Disclaiming that I’m operating sans coffee this morning (boil water advisory in Washington County, which is so on-brand for a week and a world that could use some disinfecting), so please forgive any typos and dissents into incoherent, rambling despair ….

Broke my broken heart this week to read that Bezos eliminated the sports department at the Washington Post.

Poof.

As a former second-rate sports writer who knew enough to know what good sports writing looked like, knew enough to know his Murrays from his Boswells from his Angells from his Alboms from his Colliers from his Jenkins, knew enough to know that fields of play give professionals and teenagers the same Shakespearean stage to live out most of life’s tragedies and comedies, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly, but always truly, and that in the hands of the right deadline saint, the record could show as much, who knew enough to clip, underline, asterisk, and scribble down golden turns of phrases like collecting seashells for keeping hoping some of it might rub off, who knew enough to know that when he read Roger Kahn’s Boys of Summer that one summer that good sports writers were just good writers who happened to write sports, who knew enough to know that the local versions of those deadline saints who I got to watch and read up close were (and are) just as great, and even greater for shining and reflecting their good light without big spotlights, who knew enough to inhale the scent of a new edition like bread come midnight fresh off the the press before proofing it for the later editions, who knew enough to know that the smudge on your fingertips after reading was what made for a sacred act, who knew enough to know that tomorrow those pages would be lucky to line bird cages before being tossed in the trash so don’t get too full of yourself, who knew enough to know that it was one thing to hit it out of the print park once, but could you do it again tomorrow? And what about the next day? Who knew enough to know that love and commitment are proven only in the act of showing up again and again and playing hurt to stare down a blank page and a deadline, who knew enough to know that to love something with your whole heart is to miss it with whatever’s left of your whole heart when it’s gone, who knew enough to know that when his mid-50s self stumbled into that Waynesburg coffee shop last summer and saw they had a take-one-leave-one book shelf, he reached for the cover-stained, out-of-print edition of Sports illustrated Great Baseball Writing like he was rescuing it from a burning building …

… which he was.

Who knows enough to know that it would be hypocritical this morning to ask if he knows anyone who subscribes to the Atlantic and would they mind sending him a PDF of Sally (who did it as well as any ever did) Jenkins’ elegy, “You Can’t Kill Swagger” published a couple days ago … and that, in the asking lies the blood, like ink stains on my hands for not wanting to scale the paywall for a whole damn subscription.

– 30 –