[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 34 (Tuesday, February 23, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S817-S818]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    REMEMBERING MEL RICHARD ANTONEN

 Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I would like to include in the 
Record the following obituary for Mel Antonen, a native South Dakotan 
and longtime Major League Baseball reporter for USA Today and 
elsewhere, who passed away on January 30, 2021. He is honored by 
Charles Raasch, also a native South Dakotan, of USA Today with an 
obituary upon his death. I extend my deepest sympathy to the Antonen 
family.
  The material follows:

       Mel Antonen, family man, friend to the world, and renowned 
     sports journalist, died Saturday of a rare acute auto-immune 
     disease and complications from COVID-19. He was a longtime 
     USA TODAY Sports and MASN-TV baseball reporter who covered 
     nearly three dozen World Series. In a half century in 
     journalism, he reveled and excelled in telling others' 
     stories.
       He was 64.
       Mel Richard Antonen's own story became the best of all. It 
     began in the tiny town of Lake Norden, South Dakota, on Aug. 
     25, 1956, when he was the third of four children born to Ray 
     and Valda Antonen.
       Lake Norden is 225 miles from the nearest major league 
     ballpark and has never been populated with more than 550 
     people, but on soft summer evenings fans from counties away 
     congregate at Memorial Park to watch a new episode of South 
     Dakota's storied amateur baseball history. Its pull never 
     left him even as he walked, as a sports journalist, on 
     Boston's hallowed Fenway Park with the late Yankees Hall of 
     Famer Joe DiMaggio, or sat in a pre-game spring training 
     dugout with another Hall of Fame member, Minnesota Twins 
     slugger Harmon Killebrew, weeks before Killebrew died in 
     2011.
       The Antonen family has promoted amateur baseball in Lake 
     Norden for decades. Mel loved to tell how his father, Ray 
     over the years brought to the tiny hometown a series of 
     barnstorming pros, including the legendary Satchel Paige and 
     Cy Young Award winner Jim Perry, to play at Memorial Park. On 
     the mornings of home games throughout his childhood and 
     beyond, Mel, his father and siblings would groom the field, 
     with the rising corn and soybean fields ritually marking the 
     progression of summer beyond the left-field fence.
       ``I love baseball because it always brings me home,'' 
     Antonen said at his induction to South Dakota Sports Hall of 
     Fame in 2017. ``A baseball park in my mind is a home. It 
     doesn't matter if it's next to a cornfield, as it is in Lake 
     Norden, or if it is next to a rumbling subway, in New York.''
       At USA TODAY, and later as an analyst for MASN, the network 
     that covers the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles, 
     Antonen ``was a very good storyteller who went far beyond 
     balls and strikes and the score of the game,'' said his 
     retired USA TODAY Sports editor Henry Freeman.
       Dan Connolly was among the reporters in the Washington-
     Baltimore area with whom Antonen was close, as they two sat 
     next to each other in the press box and exchanged good-
     natured barbs.
       ``He had such an easy way about him with players and media 
     and staff,'' Connolly said. ``It was one of those things, 
     everyone liked the guy. Everyone. He had a way about him. He 
     could relate to anybody. He was really very smart, and being 
     a South Dakota boy, he was very ease to relate to. I remember 
     him saying that if he didn't go into baseball writers, he 
     wanted to be a Lutheran minister. You could tell Mel 
     anything, he was a pastoral listening-type guy.''
       Antonen's journalism career began as a kid, when he called 
     in scores from Lake Norden's home games to two newspapers 
     that he ended up writing for: the Watertown (S.D.) Public 
     Opinion, which paid him as a high schooler 15 cents a copy 
     inch; and the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, where he got his 
     first job after graduation from Augustana University, 
     eventually covering the sports, farm and political beats.
       He joined USA TODAY in 1986, where one of his earliest 
     assignments was covering the Tonya Harding Olympics figure-
     skating scandal. Antonen became a MLB reporter and columnist, 
     covering history from Cal Ripken Jr.'s consecutive games 
     streak to the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa record-breaking home 
     run race and the steroid scandals that followed. The story he 
     often said was seared most in his memory came during the 
     earthquake-interrupted 1989 World Series. There, sitting in a 
     press box high above San Francisco's Candlestick Park, he 
     watched as the entire stadium undulated dangerously during 
     the destructive Loma Prieta quake. Antonen filed a story, 
     then headed out for days to cover the aftermath, focusing on 
     the human costs.
       Hall of Famer Ripken told USA TODAY Sports' Bob Nightengale 
     that Antonen ``was a fixture around the game for so many 
     years, and it was clear that he had a passion for baseball. 
     He was a thorough and thoughtful reporter and left his mark 
     on his profession.''
       Along with the World Series, Antonen covered three 
     Olympics, and professional bowling leagues.
