If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground

FIRST DAY. November 10,1975. It’s still relatively warm in Chicago. The high is in the 60s that day.

I have on a blue blazer, khaki slacks, white shirt, red tie, and a pair of Bass Weejuns. I look like I’m going through fraternity rush at the University of Georgia.

I leave the car for Kay. I took the Clark Street bus. It lets me off near the Sun-Times office, which is just a few steps from the rival Tribune.

The sports department is on the fourth floor. The first time I had seen it, my feathers had drooped. There was no clearly marked separation between the sports department and the news side—just five rows of desks sitting quite close together, three abreast. My desk was next to the sports rim, which looked exactly like the one at the Journal. I had always wanted my own office at the Journal, but there was only one in the sports department, which was separated from the news side by a waist-high partition, and Bisher had occupied it.

I take the elevator to the fourth floor and stopped and tell Jim Hoge’s secretary I had arrived.

I waited thirty minutes. Finally, Hoge walked out, dressed impeccably as always, and stuck out his hand. He smiled and said, “Welcome.”

He had called a meeting of the sports department to introduce me as the new executive sports editor. The old sports editor (Jim Mullen) believe it or not, was going to stay on until he retired in six months—and would keep the title. Hoge had decided to replace him as the department head, but to let him stay on until his retirement and cover the Chicago Bears football team.

Bill Gleason: Columnist.

Tom Fitzpatrick: Columnist

Jerome Holtzman: Baseball writer

Joe Goddard: Baseball writer

Bob Pille: College writer

Joe Agrella: Horse racing (turf) writer

Dave Van Dyke: General assignment, tennis

Lenny Ziehm: Desk and golf

Marvin Weinstein: Desk, auto racing, and Guild steward

Joe LaPointe: Desk and general assignment

Eddie Gold: Desk, hockey writer

Dave Manthey: High schools

Don Edwards: Desk, some layout

Harold Newchurch: Clerk, racing results, and handicapper

Bob Langer: Photographer

Emil Stubits: Makeup editor, assigned to the composing room

Seymour Shub: My assistant

Lacey J. Banks: Basketball and once-a-week columnist

—Gleason: Veteran, mid-forties, maybe. Irishman with a temper. Loud, always gesturing with his hands. Cigar always in his mouth. He had asked the paper for more filing cabinets years earlier, but he had been refused. He vowed to pile every piece of mail that came to him on his desk until he got the new space. I couldn’t see him over the ten-year-old mountain of paper. I knew he was in the office and at his desk only by the blue smoke from his cigar that rose over the pile.

He was from the South Side of Chicago, and South Siders were a proud group. He didn’t like anything about the North Side, particularly the Cubs. He preferred the South Side White Sox. He often wrote in parables. I read Gleason for three years, and I’m not certain I ever had any idea what he was trying to say. I often wondered if it was just me, or whether the readers were puzzled, too.

—Fitzpatrick: Also Irish. They called him “Fitz.” I would say late thirties. He had won a Pulitzer Prize by running with the gangs the night of the Democratic party riots in 1968 and had filed report after report back as the night wore on. He had a book published that gave examples of his work that night. Brilliant.

Fitz drank. All newspaper people drank, but Fitz drank a lot, and sort of hung it up after his Pulitzer. You couldn’t fire a Pulitzer Prize winner, so he’d been sent to the sports department to write a sports column. He was supposed to write five days a week. He wrote one occasionally.

“But, Fitz,” I would reply, “you’re supposed to write one five days a week.”

I complained about him to Hoge, who chewed him out about a thousand times, but nothing helped. As I said, you don’t fire a Pulitzer Prize winner.

—Holtzman: A dark, severe man in his late fifties. He was the dean of American baseball writers. He had written a book, No Cheering in the Press Box.

He never smiled, but he had the keys to Cooperstown. No major leaguer ever got into the Hall of Fame if Holtzman didn’t want him there. He had tremendous sources. He was writing about the fact there would one day be a baseball players’ union and possibly a baseball players’ strike long before anybody else got on the story.

Despite all this, he was a terrible writer. He wouldn’t talk to anybody and get quotes. Used all the clichés, like circuit-clout, hot corner, keystone. Impossible to deal with.

—Goddard: He was in his late twenties and eager. He liked the idea of fresh blood taking over. Worked his tail off for me.

—LaPointe: Another kid who wanted to learn. Give me twelve Joe LaPointes and I’m happy. He wanted to be a hockey writer.

—Gold: Covered home Black Hawks hockey games. We didn’t spend the money to cover the team on the road. Quiet man in his late thirties. He had that Mr. Peepers look. His older brother had been a doorman in an old Chicago theater, and would slip his little brother in for performances. He had heard Henny Youngman countless times, and knew at least a thousand Henny Youngman jokes. He was a nervous sort of guy, and when he would be typing close to deadline, I could hear him reciting Henny Youngman jokes to himself: “Hear about the shoe store that burned down? Not a sole was saved.”

—Manthey: Late twenties. Devoted to the high school beat. Always covered the International, Chicago’s big dog show. We used to talk a lot about dogs. Dave Manthey was a keeper.

—Edwards: Desk, some layout work. Quiet. Never gave me any trouble. Always had a couple of pops before he came to work. Fine with me.

—Newchurch: Young black man. Friendly, always cooperative. He took down the racing results and the following day’s charts. We carried a couple of handicapping boxes on the racing page. One was “Tack Towne.” For months, I thought Tack Towne was a real person. Harold did Tack Towne.

—Stubits: It was hard to tell how old Emil was. I’d guess late forties. He was a nervous man, too. The composing room will do that to you.

—Bob Langer: The best newspaper photographer I’d seen since Browny Stephens. Sports Illustrated had tried to hire him for years.

—Shub: He was near retirement age, too. They called him “Sandy.” He was a Jewish guy from Skokie. I would have never made it without him. He had basically been running the department for the old sports editor. He handled the expense accounts, made out the week’s work schedule, argued with Weinstein, the Guild steward, and usually put out the day’s first edition, the Green, which hit the street around four in the afternoon for commuters going back out to the suburbs.

He had arthritis. At times, I don’t see how he held a pencil. His hands shook. But he worked harder than anybody. I was constantly amazed at his energy.

—Banks: Black man in his late twenties. Hoge had hired him from Kansas City and had given him the Bulls beat. The Sun-Times had put in an affirmative-action policy, and Lacey was a beneficiary of it.

The Sun-Times had a large black readership, and the Bulls had a large black following, yet there were no black sports columnists in any major newspapers. Lacey was given a once-a-week column, with his picture, and the Sun-Times even took out a front-page ad on the cover of the industry’s Bible, Editor and Publisher, to publicize his column.

He was also a lay Baptist minister. He had a strong, resonant voice. Lacey J. Banks would be my second Chicago nightmare.

Hoge called the meeting in a conference room at the Sun-Times. Each member of the staff was there, with the exception of Joe Agrella. He was somewhere writing about hay-eaters.

I stood up before the troops, stared into the empty eyes before me. I was nervous and unsteady. The sweat began to pour out. I said that I was happy to be at the Sun-Times, that I wanted to improve it and make it a big-league section as I knew it could be, and a few other clichés. Then I asked if anybody had any questions. Nobody did.

Then I gave them a few thoughts about what I might do—improve the graphics, work on better writing, do more in-depth and offbeat features. Save for my words, God, was it quiet in that room.

After that, I named a few of the sports sections that really impressed me around the country: the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Louisville Courier-Journal. I asked, “Can anybody here add to that list or make a comment?”

