RIP JOHN CLAYTON: It was fitting that the passing of pioneering pro football journalist John Clayton this past weekend battled with NFL free-agency news for the headlines.
Clayton became a headline name himself breaking news in a 45-year career that spanned covering the Steel Curtain Steelers for the local newspaper to becoming the subject for one of ESPN’s more memorable commercials as one of sports’ first insiders for the worldwide leader.
Clayton knew everything and everyone in the NFL because that’s all he did. His idea of a vacation was spending two days working the phones at the Marriott Mission Valley. The way Clayton inhaled the beat in the ’70s and ’80s, keeping track of every salary and every roster in notebooks of information culled from phone calls to those with the numbers became a staple of how to cover the game once free agency hit and the NFL morphed into the national pastime at the turn of the century.
It is guys like Claytie that helped the NFL become as big as it…