George F. Will, the ever-loquacious political commentator and baseball scholar, has surely seen his fair share of restaurants come and go. But when it comes to one in particular, he does not mince words.

"Congress should intervene," Will says. He might even be serious.

The baseball world collectively drew a sharp, pained breath last spring, when Don Carson announced that Don & Charlie's, the beloved, well-worn Scottsdale restaurant famous for its Chicago-style meaty fare, memorabilia collection and star-studded clientele, would be razed to make way for a boutique hotel.

"He talked about selling the restaurant a couple of years ago, and now, all of a sudden, a couple of years ago are here," says Bob Uecker, a baseball legend and longtime friend of Carson's.

As the reality starts to set in, Don & Charlie's regulars are coming to terms with the imminent loss of an Arizona icon that many of baseball's greats consider, for six weeks every spring, to be the epicenter of the baseball universe.

"I've had more people say to me in the last month, 'Commissioner, what are we going to do? Is Don & Charlie's really going to close?'" says Bud Selig, the former commissioner of baseball.

If there is, indeed, no crying in baseball, Selig's successor, Rob Manfred, may need to make an official exemption for April 10. That's when Don & Charlie's — possibly in its current form, possibly forever — will serve its last steak.

This spring, Uecker, Will, Selig and the restaurant's legions of fans are getting their fix while they still can and struggling to figure out how to say goodbye.

They're not the only ones.

Carson sits at table 53, under a framed R.J. Grunts T-shirt — the first piece of memorabilia ever to adorn the restaurant's now famously cluttered walls.

Though he's just one year removed from reconstructive hip surgery and a few months shy of his 75th birthday, this is nonetheless an unusual sight. During a busy service, Carson will typically stay on his feet all night, making the rounds and greeting guests, especially those who have rolled into town for the annual spring baseball pilgrimage.

Tonight, however, the guests come to him, making their way past table 53 to bid Carson a warm farewell as they waddle to the door, stuffed with charred ribs, broasted chicken and steak specials like the George Will, a prime New York strip topped with fresh garlic.

"I've got a Pulitzer Prize and 23 honorary degrees from universities," Will says, "and that's my biggest honor."

The smell of sizzled meat may clear in a few hours, but a deep breath reveals that it has worked its way into the wood paneling, along with more than 36 years' worth of signatures and stories. To the casual fan, the memorabilia-clad walls give Don & Charlie's the look of a museum. But to those in baseball, they aren't distant legends. The walls are a photo album filled with memories of their friends.

"You know what going to Don & Charlie's is for us and a for lot of baseball people?" Selig says. "It's going to eat with your family."

Fittingly, family is where Don & Charlie's began.

Born into a Chicago restaurant family, Carson lived his teenage years in the Valley after his father, Chris Carson, moved to Phoenix in 1959 to open the short-lived Black Angus. The restaurant folded and they returned to Chicago, first finding success with the Millionaire's Club before launching the family's namesake, Chicago's iconic Carson's, The Place for Ribs.

Named the best place for ribs by Chicago magazine shortly after opening, the restaurant was a runaway success for the family. But the younger Carson was looking to strike out on his own. In a survey of the famed battleaxes of the Arizona dining scene, he saw opportunity.

"Dale Anderson, a titan. Jack Durant, a titan. Paul Shank, Safari, a titan. Charlie Briley, a titan. Joe Miller at El Chorro, a titan. Joe Hunt, another titan. All great restaurant men. All running them different ways. And they all had something in common," Carson says. "They were all getting old. And none of them really very pliable."

Carson bought back the stark, dilapidated building that once housed Black Angus. After a few months of renovations, he opened the Scottsdale outpost of Carson's in 1981.

The reception was a little uneven.

"I will surely incur the wrath of Chicagoans who swear by it," wrote The Arizona Republic's food editor, Dorothee Polson, in February 1982, "but despite its slogan, I do not think Carson's is the place for ribs."