Hoge saw the trouble I was in and saved me. “Well, if nobody has anything else, let’s go back to work,” he said.

Seymour Shub and a few others reported to work around ten in the morning on weekdays. Shub would get the layouts for the next day’s paper and begin work on the Green edition. During baseball season, we always tried to get a Cubs final for the commuters if they were playing a home game.

Those working nights reported in the late afternoon and then produced three other morning editions. What was easier about Chicago was that it was in the Central time zone. East Coast games were mostly over by nine-thirty, and West Coast results were in a couple of hours later. There wasn’t nearly the panic we had in the Atlanta composing room to get in games finishing near deadline.

What I also liked was that the Sun-Times was a tabloid. It made laying out the paper easier, because it didn’t take as many elements to finish a page.

Surprisingly, I would have none of the problems in the Sun-Times composing room that I had had in Atlanta. Not only did the pages come together more quickly, but the printers were more cooperative and more willing to work as well. It was the newsroom union, or Guild, that would cause me the most headaches in Chicago. The only labor problem involving the Journal had been the Bill Clark case. But members of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, which included members of the Sun-Times sports staff, were fiercely union. There was not one second’s extra work without overtime.

It was a completely new experience for me, one nobody spoke with me about or explained to me before I came to work. I was naive and ill-prepared for a problem that arose my first week at the paper, one I would have to deal with, in some fashion, during my entire career in Chicago.

The first time I put out the green edition, I did something that would play a major role in what was about to happen. I got the edition in on time. I was experimenting with cleaner-looking, vertical layouts. I had reduced the size of the sports logo, which seemed to be about the size of Kansas when I got there.

The back page of the Sun-Times was the front page of sports. You read the section from the back toward the middle, which took a bit of getting used to. But what I liked about dealing with the tabloid open-page front (or back, if you want to get technical) is that, in many ways, it was designed like a magazine cover.

I thought the sports front had been much too cluttered, so I began reducing the number of articles that started there. I wanted one major headline, a large photo, and then other smaller heads, teasing to stories inside.

You know the tabloids at the grocery stores that feature headlines screaming, “NAZI ASTRONAUTS RETURN TO EARTH?” That’s what I wanted, as far as packaging went. I wasn’t about to put a head out there that read, “NEW CUBS MANAGER FROM MARS,” but I would go with a huge Langer action photo, and a big headline screaming, “CUBS SWEEP REDS.” Done neatly, a tabloid page can get much more immediate attention from a reader than a broadsheet with seven or eight smaller elements on a page. That made things easier in the composing room, as well. Pages came together much faster than they had in Atlanta where the papers were broadsheets, wider and longer pages than tabloids.

When I returned to the rim after the Green closed, I did what I always did when I had worked the slot. I found myself a large wastebasket. Then I cleared off every piece of paper that was still on the rim, so it would be neat for the person who was putting out the next edition. There would be leftover copy, leftover local copy, rejected headlines, full ashtrays, rejected photos that didn’t make the first edition. I would do sort of a sweep with my forearm and dump it all into the wastebasket.

The trouble started the first week. Shub had put out the Green. Lenny Ziehm had come in to work the night desk. When the Green arrived on my desk, I looked through it and came upon the once-a-week Lacey Banks column.

It was something about a couple of newsboys. There were religious references. I’m thinking, They’re letting this sort of thing in the paper? It had little or nothing to do with sports. The writing was cumbersome. I didn’t get the point of the column.

I sat down with Shub and Ziehm to plan the rest of the night. “Take that Banks column out of the paper,” I said.

Not supposed to touch it? Since when did a beat writer get to write a once-a-week column the executive sports editor couldn’t touch?

I was at my desk the following morning. Lacey J. Banks walked over and said he wanted a word with me. I said, “Sure.” He wanted to know why his column hadn’t been in the morning edition.

I said it really didn’t have anything to do with sports, I didn’t want my writers expressing their religious beliefs on the sports page, and that I hadn’t understood the point of the column.

“Why wasn’t I told the column wasn’t going to be in last night?” Lacey went on.

The next morning when I returned to work there was a pink memo slip in my mail slot. It was from Lacey J. Banks.

What the memo said was he thought I had killed the column because of a racial motive. He said nobody ever killed a column by Gleason or Fitzpatrick, who were white. He said the column made perfect sense. He demanded it be placed in the next day’s editions.

Racially motivated? I hadn’t cared if Lacey Banks were orange, the column still stank and had no business in a major-league sports section.

I wondered if the fact I was from Atlanta had anything to do with this. I figured it had. It was a neat story: White racist from South kills black man’s column.

I decided I would explain to Lacey how wrong that was. But before I could get a chance to, Hoge brought me in a copy of a local black-owned newspaper. A columnist had written a piece about the column being killed. Lacey Banks was quoted as saying he thought I was racist.

“If we allow him to get away with this, then it will send a message to the staff that you’re weak.”

I called Lacey and told him to meet me in Hoge’s office. Hoge said he had had no business spouting off about his supervisor for public consumption. Lacey said the Lord had shown him the way, and under Guild guidelines he could do it.

I told Lacey nothing I had done was racially motivated. I also told him that his column was suspended. I also said I wasn’t pleased with his coverage of the Bulls, either, and that I would be working closely with him to try to show him exactly what it was I wanted from him.

Needless to say, he didn’t take any of what I said very well. He said he still felt he was a victim of racism.

I told him he had no other choice than to accept my dicta. He got up and said he would pray about it and get back to us.

That was fourteen years ago. I’ve often thought about Lacey and our problems and just how they came about in the first place. In retrospect:

The first mistake was made by handing over a major-league beat and a once-a-week column to a person with very little experience and expertise in the first place. But the Sun-Times had wanted to send a message to its black readers that it believed in affirmative action. Giving Lacey that big of a stick gave him the false message that he was an accomplished journalist and that he was above any sort of internship or heavy editing. He actually believed his writing was superior when, in my estimation as head of the department, it was terrible.

The paper had done Lacey J. Banks an injustice by throwing him into the deep water. Had he been brought along much more slowly, he might have become an excellent writer.

But then we get into 1975. The idea was that, because of the wrongs done to blacks previously, in order to give a black man his due, perhaps he shouldn’t have to live up to the standards set for white people by other white people.

Meanwhile, I was a twenty-eight-year-old kid just off the turnip truck from Atlanta who had never had to supervise a full-time black staffer, who had never had to deal with a staff that was organized, and who was rather bullheaded himself about what was good and what wasn’t.

Lacey continued to sulk about the column. He asked me over and over, “When am I going to get it back?”

The truth was, I didn’t think he would ever get the column back, because I didn’t think he felt he needed any of the guidance I could give him. Again, in retrospect, I made up my mind early that Lacey was a hopeless case.

The explosion came one morning when I was working on the Green. The big story of the day was a possible merger between the National Basketball Association and the new American Basketball Association. There were meetings going on in Louisville, and the AP had picked up a story by a Courier-Journal writer giving in-depth details of what was transpiring. I figured if anybody knew what was going on in basketball, it had to be somebody from Kentucky.

Lacey came in and wrote his own story about the possible merger. It was one page. It basically was a rewrite from what the morning Tribune had carried.

I ignored it. The wire piece was far superior, so I put the wire story in the paper. When I came back from the composing room, I did my normal cleanup job. I forearmed all the waste on the rim into the wastebasket.

