When the call came that May morning that Dave DeBusschere didn’t make it, that they just couldn’t get him to the hospital in time, the yellow legal pad on my desk was turned to the page headed “DeB”, and sat next to a copy of The Open Man.
Dave and I had been playing phone tag for several weeks. I’d leave messages for him, he’d leave messages for me. I knew someday soon we’d have that long talk, about the trade that brought him to New York, about the Camelot years, about his fabled teammates, about Red, about Lost Battalion Hall and the Vitalis commercial, about winning the Ewing lottery, about everything.