Riding into the sunset: Remembering Doug Nye

UPDATE: A funeral service for Doug Nye will be at 2 p.m. Thursday at Spring Valley Baptist Church, 91 Polo Road Columbia 29223

I’ll miss Doug Nye. A lot.

His passing is a very sad time for his friends and family. Our loss is large.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if ol’ Doug hasn’t already hooked up with cowboy movie stars Sunset Carson and Rocky Lane. And he’s probably telling Roy Rogers all about that Chicken Curse at Carolina.

And none of that would come as a shock to anyone who knew and laughed with and loved Doug.

I first encountered Doug Nye in one of his favorite places: the press box high atop Williams-Brice Stadium. He was smoking, laughing and telling stories, and he was surrounded by a big group of friends. And if you could somehow have added a few cowboys to the mix, you pretty accurately summed up ol’ Doug.

For as long as I knew him — nearly four decades — Doug was a Gamecock at heart, a smoker in the lungs, a storyteller at the mouth and a cowboy in his soul. He possessed a wonderful good nature. He was congenitally kind. He couldn’t resist making jokes at the most inappropriate times. He loved to make fun of cliches, and he knew more of them than anyone else. (Cowboys were not just cowboys, they were “the daring knights of the plains,” a phrase so full of lard Doug couldn’t resist using it in spite of himself.) And he was almost impossible to provoke to anger.

No one ever loved what they did more than Doug. He indulged his passions — cowboy movies and sports — in ways that make most other enthusiasts seem downright lethargic by comparison. He wrote about those topics for years, first at The Columbia Record, where he was the sports editor, and later at The State, where he covered sports and television and entertainment and whatever else he was assigned to.

Doug could write about anything. Like a good journalist, he had knowledge that ran a mile wide and a foot deep. Except in Doug, that knowledge ran for hundreds of miles and volcano-deep.

Ask him to come up with a story on earthworms in Lexington County, he’d find the sources, write a story and try and figure out how to get Gene Autry into the mix. And he’d turn it in on deadline.

Ask him to write about cowboy movies, however, and he’d have a novel-sized manuscript, complete with footnotes, on your desk an hour before deadline. Ask him to put together a piece on the Gamecocks, and he’d write a story so full of facts the USC sports information office would ask if they could use it, too.

I was Doug’s boss for a good many years. We’d meet sometimes over at the stadium and watch the Gamecocks play mediocre football, year after year. Doug’s authority was evident — he could name players, scores, statistics and oddly assorted facts before anyone else. Everyone knew he was the expert. When some unfortunate fellow wrote a book about the Gamecocks’ gridiron history, Doug read it and found dozens of errors no one else had spotted. When a corrected second edition was issued, Doug found even more mistakes.

Doug was also the fan. He wanted the Gamecocks to win; he desperately wanted them to win. He went to games knowing they would be defeated. He couldn’t help himself. Even though he knew the “Chicken Curse” — a vile force condemning the team to constantly disappoint supporters at the most unlikely times — was pure fantasy. Back in his early years as a sportswriter, he perpetuated the idea of a curse to explain how the Gamecocks would lose again and again, always at the worst possible moment. (The loss to Navy in the 1984 “Black Magic” season, for instance, was a prime example.)

Coach after coach denied the existence of any curse; everyone knew they were wrong and Doug was right. If you doubt Doug’s vision, just consider that this year’s victory over No. 1 Alabama was followed by an upset loss to unranked Kentucky.

Doug also loved the Yankees. No, not the ones who invaded and burned Columbia. The New York Yankees. The Bronx Bombers who have won more World Series than any other team. Given Doug’s love of the perpetual underdog — i.e., Gamecocks — his pleasure at the Yankees’ success is a bit hard to explain, except maybe even he needed a winner now and then.

I went over to his home to watch a Yankees game once; Doug invited me to sit down, but not in his reclining chair positioned exactly 13 feet to the left of the TV set. That was Doug’s “lucky” chair, and to ensure a Yankee victory, he needed to be in that chair placed in the correct way. I laughed and drank a beer with him. The Yankees won, of course.

But to talk about Doug, really, you have to talk about the cowboys. Their spirits animated his. He sometimes seemed to inhabit a world of black and white, the good guys wearing white hats, the bad guys the black ones, the good guys on the magnificent white stallions, the bad guys mounted on the headed-to-the-glue-factory nags. It may have been another case of Doug wanting to be with the winners. His cowboys were all winners: Roy Rogers, Sunset Carson, Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Rocky Lane, the Durango Kid, Johnny Mack Brown. No mistaking who’s on the side of law and order here.

Doug went out West once and got to meet Roy Rogers. He came back like a little boy who had seen Santa, except that Santa doesn’t have a stuffed horse at his home. Doug was awed by Trigger, Roy’s wonderful horse, who remained with his master after death, thanks to the miracles of taxidermy. I’m guessing Doug is still chuckling over that scene.

Doug was always fun. Well, once or twice, maybe, his editors got him sufficiently ticked off to be angry (editors can do that). But he couldn’t keep a smile off his face long, and before you knew it, Doug would be comparing a character in a Dilbert cartoon to his addle-brained editor (I know that because occasionally I was that editor). And no one ever, ever stayed mad at Doug.

In those editorial planning meetings — which everyone had to attend and everyone hated — he looked serious and supportive and full of good ideas, and then all of a sudden he’d offer a one-sentence wrap-up of everything that had happened in the meeting in the form of a monster cliche that brought everyone to tears laughing. It happened more than once.

About the only time he wasn’t fun to be around then was when he slipped out the back door to grab a smoke. That happened an awful lot, it seemed to me. I guess that’s what finally got him, too. He knew it was bad for him. We all told him. But then we’d get to talking about the Gamecocks’ latest disaster, or listening to a story about Hopalong, and, well, the time just flew by. And pretty soon it was all gone. Nothing left. Not even the smoke.

Bill Starr is executive director of the Georgia Center for the Book, based in Atlanta. He was a writer and editor for The State from 1973 until 2003, serving as a city editor, investigative reporter and arts editor. He received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the Humanities Council of South Carolina and the Order of the Palmetto in 2003. He is the author of three books, including, most recently, “Whisky, Kilts and the Loch Ness Monster: Traveling Through Scotland with Boswell and Johnson,” published in December by the University of South Carolina Press. Contact him at starrw@dekalblibrary.org