Lacey went back to the black-owned newspaper and made charges of racism against me, the Sun-Times, and anybody else he could think of.

Hoge called Lacey into his office again. I was present. Hoge did the talking. In my mind, he gave Lacey every chance.

There should have been a way to get around what eventually happened. I kept thinking to myself during the entire episode, Certainly, nobody would think I would ride in here from Atlanta and immediately tangle with Lacey Banks just because he was black.

If Lacey had been brought along slower. If maybe I had, in fact, worked with him a little more. If Lacey hadn’t been so quick to charge racism, if he had shown me a willingness to learn. My only excuse is he certainly wasn’t the only problem at the Sun-Times sports department. I was up to my butt in alligators almost every day.

The Chicago Newspaper Guild filed suit against the paper, charging that Lacey had been dismissed unfairly. The issue would go before a federal labor arbitrator. Before it did, however, I found out what I had expected all along—that racist feelings knew few geographical bounds.

I got unsigned memos from members of the news staff saying ridiculous and horrible things like, “I’m glad somebody finally got rid of that nigger.”

It was an old and unpleasant story. Some felt Lacey J. Banks had been promoted to the lofty heights as pro-basketball writer and columnist simply because he was black, not because he had any special talents for the job. But that was irrelevant to me. I came to make the layout look better and put some zing into the words we wrote. That was all I cared about.

Before the hearings began, I hired a replacement for Lacey, Thorn Greer from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He was black. Nobody said to me, “You must hire a black replacement,” but I knew the message I would send if I didn’t—he got rid of the nigger so he could hire a white guy.

In this case, however, I must insist that Thorn Greer, had he been plaid, was eminently qualified to take over the basketball beat. He was an excellent writer and reporter. He was a man of great dignity and humor. He was also a terrible poker player—we had a weekly game at my apartment that included him and an occasional other member of the staff who didn’t hate me—as was I.

Another Chicago weekly did something. A man on a radio station who did commentaries on Chicago media doings defended me. Said I was “guilty by geography.”

One cold morning, I stepped off the Clark Street bus and there were black people demonstrating in Lacey’s behalf in front of the Sun-Times.

The thought occurred to me there: I could turn right around, grab a cab, go back home and pack, catch a plane (yes, a plane), and be back in Atlanta and at Harrison’s by eight in the evening.

I went on in, however. Luckily, none of the demonstrators had any idea what the White Racist from Atlanta looked like, so I managed to pass by them without notice.

I went through weeks of discussions and practice-testifying with the paper’s attorneys. Both the Daily News and the Sun-Times were owned by the Marshall Field Company, of department-store fame.

As we were entering the room for the first of the hearings in front of the federal arbitrator, I asked one of the Field lawyers, “Do we have a chance to win?”

He said, “Let me put it this way—we have a white sports editor from Atlanta and the wealthy Marshall Field Company against a black man in front of a federal arbitrator. No, we don’t have a chance. We just have to do it for show.”

So Lacey Banks and his lawyers and representatives of the Chicago Newspaper Guild were on one side of the room, and newspaper management, me, and our lawyers were on the other. To tell the truth, I felt very lonely in there. I had very little in common with either side, as a matter of fact, and the only other experience I had had in a courtroom as a witness was during the Bill Clark thing back in Atlanta. There, I was a small player. Here, I was The Villain.

“Mr. Grizzard,” began the Guild lawyer. “Did you not tell Mr. Banks religion had no place on the sports pages of the Sun-Times?”

“Mr. Grizzard, is it not true that you once worked for Sports Illustrated?”

“In your opinion, as a professional journalist, what is your feeling about the quality of Sports Illustrated? Do you think the magazine exhibits standards that are of a high quality?”

“You do. Well, then, Mr. Grizzard, are you aware that Sports Illustrated recently did a series of articles on religion in sports, written by Mr. Frank Deford?”

I knew where he was going by now, of course. I had said SI was a great magazine, and SI had done articles on religion in sports written by the brilliant Frank Deford.

What the lawyer would say to me next was, “If a publication of such high quality—and you have testified you agree with that assessment of the publication—sees a relationship between sports and religion, why then would you say to Mr. Banks when he wrote about religion that it had no place on your sports pages?”

This is where the truth sort of got lost in a courtroom. Okay, so Sports Illustrated had written about religion in sports. But Frank Deford writing about the religious philosophies of professional athletes in Sports Illustrated was a far cry from Lacey J. Banks doing a give-Jesus-Christ-the-football sort of thing in his sophomoric once-a-week column. The link between the two was so frail, it didn’t apply. Not in the real world. But in court, before the ears of the federal arbitrator who didn’t know one thing about Sports Illustrated or newspaper sports sections, the damage had been done.

I did stop the proceedings one day under direct examination by our lawyers. He asked what my reaction was when Mr. Banks had first charged me with being racist.

“I don’t think I am familiar with this term, bumfuzzled,” said the Guild attorney.

My mother used to say “bumfuzzled” a lot when I was growing up, as in, “It completely bumfuzzles me how you can mess up one bathroom in such a short time,” or, “I’m bumfuzzled that you won’t eat pickled okra.”

I said, “Like it sounds. B-u-m, ‘bum,’ f-u-z-z-1-e-d, ‘fuzzled.’ Bumfuzzled. It means confused or surprised.”

Again, I felt terribly out-of-place. I’m in Chicago-by-God-Illinois getting raked over the coals by a bunch of northerners who don’t even understand a perfectly good word like “bumfuzzled.”

The hearings continued. Lacey testified about the story he turned in concerning the NBA-ABA merger, the one I had rejected for a wire story I thought was more complete.

“And when you saw the first edition and realized your manuscript had been replaced by another off the wire, what did you do?”

“He didn’t sit down with you and explain why the wire manuscript was better than your own?”

“You wanted to know what had happened to the manuscript you had submitted, am I correct?”

“I had worked hard on it. I wanted to compare it to the article Mr. Grizzard had chosen.”

“The one he chose to run in the newspaper rather than the one you had delivered him.”

“Let me see if I have this straight, Mr. Banks. You worked until nearly midnight on your manuscript. You submitted it to Mr. Grizzard for the following day’s first edition. And he not only cast yours aside for a story off the wire—a nonexclusive story, when yours was exclusive—but he also never gave you any sort of detailed excuse for why he didn’t run your manuscript.”

“And then when you asked him for your manuscript back, he said that he had discarded it into the waste can?”

I tried to explain when my lawyer questioned me about the incident. I said that Lacey’s article was not exclusive, it was basically a rewrite of the morning Tribune. I also said that if he had stayed up until midnight working on it, he must not have started until eleven forty-five. But that is making an assumption, which they won’t listen to in court.

I also pointed out that I always threw all leftover materials on the rim into the wastebasket to clear it for work on the next edition, and that’s the way I had learned to do it when I first started in the business, because if you didn’t get all that paper off the rim by the time the night was over, the entire sports department would disappear under tons of it.

I could tell the arbitrator was not impressed, and I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking about Abe Lincoln. Remember how Abe Lincoln used to sit up late at night and read from the dim light of a candle? He could see Lacey doing this, staring down at his typewriter as the flicks of candlelight danced across the blank page before him. He probably saw a log cabin where this was taking place, too. And here was this black man, struggling over each word of his manuscript. And what happened the next morning? The cruel Simon Legree took this precious manuscript and callously dumped it into a cauldron of waste.

