The Sportswriter's Hero
August, 1986
Sports columnists get tired, behind on their bills, down in the back and churlish, like everybody else, and there is an old joke that circulates among us. The joke is about the member of our sect who was always looking for a way to bail out on a column, to slide by with an easy one, on those days when even his hair hurt, which were often.Frequently, the poet would side-step issues he ought to have confronted in print. Instead, he would run a column of letters—nearly all of which he would invent,...