Less than a year into its run, Carson split with the family business. He retooled the restaurant with an old friend, Rich Melman, whose Chicago-based restaurant group, Lettuce Entertain You, was already a force on its way to becoming an empire. The move proved to be a shrewd one, even if its benefits weren't immediately clear.

Carson and Melman dubbed the revamped restaurant Don & Charlie's, a nod to Carson and a joke at the expense of Lettuce Entertain You's chief financial officer, Charles Haskell.

"He was Charles. He hated the name Charlie," Carson says. "That's why we did it. Just to irritate him."

Business was slow — slower, for the first eight months, than Carson's had been.

"That's the only thing you can't control in the restaurant business," Carson notes. "You can control what your portions are, the quality of the food, what to charge. The only thing you can't control is if they come in. If they don't come in, you've got a problem."

Part of Carson's plan was to woo the baseball crowd, but a new venture is a tough sell with competition like the Pink Pony practically around the corner. Carson recalls, with no small amount of emotion, the night he felt he'd finally gotten a toehold.

The president of the National League, Chub Feeney, legendary sports essayist Roger Angell and former manager Bill Rigney came in with their wives.

"They were totally, totally Charlie Briley people, Pink Pony people. They'd been going there for years," Carson remembers. "And I went home and I said, 'I think we're starting to make inroads.'"

From there, things started to snowball.

"Little by little by little, Bob (Uecker) started coming in, commish (Selig) started coming in, George (Will) started coming in, and I always tried to make it easy for them. I didn't want them to be bothered," Carson says. "I think everybody's entitled to have a meal and just have a nice experience."

As more players, managers, executives and sportswriters rolled in the doors and the memorabilia collection grew, baseball brought Don Carson success. But to hear the baseball community tell it, he brought them much more.

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"Don & Charlie's far eclipsed anything the Pink Pony had ever become, and it grew as spring training grew in Phoenix," Will says. "We use the word 'family' far too promiscuously to describe various parts of life, but baseball really is a family, and Don & Charlie's is the family den."

It isn't hard to grasp the appeal, but Will deftly buttons it up, starting with the basics. "It serves the appetites of sports people — red meat, good potatoes, good martinis. What more is there in life? It's just crowded enough to give you the sense of a party, and just noisy enough to stop short of drowning out conversation."

Physicists may tell you that it isn't possible to squeeze the entire baseball universe into a 350-seat restaurant, but on a busy night in March, it sometimes feels that way.

"If my table is at the back of the restaurant, it's going to take me about 15 minutes to get there because I stop and talk to so many people," Will says.

"It's like a second home for us. Not only during spring training, but all year long," Selig says.

Sure, if your second home has a few thousand signed family photos.

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Carson walks the floor, pointing and naming one sports great after another after another. He pauses at a photo of Cubs broadcasting legend Harry Caray.

"I was fortunate enough to see him almost every day for a lot of years during spring training," Carson says. "He ate here every night. He was the Cal Ripken of Don & Charlie's."

To whittle the collection down to a list of highlights would be an exercise in futility. The question isn't who do you include, but who don't you include? They're all highlights — every one — slowly and painstakingly gathered over the years.

"I've never seen a collection like Don has," Uecker says. "You go and look at some of the greatest players to ever play the game, I don't care what the game is, he has got that stuff in there."

To look at the place now, it seems impossible to think the walls were once bare. But Carson is relentless, always with stacks of unsigned photos and magazines in a back room, ready and waiting for those pictured to walk in the door.

"Emmitt Smith came in, and I came out with a Gameday, and it was about 10 years old. He said, 'How long have you had this?' I said, '10 years.' He said, 'What made you think I'd come here?' I said, 'Just taking a shot. I've got FDR in my office too, but better chance of you coming in than FDR.'"

It would be easy to point to the memorabilia as the element that sets the restaurant apart. But to those who have spent any amount of time within its fabled walls, tearing into a char-crust ribeye while sucking down a few martinis, the appeal at the heart of Don & Charlie's is something far more personal.