It was the word “manuscript” that helped Banks’s case, too. “Manuscript” as in “book”—as in 1,696 typed pages. “Manuscript” is not an operable word in the newspaper business. It’s “story,” “article,” “piece,” or, in this case, “one-page, eight-paragraph rewrite of the rival paper’s piece.”

Then they nailed me again. We had a special Saturday section. People were milling around in the hearing room, waiting to begin. I noticed another black man in the room I had not seen at previous sessions. And he looked familiar to me.

I kept watching him. I’d seen that face before. Then it hit me upside the head like a slashing foul ball into the seats.

It was Alfred Johnson, who had been Minter’s stringer for Atlanta University sports teams at the Journal. I had forgotten about Alfred Johnson. I had forgotten the circumstances involved the last time I had seen him.

The three Atlanta University schools—Clark, Brown, and Morehouse—were in an all-black conference that was holding its annual conference tournament in Montgomery. It was the first time the tournament had come around when I was executive sports editor of the Journal.

Hudspeth was covering pro football at the time, but it was March, and he was available for another assignment, so I had dispatched him to Montgomery, where the Southeastern Conference Indoor Track Meet was taking place. I had mentioned to him that if any of the Atlanta University teams made a move in the basketball tournament, I needed him to be available to cover a game or two.

Alfred came into the office of the old 10 Forsyth Street sports department and walked over to my desk. He said he wanted to get some expense money so he could go to Montgomery and cover the basketball tournament. The budget was so tight in those days that when I dispatched a reporter to cover a night basketball game at Auburn University, a two-lane, 110 mile drive, the paper wouldn’t pop for an eighteen-dollar hotel room. You had to drive back that night.

“Have you ever received advance expenses from the paper to cover an out-of-town event before?” I asked him further.

I tried to explain to Alfred he was not an employee of the paper. He was a “stringer.” We had stringers all over. They never got advance expenses for anything.

And then Alfred said it. He said, “If I were white, you’d give me the money.”

“Alfred,” I went on, “I don’t have time to argue with you about this. Hudspeth’s in Montgomery, and if we need somebody to cover the tournament, he’s already over there. The paper’s not going to let me send anybody else.”

Alfred then launched into an attack on me and the newspaper as racists. He got ugly about it. He cursed me. He said, “You better watch yourself when you go out of this building.”

I said, “Alfred, I can’t have this. You will have to leave the building, and leave your building pass with security.”

He started cursing me again. I went and got Durwood McAllister, the managing editor. He called security. Security escorted Alfred out of the building. It took me about a day to find another Atlanta University stringer, also black, who turned out to be much more conscientious and capable than Alfred.

I hadn’t thought about Alfred Johnson in five years, but here he was across the room from me in Chicago, and now I could see the Guild’s next move.

Grizzard takes over as executive sports editor of the Atlanta Journal He gets rid of the black guy.

Grizzard takes over as executive sports editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. He gets rid of the black guy.

My lawyer buried his face in his hands as Alfred began his testimony, which went something like, “I was one of the top black journalists in Atlanta, and this white racist gave me the gate.”

Our side would bring in Jim Minter to Chicago to give a deposition refuting Alfred’s claims of his lofty position, but it wouldn’t do any good.

My lawyer said to me, “How could you forget something as important as this incident with Alfred Johnson?”

Somebody had put the Guild onto Alfred Johnson. I never found out who. Perhaps someone who worked for me in Atlanta. My mother had once said to me, “Not everybody is going to think you are as cute and love you like I do.” She sure was right.

The arbitrator had a lot to say about the “manuscript callously thrown into a wastebasket” and said I was “racially insensitive.” He ordered Lacey reinstated with all his back pay.

But the arbitrator did not have the authority to order that Lacey be put back on the Bulls beat, nor that he be given his column back. The First Amendment protects a newspaper from being ordered what it must print. It also protects newspapers from being told by the government what they can’t print.

Lacey J. Banks came back to the Sun-Times sports department after several months’ absence. By that time, Thom Greer had established himself as a top pro-basketball writer and an integral, important part of the staff.

I put Lacey on the desk. After I left, I heard they let him cover a women’s pro-basketball league that eventually flopped, and somebody said he covered some soccer occasionally. I also hear that he was still doing his preaching and often tried to convert wayward staffers.

* Gleason would go crazy on me and write columns about “Prince Peter (Rozelle), King of All the Footballs.” I killed a few of his efforts, too. He used to rant and rave at me and throw his hands about and say, “But, Lewis, you don’t understand. I’m circulation.”

I did learn something about being a cocky, twenty-eight-year-old sports editor from Holtzman, however.

I called him into my office one day and began to tell him how baseball writers should be writing in the late seventies.

I mentioned the need for quotes, and then I said, “And you use too many clichés.”

“Yes,” I said. “You are still using worn-out baseball clichés like ‘hot corner’ for third base and ‘circuit clout’ and ’roundtripper’ for home run.”

Holtzman looked puzzled. Finally he said, “Lewis, you don’t understand. Those are my clichés.”

I hadn’t thought of that. Here was the dean of American baseball writers, and he probably did come up with those terms. And if a man invented a term, no matter how long he used it, it really couldn’t be called a cliché, could it?

* One night, we were trying to get out the Sunday edition, and Emil came out of the composing room complaining he couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I should take care of him and forget about getting the paper in on time, or put Emil somewhere until I could finish up the job in the composing room. What if he died? I compromised. I got Emil a chair and I said, “I’ll keep an eye on you while I get the paper in.”

* Marvin Weinstein, the Guild steward, showed no quarter when it came to Guild rules. If a reporter was in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a story and his shift was over, Marvin would order him to leave the office.

* I hired a new assistant, John Clendenen, to take over the night desk. After the green edition, we would hold a nightly meeting that involved me, Shub, and Clendenen. John didn’t like Marvin. If Clendenen had somebody working on a piece and Marvin came over and said, “Leave the office, your shift is over,” Clendenen couldn’t understand it and would tell Marvin he was an idiot. They would argue, then Marvin would file grievances—and I suddenly began keeping a large jar of Maalox in my desk.

* Bob Pille, the college writer, did something I detested. He covered a Notre Dame–South Carolina football game in Columbia, South Carolina, and he made reference to Sherman’s burning of Columbia in his story.

Why did every northern writer have to mention Sherman or the Civil War when he covered a ball game in the South?

I wrote Pille a memo and told him what I thought of his reference, and pointed out that Sherman didn’t burn Columbia, anyway. His siege ended in Savannah.

Pille wrote me a subsequent memo, pointing out Sherman had, indeed, burned Columbia. He even had exact dates and a quote or two from a history book.

I wrote him a third memo and said, “I still maintain references to the Civil War when one is covering sporting events in the South is a cliché, but I do stand corrected about Sherman’s burning of Columbia, the capital of the great state of South Carolina. Realize, however, I am a product of the Georgia public school system, where we were taught when the little bearded bastard of a firebug got to Savannah, they hung him.”

* The Guys with the Mops: Damndest thing. Every Friday night at six o’clock, three guys with mops would walk into the Sun-Times newsroom. All work of a journalistic nature came to a halt. The Guys with the Mops would go around to each desk and put the accompanying chair on top of the desk. Then they would mop the floors. You couldn’t remain in the newsroom while they were mopping. There was no place to work, and even if there was, it was tough to work while a guy was mopping underneath you.

I always forgot about the Guys with the Mops. Shortly before six o’clock each Friday, I would start laying out the first Sunday edition. I would have my layouts on my desk, my pencils, my glue pot, the copy, and just as I would begin, here they would come, the Guys with the Mops. I would have to pick up all my work and move down to a table in the employee cafeteria while the Guys with the Mops brought a major news operation to a complete halt.

