Tuesdays With Morrie

'Tuesdays with Morrie' Author
Endeavors to Practice Lessons of His Mentor

morrie.gif (13312 bytes)

Ken Garfield
The San Diego Union-Tribune
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
June 20, 1999 (Copyright 1999)

Mitch Albom used to rush through airports, dodging people who wanted to grab him by the shoulder and bellow, "How 'bout them Pistons?" He was a big-time Detroit sportswriter barreling to his next big- time assignment. He had neither the time nor the interest to slow down and relate to some guy whose existence he figured revolved around ball games and Budweiser. So whenever anyone approached him in the airport to talk, the big- time sportswriter on deadline followed the advice offered by National Basketball Association coach Chuck Daly: "Always keep your feet moving." But that was in another time long ago, before Albom wrote a book that changed his life and touched the lives of millions who have read it. Now when people stop Mitch Albom, it's to tell him about a mother with cancer or a father who just died, and how "Tuesdays with Morrie" (Doubleday) helped them see what really matters. Often they'll recite the book's signature line: "Death ends a life, not a relationship."

The young sportswriter who wrote a book about his dying college professor and the need to slow down and savor life no longer runs through airports. Now when a fellow human being stops to talk, Albom stops to listen. You will not find a more unlikely conscience of the culture. ESPN regular Albom is sharp-dressing and fast-talking; he's 41 years old and at the top of his game. His high-speed life is spent flying from here to there, covering Detroit's beloved Red Wings hockey team one season, the Wimbledon tennis tournament in England the next. When he's home in Detroit, he hosts a radio talk show from 3 to 6 p.m. weekdays. He also hosts two other radio shows, on Saturdays and Mondays. In a streak of invincibility surpassing that of any team he has ever covered, Albom has won the Associated Press Sports Editors column-writing contest 13 of the last 14 years. When Albom's not writing columns or winning awards, he's spouting opinions faster than a know-it-all on a bar stool as a regular on ESPN's "Sports Reporters." The TV show is seen locally at 7 a.m. on Sunday. "I think he's a jerk," said Charlotte, N.C., mortgage processor Lisa Kitterman, who tunes in anyway. "It's sort of like a big windbag thing." He may be a windbag on sports, but to Kitterman, 32, he's a gentle visionary on life. She read "Tuesdays with Morrie" in one afternoon at South Carolina's Folly Beach, and it moved her to tears. "It's about the whole idea of grasping life," she said.

When he's not working, Albom plays keyboard in a band -- the Rock Bottom Remainders -- with fellow hotshot writers Stephen King, Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Roy Blount Jr. and Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons." King jokes about "Tuesdays" being like the Energizer Bunny, Albom said. It just keeps "going and going and going." When he is working -- firing off Detroit Free Press columns on deadline -- woe be it to any editor who tries to cut even an inch of his prose. Said one Free Press colleague: "Sometimes I wonder myself if he should stop and read the book once in a while." That same colleague sat at his desk until 3:30 one morning finishing "Tuesdays with Morrie."

3 million copies

With Albom now, it always comes down to that. Since Doubleday published a modest first run of 25,000 copies in 1997, the book about Albom's final visits with Morrie Schwartz, his beloved college professor, has struck a nerve. "Tuesdays with Morrie" has sold 3 million copies worldwide and is in its 64th U.S. printing. It has spent the last 84 weeks on The New York Times' best-seller list for nonfiction hardback. It's available in 26 countries and is a hit in Australia, Brazil, Japan and Spain. Albom has turned down offers for Morrie Schwartz refrigerator magnets. He has heard that comedy star Adam Sandler, hoping to be taken more seriously, wants to play him in a movie being planned by Oprah Winfrey. Dustin Hoffman and Jason Robards are two of the names he has heard to possibly play Morrie. All this for a 192-page book that chronicles Albom's visits to suburban Boston for 14 Tuesdays in 1995 to talk about the meaning of life with a dying old man.

Albom had lost touch with Schwartz soon after graduating in 1979 from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. He had promised to stay close to the colorful sociology professor who loved to dance, and who once taught a class on trust by getting students to fall backward into each other's arms. But who has time for promises and professors when there are games to get to? A TV show reunited them after 16 years. Albom was channel-surfing late one night on his wide-screen TV when he slowed down to see what was on "Nightline." There was Ted Koppel, of course. But who was that fellow he was interviewing, the thin little man talking about laughter and dignity even as Lou Gehrig's disease was robbing him of his strength and, ultimately, his life? It was Schwartz. Though not especially religious (he was raised Jewish in suburban Philadelphia), Albom wonders today whether it was more than the accidental surfing of channels that brought student and teacher back together. "God, fate, destiny, I don't know," Albom said. "I don't even watch `Nightline' all that often."