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"You go into restaurants and they're palaces — $5 million, $6 million, $8 million, $9 million," Carson says, referring to the cost of building out a high-end restaurant."We can't compete with that. I'm afraid if we take down the R.J. Grunts shirt, this wall might fall down. The building is from 1959. It's old. Our hook is hospitality and service."

Carson laments that true hospitality in the restaurant industry is something harder and harder to come by, and he struggles to wrap his head around just how unusual it is, this personal connection he forges with his guests. He's a regular at a nearby restaurant himself — a highly regarded one, at that — and he's shocked by the modern-day norm.

"I've been (going there) twice a week for five or six years. The bartender knows me, a couple of the servers know me, but the manager has never stopped by. Twice a week. You've got a guy eating here twice a week, I know his shoe size."

The hospitality that Carson preaches and practices has always made Don & Charlie's special. It may also prove to be the restaurant's fatal weakness.

"Emerson said that any institution is the lengthened shadow of a man," Will says, "and Don & Charlie's is the lengthened shadow of Don."

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Though Carson has floated the possibility of a smaller, revamped Don & Charlie's inside the new hotel, nothing has been decided and it won't be for a while. Carson plans to take eight months to a year for a well-deserved break before making any decisions.

If Don & Charlie's never returns, it certainly won't be for lack of interest. "We just had, in '18, the biggest year we've ever had," Carson says. "It's not a question of the age of the restaurant, it's a question of my age, that's a factor."

Depending on the day and his mood, Carson can lend the impression it will be a short respite before he's back to the races, or that these truly are the restaurant's final days.

"It's kind of a sad thing, but it's understandable too," Uecker says. "I don't see him separating himself totally from the restaurant. He's got to be doing something there. Maybe he'll work the parking lot, park cars."

The public may hate uncertainty, but this ambivalence is a luxury Carson has earned. For someone who has built a career and life around meeting the needs of others, Carson needs a little time away from the restaurant’s bustle to figure out his own needs for once.

"It's bittersweet. I've been doing this for a long time, and I enjoy what I do. And I think that many people don't get to do what they want to do," he says. "But I've got to see how I feel. I'm an old guy. I mean, how important do you think I am to the success of this place?"

It isn't a rhetorical question, but he knows the answer. How do you separate a man from his shadow?

The diners are gone, the restaurant is quiet, and Carson recalls an encounter with one of his guests.

"Last night, a guy comes in and I looked at his face and I said, 'Hey, I know you. Aren't you the pitcher that throws batting practice?' He's a lefty, he's from California, his name is John and he's walked by me in a dugout prior to a game, got to be 200, 300 times because he's been tossing practice for 35 years."

Carson pauses and becomes visibly wistful at the thought.

"I said, 'I didn't talk to you because I didn't want to bother you. I don't know why you didn't talk to me.' He says, 'Well, kind of the same reason.' And I said, 'We've wasted 35 years.'

"It's the people. That's what I've enjoyed," Carson continues. "I've enjoyed the people, I've enjoyed the relationships that I've made, and every night I meet another guy named John."

When April 11 arrives and Don & Charlie's is flattened to make way for a new hotel, people may miss the steaks, the memorabilia and the clatter and buzz of the warm and chummy center of the spring baseball universe. More likely, they'll miss moments like these. But they may never realize how much they'll be missed in return.

"All of life is about relationships. It's interconnected, the way you treat people," Carson says.

"It's all about the people."

Don & Charlie's

Where: 7501 E. Camelback Road, Scottsdale.

Hours: 5-9:30 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays, 5-9 p.m. Sundays.

Final service: April 10.

Details: 480-990-0900, donandcharlies.com.

Tried something delicious lately? Reach the reporter at dominic.armato@arizonarepublic.com or at 602-444-8533. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @skilletdoux, and on Facebook at facebook.com/darmato.

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