* Sandy Shub and Beat the Champs: I meant it earlier when I said I loved Sandy Shub. He was such a gentle little man, and he helped me put out a zillion brushfires. But Sandy Shub had another job at the Sun-Times, besides handling work schedules, expense accounts, and keeping me sane. Each year, the Sun-Times sponsored a bowling tournament called Beat the Champs. I went through three Beat the Champs. I still couldn’t tell you exactly how the darn thing worked. But I do know this: Half of Chicago entered. Bowling, an indoor sport, is big in Chicago. And everybody who entered got his or her name and his or her score set in small agate type in the Sun-Times sports section. And everybody who entered then called the Sun-Times to ask if his or her name and score was going to be in the paper that day.

Beat the Champs, I swear, lasted longer than the NBA season. And Beat the Champs ate space. It ate it without conscience. It ate space like a lion devouring a lamb. Inches and inches of names and bowling scores, running day after day in my sports section.

Beat the Champs finally ended when finalists were chosen and they rolled off against some pros. They put the thing on television, and Sandy would proudly state, “We’ve raised over a million dollars for charity with Beat the Champs.”

I hated Beat the Champs. I hated it more than I did when somebody put a horse in “People in Sports” back in Atlanta. I hated it more than I hated communism and loud rock music and cabdrivers who spoke no English, who were in the front seat of every cab I ever took in Chicago.

I eventually began to hate Chicago itself. Oh, there were some moments. I got to meet the famous mayor Richard Daley at the press lounge at Comiskey Park one night. He was very fat.

I found a great place to play tennis, Mid-Town Racquet Club. It had sixteen indoor courts. I joined an early-bird league and played five mornings a week, between seven and nine. That helped keep me sane. I made a new friend at the tennis center, Tim Jarvis.

We were a pair. He was an ex-hippie, liberal social worker, who openly admitted he had used drugs during his hippie days. I was a conservative, southern patriot, who had been close to marijuana only once in his life. I had seen The Gene Krupa Story, starring Sal Mineo as the legendary drummer, at the Alamo Theatre in the county seat back home.

We did both have beards, however, and we both enjoyed tennis. The pro introduced us. When Tim heard my name, he said, “Are you the guy who got rid of Lacey Banks at the Sun-Times?”

I also met a neighbor in the apartment building, Johnny Reyes, a free-lance photographer who was originally from Colombia and knew everybody I knew, including Lacey. He was from Colombia, as in Juan Valdez, the coffee picker, not as in South Carolina, which Sherman burned.

Johnny was always inviting Kay and me over for dinner or drinks. He had a thick accent, and often I had a difficult time figuring out what he was trying to say. I would listen to Johnny, and then when he finished speaking, I had two responses. I would either laugh, say, “You’re absolutely right,” or “I know exactly what you mean,” which I rarely did.

Two weeks after we had moved to Chicago, Kay had gone to visit her family and her brother at his home in Virginia for Thanksgiving. I stayed in Chicago. Thanksgiving night, Georgia and Georgia Tech were to play their annual football game on national television. I planned all day for the event. I bought a couple of six-packs of beer, built a fire, and awaited the game.

Johnny called. I think he said, “Hey, man, come on over. I got some chicks and some food, man.”

I thanked him but told him I wanted to stay in my own apartment and watch the football game. Georgia won 42–26. Johnny called again. I said I would be right over.

There were some strange people in Johnny’s apartment. I suddenly felt terribly homesick. Back in Atlanta, the bulldog faithful were celebrating. I’m seven hundred miles away with some people who didn’t speak English, were puffing away on odd-looking cigarettes, and listening to music I couldn’t identify.

I was hungry. The dressing was good. I ate two helpings. I awakened on Johnny’s couch the next morning.

“Hey, man,” he said laughing at me. “I put pot in the dressing. You sleep good, no?”

Winter came that Thanksgiving weekend. I had found a neighborhood bar, John Barleycorn’s. I went there on Saturday night, sat alone at the bar, and had a few beers. It hadn’t been snowing when I walked into John Barleycorn’s around seven.

When I decided to leave and walk home at around ten, there was more snow on the ground than I had ever seen before. Maybe five inches. Later, that would be nothing, but I’d been in Chicago only two weeks.

I was wearing my Bass Weejuns. It was eight blocks home. The next morning, my Weejuns had turned white. The two things I had vowed never to do, no matter how much it snowed in Chicago or how cold it got, was wear a pair of rubber overshoes or get me one of those Russian-looking hats with all the fur.

The only individuals I had known in the South who wore rubber overshoes were sissies and nerds, or guys who hung around the science lab a lot and grew up to be billionaire computer-company CEOs. I didn’t like those Russian-looking hats because my father used to talk a lot about how one day we would have to fight the Russians to keep us safe from the peril of communists, and how we should have just kept everybody over there when World War II ended and gone ahead and fought them then.

As it got deeper into winter, however, and I had ruined my third or fourth pair of shoes, I bought a pair of rubber overshoes. But allow me to save some face from the embarrassment of finally giving in to something I had vowed never to do—I never did get one of those Russian hats.

The weather was more than enough to tell me I was in the wrong place. I had never lived anywhere where a television announcer would warn, “Do not go outside with any part of your skin exposed. Frostbite warning.”

The lake would freeze. Everybody’s pipes would freeze. Streets froze. People walking on streets froze. Cars froze. Dogs and cats froze, and I guess the birds had the good sense to go find a condo somewhere in Florida.

I saw it snow in May. That’s not natural. I was down by the lake one June evening, and a temperature sign at a bank read 38 degrees. That’s not natural, either. I heard a line that I thought was funny, as well as quite descriptive: “There are only two seasons in Chicago—winter and Fourth of July.”

They put up ropes and lines along the street in the Loop so you could hang on and not be swept across the ice and into the Chicago River by a blizzard wind. I had never been in a blizzard until I lived in Chicago. Being in a blizzard is like standing in a wind tunnel, getting pelted by ice cubes going three hundred miles an hour.

April was the cruelest month. One morning an April day would dawn, and you would exclaim, “The long gray nightmare is over.” It would reach 67 degrees, and you would put your rubber overshoes away. The next day, it would snow seventeen inches.

I mentioned earlier how I never got a cabdriver in Chicago who spoke English. I never got on a city bus when there wasn’t some sort of crazy on board, either. There was a man who rode to work on the same bus as I did who used to talk to his hands, like they do in New York subways.

He would open his hands, look at them, and say, “Good morning, hands.” Then he would break into a diatribe involving everything from freeing Castro’s slaves to there will never be another Cubs’ shortstop as good as Ernie Banks.

A man dressed as Abe Lincoln would ride my bus occasionally. He not only dressed like Lincoln, top hat and the works, he even looked a lot like Lincoln. He was tall and gangly, and had a beard.

He never said very much. The bus driver would always say, “Good morning, Abe,” and Abe would tip his hat to the bus driver.

That’s nothing. One morning a man with a live chicken on his head tried to get aboard number 151. The bus stopped, and a few people got on in front of the man with the live chicken on his head. When he tried to board the bus, the driver said, “You can’t bring that chicken on here.”

The man with the live chicken on his head said, “I’ll pay an extra fare for my chicken.”

