Buck's Ballpark: Honoring an old friend of mine in Aledo (Texas)

Newspapers, spaghetti and 'The Gong Show': How I continue to remember Tony Eierdam

When I found out last week that I was going to go cover a football game in Aledo, Texas, I was enthusiastic.

For a number of reasons.

I was going to get the chance to see one of the true dynasties in Texas high school football, and one that is coming off yet another state championship. I was also going to see a game in one of the best football towns in the state (when you’ve won a bunch of games and titles like the Bearcats have, chances are the townsfolk know and appreciate good football).

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But I was eager to get to Aledo for another reason. I wanted to pay homage to an old friend of mine in the sports journalism business.

His name was Tony Eierdam.

If I had to describe Tony Eierdam, it would be someone who was larger than life, someone who had a dominating personality and someone who was passionate about the business and the athletes and coaches he covered. Tony grew up in the newspaper business, as his father worked at one of the papers in Fort Worth, so Tony definitely knew the business inside and out.

He was the quintessential small-town Texas newspaper sports editor, but he worked in a variety of places. From Henderson in East Texas (which was where I got to know him), to Graham near Wichita Falls, to Plainview within striking distance of the Panhandle. And then to Aledo, just outside of Fort Worth on the outskirts of the Metroplex.

At each stop, Tony brought his personality and flair to the stories and columns that he wrote. He made the athletes he covered feel extraordinarily special, and he reveled in their successes and shared in their disappointment whenever they fell short on the scoreboard.

I’ve used a similar approach in my stories and how I wanted to cover athletes. Like Tony, I wanted to treat each game like the Super Bowl or the seventh game of the World Series. And the stories were much easier to write when the teams I covered found a way to win.

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You would think by meeting someone like Tony for the first time, we would hit it off right away. But funny enough, that wasn’t the case.

I didn’t have very good interactions my first couple of times meeting or talking with him over the phone. That was when I was serving as sports editor in the late 1990s in Kilgore, Texas, right up the road from Henderson, when Tony took over as sports editor at the paper there.

To be honest, I found him to be a bit too brash and arrogant. We really didn’t keep in touch his first few months there, and I had no reason or interest in doing so.

But it was at a district track meet involving both Kilgore and Henderson that I got to see and know the real Tony Eierdam. The fun-loving side of him. The life of the party.

Buck Ringgold of SBLive Texas, right, alongside a commemorative plaque of former Aledo (Texas) sports editor Tony Eierdam

During a break in the action, I ran into him and he started talking (naturally). And the more he talked, the more I got to see his best side. We ended up hitting it off that day, and from that day forward, we became tight.

When football season came around, he invited me to his apartment in Henderson and would make some food for us. The best thing he made was spaghetti, which was so good that to this day, it’s still maybe the best spaghetti I’ve ever had.

I also found out that we shared some eclectic tastes in the non-sports TV shows we liked to watch. He was a huge fan of, among other shows, “Barney Miller,” “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “The Gong Show.”

Though I left Kilgore in January of 1999 to take a job in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, we still continued to stay in touch.

In the mid 2000s, he took a job as sports director of a radio station in Palestine, Texas and had his own daily talk show. On occasion, I would call in, but listeners didn’t hear my own voice. Instead, they heard the voices of legendary play-by-play announcer Keith Jackson and Beano Cook, the curmudgeonly college football analyst from ESPN.

There was a reason for that. Tony, like myself, loved to listen to sports talk radio and he loved listening to The Ticket out of Dallas. One of his favorite bits was one of the hosts doing a fake voice imitation of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, which usually began with the fake Jerry saying, “Good mornin’ to ya.”

Whenever me and Tony talked on the phone, he would always open each conversation with the fake Jerry. “Good mornin’ to ya.”

Tony ended up in Aledo in the late 2000s, serving as the sports editor of the Aledo Community News. When he got the job, I came down to his place a couple of times to stay with him and commensurate over the Rangers. He even took me on a tour of the Aledo Bearcat Stadium, which is the first time I saw it well before last week.

We continued to interact with Facebook and over the phone a couple of times, but partly due to my marriage (he also was in a relationship around that time), I wasn’t able to see him quite as frequently as I did in the past.

But in September of 2020, I received some jarring news. I found out that Tony passed away, mainly due to complications from COVID-19.

He was so popular in Aledo that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram did a story on his passing. I also saluted him with a column in the Fort Smith (Ark.) Times Record, which is where I worked for more than 20 years prior to me coming on board at SBLive.

And without a doubt, he’s still somebody I miss and still think about from time to time. To get to hang out with him one more time and to have his awesome spaghetti again.

It also would have been cool to tell him, when I started working for SBLive and when I would have Texas as part of my duties, that I was looking forward to maybe one day hanging out in a press box with him once again.

So, when I went down to Aledo, I went back to Bearcat Stadium, where Tony took me around all those years ago.

I saw the huge state of Texas outline at midfield, with the Aledo logo in between. I saw the 11 state championship titles listed on the field (the first 10 are on the sidelines and the most recent, 2022, was placed beyond the back corner of both end zones).

But the best feature to me was inside the press box, on the right-hand side once you walk in.

A commemorative plaque of Tony, with a photo of him in his natural element, working inside the press box. The inscription below reads, “A longtime sportswriter with an enthusiasm for covering local sports, especially the Bearcats and Ladycats. Tony was a treasure to the Aledo ISD community and will be forever missed.”

Then below that was a quote from Dutch Meyer, the legendary former football coach at TCU, Tony’s alma mater (he was also a passionate Horned Frogs fan, by the way).

“If a man is happy in his work and has a happy place to live, there is nothing else he can hope to have.”

Plaque honoring Tony Eierdam in the press box at the stadium in Aledo, Texas

That was my friend Tony Eierdam in a nutshell.

Needless to say, his spirit was with me all throughout that night, a game in which Aledo prevailed, 38-13, for its 17th straight victory.

I’m also hoping to be in his presence later on this year, should the Bearcats make it back to AT&T Stadium and play for another state title. So, in the place they affectionately call “Jerry World,” I can take two seats in the press box, one for me and one for Tony, and I can tell him, “The Bearcats made it back here, Tony.

“Good mornin’ to ya.”

-- Buck Ringgold | buck@scorebooklive.com | @SBLiveTX