By RANDY COVITZ and MIKE FANNIN
Kansas City Star

He was, by accounts, a man for all seasons. He was an award-winning newspaper editor, a community leader, a persuasive voice for change, and later in his life, a study in quiet courage.

He was a father, a husband, a friend.

But above everything, Joe McGuff was the conscience of Kansas City sports for more than 40 years. When he died Feb. 4 at his Prairie Village, Kan., home, finally succumbing to complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the city lost one of its most influential and revered citizens.

And APSE lost one of its founding fathers.

McGuff lived 79 extraordinary years. He spent many of them writing sports columns for The Kansas City Star and fighting for the town to be recognized as major league.

But McGuff's influence carried far beyond the field. He may be the only inductee in the Baseball Hall of Fame who led a newsroom to the Pulitzer Prize. In his 44-year career at The Star, McGuff traveled the world, covering six Olympics, 16 Super Bowls and 31 World Series.

His sports columns helped sway voters to approve funding for the Truman Sports Complex and Kemper Arena.

At its peak, Kansas City was home to four major-league franchises, and McGuff was a central figure in the growth. He played a major role in the city getting the expansion Royals in 1969 after the Athletics moved to Oakland. When he wasn't campaigning through his columns in the late '60s, McGuff was pulling strings behind the scenes, badgering American League owners for approval. He found an ally in Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey.

As an owners session broke up during the 1967 winter meetings, Yawkey told McGuff that Kansas City would get an expansion team "sometime after the next two years."

That wasn't good enough for McGuff, who thought the promise sounded vague and squirmy. Baseball was expanding the next year, McGuff explained, and Kansas City wanted a guarantee from the owners it would be selected — now, not two years from now. Yawkey called the owners back in the room and a re-vote was taken. The Royals were born that night.

"That should tell you something about Joe's impact on baseball," said former Chicago Tribune columnist Jerome Holtzman, a Red Smith Award winner. "He was a very good and very fair writer who never called attention to himself yet did what was good for his community and baseball."

McGuff's connection to the game was lifelong. He was enshrined in the writers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., as the recipient of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award in 1985. Later that year, he threw out the first pitch in game seven of the World Series. The Royals, the team he had helped birth, won their first and only world championship that night.

McGuff was also there to help a fledgling organization of sports editors take its first steps. He went on to serve as APSE president in 1977-78.

McGuff's straightforwardness won him friends in many circles, even when his columns included a few jabs.

"Joe was a different breed of sportswriter," said former Royal George Brett, a fellow Hall of Famer. "He treated you with respect. He could criticize you one day and praise you the next, but it was all sincere. And he never carried a grudge, so you never carried a grudge with him."

McGuff was named the editor and vice president of The Star and the morning Kansas City Times in 1986 and oversaw several watershed moments, including the bittersweet merger of the afternoon and morning papers.

In April 1992, he retired. That same month, The Star won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Joe McGuff always knew how to leave people wanting more.

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