Years ago, former Indiana University men’s basketball coach Bob Knight spoke of his friend, Ted Williams, being spectacularly proficient at two different things.
World’s greatest hitter. World’s greatest fly fisherman.
In a world in which most gain satisfaction by merely being above average in their work lives, Center Grove graduate David Benner did his best imitation of the legendary former Boston Red Sox left fielder.
Unknowingly, of course.
Benner, who passed away early Wednesday morning at the age of 67 following a 13-year battle against cancer, didn’t possess the ego necessary to do so intentionally.
Readers long enough in the tooth remember Benner as a sportswriter for the Indianapolis Star. He worked there from 1979 to 1994, his flurry of bylines topping game and feature stories about the Indiana Pacers, Notre Dame football and, for a time, Knight’s Hoosiers.
As someone who worked in the same sports department from 1985 to 1999, my tenure overlapped with Benner’s for roughly a decade.
We were even teammates on the Star/News softball team every summer along with the likes of David’s older brother Bill and the late Robin Miller, the Star’s lightning rod and occasionally-despised sports columnists at the time.
Mike Chappell started at third base, Bill and Robin manned their outfield posts, yours truly roamed center or right, and David Benner’s glove benefitted this most unruly cast of characters at first base.
On the diamond, we were, in a word, marginal.
Had laughs equated to runs, however, we would have finished undefeated every year. And it wouldn’t have been close.
David Benner, who could do amazingly accurate voice and mannerism imitations of some of our more-established co-workers, usually served as ringleader in those rare moments Miller wasn’t.
Then, in 1994, David Benner left to become the Pacers’ director of media relations, a job he held through the completion of the 2021-22 NBA season.
For 28 years, he pulled off an impressive about-face from his Indy Star days.
Dressed to maximum spiffiness every time I saw him in one of his suits — we were something of a jeans/concert T-shirt crowd in our downtown newsroom — Benner was about representing the Pacers organization in the most professional way possible.
Pull him aside, and you could still get an imitation or two from Benner. And then it would be back to work.
He was still David Benner. Different, but same.
“I don’t know anybody who didn’t like David. It was just his great sense of humor,” said Mark Ambrogi, another one of Benner’s co-workers at the Indianapolis Star. “We had great times with road trips. He took me to see Michael Jordan for the first time when Jordan was playing against the Pacers in an exhibition game in Cincinnati.
“David just always made you smile.”
Prior to Wednesday, the old Star sports department had lost no fewer than 10 full-time writers since the time I was there — John Bansch, Don Bates, Bob Collins , Kurt Frudenthal, Dave Garlick, Terry Hutchens, Robin Miller, Bill Pickett, “Bayou” Bill Scifres and Max Stultz.
David Benner makes it 11.
Typing these names, while sad, kick-starts countless hilarious memories that I hope to hang on to for the remainder of my days.
Rest assured, David Benner plays a starring role in most.
Mike Beas is a sportswriter for the Daily Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
