Tuesday, June 04, 2002
DAUGHERTY: A foundation of love
House a memorial to UC's Sheffield
It was the first party he'd ever missed. Some 500 University of Cincinnati athletes built a house, as part of the Habitat for Humanity project. Saturday, they dedicated it. This was a party of the human spirit. Nobody loved a party like John Sheffield, not ever.
He'd have showed up in a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops, a couple Buffett tickets in his pocket. Oh, how the man loved Jimmy Buffett. Saw him 300 times. He'd have been smoking a cigar, talking on his cell phone and slurping Graeter's. He'd have been loud and profane, and by the time the party ended, everyone would have been his friend.
As it was, John Sheffield's friends dedicated the house in Evanston without him. Not all his friends, because the whole planet couldn't get the day off. But some of them, even some he never met. Maybe especially them. The seven members of Robert Getter's family never knew John Sheffield. Now, they'll never forget him.
“Just a blessing,” Getter said. His brood moves into the house in three weeks. “Just a blessing.”
Sheffield was a senior associate athletic director at UC until he died too soon. He passed in February at age 51, after a 10-month siege against lymphoma. He never hammered a nail into a stud, but he built that house on Clarion Ave. as sure as the athletes did. He didn't pour the foundation. He was the foundation.
“I want to build a house,” Sheffield's assistant, Carol Wissman, remembers him saying, more than a year ago. The story is, Sheffield had seen the Habitat house Xavier students had built just down the block, complete with a Xavier-blue front door. Sheffield would not let that go unanswered.
“We all just looked at him. "We don't have the money, John,' ” Wissman said.
“We'll get it,” Sheffield said.
He'd built a Habitat house while working at Florida State. He knew how, having worked his way through college as a carpenter's assistant. He also knew how to wheel and deal for the needed cash. “A world-class finagler,” is how Wissman puts it.
Wasn't it John who showed up at city public schools with armloads of old UC uniforms? Didn't he get the jerseys and basketballs to kids downtown? Sheffield also worked as a ticket manager at Florida State and Wisconsin. He helped with ticket distribution at 21 Super Bowls. Nobody knows how to make deals — and spot them — like a ticket guy.
There is a story from his time at Wisconsin. The basketball team had just moved into its new arena. Ticket demand was nuts. A Badgers fan badgered Sheffield for some.
“What do you want me to do? Drink ink, eat paper and (expletive) the tickets?” he asked.
That was Sheffield. So was this: After a Jimmy Buffett concert in Atlanta, he and some friends repaired to a hotel room and continued the party. The people in the next room called the cops. When the blue showed up, Sheffield said, “We tried to get those people next door to cool it, but they wouldn't.”
“We don't want to have to come back here,” the cops said.
They did, 45 minutes later.
“You said you didn't want to come back,” Sheffield said. He was, yes, wearing a lampshade on his head. “But as long as you're here, you wanna come in?”
It took Sheffield only a month at UC before athletic director Bob Goin took his cell phone away because he racked up outrageous minutes. Sheffield fixed that by getting the department a new plan, with unlimited minutes.
Sheffield would wake Goin with a call at 6:30 any given Saturday morning, just to tell him what a great day it was going to be.
“He was just a great liver of life,” Goin said. “He never wasted a day on this earth.”
Sheffield almost never missed a UC game of anything. Said Wissman: “You'd go to a soccer game, cold and rainy, there was John. Swimming, there'd be John. Soccer. Tennis. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but he was the biggest supporter we had.” A month before he died, weakened by nine rounds of chemo, Sheffield showed up at Shoemaker Center, to honor the women's soccer team.
During the 2001 basketball banquet, Sheffield had fled to his office and laid down on the floor in pain. His spleen was enlarged. He shaved his head when the chemotherapy began, knowing he'd lose all his hair. He went to the ground-breaking of the house, Jan. 5. Two weeks later, he went to the hospital and never came out. Goin took Graeter's to him there. Goin's wife, Nancy, made mashed potatoes for him. Sheffield's wife, Peggy, once took a book to him, but beyond Sports Illustrated and the newspaper John wasn't much of a reader. It required too much sitting-still time.
The book was “Chicken Soup For the Surviving Soul.” After John died, Peggy noticed just one page was dog-eared: An essay called “The Best Day of My Life.”
“He loved, I don't know, the humanity part of all this,” Peggy said. “The friendship, the camaraderie.”
We all can be replaced, but not all of us are remembered. The measure of our lives is the joy we leave behind. On an outside wall of the house on Clarion Ave. will be a plaque in memory of John Sheffield. For everyone else, there will be fond thoughts of a guy whose personality filled the day and made it good. A man who never got cheated out of one day of living.
“He lived a full life,” his brother, Michael, said. “Hell, he lived 10 full lives.”
Peggy buried John in shorts, a flowered shirt and a straw hat, the whole Buffett catalog. A pair of concert tickets creased his pocket. At the house dedication Saturday, Bob Goin wore a flowered shirt in John's honor.
You know how it is when someone whom everyone liked dies? It's a joke and a cry, like watching a rainbow through the drizzle. That's how it was Saturday on Clarion Ave. The man left the earth laughing. And too soon. Far too soon.
Someone asked Peggy Sheffield how her husband might have liked the house.
“John would be tickled to death,” she said. “No pun intended.”
The rainbow through the drizzle.
John Sheffield was a piece of work. A real piece of work.
E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com
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DAUGHERTY: A foundation of love