Later, I thought, why didn’t I get off the bus and interview the man with the live chicken on his head? I should have, because, now, it would be nice to be able to sit here and explain about the chicken. But I was late that morning, and if I didn’t get to work pretty soon, Sandy would fill up three quarters of the sports section with Beat the Champs names and scores, and there wouldn’t be room for the U.S. Open golf story. Maybe the guy just liked chickens.

Food was a continuing problem for me in Chicago, too. In Chicago, barbecue was ribs, and that was it. You could find plenty of barbecued ribs in Chicago, but what you couldn’t find was a barbecued pork sandwich (described, elsewhere, as a “barbecue pork-pig sandwich”), and I dearly love barbecued pork sandwiches, which I grew up on at the world-famous Sprayberry’s Barbecue in Newnan, Georgia.

You go into a restaurant in Chicago looking for maybe some country fried steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, and other southern delectables, and what you might get was Salisbury steak, a baked potato, and green beans that had been steamed. I don’t like steamed vegetables. I like green beans that have been simmering for about a week with a large piece of ham thrown in for flavoring.

There were many ethnic restaurants in my rather ethnic neighborhood, but once you’ve eaten one portion of boiled yak, that’s about it for the rest of your life.

Kay tried. She would still fry an occasional chicken or cook a pork roast, and she did manage to find some grits for breakfast, but where were the home-grown tomatoes, the speckled-heart butter beans, and the fried okra? And the cornbread mix she found was too sweet. I hate sweet cornbread. Not as much as I hated Beat the Champs, but close.

Okay, the hot dogs were good at a little joint up on Clark Street near my apartment. Yankees, I must admit, know something about hot dogs, even though they pronounce them as they do. I learned to eat nothing but sharp mustard on my hot dogs while I lived in Chicago, a practice I have continued even until today. What’s good about northern hot dogs is they are all beef and they are much smaller than the plump dogs they serve down South. I prefer smaller dogs because they are easier to eat, and the smaller the dog, with apologies to Ralph Nader, the fewer rodent hairs I’m getting.

Speaking of grits, I invited my friend Tim Jarvis and his wife over to a Sunday morning breakfast once. Kay had found some country ham someplace, and she was planning scrambled eggs, cheese grits, and homemade biscuits.

Tim and his wife arrived at our apartment. He walked into the kitchen and saw Kay’s biscuits, just before they were to go in the oven. He took a long look at them and said, “So those are grits.”

Kay began picking up pieces of the midwestern, dull-as-dishwater accent, which concerned me greatly. Her initial appeal to me had been the lovely lilt of her South Carolina low-country manner of speech.

I first noticed the change when she said good-bye to me on the phone one day. Most southerners get off the phone by saying, “Bye,” which sounds more like “Bi” with an extremely hard i.

Chicagoans said, “Bye-Bye,” with the emphasis on the second “bye.” It was sort of like, “Bai-Bai.”

I said to her, “Don’t start sounding like these people. We’ve got to maintain some of our heritage.”

Perhaps that was the first fissure in our Chicago relationship. Gradually, it got bigger.

2. Get up before she does and go play tennis, then go to work and don’t come home until you’re too tired to do anything but lie on your couch and ask her to bring you beer.

7. If she thinks she has the talent to sing and wants to go up to Lincoln Avenue pubs with her guitar, laugh at her for being so naive as to think she could be discovered like Bette Midler.

8. If she wants to take a cultural tour of the city, say, “I ain’t going to no art gallery.”

9. If she wants to get romantic and build a fire in the fireplace, say, “If you want a fire, build it yourself. Who do I look like, Daniel Boone?”

I did them all. All ten. I lost her trust in Atlanta with my fooling around at Harrison’s, and then I added to the problem with the other nine when we got to Chicago.

It was early May. I caught a train from Chicago to Dallas. I went to Dallas to attempt to hire a young sportswriter named Randy Harvey from the Dallas Times-Herald, one of the country’s top new talents.

I offered the job to Randy, and he took it. I boarded the train Saturday afternoon and arrived back in Chicago Sunday afternoon. I caught a cab home.

I couldn’t. Hoge, two weeks earlier, had given each department head another newspaper to study. We were to report the next day on what we had learned from the paper we had studied and comment on what we thought was good or bad about it and what we could learn from it to make the Sun-Times better. I had The New York Times.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t worked on my report. Sunday night after dinner was my last chance.

I finished eating. I spread out The New York Times on our kitchen table and went to work.

We had a balcony off our living room. Kay walked outside and was gone a long time. I could tell she was upset, but I still had to do my report.

I tried to make up for it Monday. In the afternoon, after the department-head meeting, I called her at home. I suggested I bring home a couple of steaks and some champagne and we could spend a romantic evening together.

It’s odd what the mind records indelibly. I was sitting at my desk in the sports department. I had the phone to my left ear talking to my wife. I had bought a paperback copy of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. I was staring at the cover as we talked.

“Let me ask you a question: What did you do for dinner before you married me?”

Give her a couple of days and she’ll get over it and be back, I thought. How many husbands have thought that when their wives first left them?

But Hudspeth had spoken a truth once. He had said, “Women will forgive and forgive and forgive. But once they turn on you, it’s over.”

I spent the next eleven months living alone in Chicago. I tried everything to get Kay to come back home. I called her, I begged her, I promised to change. I hurt. God, how I hurt.

I’ve still got a mess at the newspaper, I’m uncomfortable with where I live, winter is coming, there’s no Harrison’s. And my wife has left me. I spend long hours and much money talking to friends long-distance back in Atlanta. I called my stepbrother one lonely Friday night.

Late Saturday afternoon, I got a call from him. He and his wife were on the outskirts of Chicago and wanted to know how to get to my apartment.

“I’ve never heard you so down,” he said when he arrived. “I was afraid not to come.”

I’d never felt as alone in my life. This wasn’t my town. These weren’t my people.

I kept hoping a miracle would happen, and Kay would come back. It was often that I asked myself, though, Do I really love this woman that much? If she came back, would I change like I said I would, or would I go back to my old ways?

And what if this had happened in Atlanta? I had my pals in Atlanta, my support group. I would have Harrison’s on Friday night as a means of filling the void.

I could never answer any of that. And it didn’t matter. That was Atlanta, this was Chicago.

I did a lot of eating alone. Drinking alone is bad, but eating alone is worse. You’re alone and sober. I stopped going to bed. I would lie on the couch watching television until I went to sleep. Falling asleep on a couch in a living room is preferable to a man filled with the demons of loneliness and regret, lying in a bed meant for two in the dark and the quiet.

The drinking. It’s not supposed to be an answer, but it helped. I would sit at John Barleycorn’s some nights. Or I would walk to the 2350 where they had two Eddie Arnold country songs on the jukebox and Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia.” I listened to that a lot.

I tried Division Street, Butch McGuire’s. The Bombay Bicycle Club. I never scored. There was no Hudspeth around to lay the groundwork for me.

And the old feast-or-famine rule was working against me. That goes like this: If you are married or have a steady girlfriend, you’ll run into more good-looking eligible women than you could handle in a lifetime. You’re loose, you’ve got something at home to go back to, and they are everywhere. But get down and out. Get with absolutely nothing. Be desperate. You haven’t got a chance. Famine. Dog days. The locusts have come, and the earth is dark and without form. I couldn’t catch a break.

One day, I saw a lovely blonde walking through the newsroom. Despite my classic male fear of rejection, I got on the elevator with her and rode down to the lobby. On the way down, I introduced myself. She introduced herself. She was with somebody’s PR firm. She seemed receptive. I asked her for a date. She accepted.

