Remembering John Clayton and the idiosyncrasies that made him one of a kind

July 8, 2000. My wedding.

In attendance: the standard assemblage of family members and friends, along with one emerging celebrity. Years before John Clayton became “The Professor” to NFL fans, he was captured on my wedding video in another capacity.

The Love Doctor?

“How do you think Mike can keep the romance alive in his marriage?” the 15-year-old son of my best man irreverently asked on the now archival looking VHS recording.

John was then a rising star at ESPN, a leading expert on the NFL’s salary cap and a workhorse reporter in the old-school mold of his idol, Will McDonough. He was 12 years away from shooting the iconic SportsCenter commercial in which he showed, for the first time, that he didn’t take every little thing so seriously. I was then two years into succeeding John as the Seattle Seahawks beat reporter at the Tacoma News Tribune, a position John had proudly built into one with expansive budgets for travel and whatever resources were needed to cover not only the team, but the league.

A professional videographer wasn’t in our wedding budget, so here was Clayton, put on the spot for marriage advice by a teen-ager who thought it would be funny. John didn’t flinch. In classic Clayton form, he stepped into the frame as if delivering an ESPN live shot from an NFL practice field. His answer about how to keep the romance alive so perfectly reflected his trademark workaholic ethos that my wife and I joke about it to this day.

“The big thing is to make sure that once the Seahawks’ season goes bad, that he pulls off the bad stories he has to write and spends enough time at home in those usual times for a writer,” John said on the wedding video, referencing the team’s on-field futility in those days.

And what would those usual times be?

“After 10 o’clock, because he’s going to be on call until like 10 o’clock at night,” John said, “and make sure from 10 o’clock on, he pays full attention to Kim and does a great job.”

John wasn’t kidding. This was his actual advice for keeping alive the romance. All these years later, in those instances when I’m working deeper into the night than my wife would prefer, I’ve always got John Clayton’s 10 o’clock rule to fall back on.

No one worked harder than John. No one revelled in how hard he worked more than John. If he could somehow make one final check-in phone call following his death Friday at age 67, I can say with certainty and in the most affectionate terms that John would say two things. He’d point out that Saturday was his first day off in I-don’t-know-how-many years. And he’d grumble about how his own death had put him so far behind schedule, he’ll never catch up.

That was Clayton every day, year after year, up until the very end.

As the unsuspecting person hired to succeed John on the Seahawks beat at the News Tribune in 1998, I had zero choice but to uphold some semblance of the impossible standard John set in building the paper’s beat coverage into a 24/7 obsession. John wouldn’t accept anything less. That meant committing to the same work schedule he kept, or at least some facsimile. You earned John’s respect by working your ass off.

I’m not exaggerating when I say John called three or four times per day, seven days per week, 365 days per year, for my entire nine-year run on the Seahawks beat. This continued deep into our overlapping years at ESPN. We spoke so frequently, I was fittingly on the phone with John that dark day in 2017 when ESPN laid off some of its most established reporters and personalities.

John was rushing through the Denver airport, trying to make his connecting flight to cover the draft, as news of looming layoffs broke. It was surreal even then. As we were speaking, John heard the beep in his ear signifying an incoming call. John looked down at his phone and saw the dreaded 860 area code signifying someone calling from Bristol, Conn., where ESPN is headquartered.

A part of John died that day in 2017. He cherished everything about working for ESPN and what it represented, except occasionally having to visit Bristol, which he hated, despite the chance to accumulate airline miles, which he loved. But John was durable. He hosted local Seattle radio shows, subbed as a host on national SiriusXM shows, reported from the sideline during Seahawks radio broadcasts, appeared on a local Seahawks postgame TV show, wrote columns for The Washington Post, wrote about the Broncos for a radio station in Denver, continued as a voter for the Pro Football Hall of Fame and kept calling me and dozens of others, dozens upon dozens of times, whether or not there was anything new to talk about.

Something about John wasn’t right during his final weeks. He complained about how he felt, which wasn’t all that unusual; John complained about lots of things. Plenty of waiters and customer-service reps can attest to that.

John wouldn’t listen to anyone who advised him to seek medical help or even to take a break. Again, not unusual for John.

