My friend just posted this on FB, the cold call part is pretty amazing:
"A tremendously sad day, as the great Ernie Banks has died. I was incredibly fortunate to get the chance to interview him for a story I was writing for Major League Baseball several years ago. We spoke on the phone and when I asked him about his career with the Cubs, he instead started out by telling me about playing baseball while stationed at a US Army base in Bremerhaven, Germany. He recalled how the local community had come to see him off on his last day before returning to the States, and then sang for me, in German, the song they had sung for him more than half a century earlier. Our interview went incredibly well from there, and unlike most of my interviews with great ballplayers he acted like I was doing him the favor by talking to him. He was happy to answer all my questions. In fact, at the end of the interview, when he heard that my cousin was a huge Cubs fan, he insisted that I get him his phone number at work. Ernie then proceeded to cold-call my cousin at his office, and when he was understandably too nervous to even utter a word to his hero, Ernie guided him along by asking him about how he would improve the Cubs, who at the time were playing their typically inept brand of baseball. Soon they were talking about the 1908 Chicago Cubs starting rotation, and after the conversation ended Ernie insisted that I send him all the information on that team so that he could bother the current Cubs players and ask them why they weren't as good as Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown and Johnny Evers!
Working for the Hall of Fame and Major League Baseball over the years, I've come to learn that quite often, great athletes are not great people. Ernie Banks was an emphatic exception to this trend, one of the nicest men I've ever met. I remember when I asked him if it bothered him that he never won a pennant during his playing career, he told me a story about how after his retirement, he had to go to the hospital with an infection that could have been life-threatening, but was treated in time because one of the doctors had grown up rooting for him and recognized him in the emergency room. He then told me, "That's winning." Ernie Banks did a lot of winning in his life, and now that he's gone, I feel a tremendous sense of sadness. This is what losing really feels like."