Let the record show that even at age 10, Ray Didinger did his homework. Of course he did, just as he would years later, during his half-century covering pro football as a writer and broadcaster.
So renowned for his tireless research that his retirement cake earlier this summer was made to look like a stack of yellow tablets – one of which he always had before him, covered with handwritten notes, as he dissected an Eagles effort on NBC Sports Philadelphia’s pre- and post-game shows – he actually spent his career doing what he had always done, all the way back to middle school.
So of course 10-year-old Ray knew all about Tommy McDonald, the Eagles’ third-round draft pick in 1957. There wasn’t much college football on TV back then, but there was enough that he knew McDonald had been a star halfback for Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma. That the Sooners had gone 31-0 McDonald’s last three seasons, part of a winning streak they would stretch to 47 games. That he rushed for 853 yards, averaged 7.2 yards a pop and scored 12 touchdowns on the ground as a senior, while catching four TD passes to boot.
“He was,” Didinger said on the phone Tuesday night, “the best player on the best team there was.”
Which is why young Ray was standing atop the stairs leading from the Eagles’ locker room in the basement of Hershey Arena to the practice field one day in the summer of ‘57: He wanted to meet Tommy. The Birds had convened in Hershey for training camp, as they would for several years back then, and Ray and his family were such big fans they always spent their vacations in town.
Finally McDonald, who was amid a transition to wide receiver, emerged. And Ray was shocked.
“He didn’t look any bigger than I was,” Didinger said of the 5-9, 175-pound McDonald. “He didn’t look any bigger, and didn’t look any older.”
He fell into step with McDonald, and the conversation began. Didinger mentioned Tommy’s upbringing on a farm in New Mexico. He mentioned OU. He mentioned this stat and that stat.
“I read so much about him, I knew his whole life history,” Didinger said. “The conversation was largely me rattling off his life history, some of which he didn’t know.”
The conversations would continue later in the day, when Ray and his family headed over from the old Cocoa Inn to the team’s headquarters at the Hershey Community Center, there to find McDonald and his teammates lounging on the steps near the fountain, having fled their stifling, un-air-conditioned rooms.
In time McDonald would let Ray carry his helmet as they walked out to the practice field. In time, he took to calling him “Little Brother.” And so it was that a life-long bond was formed. Their friendship is the basis of Didinger’s play Tommy and Me, which premiered in 2016 and had a limited run in and around Philadelphia. Now it is coming full circle, as it will be performed at the Hershey Theatre, Thursday through Saturday. (And it should be noted that the theater is located in the very same building the Eagles inhabited, all those years ago.)
“I always had in the back of my mind that I would love to bring it back to Hershey,” Didinger said. “I would love to bring the story back to where it began.”
It has long been said that it is a mistake to meet one’s heroes, for they can never live up to your expectations. It has also been said, notably by F. Scott Fitzgerald, that there are no second acts in American life.
Didinger would be an exception to both long-held truths. He not only met and adored his hero, but championed his 1998 induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame – having beaten Tommy to Canton by three years, as winner of the Dick McCann Award for his NFL coverage. And professionally speaking Didinger is on, like, his fifth act. In his 53-year career he wrote for the Philadelphia Bulletin and Daily News, worked for NFL Films, authored 12 books and did the radio/TV thing. He gave up the last of those gigs in July – hence the cake – having realized that there were days last season where covering the Birds just felt too much like work. That had never been the case before.
He also looked around the press box each Sunday, saw all the young faces and hearkened back to when he was starting out with the Bulletin, just out of Temple. The veterans then were guys like Bulletin colleague Ray Kelly, the Inquirer’s Allen Lewis and the Trenton Times’ Bus Saidt, and they looked impossibly old to him. In actuality they were all around 50.
Now, at age 75, he found himself wondering how he looked to the young bucks, even though his recent electronic work had given him street cred, a hip nickname (“Ray Diddy”) and a cult-like following. Whether he was doing his thing for NBC Sports Philadelphia or working on WIP alongside on-air partner Glen Macnow, he would deliver reasoned analysis, as opposed to hot takes. When everyone else seemed to be yelling and screaming, he would speak softly … and carry a big notepad. His approach played well in one of the nation’s most manic sports cities, but he nonetheless decided it was time to walk away.