       ``I can't imagine being anything other than a reporter, an 
     ink-stained wretch,'' he told his Hall of Fame audience.
       Freeman, his editor at USA TODAY's pioneering sports 
     section, said Antonen's knowledge of baseball, reverence for 
     its history, and his love of stories, was evident from the 
     first day.
       ``It became clear to me right away the understanding he had 
     of baseball, and a lot of that was because of his father,'' 
     said Freeman.
       Freeman said one of his favorite stories involved Antonen 
     at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. Canadian sprinter Ben 
     Johnson won the 100 meters in world-record time, but failed a 
     drug test, was stripped of his gold medal and ordered to be 
     sent home. USA TODAY received a tip that Johnson had 
     reservations on one of several potential flights out of South 
     Korea, and Freeman immediately sent Antonen to the airport to 
     find Johnson and to do anything necessary to get an 
     interview.
       Carrying nothing but a walkie-talkie and his reporter's 
     notebook, Antonen arrived at the airport and quickly 
     discovered that Ben Johnson was booked on a flight to 
     Toronto. Antonen bought a ticket, went aboard and found Ben 
     Johnson--who turned out to be a doctor, decades older than 
     the sprinter by the same name. Antonen turned failure into a 
     memorable human interest story about the frantic hunt through 
     Olympics high-security obstacles that ended with the wrong 
     Ben Johnson.
       ``It was a non-story that he made a good story of its 
     own,'' Freeman said. ``It also showed the lengths that Mel 
     would go to get a good story.''
       Using persistence and personality, Antonen scored a rare 
     interview with the notoriously press-shy DiMaggio, late in 
     the legend's life, after learning that DiMaggio was in Boston 
     for a special event at Fenway Park. The man considered 
     ``ungettable'' by many sports journalists talked for several 
     hours with Antonen, and they finished with a stroll in front 
     of the Green Monster. DiMaggio ``loved the history of 
     baseball,'' Antonen years later told the Argus-Leader.
       He was a sports broadcaster for MASN's Mid-Atlantic Sports 
     Report, and radio analyst on Sirius-XM in the last decade of 
     his career, and also wrote for Sports Illustrated and other 
     publications. He did a radio interview on the baseball Hall 
     of Fame voting from his hospital bed less than a week before 
     his death. He especially loved talking baseball with long-
     haul truckers on his late-night satellite radio show.
       Antonen's mother died when he was 12. His father, himself 
     enshrined in the South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame, raised Mel 
     and his sisters, Kathy and Carmen, and brother, Rusty, with 
     the field at Memorial Park becoming a refuge.
       ``My life reflects the power of baseball,'' he said in that 
     2017 speech. ``One of my earliest memories of Lake Norden 
     baseball was the summer of 1969. . . . In March of that year 
     my mom died after a year-long battle with cancer. But it was 
     baseball, and Lake Norden baseball, with hot dogs and a 10-
     cent glass of pop and chasing batting-practice foul balls on 
     a beautiful summer night, that created a diversion from 
     fearful images of three months prior--(of) my mom's tan 
     casket, crying adults, the hearse in front of Trinity 
     Lutheran, on an overcast subzero day, when there were piles 
     of snow in one of South Dakota's worst winters.''
       Antonen kept reporting and writing throughout his illness 
     with COVID-19 and an auto-immune disease so rare that his 
     doctors told him he may have been the only person on Earth 
     with that combination.
       Months after being diagnosed with both diseases, Mel scored 
     an interview with Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious 
     disease expert and big baseball fan, who talked about the 
     need for caution, but also hope, in a pandemic. ``You've got 
     to go on with your life, but that doesn't mean you have to 
     deprive yourself of all the pleasures'' Fauci told him.
       Antonen's final column for MASN, written after the Dodgers 
     won the World Series in October, paid homage to the 
     comforting and reassuring next-year ritual of baseball. It 
     ended this way: ``World Series 2021 prediction: The Padres in 
     six over the White Sox.''
       Mel Richard Antonen is survived by his son, Emmett, 14, and 
     his wife, Lisa Nipp, a photojournalist, whom he married in 
     2001, along with three siblings and their families. Lisa 
     embraced the many characters in Mel's baseball orbit, once 
     holding the phone for Mel with the crusty, late Hall-of-Fame 
     pitcher Bob Feller by discussing the beauty of hollyhocks.
       ``From Joe DiMaggio to Dusty Baker and Bryce Harper, I have 
     gotten to meet and interview and become friends with people 
     that baseball fans around the world would love to know,'' he 
     said in that Hall of Fame speech in South Dakota. ``But those 
     experiences only happened because I grew up around people 
     that we should all be lucky to know. The lessons learned 
     here, and on the prairie, have gone with me and worked 
     beautifully. And tonight, baseball brings me home once 
     again.''

[[Page S818]]

  

                          ____________________