She came to my apartment by cab. I cooked us steaks. I served us a bottle of wine. Afterward, we sat on the floor in front of a fire Daniel Boone could, in fact, have built.

I’m not really certain what happened, but this woman had just completed one of the est things, and she was trying to learn to be assertive. We got into a large argument about something, and the next thing I knew we were screaming at each other and I was calling her a cab.

I turned thirty in Chicago. I gave myself a birthday party. I invited Tim and his wife and Sid Cato, another tennis friend, and Johnny Reyes and another guy named Carl, who also lived in the building. Carl was single, and was always bringing home lovely women.

Tim gave me a houseplant. Sid gave me some tennis balls. Johnny Reyes gave me an album of genuine Colombian music. Carl brought me a girl.

Lorraine left the next morning. She gave me her telephone number, but it turned out to be bogus. I called Carl. He said he’d heard Lorraine had moved to the West Coast.

I dated a girl at Playboy. Not a Playboy girl. A girl who worked at Playboy. She used to make fun of how skinny my arms were.

She came to see me a few times, and even brought me barbecue sandwiches. When she realized I was looking forward to the sandwiches more than I was looking forward to her, she stopped coming.

Kay got her own apartment and a job. I called her an average of four times a day to beg her to come home. I began to neglect my job.

Clendenen, my assistant, scolded me. “You’ve got to get off the phone and pay more attention to what’s going on around here,” he said.

“I never felt as lonely in my life. All you did was work. You never had time for me. On Saturday, I went to down to the Oak Street Beach. A man came up to me and asked if he could sit next to me. Me. I told him I was married.

“He asked me where my husband was. I said he was out of town on business. He said, ‘If I were married to somebody like you, I wouldn’t leave town and leave you out here all alone.’

“Nothing happened, but I did realize I was somebody, too. There were people who thought I was attractive and had talent.

“When you ignored me that Sunday night and went to work after being gone for three days, I walked out on the balcony and made up my mind to leave you.”

Sid Cato talked me out of suicide. He told me something I’d never known about him, something he had never talked about before.

Sid had a wife and kids. He was devoted to them. The family went driving one Sunday afternoon. Vandals had taken down a stop sign at a country intersection. There was nothing to tell Sid he was coming to an intersection.

He drove into it. A truck hit his car broadside. His wife was killed. One of his two children was killed. “I’ll never get over that,” he said to me. “My grief and my guilt were enormous. I thought about killing myself, too. You never get over loses in your life, but you can get better with time.”

And Tim Jarvis helped. Despite our different backgrounds, we became close. He and his Puerto Rican wife, Paula, worked together counseling Hispanic families. Tim was the most intelligent, sensitive man I’d ever known. I would talk. He would listen.

We had the tennis, and he was a regular in my poker games. Tim had a VW beetle, like my old ’66. When I first began playing tennis at Mid-Town, I had to ride the bus. Imagine how I looked at six-fifteen in the morning, standing there in a snowstorm with two tennis racquets under my arms.

After I met Tim, five mornings a week he would pick me up in the VW and drive us to the tennis center. Tim was the least demanding friend I’d ever had. Except for one episode for which I will never forgive him.

One bitterly cold morning, he called around five-thirty and told me his car wouldn’t start. We both took the bus to tennis. Afterward, he said, “Let’s take the bus back to my apartment. I need you to help me push my car into a garage so it will warm up and I can get it started again.”

Sounded easy. It wasn’t. In the first place, the garage was three blocks away from where Tim’s car was parked. In the second place, there was snow all over the street, which made pushing his VW like pushing a tank. In the third place, I hadn’t bought my rubber overshoes yet, and there I was pushing a Pershing tank down a snowy street in Chicago in subfreezing weather in a pair of loafers. It took us an hour to get Tim’s car into the garage. I had snow all over me. I had snow internally. I ruined another pair of shoes.

I thought, If I could just get the hell out of Chicago and get back to Atlanta . . .

But I didn’t see a way out. I’d only been in Chicago just over a year. To leave would send a message that I couldn’t cut it. To leave would be a defeat. And what would I do back in Atlanta? Work in a convenience store?

To make matters worse, Jimmy Carter was about to be elected president of the United States. When Carter had first run for governor of Georgia, the Athens Daily News had endorsed him. He lost the election, but came back to win later.

When Carter brought his Illinois campaign to Chicago, he met with Hoge and other editors at the Sun-Times. Hoge invited me to sit in. I had known Carter slightly when he was governor. He remembered me. And, incredibly, his Illinois campaign manager was a former minister at the Moreland Methodist Church where I grew up. More incredibly, he had performed the marriage ceremony of my mother and stepfather at the church when I was ten.

All that made me more homesick. The South suddenly was hot. The national media was discussing southern language, southern politics, southern food. “Good ol’ boy” was a new catchphrase of the time.

Tim and I watched the election returns together in November 1976. He was for Carter, too. He was for Carter because he was a liberal Democrat. I was for Carter because he talked the way I did. When the networks declared him the winner over Gerald Ford that night, I got teary.

Give me some credit, though. I did take a few positive steps. I got reinvolved with the paper. Randy Harvey turned out to be brilliant. I assigned him what we called “take-out pieces,” longer stories profiling athletes or looking into issues that were beginning to crop up in sports—drug use, high salaries, etc. I assigned him the best piece he wrote at the Sun-Times.

I was stripping the wire one afternoon and came upon a short that announced the death of tennis star Jimmy Connor’s father in Belleville, Illinois, downstate, across the river from St. Louis.

I knew about Jimmy Connors and his mother and his grandmother who had trained him, but I’d never read a word about his dad. I sent Randy to find out more.

Mr. Connors had been a toll collector on the Martin Luther King Bridge over the Mississippi. Randy found a bar he frequented. The patrons said he would come there to watch Jimmy play. They said even after a Wimbledon or a U.S. Open, he would never hear from his son or estranged wife. That was the kind of story and writing I wanted, and Randy could deliver.

I had also convinced Hoge to allow me to hire another columnist. Fitz was fizzled, and Gleason was still in the left-field bleachers. I thought a new columnist, one who bit hard and could also write humor, would give us an edge on the Tribune, which had a larger staff and many more resources than we did, but in my mind lacked the sort of sports columnist I thought Chicago readers would like, a Bisher or a Jim Murray.

I interviewed Dave Kindred from Louisville. His wife didn’t want to live in Chicago. I couldn’t pay him. I finally hired Tom Callahan from Cincinnati. He wrote well. I liked his ideas. He said to me, “I want to play the Palace.”

He lasted a week. I edited a few lines of a couple of his columns, and he resigned and said, “This isn’t the Palace, it’s the Orpheum Circuit,” and went back to Cincinnati.

I hired Ron Rappaport, who was covering baseball for the LA. Times. He wasn’t exactly another Murray, but he worked at his craft and was easy to deal with. That meant a lot.

But I never did construct a feeling on the staff like the one that had been so evident in Atlanta. The camaraderie was never there. Maybe it was the Guild that did that. The relationship between management and staff, in so many ways, was adversarial. The new people I brought in were with me, but most of the older ones weren’t. It was as Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda said once: “Half the guys on the team love me. Half hate me. It’s my job to keep the two apart.”

The rap on me from the anti-Grizzards was that I played favorites. And I did. I gave the plum assignments to the people who would cooperate. I ignored the ones who wouldn’t. That’s one way I hung on to at least some of my sanity.

