At some point, we should make a list of the top 100 Detroit personalities of the WKNR era. When we do, Joe Falls will be near the top. He was one of the first bylines we looked for whenever we opened the sports section. His knowledge was encyclopedic, his opinions were often hotly debated and his love for the games people play was palpable. He witnessed every major sporting event that made history in Detroit. He shared our joys and heartbreaks and helped make sense of it all in prose that sprang from his keyboard with the intensity of a lightning bolt. At news conferences, he seemed to always ask the one question everybody else missed.. The question that often defined the story. I crossed paths with him only once, the day Judd Heathcote announced that Ervin Johnson was turning pro. He sat in the back of the room but everybody knew he was there. To some of us it seemed as if he had divined the details weeks earlier, and was just waiting for the prophecy he had so elegantly documented in his column to be fulfilled. His death, of heart failure on August 11th, leaves a gaping hole in the Detroit News masthead, but he lives on in the generation of sports writers who were fundamentally and irrevocably influenced by his professionalism and his class.