Ray Didinger wanted to retire but couldn’t stop working. Now he’s written another play.

Ray Didinger wanted to retire. He was done. It was time to be home and watch his granddaughter play field hockey. He covered Philadelphia sports for more than 50 years — perhaps better than anyone ever did — and it was a great run.

“I fully intended to retire,” said Didinger, who bid farewell in the spring of 2022. “I really did. I was committed to it. I really wanted to retire. But my phone kept ringing.”

The Phillies were headed to the World Series. Three months later, the Eagles reached the Super Bowl. The radio shows wanted Didinger’s voice. He was soon appearing again on TV. There were books to be updated, articles to write, and shows — Didinger’s Tommy and Me still is running after its debut in 2016 — to attend. His retirement proved to be more of a sabbatical.

“People tell me that 10 times a day, ‘I thought you retired,’” Didinger said. “Well, in a sense, I did. I’m not locked into doing radio every Saturday at 10 a.m. I’m not locked into being on every Eagles pregame or postgame. I can choose to be as busy as I choose to be. When people call up and say, ‘Can you do this podcast?’ or ‘Can you write a story for this dinner program?’ I could always say, ‘No,’ but I never do. I probably should.”

The “retired” Didinger could finally make his own schedule, which allowed him last summer to carve the time to revisit a story he first wrote when he was just breaking into the business.

Didinger was working nights on the desk in January 1971 at the Philadelphia Bulletin two years after graduating from Temple when he saw a story come across the wire.

Brian Spencer played for the Toronto Maple Leafs on the same night his father was killed by police. The player’s father was so angered that the Maple Leafs game wasn’t being aired as planned that he went to the TV station with a gun before the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived and a shootout occurred. The player learned what happened the next morning.

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This is a big story, Didinger told the night editor. The editor disagreed. It’s a hockey story from British Columbia, he said.

“I just remember thinking, ‘Gosh, this is so much more than that,’” Didinger said.

Didinger asked the sports editor the next day if he could follow up. He called the Maple Leafs and left a message for Brian Spencer. Didinger didn’t expect Spencer to call back.

But he did, and they spoke for an hour. Didinger sent him a copy of the Bulletin with the headline “Tragedy Turned Triumph.” Spencer thanked him in a letter. The story later won Didinger his first writing award, and he credits it for helping launch a Hall of Fame career.

Spencer played in the NHL for 10 seasons, and Didinger stopped by the Spectrum every time Spencer came through Philly. They often talked about Spencer’s father, growing up in Fort St. James, and the player’s challenging family life. Spencer retired in 1979, fell into a chaotic life after hockey, was charged with murder in 1987 before being found not guilty, and was killed months later at 38 years old after buying drugs.

“It’s the kind of story that never really leaves you,” Didinger said. “I always felt that I would write that story again. I have too much history with this story to never write it again and bring it to conclusion. I just didn’t know when or how.”

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Didinger’s retirement gave him the chance. Perhaps Spencer’s story could be a play, just like Tommy and Me. He started writing last summer near the start of Eagles training camp — “My whole life is determined by football seasons,” the Eagles expert said — and finished his first draft eight months later.

“I must’ve rewritten that thing at least 25 times,” Didinger said. “It was a real challenge. But there was never a point where I said, ‘Forget it. This isn’t working.’ Because I really wanted to tell this story. I had lived with it for the better part of 50 years, and I just felt like I wanted to bring it to conclusion.”

Finally, he had it. The Delaware Theater Company agreed to put on the show — titled Spinner — and a cast was hired. Didinger sat in the seats on Sunday and watched the dress rehearsal. Everything came together.

It premieres Friday night after three days of previews. Didinger has written another play, positioning himself as the Andrew Lloyd Webber of Philly sports theater. Not bad for a retired guy.

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“I’m very nervous about it because it’s so different than Tommy and Me,” Didinger said. “It’s a very different story. I think a lot of people are going to come to the play without knowing much about it and expect it to be a Tommy and Me, happy, feel-good story. It’s a tougher story. It’s complex and very dark. But the story itself is very powerful. The fact that I never forgot it after 50 years tells you what kind of story it is.”

Didinger fell in love with theater as a kid when his parents took him to the Academy of Music to see Golden Boy, a musical starring Sammy Davis Jr.

“We were walking up Locust Street headed to the theater and walking toward us to the stage door was Sammy Davis Jr.,” Didinger said. “He walked right by us and I thought, ‘Hey, this is really cool.’ Then to go into the theater and see it happen live. I had been to the movies, but the difference between seeing something on the screen and seeing it live was awesome. I wanted to do this again.”

He became a sportswriter but never lost his affinity for the arts. Didinger was thinking about how to tell the story of his relationship with Tommy McDonald, the Eagles great he met as a kid and then helped him reach the Hall of Fame decades later, but didn’t know how to do it.

He was at a show with his wife when he realized his story with McDonald could be a play. He wrote it that night, had some friends help mold it, and it’s returning to the stage next month for the 10th straight year.

Perhaps the success of Tommy and Me gave Didinger the confidence to try it again. But this story is different. He had a relationship with the subject but is not portrayed in the production. The themes are darker, and the ending is far different. It was a challenge, Didinger said. But he pushed through. He wanted to do right by the guy who called him back and helped him get his career going.

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“People often say to me about Tommy and Me, ‘Oh, it’s a play about football,’” Didinger said. “I don’t see it that way. I think it’s a play about relationships, and it’s a play about a little boy and his hero and dreams coming true. Yes, my hero played football. But he could’ve been a concert pianist or a baseball player. Anything. That was the guy you looked up to, and this is the story about how he affected your life. That’s what Tommy and Me is about, and football is the backdrop. The real story is the personal story between the little boy and his hero.

“I view Spinner the same way. People say it’s a hockey play, but I don’t think it is. It’s a story about a father and a son and their pursuit of their mutual dream of the son getting to the NHL and the price that people are willing to pay to realize their dream. It’s a family story about how this whole thing affects the family. I tried to write it as a story about the family and this whole pursuit that they had of building everything around this one kid who was going to make it.”

Didinger retired a few months before his granddaughter started her final season of field hockey at Gwynedd Mercy University. She was a team captain, and Didinger wanted to be there. He hosted his final radio show at WIP-FM, was celebrated by NBC Sports Philadelphia, and signed off.

“I wanted to see every game. Not that I understand the first thing about field hockey, but I just felt like I wanted to be there,” Didinger said. “Because when that’s gone, it’s gone. You can’t look back and say, ‘Jeez. I wish I would’ve seen Haley play.’ That was important to me. I wanted to do that and I got to do that.”

And then his phone started ringing. Just when he thought he was out, Didinger was pulled back in. He’s a regular guest on WIP-FM’s morning show and is featured by NBC Sports Philadelphia. He updated his Eagles Encyclopedia after the Birds won the Super Bowl before it’s released next month. He is just “busy enough,” Didinger said as he still spends time with his family while also staying involved in the business he loves.

“In a lot of ways, I feel like I have the best of all worlds,” Didinger said.

And he finally found a way to retell a story he’s been thinking about for 50 years. Retirement can wait.

“I do love it. I really do love it,” he said. “I was born here, raised here, grew up here. I went to school here. I never worked anywhere else. I’m as Philadelphia as anyone could ever possibly be. I grew up in a real sports culture with a family that just loved it, lived it and breathed it. Here I am. I’m going to be 79 this week. I feel so fortunate that I’ve been able to do exactly what I always wanted to do in the city where I grew up. Writing about and talking about the teams that I followed since I was a kid. Who gets to be that lucky? I have and I’m grateful for it.”