Ink-stained wretches

That's what they used to call us ... ink-stained wretches.

It is a name for reporters, or more specifically (in my case) sportswriters. So-called because, I suppose, our fingers were either stained with ink from our pens, or maybe from the ink that came off the pages of the daily newspapers that we worked for. Either way, I rarely, if ever, had ink-stains on my fingers (although I did discover a few in my inside jacket pocket, where I often kept my pens).
Over the years in my previous life as a sportswriter, I spent more holidays and weekends with a fabulous group of story-tellers/fellow ink-stained wretches. At the very first football game I ever covered, I found myself with an assigned seat (they assign seats in press boxes) between Furman Bisher and Lewis Grizzard. Now, to a twenty-something kid who grew up in Atlanta and regularly stained his fingers reading the sports section, it was like sitting between the Father and the Holy Ghost.

I say "father" because Furman was the man I grew up reading; and "ghost" because Lewis seemed to spend more time walking around collecting stories than actually watching the game.
When "Mr. Bisher" came to his seat, I froze. But he leaned over and said, "Hello. I'm Furman Bisher." As if I didn't know.

That's the thing about most sportswriters I came to know over several decades of this. The good ones typically were very approachable - certainly by other sportswriters - and didn't take themselves too seriously. Oh, in the last few years I'd run into some real egos. But for the most part, no matter if they worked for the New York Times or Sports Illustrated (back when Sports Illustrated was the gold standard of sports journalism), they were just like the guy working for the county news: desperate to find a good story angle. And more often than not, it was the guy from the county newspaper who knew some little obscure tidbit on a player or coach that opened the door to a great story. I learned that early on, and never forgot it.

As a 'beat writer' - which means I was assigned to a particular team and was expected to know everything there was about that team - I attended every game of course (home and away), but also practices, meetings, lunches, and had countless conversations with coaches and administrators and players and medical personal and parents and just about anyone who might know something about the team I was covering that I didn't know and might need to know.

From 1985 until 2000, I was the beat writer covering the University of Alabama for the Birmingham Post-Herald. As a result, I spent a lot of holidays (bowl games, basketball tournaments) with a group of ink-stained wretches who became like family to me: Doug Segrest, Cecil Hurt, Chris Welch, Paul Gattis, Philip Tutor, Glenn Guilbeau, Andrew Carroll, Philip Marshall, Tommy Hicks, Jimmy Bryan, Steve Kirk, Mike Tankersly ... that great staff at the Post-Herald when I got there of Tom Lindley, Bill Lumpkin, Mack Shoemaker, RB Falstrom, Rubin Grant, Roger Shuler, Paul Finebaum ... and of course I'm leaving some people out. And there were the legends in Alabama sports like Lumpkin and Alf Van Hoose and Jimmy Smothers and John Pruett and Clyde Bolton.

And that was just in the state of Alabama.

And don't include the "talking hairsprays,'' as I called the TV sportscasters - good friends like Steve Phillips and Matt Coulter and Scott Griffin and Greg Screws and of course my old radio partner Herb Winches. And radio guys like Doug Layton and Jim Fyffe and Eli Gold. Again, there are more names than I can mention or, in some cases, remember. That doesn't mean they aren't part of my history.
And oh, the stories.

Not the ones that made the sports pages. The ones that occurred away from the stadium and practice fields, at dinner or traveling in cars or hanging out in hospitality rooms.

There are so many (but I can't use names) ... the college broadcaster who pulled into the media hotel in Memphis, handed the keys to his car (with his luggage and the broadcast equipment packed inside) to the valet, went inside to check in, only to find out there was no valet parking. ... or a certain TV guy (and Alabama grad) who so hated Tennessee that every time he crossed the border he'd stop his car, get out, and relieve himself on the "welcome to Tennessee" sign. ... Or another infamous road trip in which once the car full of sportswriters hit the interstate, one of the guys pulled out a quart of Jack Daniels, took off the top, rolled down the window and threw the top out saying "Well, I guess we won't be needing this anymore." (I will say, however, that the driver did not drink!).

I spent an eternity in the backseat of a rental car that was being driven up the winding Pacific Coast Highway by a sportswriter who somehow believed you were supposed to drive only using cruise control. But the Pacific Coast highway winds around the coast, causing a lot of speeding up and slowing down. This guy drove by setting the cruise control, then when he needed to he'd hit the breaks, then hit "resume,'' only 20 feet later have to tap the breaks again; come out of the curve and hit "resume" ... it was the most nauseating drive up one of the most scenic roads in America - and the last time I ever road in a car driven by this particular sportswriter (but that didn't make him a bad person!).

I was witness to a bar fight in a blues club in Memphis that was something out of a John Wayne movie, with guys coming out of the balcony and busting through stair railings, tables and chairs ... and to the infamous moment when a certain sportswriter bet that a star athlete would not show up for interviews the next day because he never showed up, and if the guy did show up, the sportswriter would wear a dress to practice. I slipped into the head coaches' office and told him about the bet, and he made sure the athlete showed up the next day for interviews. Of course, the sportswriter refused to wear the dress. And in one of the great post-practice press conferences of all time, the (then) head coach at Alabama started his post-practice press briefing with, "What do you guys think about a guy who welches on a bet?" He then proceeded to publicly (and quite humorously) called the sportswriter on it ... or getting a certain lineman to agree to give a group of us false information about this supposed major position change he was undertaking for the next game (which we made up), because there was one sportswriter who was infamous for eavesdropping on our interviews rather than getting in and asking his own questions, then writing stories based on what he overheard. Mind you, there was nothing stopping him from joining in our interview scrum; he just didn't do it. So that afternoon, after practice, we thought we got what we wanted when this guy asked the head coach about what would have been a major position change for this lineman, and the head coach looked at him like he was crazy (and we barely contained our giggling). We thought that was the end of it, but sure enough in his paper the next day, he'd printed the story anyway!

Too many sportswriters are not, traditionally, very good with money (maybe because we were paid so little). In the old days when we used to get our money for trips to bowl games or basketball tournaments in advance (to pay for hotels, meals, etc.), there was more than one sportswriter who found a way to blow a weeks' worth of expense money in the first night out of town (usually with alcohol or a strip club), causing very clever calls back to the office saying he'd "underestimated the hotel bill and would need more money" ... oh, and the guy who spent all his money in a strip club one night and defending it by saying the dancer 'was a really nice girl who really liked me!' ... or the guy who hit it big one night in a casino, winning something like $70,000, but he wasn't particularly happy because, he said, "about three more of those and I'll have broken even." ...

Obviously I could go on. But I won't. I will, however, repeat one of the great stories of all time that I'm surprised isn't more widely known.

It was after Alabama's famous "goal line stand" against Penn State, where the Tide defense rose up and stuffed Joe Paterno's offense on something like four plays at the goal line - the last one on fourth-and-inches - in the Sugar Bowl to win the national championship. In the post-game, everyone gathered around Tide coach Paul "Bear" Bryant. You had to get in close to Bryant, because he would mumble (which I found out in the only game I ever covered that Bryant coached, an Alabama game against Georgia Tech in Atlanta near the end of Bryant's career). So they gathered around, and one old-timer said to Bryant, "Bear, how close was that ball to the end zone?"

Bryant looked up, smiled, and mumbled, "about the length of your pecker."

That would be funny in and of itself, but because Bryant mumbled, from the back of the crowd somebody yelled out to the sportswriter, "How long did he say?"

And the old sportswriter, in a very loud voice, said "About a foot."

Which is why you never let the facts get in the way of a good story.