Sly and The Family Stone had a great song: Every Day People. This is a story about one of those people.

2 Weeks ago at the Gotham golf outing I was sitting in my cart just before the start. A grizzled old caddie approached and introduced himself to me as Joe. I asked him the year of his birth. He said 1935 and I said "78 is pretty old for a caddie". He said "what's more I have a partially torn Achilles tendon". Immediately, my cart mate Victoria Drogin and myself were sympathetic to him. From the start, we did all we could to make his job easier as we gave him a ride on our cart whenever we could.

As the holes went by we became more and more familiar with Joe. At one point he mentioned that he had been a writer. I asked him what type of writer and, bingo, he said a sports writer. I asked him for what newspaper and he said Newsday.

At this point I asked him his name and he said he was Joe Donnelly. I was amazed! When I was growing up on Long Island my two favorite Newsday Sports writers were Stan Isaacs and Joe Donnelly. Over the years I'd become friends with Stan Isaacs and here before me was his counterpart.

To say the least, it was the most pleasant kind of shock. Here was a grizzled old caddie, an every day person, who morphed into the immortal Joe Donnelly, a man who still has a baseball Hall of Fame vote.

Of course, I told him about Gotham and our mantra and invited him to a Long Island meeting at the Milleridge Inn.

To be continued.