Getting him to take up golf recreationally stands as one of my greatest achievements, fleeting as it wound up being. I was thrilled to see him finally order a new car with power windows (John always got Camrys and, yes, he used to get them with the old hand-crank windows). If my berating of John played any role in him finally treating himself to a new house that he could have easily afforded for many of the years he inhabited a small condo with noisy neighbors and none of life’s luxuries, add it to the list of my proudest accomplishments.

The Professor was so old-school, he refused to wear seatbelts, presumably for fear of being trapped in a vehicle during a collision (the same reasoning my grandfather cited, except he had an excuse, having been born in 1902). It was an utterly ridiculous position to take in the current century, which I told John many times, but it did lead to some classically comical Clayton moments.

Imagine what it’s like speaking on the phone with someone or riding with them while the rental car seatbelt siren wails non-stop in the background.

“Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding, ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!”

It was like riding in a casino. Completely ridiculous. Completely Clayton.

My wife recalls John ducking under one of those automatic sliding seatbelt harnesses as it moved into place while he was taking his seat behind the wheel.

That’s how far John would go to be John.

Alas, the tip-off that something wasn’t right about John could not be found in his many idiosyncrasies. In retrospect, the tip-off revealed itself in some of his recent radio appearances and phone conversations. John didn’t sound the same. He wasn’t thinking the same. John stubbornly, defiantly insisted the Seahawks would not trade Russell Wilson, something I believe John never would have gotten so wrong back in the day. John called me after the trade and asked if I was surprised. He sounded terrible, almost defeated. It was our final conversation — so sad to think about now, but not at all how I’ll remember our many phone conversations over the years.

About John and the phone: He’d call and leave the same voicemail in the same hurried, urgent-sounding delivery, each message lasting three or four seconds.

“Hey, Mike, John Clayton, give me a call, 425-xxx-xxxx.”

Yes, for years, John would leave his number every single time, even though everyone he called already had his number, and no one even dialed numbers any longer, or even listened to half their messages. I couldn’t tell you from memory any of my friends’ phone numbers, but I’ll never forget John’s, having heard him leave it for me unnecessarily so many freaking times.

By never disclosing what he was calling about, John left the person on the receiving end unsure whether he was calling with an urgent news tip or simply to find out whether you had an accurate date of birth for the 10th receiver on the Philadelphia Eagles’ 90-man roster (which he cared about, for reasons we’ll discuss below).

It was a brilliant strategy when John was still in the news-breaking game, because you had to call him back just in case, even if it was a Saturday in April and you were finally sneaking away from the beat to spend a few hours with family. As texting became mainstream, I learned to fish for details that way during those times when it was toughest to answer his calls.

At John’s peak, when general managers and agents and coaches were calling him non-stop, John would frequently have to bail from whatever less important conversation was ongoing so he could take these higher-priority calls.

During his Seahawks beat reporting days, John might have one corded phone on each ear and a third extending from another desk.

There were dozens of times when our conversations went exactly like this:

Me, answering the phone: “Hey, what’s up?”

John, abruptly: “Oh, hey, gotta go, gotta take this one.” Click.

John had initiated the call, I had dutifully answered and we spoke just long enough for him to basically hang up on me. It was so comical. So Clayton.

Those incoming calls were sometimes producers from radio stations. John used to earn more doing freelance radio around the country than he earned as the Seahawks’ beat reporter at the News Tribune. He invested and saved as maniacally as he worked, before and after he’d accumulated enough wealth to retire comfortably, which he never wanted to do, and never did. I’m pretty sure he was still collecting income from municipal bonds he’d purchased in the ’70s.

To the end, John continued to do the grunt work that differentiated him. That included maintaining two exhaustive data sets that John updated every day, reflecting every NFL transaction. One data set included salary info for every player in the league. The other included heights, weights, positions, birthdates, colleges, draft information and current roster statuses for every player on every team, including players on various obscure reserve lists.

Clayton, speaking with Seahawks coach Pete Carroll at the 2018 owners’ meetings, took granular data and gave it national importance. (Mark Brown / Getty Images)

John pioneered granular beat level NFL coverage at the national level. Beyond his early knowledge of the salary cap, he doggedly called every team on the Fridays before games to collect the latest injury information. He followed up on Sundays to find out which players would be named inactive 90 minutes before kickoff. Teams developed systems to accommodate his calls, and other reporters followed in gathering the information.

