Tom McIntyre RIP

I’m still feeling a bit rocky and am unable to type, but Tom deserves better than excuses, so let’s go.

My friend Thomas McIntyre died in his sleep at his nome in Sheridan Wyoming last week at 70 years of age. As far as I know he had no premonitions.. He had talked to me cheerfully a few weeks before; he had just completed his magnum opus, the magisterial and thoroughly weird Thunder Without Rain,and the publisher accepted it without any major changes. ThiS was a victory, and he was savoring it.

Tom and I have been friends for more than three decades. During that period he called me the most annoying man on earth and statement to me and expected me to  agree with io. We agreed on everything from our odd politics to esthetics, quarreled about anyway,  and yelled a lot. Both of us had strong  Irish Catholic streaks , and both of us went to private Catholic schools, if that meant anything.We never went too long without talking to each other because each valued the other’s opinion more than almost anyone’s.. But it was not an easy relationship. I firmly believe that Tom was the best of our generation’s sporting writers, period. He had vast and rarely unacknowledged influence among his contemporaries, but also  the sporting magazine as it existed  when he came into the field field, and read them, and used them as good writers do, and regularly surpassed  its standards  without a whiff of condescension.  He. knew his  Ruark, sure, but also his Nabokov and he was not shy about expressing what he had learned  from either or both   in the pages of popular magazines. (Somewhere a hilarious letter by editor Dave Petzal exists, moaning about this).

Tom’s obsession in game was of course the Cape buffalo, the subject of his last book . That he was able to persuade David Mamut to give an introduction to it is a tribute to the quality of his prose.

He leaves me a bit lost. Who else could I call late at night to get the source of an obscure quote, or just laugh at the absurdity of the situations we encounter every day. I will miss him. But I can’t even imagine how much his wife  Elaine, or his son Bryan will miss him, or his best friend Carey Caruso, an LA lawyer who accompanied him on many of his trips. I will miss the originality of phrase that peppered his conversation as well as his prose—. he once described a well-known editor at a convention as having “an expensive suit and an inappropriately youthful haircut.” Perfect!  When he was writing about the genesis of his own strange book, A Snow Leopard’s Tale, he wrote that Stephen J. Bodio had “of course” approved of it and accepted it. I did and I did.

Good bye Tom. I know   I will continue to miss you, moore than I even  know now..