'A final thesis'

Albom got in touch with Schwartz after the show. Soon he was flying to Boston each Tuesday, renting a car, stopping at a deli to get bagels and salad and then spending the day at his professor's bedside. They began talking by the light of the window in the professor's study. By the time death ended their conversation, Albom was caressing his feet, and Morrie was telling him, "I don't know why you came back to me. But I want to say this. . . . If I could have had another son, I would have liked it to be you." Albom's not sure why Schwartz chose him to be the student in what they both wistfully called "a final thesis." Albom thinks it might have been because Schwartz saw some of himself in this grim workaholic of a sportswriter who refused to let his feelings show. "It was like he was forgiving me," Albom said. Albom was deep into his Tuesdays with Morrie before he decided to write the book to help cover the Schwartzes' medical bills. By then, he had already begun gently clipping a microphone to the neck of the professor's pajamas, recording the weekly words of wisdom. One London critic said "Tuesdays with Morrie" is high on schmaltz, serving up dollops of syrup for navel-gazing baby boomers wondering where to look for meaning. Albom might take that as a compliment, for he spent nine months in his basement working to craft simple sentences that reflected Morrie's simple lessons. With Morrie gone -- he died Nov. 4, 1995, at age 78 -- it's left now to Albom to keep the lessons alive, as he did recently with 40 Southern utility company executives and their wives on a two-day retreat. What an unlikely scene, this high-powered sportswriter preaching about life to wealthy men and women nibbling shrimp, sipping Chablis and planning the next day's charter fishing trip.

Forgive everyone

Recently in the Beau Rivage resort casino on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in Biloxi, Miss., gamblers were spending a fortune at the blackjack table. Upstairs in a ballroom, Albom talked about Morrie's anguish over never having reconciled with an old friend. Forgive everyone everything so you don't die with regret, Albom said. Forgive yourself, too. Albom talked to the group about the power of touch -- a hand on a shoulder, perhaps. You need the warmth of touch when you're born and when you die, he said, but you also need it in between. To this roomful of executives with beepers on their belts, he shared Morrie's vision of the one path to immortality -- giving yourself away to others. "Then when you die," Albom said, "you're not 100 percent gone. You live on. . . . They can hear your voice. It rings on. You spent time putting yourself inside them. That's why it lives." When Albom was done, the group retired to the Coral Room, where the walls are lined with aquariums full of exotic fish. The sea bass and lamb and more wine were on the way, but first the executives and their wives crowded around Albom for autographed copies of "Tuesdays with Morrie." Sharon Evans was one of the first in line. The wife of Mississippi Power Co. CEO Dwight Evans, she sits with dying patients as a hospice volunteer. She promised Albom that her husband, one of Mississippi's most powerful men, was going to read every word. "It's almost as good as the Bible," she said. About the only glitch in the evening came when Albom was introduced as Morrie. He said he gets that all the time.

Stopping to listen

The funny thing about all this is that the person struggling the hardest to live out the lessons of "Tuesdays with Morrie" is the guy who wrote it. Albom said as much to the group of executives in Biloxi. Here he is talking about putting family before business -- and he's on business more than 1,000 miles from his wife, Janine, back home in suburban Detroit. When he was done with his talk, Albom skipped dinner and conversation and rushed back to his room to finish Sunday's column. Here he is talking about the most important things in life -- and he covers games for a living, a job he said is getting harder to justify. Here he is telling people to open up and share -- and he doesn't like to share much about his wife or his younger brother, Peter, who lives in Amsterdam and is struggling with cancer. About all he volunteered was that Peter, 38, didn't like people trying to get in touch after they read about him in "Tuesdays." Here he is telling people to do like Morrie and hold back no emotion -- and he can't even bring himself to admit that all these people who stop to tell him their stories are moving him to tears. On those occasions when tears do well up, Albom says it's just something in his eye. Maybe in the end, this is why Albom and "Tuesdays with Morrie" have touched so many people. It's a book about an old man who tried to live a good life, written by a young man struggling to do the same. The young man isn't where he wants to be in life, but who is? That's the point above all others that Albom shares in the book and wherever he takes the message in person: Living is in the trying.

So now, after Morrie and the book, Albom stops whenever anyone wants to talk. Instead of seeing a sports fan obsessed over a game, he sees real people carrying pain like a 50-pound weight. Albom's not to the point where he knows what to say to somebody about a death in the family or a struggle with loneliness. So he just forgets about where he's rushing to for a moment and listens. Wherever Morrie is, the young man can hear the old man whispering, "I told you I'd slow you down."