Trying to read between the lines with the perfect stranger
None more so, I learned this week, than an American sportswriter who was once called Mike Penner. He died last November, aged just 52, having since worked under the byline, Christine Daniels.
Several of my visits to some of western Europe’s coolest cities – think watching a brass band in Hamburg’s famous Fishmarket on a Saturday morning or taking in Checkpoint Charlie on my way to the Olympic Stadium – were, unfortunately, as quick as a beery hiccup.
Recently on a train journey, reading a newspaper travel feature on the city of Leipzig, for example, I was embarrassed at how much I contrived to miss in my time there.
My Leipzig was not the renowned old Opera House or historic Augustusplatz. No, mine was the cramped basement of a 24-hour internet cafe where an entrepreneurial Turkish proprietor sold illicit bottled beers to myself and dozens of ticket-less Mexico and Argentina fans sitting on up-turned crates.
Hanover, though pleasant, was my least favourite destination. Predictably, I managed to alight on that particular platform more than any other.
One evening after a game, I sat at a bar in an ‘Irish pub’ I had come to know, to pass the hours before the next train.
Watching the televised late match, nursing a cloudy German wheat beer I fell into conversation with the sports editor of the local newspaper.
We talked football, the Sultans of Ping FC and match tickets. In the course of the evening, like a Harold Pinter play, two American reporters joined the chat. One (I think) was Mike Penner.
Ultimately, after the grown-ups exchanged business cards (I didn’t have one obviously) I caught my intercity express to the next host city.
Penner probably did the same. But, I now know, after Zinedine Zidane dotted a violent full-stop in the tournament with that headbutt on Marco Matteratzi in Berlin, the LA Times writer returned home to California.
Not long after, in 2007, his loyal readers were greeted with an unusual column – beautifully written and creaking with wit – headlined “Old Mike, New Christine”.
Prompted by a supportive editor, the normally-circumspect Penner wrote: “During my 23 years with The Times’ sports department, I have held a wide variety of roles and titles. Tennis writer.
Angels beat reporter. Olympics writer. Essayist. Sports media critic. NFL columnist.
“Today I leave for a few weeks’ vacation, and when I return, I will come back in yet another incarnation. As Christine.
“I am a transsexual sportswriter. It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words.
“I realise many readers and colleagues and friends will be shocked to read them.”
Within two weeks his wife – a colleague on the sportsdesk – had filed for divorce.
The well-known Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly (now ESPN) – whose famous bid to see every sport at the Barcelona Olympics on a budget of $2,000 inspired me on my €150-per-day quest to see every team in Germany – wrote of how he was surprised at a book signing by his old pal who turned up in a frock.
“I’d heard about the change of course,” Reilly wrote.
“Everybody in sports had. Mike had announced it in an amazing column. And my first thought was, damn this guy is really hurting for a column idea. Gal, whatever.”
While she now clip-clopped into the Clippers press box wearing high heels and elegant dresses, Daniels also endured the transformation from private citizen to instant celebrity.
She gave speeches, was profiled in magazines and collected plaudits from an alphabet soup of acronymic transgender groups.
Fans of Penner’s writing may have missed his byline, but his stubble-sharp humour was still felt in Daniels’s offerings.
His first professional outing in women’s garb was to witness David Beckham’s arrival at LA Galaxy’s Home Depot Arena.
The former Man United star “arrived wearing a silver-gray Burberry suit, surrounded by a phalanx of assistants and yes-people,” she wrote.
“I arrived wearing a golden-hued top from Ross, a multicoloured paisley skirt and a pair of open-toed tan heels, surrounded by nobody...”
And though once Becks took questions from the LA Times man in a newly-affected soft voice, soon his manly timbre addressed the city’s famous athletes again. In mid-October 2008, after a lengthy leave of absence, a familiar byline re-appeared in the sports pages and the Times newsroom welcomed back their colleague as a man.
At 5:45pm last November 27, Penner was found by neighbours, slumped in the front seat of his car in his building’s underground parking garage with a vacuum hose stretched from the exhaust into the passenger window.
I searched for his business card in an old shoe box full of ticket stubs and train tickets this week.
I found the German guy’s but not Mike’s, sadly.
Not that it ever told me much of who he was at all.
adrian.russell@examiner.ie
Twitter: @adrianrussell