Properly indoctrinated by John, I began keeping my own separate team-by-team rosters during the 2000s. John would procure the NFL’s internal daily waiver report, email it to me, and we both would enter the updated information every day, for every team. At any point, John might have the Arizona Cardinals with only 52 players. I might have the Minnesota Vikings with 54. We would spend however long it took, sometimes hours, on the phone trying to eliminate discrepancies. It could be mindless work, but it was also an exercise that gave both of us insights into roster construction that even people who worked for the teams might not have.

I finally stopped updating rosters several years ago as more robust data became available and the time investment no longer seemed worthwhile. John kept plugging away. He never could rest, which I always attributed to the insecurity that makes a person never feel satisfied, no matter their success.

John craved affirmation. To the extent levity is therapeutic in this moment, I must confess to joking with one of John’s other close friends that, had John known the reaction to his passing would be so incredible, punctuated by a formal statement from the NFL commissioner himself, he would have died long ago.

“How’d I sound?” John would ask following what could have been his millionth radio hit, long after he’d mastered his delivery.

Ten years ago, John forwarded to me an email from Gerry Matalon, then a senior producer at ESPN. The email contained an early script for the “SportsCenter” commercial that turned John from well-known reporter into cultural icon.

John initially sounded unsure whether to participate. He’d invested so much work in building his credibility. Donning a “Slayer” shirt (the original script called for “Megadeth”) and a ponytail, then screaming to his mother that he was finished with his SportsCenter segment was so far outside John’s comfort zone. The thought of John doing that commercial was so hilarious, I could barely contain my enthusiasm. I so badly hoped John would agree to do the commercial that I slow-played my initial excitement enough so John might feel as though he were making a reasoned decision, and not simply agreeing to some sort of comedic dare.

An early @JohnClaytonNFL script for @SportsCenter commercial called for John to be wearing a Megadeth shirt. Wound up wearing Slayer. I'm sure he had so many metal muscle shirts around the house, so many to choose from. pic.twitter.com/XkuOK4tk1b

— Mike Sando (@SandoNFL) March 21, 2022

John was already widely known among the hardcore NFL fans.

Before the Raiders played the AFC Championship Game against Tennessee following the 2002 season, fans outside the Oakland Coliseum recognized John and quickly enveloped our rental car as we tried to park it. I was covering that game for the Tacoma paper largely because John had forced the paper to commit to such coverage beyond the Seattle beat. As I recall it, we didn’t have a parking pass for some reason, which was initially a problem, but as fans increasingly mobbed our car for a shot at getting close to John, the situation seemed to magically resolve itself. A die-hard Raiders fan named “Raider Mort” gave John his card. For years, John beamed whenever the story came up. He mentioned how Raider Mort and the Oakland fans had his back that day, and loved reliving the experience.

John kept score in life using the currencies that reflected all the work he’d put in: Marriott nights (in the thousands), United miles (about 3 million) and even his own net worth, which swelled beyond anything John could have imagined to be possible during his childhood in Braddock, Pa. That is where John grew up in a modest home near the railroad tracks, the son of a divorced nurse.

Will McDonough, who was likewise 67 when he died in 2003, grew up tough in Boston and blazed the trail for the NFL newspaper information reporter to become a fixture on TV. John admired McDonough so much and took pride in carving out his own TV presence based solely on his insights and information, not any kind of flair for the camera.

The SportsCenter commercial took John’s fame to another level, beyond the die-hards, and he loved it.

During a Super Bowl week a couple years after John first screamed to his mother that he was finished with his segment, the two of us decided to leave the media center to grab lunch. In that environment, with NFL fans everywhere, I might as well have been walking down Hollywood Boulevard with Madonna on one arm and Beyoncé on the other. We couldn’t walk 10 feet without three fans asking John for selfies.

When we finally reached the sandwich shop, another stranger approached John with a request. The man introduced himself and informed John that someone in the room wanted to meet him.

The someone in the room was Evander Holyfield, the only four-time heavyweight boxing champion.

John and I looked over at Holyfield and then back at each other. It was a marvel to both of us what The Love Doctor had become.

(Top photo: James D. Smith / Associated Press)

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