We’re very fortunate to have columnists in The Pilot like Gordon White with decades of sports memories and columns he wrote for The New York Times for 43 years. I especially enjoyed his recent column, “Stan The Man: The Nice Guy Who Didn’t Finish Last” (Jan. 27).

I had the pleasure of watching Stan Musial play for the St. Louis Cardinals when I was growing up in the suburbs of St. Louis.

Years later, in the 1970s, when I was director of marketing and sales for U.S. Steel’s Realty Division condominium projects in the Belleair-Clearwater area in Florida, I co-founded a golf tournament with the American Cancer Society to raise funds to fight cancer. We used our two Donald Ross golf courses that USS Realty Development owned around the Belleview-Biltmore Hotel.

Musial owned the Hilton Hotel on Clearwater Beach and not only agreed to be one of our celebrity guests, but he donated a block of rooms for use by the other celebrities who attended, like Buddy Rogers, Robert Stack, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Ralph Kiner, Johnny Bench, Willie Mays, Tom Seaver, George Gobel, Kathryn Grayson, Patty Berg and all of the other celebrity guests for the annual weeklong event.

Musial was our celebrity chairman one year, and in 1975, I wrote a four-page article for Tampa Bay magazine headlined “Golf at the Belleview-Biltmore.”

The article featured a two-column, full-page photo of “Stan The Man” in his batting stance that Gordon White so aptly described as “the corkscrew batting stance,” only Musial was armed not with a bat, but a golf club.

Jim Dawson

Pinehurst