“It’s a young man’s game now,” he said.
He and Tommy stayed in touch as McDonald’s 12-year career unfolded. It was one highlighted by a touchdown reception from Norm Van Brocklin in the Eagles’ 17-13 victory over the Packers in the 1960 NFL championship game, and one that saw him record 495 regular-season catches, for 8,410 yards and 84 touchdowns, while spending seven years with the Birds, one with the Cowboys, two with the Rams, one with the Falcons and one with the Browns. But it was also one that seemed destined to fall short of the Hall of Fame.
McDonald mentioned his disappointment at that last fact to Didinger when they spoke in 1985, as Didinger was working on a 25-year retrospective about the title team. As luck would have it, Didinger gained a Hall of Fame vote that year, and he began lobbying for McDonald, noting to his fellow voters that when Tommy retired following the 1968 season he was sixth on the all-time receptions list, fourth in receiving yards and second in touchdowns.
It took 13 years, but in 1998 McDonald finally gained entry. And when he did, he asked Didinger to serve as his presenter.
“I was shocked,” Didinger said, believing that Sonny Jurgensen, McDonald’s close friend and former quarterback, would be asked to serve in that capacity. “I was very honored, but very shocked.”
It was while he was riding in an open convertible alongside McDonald during a pre-induction parade through the streets of Canton that Didinger first thought about telling their story. But it wasn’t until 2014 that he grew serious about it.
“I couldn’t figure out the best way to do it,” he said.
He didn’t believe the tale had enough heft for a book, so he began thinking about a play. One problem, though.
“I had never written a play,” he said. “I didn’t know how to go about it.”
But he began putting his notes on paper, and then began shaping the dialogue and storyline. Joe Canuso, the artistic director at Philadelphia’s Theater Exile and the director of Tommy and Me, proved to be an invaluable resource during this phase of the creative process.
They staged a public reading in the spring of ‘16 – just the actors, without any scenery or stage direction – and the play was well-received. Especially by McDonald himself, who was in the audience with his family.
“At one point he got so excited,” Didinger said, “he ran on stage and started leading the crowd in an ‘Eagles’ chant.”
Didinger, ever studious, is always curious about the crowd as it files in before a performance. He worries not about those who might be dressed in Eagles regalia.
“I know I’ve got them,” he said. “I got them at ‘hello,’ to quote Tom Cruise (or, more accurately, Renee Zellweger in the 1996 film Jerry Maguire).”
It’s the other theater-goers Didinger wonders about – the non-football people. How will they respond? Will it move them? And in post-play talk-backs, he has heard again and again that it has.
He last saw Tommy shortly before his death on Sept. 24, 2018, at age 84. McDonald, who had lost his wife Patricia nine months earlier, was in hospice care at the home of his daughter Sheryl, in Audubon, Pa. And as Didinger arrived, having been told he better come quick, he also learned that Tommy, so effusive his entire life, could no longer speak. He could, however, understand everything that was said to him.
Didinger tiptoed into the bedroom where his friend was lying, wearing the green No. 25 jersey he had donned during his playing days. And no sooner did he hear Ray’s voice than he did indeed perk up.
Didinger remembers staying for two hours, at one point telling McDonald about the most recent performance of Tommy and Me: Why, Dick Vermeil was there! McDonald smiled and nodded, but he was drifting in and out. Finally he fell into a deep sleep. Didinger stayed a little while longer but then departed.
Two days later, Tommy was gone.
After a subsequent performance of the play, another one of Tommy’s four children, Tish, sidled up to Didinger.
“You know what this play has done?” she asked him. “It’s kept Dad alive for us.”
For others, too – one guy in particular.
“There’s something special about Tommy and Me,” Didinger said. “It was such a wonderful chapter of my life. … The whole time (the play is going on) I’m thinking, ‘Do you realize how lucky you are? This isn’t one-million-to-one; this is one-billion-to-one that somebody would be this lucky, to meet and have a hero like this guy.’ ”
He didn’t sound the least bit old when he said that. He sounded like a 10-year-old kid, filled with wonder, filled with awe.