Philly sports-talk legend Didinger turns playwright in 'Tommy and Me'

Any Philadelphian who knows sports knows Ray Didinger. A statesman of football reportage, he's penned locker-room reports and gridiron stories for the Philadelphia Bulletin and Daily News, along with several colorful books. Didinger is on the honor roll of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and is a respected member of Comcast SportsNet's Eagles Post Game Live and the WIP radio roster.

"The Eagles locker room is to me what the Mississippi River was to Mark Twain," says Didinger. "I never tire of it."

His is not a name you'd expect to see in Philly's arts pages. But he has become a playwright: His first play, Tommy and Me, opens Wednesday at Fringe Arts, courtesy of Theatre Exile and its founding artistic director Joe Canuso, who directs. With Didinger's restless vigor and earnest adoration of football, the play tells of Didinger's efforts to get Tommy McDonald, the legendary Eagles wide receiver (1957-64) who was on the team's 1960 NFL championship team -- into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

It's autobiography, and it's hero-worship. Young Ray Didinger first befriends rookie McDonald during Eagles training camp, when McDonald lets young Ray carry his helmet.

"That's not something you see today," says Canuso. "Everyone's too guarded. Too few players can be seen as role models."

Tommy and Me also captures the pair's later relationship. McDonald (a Maxwell Award winner with 495 receptions for 8,410 yards and 84 touchdowns) retires in 1968. Didinger starts his sportswriting career in 1970 and builds a following, interviewing McDonald now and again. The two become topic and essayist without McDonald remembering the writer as his onetime helmet-toter.

"When I would interview him for this anniversary or that, I never told McDonald about our history," says Didinger quietly, sitting on Canuso's couch in South Philly. "I kept our relationship professional, not 'Hey, do you remember that little kid who idolized you?' That would have been unethical." Decidedly old-school.

Didinger was writing out his work in pencil on a pad and getting "three separate sources" for every story. "Now," he says, "a player gets on social media at midnight and it's a story within an hour."

Didinger and Canuso's Tommy and Me is far gentler and innocent.

Relaxing in a row home near Theatre Exile's Wharton Street studios, the pair is a study of contrasts: Didinger neatly buttoned up in striped seersucker shirt, Canuso in baggy shorts and T-shirt. Each loved McDonald back in the day. "My family didn't have summer vacation in Hershey near the Eagles training camp," says Canuso with a laugh, "but I grabbed the sports page after my dad read it."

"I was 10, Tommy was a rookie, I'd wait outside the lockers or carry his helmet as he walked to practice," says Didinger. "We liked Tommy because he was little -- five-foot-nine -- playing against these giants. As a kid that meant something. That's the passion I wanted to convey in the play."

Didinger lovingly recounts McDonald's signature quirks: He always played in short sleeves, and at game's start, he sprinted onto the field, rather than jog. Didinger compares McDonald's zeal to that of a kid at recess: "There was always joyful abandon . . . getting the maximum from the moment."

"If Tommy got knocked down, he made a show of popping back up," says Canuso. "That's part of what made McDonald theatrical, his energy."

They tell hilarious, heartwarming tales of the first reading of Tommy and Me at Plays & Players in May 2015, to a packed house of sports fans who had heard Didinger discuss his project on WIP host Anthony Gargano's show. McDonald, then 81, was there with his family.

"It was standing room only, like I've never seen a reading," Canuso says. "In the middle of the reading, Tommy stands up, starts clapping and jumping."

Canuso should know sports theater. With Philly thespian Tom McCarthy and local playwright Bruce Graham, he created The Philly Fan, a one-man show of in-your-face Philly sports bloodlust that has played several times in town. "It wasn't my intention to be the sports-theater guy," Canuso says, "but there you go."

Didinger got to know Canuso and Graham through The Philly Fan. The sports writer developed a first draft  -- "really an expository . . . very documentary-like take" -- and pulled what he thought was a "sweet, one-of-a-kind story" out of his head. But he knew it would need shaping. Canuso suggested Graham.

"Ray took me to breakfast at the Penrose Diner and told me the story, wondering if there was a play there," says Graham. The playwright said there was one, and that it wasn't sappy: "The sentiment isn't manufactured."

Here Didinger showed his journo chops. Used to deadlines, he wrote subsequent drafts at blazing speed. "We'd meet at my place in South Philly and talk a half hour about the play and an hour about the Eagles," Graham says. "I'd make suggestions, and, I swear to God, he must have written them on the way home. I'd get a rewrite the next day."

The finale may be news to theater buffs, but Eagles fans know the story. Didinger led the charge to get McDonald, long denied entry, into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In 1998 he got to induct his hero, thus completing the circle.

Didinger wasn't looking to sensationalize -- just tell a powerful story in which sentiment is just part of the reporting.

"People ask me how I could go from cheering in the stands to writing about it objectively. How I could go from being a rabid fan to being an objective witness," Didinger says. "That's something the 'old Ray' and the 'young Ray' " -- played by Matt Pfeiffer and Simon Canuso Kiley, respectively -- "have a conversation about in Tommy and Me. You can't let the fan influence the reporter. McDonald's theatricality then, his drama, is all in the physical act of the game."

In Tommy and Me, the reporter in Didinger lets the fan in Didinger out.

"Tommy and Me," produced by Theatre Exile,opens Wednesday and runs  through Aug. 14. at FringeArts, 140 N. Columbus Blvd. ComcastSportsNet tailgate party at 5:45 p.m. Wednesday, with show at 7 p.m. Tickets: $35. Information: 215-218-4022, theatreexile.org