Clayton, you see, called everybody “Big Guy.” But in the end, it was Clayton who had become the Big Guy, having built a nationwide reputation across various platforms, with a social media following of more than a million.
He accomplished this one infinitesimal detail at a time, constructing his beloved database of NFL contracts and parlaying that into a network of contacts that made him a pioneer among NFL “insiders.”
Some referred to his knowledge as “encyclopedic,” but that implies a broad base of information at a shallow depth. Instead, Clayton had a bottomless reservoir of facts on one specific topic: the NFL.
I worked with him for years — as competitors in the late 1980s and then through the ’90s as “teammates” at the Tacoma News Tribune. His hunger for news was obsessive. Seattle reporters turned his surname into a verb when we saw how often he would sprint from the Seahawks’ media room into the parking lot to track down a coach or team executive. When one tried pulling away in his car as Clayton ran alongside shouting questions, we called it being “Claytoned.”
He grew from just being a Seattle-area guy who was sharp with contract clauses to a guy with a famed ESPN commercial to a guy who was cited by former president Barack Obama, who once said he never set his fantasy lineup until he heard Clayton’s injury update.
Clayton told me over the years that several teams offered nice contracts for him to become their “cap guy,” but they didn’t understand that the rush for Clayton was in breaking stories and digging for news nuggets.
In the early days of his television exposure with ESPN, he used to kid that he must be a great reporter to get so much “face time” despite not being what anyone might consider a matinee idol.
His editor at ESPN, Chuck Salituro, once told me that that Clayton “comes across as ‘Everyman’ on TV” and viewers liked that he was not the “slick-haired Ron Burgundy type.”
“I think that adds to his credibility,” Salituro said.
And NFL executive Bill Polian told me in an interview that he often learned things about the league from Clayton rather than the other way around. “This is something rare in the media business,” Polian said, that Clayton “understands nuances and can weigh all sides of a question.”
In time, you couldn’t go to a restaurant with Clayton without football fans coming up to talk about their favorite teams or seek fantasy football advice. Clayton never once turned away a fan. He never wearied of the attention and recognition, either.
As many hours as I spent with him on the road and in press boxes, he never brought up his background. It felt, in a way, as if all the cold facts and data were covering up for something.
When I interviewed him in 2013 for a feature for our old newspaper, I wanted to pinpoint the sources of his motivation. It became clear he was not a statistical automaton; he was much deeper, with a career shaped by his relationship with two women: his mother and his wife, Pat.
“When you grow up in Pittsburgh, a steel town … and you have a single mom who worked hard and did everything for you, that [sets] the example,” he told me.
His mother, a nurse, encouraged him to start writing for his junior high newspaper, and before he was out of high school, at age 17, he was stringing Steelers games for suburban papers.
It was his mother, a nurse, who encouraged him to start writing for his junior high newspaper, and before he was out of high school, at age 17, he was stringing Steelers games for suburban papers.
Everything he became professionally, he said, he owed to his mother’s inspiration.
He met his wife, Pat, at the News Tribune; she was a sports clerk and compiled the bowling column.
“Pat is the perfect complement for John,” said Gary Wright, former longtime public-relations director and executive for the Seahawks. “She is dedicated to him, and he’s dedicated to her.”
That dedication manifested in acts of daily devotion in recent years as Pat dealt with the effects multiple sclerosis. As her mobility grew limited, Clayton spent more time at home.
It turned into a very moving third act of a love story, not at all what viewers and readers might have thought of the man they saw spewing raw facts about a violent game.
On his passing, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell released a statement, including this sentence: “He earned my tremendous respect and admiration as a journalist, but more importantly as a wonderful person, particularly as it relates to the love, care, and devotion to his wife Pat.”
Clayton would have loved that tribute. And he earned every bit of it.
Dave Boling is a retired sports columnist for the News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash. He worked with John Clayton there or as a competitor in the Seattle market for more than 30 years.