‘A consummate reporter’ — former TNT columnist Bart Wright offers memories of John Clayton

Editor’s note: Bart Wright, former sports reporter and columnist for The News Tribune from 1981 to 1996, worked closely with famed NFL reporter John Clayton. Hearing of Clayton’s death Friday, Wright offered to share memories of a close friend and colleague.

It would have been kick started sometime back in the 1980s when we had the most primitive version of the internet and no cell phones. Like the Stone Age.

I was covering the Seahawks and writing columns for the Tacoma News Tribune and for Pro Football Weekly. Back in those days, you didn’t Google up a story from a Pittsburgh newspaper, you called the reporter. There had been a deal or a rumor of a deal involving the Seahawks and the Steelers that prompted my first call to John Clayton. He told me everything I needed to know, and then some. He also put me in touch with an agent I had been trying to contact and said I should tell him John gave me the number.

That agent became a great source of mine over the years, thanks to John.

After that, I learned I was one of a couple dozen he kept in touch with that way. It was what he did, day in, day out.

I just saw John a couple months back in Tacoma. His death last week has rattled me to my core. For a time, maybe two or three years, I felt like I talked to John more than I talked to my family or anyone else, on a daily basis.

Our first meeting was just a part of business, and then it developed into a friendship that lasted decades, right up until a few days ago.

The origin story for our friendship began back in the 1980s after I acquired a list of NFL salaries for every player in the league when that kind of inside information was highly confidential, top secret stuff. I knew a player on the Seahawks connected to the NFLPA who gave me the list. John and I had been chatting by phone every day or so and he was desperate to get the list. As it happened, we were both headed to Albuquerque for an NFLPA meeting as player strikes were being discussed.

I brought a copy of the list, gave it to John and we talked even more, constantly, almost. Around then, the paper wanted me to write columns full time and wondered if I knew someone who could provide good Seahawks coverage. After one phone call, John was interested. We talked back and forth, he talked on the phone to the right people at the paper and both sides said yes. I found him an apartment in Federal Way where he stayed for a couple years until developing a relationship with Pat, who worked for us at the paper. They eventually moved in together over by Renton, closer to the Seahawks.

John was the most dedicated news reporter I have ever personally known. Goofy? Oh hell, yes. On the road, he would often skip Saturday dinner because he had to work compiling his list of notes and who knows what all.

He was a consummate reporter. Nobody worked the phones like John, with his ever present cheery opening line, “Hey, big guy, what’s going on?”

I remember hearing him talk to then-Idaho coach Dennis Erickson when John offered to help out with the phones on college signing day at the News Tribune.

John had a list of a few Tacoma-area recruits we thought were headed to Idaho and he asked Erickson to confirm the names.

Erickson told him the NCAA didn’t allow him to do that and Clayton said, “No, that’s not the deal. I need you to confirm this to me, give some details, and I’ll cover for you, your name will never come up.”

He got the names. He always got the names, sometimes from players, often from agents or general managers, sometimes even coaches would confide in John because, well, it was John Clayton. Nobody ever attacked John for being unprofessional, they all wanted to talk to him because they would always learn something.

That was the Clayton magic. He was the reporter who called teams for information that the teams actually wanted to talk to. When he was with us in Tacoma, there were daily calls to him from general managers, agents or assistant coaches around the league feeding him information and getting some in return because John was the one who always heard trade rumors and such before anyone else.

There are hundreds of classic Clayton stories. I told him a few years back we should write a book one day about his many exploits. He demurred at first, but I tried to convince him it would be like a scrapbook, not a long drawn out narrative, just a collection of all the fun stories we could never get in the paper. He liked the idea, with the qualification, “Let’s do it when I get time.”

That’s an unwritten book, unfortunately.

John loved his rhythm and blues, which he once told me he would play loud in his room growing up because it was noisy where he lived. It was.

One dark Saturday, when the Seahawks were in Pittsburgh, he invited me to his home, located in a humble section of the city, with train tracks running 20 yards or so out the kitchen window. The house shook a little bit when the Amtrak barreled by, but it was mild, the home warm and cozy. John’s mom cooked us a great roast that night. It felt like home.

He was loved back home and he was quickly loved in his new home where readers were always writing and phoning in their support for him. When we were together, it always felt a little like the Cisco Kid and Pancho, and I was, happily, Pancho, immediately accepted by other team executives or agents because I was a friend of John’s.

He had his fun when the work got done, but the reality was that the work he wrestled with daily was always there, beckoning him to come back. There were a couple of times in New Orleans, once at a Super Bowl, he was left wobbly-legged after losing a battle with too many hurricanes, but he was always there for kickoff the next day.

The legend lives, because there may not be another quite like John and his reportorial passion. People have families, outside interests and desires to get away from the job, but not John.

Pat was his family after his parents passed, the job was his life, it fulfilled him, it was an unswerving daily passion that defined him. I knew him to go without sleep, to pass up a meal because he needed to make or receive an important call.

He was of another time and space, a place where the craft was everything, where the daily rattle and hum of phones and interviews, facts and figures all made up his happy place, for no one loved breaking a story more than John.

This was just that one story none of us wanted to know.

This story was originally published March 19, 2022 at 12:50 PM.