Sitting here at my desk at The Daily Aztec at almost midnight and with a column to write and nothing to write about, with the only sounds being the tapping of these letters and the cracking of my knuckles, with the only lights coming from my computer and the light bulb of an idea above my head, with the only smell emanating from the day-old sushi that I tossed in my trashcan, it suddenly hit me.
Why do I do this for a living, if you can call this a living?
It’s certainly not for the pay. I’d make more as a bathroom attendant. Better smell here, though, but not by much.
It’s certainly not for the prestige. Until I make it on ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” I’m pretty sure the only ones reading my columns are my dad and my friends.
It’s certainly not for the popularity. You’d think girls would flock to sportswriters, but the only attention I get is from an athlete out to get me, a grinder with an axe to grind.
No, I do this for the past, for the writers who taught me more with the turn of a phrase than a teacher with a red pen and an itch to edit.
I look to legendary writer Gay Talese, who says more in 40 words than I can say in 400. He spins words like sugar around a cone, but his candy is not cotton, it’s silk. His command of the English language would make Webster ask him to ghostwrite the dictionary.
To Grantland Rice, the granddaddy of them all. The be-all, end-all.
“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again,” Rice once wrote. “In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.”
To Red Smith, whose literary abilities were challenged only by Shakespeare and Moses. His eloquence with a sentence proved that sportswriters weren’t just hacks who couldn’t get a book published. He didn’t write about sports, he sang about society. Except his songs were stories and his sports were people.
To Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times, the greatest of them all, my idol. His ability to make a reader laugh and cry, hurt and triumph, all in the same sentence, mind you, is what makes legends. Growing up in Southern California from the age of 4, I had the pleasure of reading him until I was 14, when he died in 1998. It’s no wonder I became a sportswriter at 15.
These painters of prose molded my mindset. Future doctors watch “ER” or “House.” Future frontmen emulate Mick Jagger or Robert Plant. I read. And read. And read.
You might call this a cop-out column. A way to waste half an hour without looking into sports. I could’ve talked tourney. I could’ve opined about Opening Day. I could’ve tackled Terrell Owens and Tom Brady. So could thousands of others.
This is an ode to the great ones, an ode to the past, an ode to my idols.
Thank you.
-Jon Gold is a journalism junior.
-This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec.
