Goldstein Was a Character, Like No Other

The phone could ring at home or in the office morning, noon or night, but the greeting always was the same.

"Is this Leonard Shapiro, that Trotskyite from Wisconsin?"

It was Joey Goldstein on the line, and over the next few minutes, the conversation could meander from the current state of the Post's sports section, the health of my wife and children, the status of a half-dozen mutual friends and at the end of one of our more recent chats, by the way, would you be interested in talking to Raymond Berry about the 1958 NFL Championship game?

Of course I was interested, just as Joey always knew I would be. At the time, he was helping with the publicity for ESPN's recent documentary on the 50th anniversary of the so-called greatest NFL game ever played, Colts vs. Giants at Yankee Stadium, a natural subject for the media column I've been writing for most of the last twenty years.

Joey always knew how to pick his spots. Over the course of a half-century career as one of America's pre-eminent sports publicists, he had contacts -- no, make that friends -- in virtually every big city newsroom in America. He was always well aware of the sorts of stories they adored or abhorred, and whenever Joey called me with a suggestion, he already knew I probably couldn't resist.

It worked that way with many of my colleagues across the country, all of whom surely are now mourning the death last Friday of a one-of-a-kind character straight out of a Damon Runyon short story. He was 81 when a heart attack and subsequent stroke suddenly and so sadly took him away, but even toward the end, he had the energy of a man half his age, with a motor and a mouth that never stopped running at full speed.

I first met Joey back in the late 1970s when I was an assistant sports editor at The Post, and right from the start, he treated me like a long-lost cousin. Quite frankly, I often thought that somehow we actually were related. He shared the same name, Joe, and alma mater, NYU, as my own father. Both grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan, and my mother's maiden name just happened to be Goldstein, as well.

Then again, Joey was from the South Carolina Goldsteins, where he spent his childhood until the family moved north to New York City in 1940, apparently no relation to the Brooklyn Goldsteins on my mother's side. Still, Joey always felt like family, and judging from many of the tributes I've been reading and hearing from mutual friends around the country over the past few days, he had the same sort of effect on so many others, as well.

Why was I the "Trotskyite from Wisconsin?" That's what the late, great Howard Cosell used to call me back when he was still speaking to sportswriters. It figured that he and Joey were pals, going way back even before Cosell had become the most controversial sports broadcaster in the history of the medium. Howard knew I had gone to the University of Wisconsin in the turbulent 1960s, and while I never had been any sort of radical bomb-thrower -- save for the occasional column/rant about dreadful Badger football in the school newspaper -- Joey always delighted in greeting me the same way.

He started out wanting to be a sportswriter, doing stringer work for the old New York World Telegram when he was still in high school, spending time with the New York Sun before it folded in 1950. He worked for a while in basketball publicity at Madison Square Garden until 1954, when he became the public relations director for Roosevelt Raceway, a harness track on Long Island near where he lived, and I grew up.

His promotions and publicity stunts at Roosevelt over the next 15 years became the stuff of PR legends. One year, he'd been told that a French horse coming to town for a big race had thrived at home on Normandy artichokes, none of which were available in the New York metropolitan area. Joey started to get the word out that the horse was training poorly and even sulking in his stall without his artichoke diet, prompting a wave of stories and a subsequent flood of donated artichokes to the track. The day of the race, 45,000 spectators also showed up, and don't you know that the horse, Jamin, fueled by who knew what, won the race.

In 1969, Joey started his Manhattan-based Joe Goldstein Public Relations firm. The New York Marathon was a quirky afterthought on the city's busy sports calendar until Joey got the account for the race in the early 1970s, eventually turning the event into an international happening. Over the years, he promoted track and field, college basketball, the New York Stock Exchange, the Saudi Arabian Olympic soccer team (don't ask) and even Evel Knievel's Snake River motorcycle jump, among many of his countless projects.