I decided to take another step I thought was positive. I decided to move out of the apartment where Kay and I had lived together as man and wife. We were still only separated, but I knew divorce was inevitable. Sid encouraged me to move. It would be a major part of my healing process, he promised.

So I found a new place, an apartment a few blocks south on North Cleveland Avenue. It was an old brownstone. The owner and his wife lived downstairs. They had rented me a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor.

It was late fall 1976. The movers came in the morning. They left to take a final load to the new apartment. I decided to go back through and see if anything might have been left behind. One more walk through, then I would leave this place and, hopefully, the anguish associated with it. I felt as positive as I had felt in a long while.

The last place I checked was the closet of the bedroom Kay and I shared. There was nothing left hanging, and there was nothing on the floor.

On Christmas Eve 1975,1 still hadn’t done my shopping for Kay’s gifts. I planned to go to Marshall Field around five. I’ve never been an early Christmas shopper.

But I hadn’t got out of the office until after seven, and I hit Marshall Field in a mad rush. I forget what else I bought my wife for Christmas that year except the furry white hat.

She would need such a hat for winter. And it looked like her, somehow. When she opened it and put it on, she looked so pretty, those big eyes and that big smile underneath the furry white hat.

When she first left me, I used to think about her in that hat and curse myself for what I had done and hadn’t done that had caused her to leave me. And there I stood. The apartment was empty, except for me and the white furry hat. I picked it up. I looked at it, felt it, and then brought it to my face and smelled it. It smelled like her.

I dropped to the floor and banged my fists against it. I cursed the Fates that had put me on my knees on that floor. When I finally arose, I put the hat back where I had found it. I didn’t want to carry it with me, to haunt me further.

But I think I knew at that moment. I think I knew I had to get out of Chicago to save my life. Or die there from either the cold or the grief or the depression or because of another Gleason column or another night of the Guys with the Mops or another year of Beat the Champs.

The winter of 1977 was awful, I forget the exact statistics, but there was one siege in January, soon after I had moved into my new apartment, where it didn’t get above zero for something like a week. The heat went out in my apartment. My landlord moved me downstairs with him and his wife. I couldn’t get to work. The three of us sat there for a week, huddled around the heat vent.

My landlord and his wife were from Philadelphia. One day, he said, “This is crazy living like this. We ought to move to Florida.”

I covered the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia, the first week in April in 1977. I had forgotten springtime in the South, the dogwoods and the azaleas and the girls in halter tops in the gallery on the sixteenth hole at Augusta National.

On Sunday of the final round, I was standing on sixteen. It was a wonderful late-spring southern day.

I had begun to fly a little again by then. The time off I had to go back home was precious, and I had decided it was foolish to waste half of it riding a train. I learned something about flying, too. If I went to O’Hare two hours before takeoff and drank six double screwdrivers, I wasn’t nearly as nervous on a flight. (I had previously been afraid to drink on a flight because of how hard I had prayed it wouldn’t crash. I was afraid if I sinned and had a drink, it would make God mad and He would crash the plane. Later, however, I realized if I had asked God what I should do to stop feeling terror on a plane, in all His infinite wisdom He would have said, “Have a couple of drinks.”)

I had a 12:15 A.M. flight back to Chicago Monday morning. I had asked about the weather when I called home. They said it was cold, and snow was expected.

On sixteen, I made my final decision. I was going to leave Chicago and come back to Atlanta. I didn’t know how long it would take me, or what I would do when I came back, but it didn’t matter anymore. Me and Chicago were through.

I went to work Monday around noon. Hoge dropped by and said, “Let’s have lunch.”

We went to the Wrigley Building restaurant. Hoge had the lamb. I had a cheeseburger.

Hoge told me he wanted me to think about taking over the job of night managing editor when the man who held the job currently retired in a few months. “I see you as a future managing editor,” he said to me. “But you need some years getting ready.”

This was familiar. I didn’t want to stay in Chicago under any circumstances, much less move from sports. But I felt that tug about not disappointing somebody. Hoge had been great to work for. He wasn’t that popular with others. They resented his looks and his glibness, I suppose. They made fun of his clothes. It was the first time I had ever heard the word “preppie.” Jim was from a wealthy background. They resented that, too. They had a nickname for him—“Attila the Hoge.”

But I respected him immensely. He knew the newspaper business, and he loved it as I did. He supported me in the Banks saga and in every other instance when I needed support.

I didn’t commit to Hoge, and I certainly didn’t tell him I was going South as soon as possible. But I knew I didn’t want to be night managing editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. I had tried the news side once and had hated it. Plus, I knew what being night managing editor really involved. It involved coming to work at six in the evening and crawling out in a blizzard at two in the morning, and if there was anything wrong with the paper the next morning, it was my fault.

I went back to the office and sat there and contemplated my next move. Should I call Minter in Atlanta and see if there was any possibility the papers might take me back? I was so desperate to go home, I’d volunteer to be garden editor if nothing else was available.

“It took you a long time to find a new columnist, didn’t it?” he asked me.

“I’m looking for a number-two sports columnist behind Outlar. Anybody impress you I could afford?”

“Jim, I gotta get my ass out of here. They want me to be night editor, Kay isn’t coming back, the weather is killing me, and I’ve got to get out of here.”

“I know that,” I answered him. “But I’ve read practically everybody in the country now, and I might not be as good as the best, but I think I’ve got enough sense to know at least what to write about. I could improve.”

I worked all night. I wrote one column about a college football player in California who was dying of cancer. I wrote what I thought was a funny piece about athletes’ overuse of the phrase, “You know.” I wrote one about a sports bar in Chicago that turned away a seven-foot basketball player with the Bulls because he didn’t have an ID. “Didn’t have nothin’ to do with the fact he was black,” the bar owner had been quoted as saying.

As I have said before, he was a man of few words. The same man who had sat down beside me that day in the press box at Georgia’s Foley Field in 1968 and had asked, “Want to come to work for us?” said perhaps the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard.

I picked up the phone and said, “Hello.” He didn’t say, “This is Jim in Atlanta.” All he said was, “I believe you can write. I can pay you twenty-two-thousand dollars a year.”

Exactly twelve days later, April 21, 1977, I boarded a Delta flight to Atlanta. I had got Hudspeth to get me an apartment back at Mi Casa. I had told Hoge, “I just can’t live in this place anymore.”

I had said good-bye to my staff. I’d said, “Some of you, it has been a pleasure to work with. Others of you, it has not been. And one of you has been an incredible pain in the ass.”

With that, Lacey J. Banks got out of his chair, walked over to me, and stuck out his hand. I shook it.

I would never have anything to do with the production of a newspaper section again, I would never manage again. A decade after Wade Saye had taught me layout and after all those mornings and late nights in composing rooms, after all that editing, sweating over graphics, waiting anxiously for a new edition to arrive, that part of my career was over.

I would never strip another wire. I would never put my hands on another tear rule or glue pot. I would never write another headline or cutline.

Hoge offered to let me stay on as a writing sports editor. But I declined. Nothing could have made me stay. I had never even applied for an Illinois driver’s license, and my watch remained on Eastern time during my entire Chicago experience.

My first column as the number-two sports columnist for the Atlanta Constitution appeared on the front sports page, Monday morning, April 22, 1977.

I had already mailed it to Minter from Chicago. It was about the years in Chicago. It went on about how happy I was to get home. I wrote, “From now on, if it doesn’t have a red clay motif, I’m not interested.” I ended it with the conversation I had with a Delta Airlines reservations agent when I called to get my ticket home.