikes. Shows we liked on ESPN. Shows we didn’t like on ESPN. A book about the election I might want to write for…

For context, you must understand something: We only worked together for a total of five years. I don’t think we were on the same broadcast more than ten times. I don’t think we were in the same place at the same time more than a dozen times in our lives. Didn’t matter. I doubt he conceived it this way, but to Pedro, all friends were best friends.

In February, 2019, I was anchoring SportsCenter the day Oakland A’s spring training opened and their top minor-league prospect Kyler Murray was supposed to report. Instead, Murray bailed out, that day, to pursue his career as an NFL quarterback. You can’t spell “Astonished” without “A’s” and that they were such was underscored by a prop Pedro used in his report on the show I was anchoring. Murray was listed on the first official A’s spring training roster handed out by the club that morning. The team made sure the stack of printouts then vanished as quickly as Murray did. As a memorabilia collector who has since 1967 walked the tightrope of becoming a hoarder, I answered Pedro on the air by telling him that even if they had all been shredded, he had to get me one of those roster sheets with Murray on it.

It arrived the next day by FedEx and, no, ESPN didn’t pay for the shipping. He did.

Some men look at the world and ask what they can get out of it. I don’t know if he planned it this way or it was something deep in his psyche or it just happened, but Pedro looked at the world and asked what he could do that day to help his best friends. And we were all his best friends.