Ray Didinger is gone. Gone on vacation, gone to the other side of the world, gone to places he has never been before and will never visit again. <\/p>\n
He and his wife, Maria, left last Sunday on a five-month Magellan-like cruise, a journey to Bora Bora, to the Hawaiian Islands, to New Zealand and Tasmania, to the Far East, to Canada and Alaska and back home again to their 15th-floor apartment in Center City<\/a>. <\/p>\n He will not be in Philadelphia to watch Super Bowl<\/a> LX \u2014 a prospect, given the very real possibility that the Eagles will return to the big game and win it again, that once would have been unthinkable. Didinger, after all, is regarded as the foremost authority on the franchise and its history, having covered, commented on, and written comprehensive books about the Eagles over his half-century-plus in journalism and media.<\/p>\n He also wrote a play tied to the Eagles, Tommy and Me, about his relationship with Hall of Fame wide receiver Tommy McDonald, and the play is the thing that makes the timing of his once-in-a-lifetime trip so ironic. Ten years after Tommy and Me\u2019s debut, Boys to Fame \u2014 a documentary\/feature film, produced by Sam Katz, about Didinger, his play, and McDonald \u2014 became available for purchase and viewing on Sunday morning.<\/p>\n Didinger, a week into his journey, isn\u2019t around for the release. And there was no chance he would be.<\/p>\n \u201cI would rather be here to help Sam promote it as best I could,\u201d he said before embarking on the cruise. \u201cBut this trip has been two years in the making, so there was no way to be here and tell Maria, \u2018Honey, we\u2019ve got trip insurance. Let\u2019s just bag this thing.\u2019 It\u2019s a long fall from the 15th floor to Locust Street.\u201d<\/p>\n Katz, 76, has seen his career evolve into multiple iterations that he still maintains simultaneously: a player in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania politics \u2014 he ran for mayor three times \u2014 a venture capitalist, and a filmmaker. Through his company, History Making Productions, he has produced documentaries about Philadelphia\u2019s filmmaking history, the rise of classical music in China, and one about Detroit\u2019s bankruptcy, Gradually, Then Suddenly, which in 2021 won the Library of Congress\u2019 Lavine\/Ken Burns Prize for Film.<\/p>\n \u00bb READ MORE: Watch: What the Eagles Super Bowl win meant to Vic Fangio’s hometown high school<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n When he saw Tommy and Me in 2016, its first run, he thought the play was worthy of film treatment \u2014 a film about the play and Didinger, that is. \u201cThe play itself was powerful, emotional, and a really incredible story of a relationship between two men,\u201d he said. \u201cI felt that a feel-good story like this would be timely, and I still feel that way.\u201d <\/p>\n He worried, though, that funding such a project would be a challenge. <\/p>\n His other documentaries, all historical and to one degree or another educational in nature, lent themselves to philanthropic contributions. A film delving into the life of a sportswriter, even one as well-known and locally admired as Didinger, required Katz to find private investors \u2014 and contribute money himself.<\/p>\n He found a group willing to back the film, former City Council member Allan Domb and Bullpen Capital founder Paul Martino among them, and decided, instead of pursuing a deal with a streaming service or television station, to release the film independently. It will be available on a website, boystofame.com<\/a>, on a pay-per-view basis \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m selling it direct to the Philadelphia sports fan,\u201d Katz said \u2014 and he hopes to generate attention and interest through grass-roots media coverage and screenings at film festivals and private clubs.<\/p>\n The 82-minute film covers topics, features voices, and reveals details and emotions that Tommy and Me, by its singular focus on the big brother\/little brother dynamic between McDonald and Didinger, and on Didinger\u2019s efforts to get McDonald into the Hall of Fame, didn\u2019t and couldn\u2019t. <\/p>\n Katz interviewed Didinger for more than five hours, talked to all four of McDonald\u2019s children and several members of his Hall of Fame class, and even tracked down Billie Jo Boyajian, who was McDonald\u2019s Queen\u2019s Court escort at the 1998 induction weekend \u2014 and whom McDonald scooped up in his arms and carried to the stage during the Hall of Fame dinner.<\/p>\n \u00bb READ MORE: As the NFL playoffs begin, remembering a Pa. pro football champion that wasn\u2019t<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n (In a fascinating side note, Boyajian pleaded guilty <\/a>last January to charges of theft, forgery, and misuse of credit cards while she was the treasurer of a Canton high school basketball booster club. Katz had interviewed her for Boys to Fame years earlier.)<\/p>\n The documentary bookends both McDonald\u2019s life and Didinger\u2019s. It directly confronts the fact that in 2021, three years after his death at 84, McDonald was diagnosed with the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, commonly known as CTE. <\/p>\n The McDonalds gave Katz access to scrapbooks that Tommy\u2019s parents had begun keeping of his exploits when he was a high school phenom in Roy, N.M., in the early 1950s. They also provided him with a video of McDonald\u2019s reaction \u2014 joyful tears, dozens of thank-yous and thank-Gods \u2014 when he received the phone call to tell him that he finally would be inducted into the Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve seen it a hundred times, and I still get a lump in my throat,\u201d Didinger said, \u201cbecause it\u2019s so raw and real and so true to the guy I know.\u201d<\/p>\n To Katz, though, it was important to give Didinger\u2019s background and story \u2014 his childhood in southwest Philadelphia, his careers at The Bulletin and The Daily News, NFL Films and WIP and NBC Sports Philadelphia \u2014 as much weight as McDonald\u2019s. To recreate Didinger\u2019s youth, Katz took over The Barn, a pub near his vacation home in Eagles Mere, Pa., for two days and transformed it into Didinger\u2019s grandfather\u2019s bar, the place where Didinger, as a kid, spent hours wowing patrons with his encyclopedic Eagles knowledge. Katz hired several of The Barn\u2019s regulars and a 10-year-old boy, none of whom had ever acted before, to star in the film.<\/p>\n