“This is Eddie from Laclede, Mr. Bascombe, whaddaya think’s wrong with the whole concept of competition on the college level these days? I think it stinks, Mr. Bascombe, if you want to know what I think,” “Well, Eddie, that’s a pretty good question …” Beyond all that I could look forward to the occasional company of good-natured men who, at least on a superficial level, shared my opinions—something you don’t often have in the real writer’s business.

What I determined to do was write well everything they told me to write—mixed pairs body-building, sky-diving, the luge, Nebraska 8-man football—I could’ve written three different stories for every assignment, I thought of things in the middle of the night, jumped out of bed, practically ran down to the study and wrote them. Raw material I had up to then—ruminations, fragments of memory, impulses I might’ve tried to struggle into a short story suddenly seemed like life I already understood clearly and could write about: fighting the battle with age; discovering how to think of the future in realistic terms.

It must happen to thousands of people that a late calling is missed, with everything afterwards done halfway—a sense of accomplishment stillborn. But for me it was the reverse. Without knowing I had a natural calling I had hit on a perfect one: to sit in the empty stands of a Florida ball park and hear the sounds of glove leather and chatter; talk to coaches and equipment managers in the gusty autumn winds of Wyoming; stand in the grass of a try-out camp in a mid-size Illinois grain town and watch footballs sail through the air; to bone up on the relevant stats, then go home or back to the office, sit down at my desk and write about it.

What could be better, I thought, and still think? How more easily assuage the lifelong ache to anticipate than to write sports—an ache only zen masters and coma victims can live happily without?

I have talked this very subject over with Bert Brisker, who was also once a sportswriter for the magazine, but who has since become a book reviewer for one of the slick weeklies, and he has a remarkably similar set of experiences. Bert is as big as a den bear but gentle as they come now that he’s stopped drinking. He is the closest acquaintance I still have in town from the old cocktail-dinner party days, and we are always trying to arrange for me to have dinner at their house, though on the one occasion I did, Bert got jittery as a quail halfway through the evening (this was about at the point it became clear we had nothing to talk about), and ended up downing several vodkas and threatening to throw me through the wall. Consequently we see each other only on the train to Gotham, something that happens once a week. It is, I think, the essence of a modern friendship.

Bert was once a poet and has two or three delicate, spindly-thin books I occasionally see in used bookstore racks. For years, he had a wild-man’s reputation for getting drunk at public readings and telling audiences of nuns and clubwomen to go straight to hell, then falling off stages into deep trance-like sleeps and getting into fistfights in the homes of professors who had invited him there and thought he was an artist. Eventually, of course, he ended up in a rehab hospital in Minnesota and, later, running a poetry program in a small New Hampshire college—very like the one I taught at—and eventually getting fired for shacking up with most of his female students, several of whom he moved right into the house with his wife. It is not an unusual story, though that was all years ago. He came to sports writing precisely as I did, and now lives nearby on a farm in the hills outside of Haddam with his second wife, Penny, and their two daughters, and raises sheepdogs in addition to writing about books. Bert’s specialty, when he was a sportswriter, was ice hockey, and I will commend him by saying he was very good at making an uninteresting game played by Canadians seem sometimes more than uninteresting. Many of our writers are former college teachers or once-aspiring writers who simply couldn’t take it, or rougher-cut graduates of Ivy League schools who didn’t want to be stockbrokers or divorce lawyers. The day of the old bulldog reporter up from the Des Moines Register or the Fargo Dakotan—your Al Bucks and your Granny Rices—are long gone, though that wasn’t as true when I started twelve years ago.

Bert and I have talked about this subject on our train rides through the New Jersey beltland—why he quit writing, why I did. And we’ve agreed, to an extent, that we both got gloomy in an attempt to be serious, and that we didn’t understand the vital necessity of the play of light and dark in literature. I thought my stories were good at the time (even today I think I might like them). They seemed to have a feeling for the human dilemma and they did seem hard-nosed and old-eyed about things. It was also true, though, that there were a good many descriptions of the weather and the moon, and that most of them were set in places like remote hunting camps on Canadian Lakes, or in the suburbs, or Arizona or Vermont, places I had never been, and many of them ended with men staring out snowy windows in New England boarding schools or with somebody driving fast down a dark dirt road, or banging his hand into a wall or telling someone else he could never really love his wife, and bringing on hard emptinesses. They also seemed to depend on silence a lot. I seemed, I felt later, to have been stuck in bad stereotypes. All my men were too serious, too brooding and humorless, characters at loggerheads with imponderable dilemmas, and much less interesting than my female characters, who were always of secondary importance but free-spirited and sharp-witted.

For Bert, being serious meant he ended up writing poems about stones and savaged birds’ nests, and empty houses where imaginary brothers he believed were himself had died grisly ritual deaths, until finally, in fact, he could no longer write a line, and substituted getting drunk as a donkey, shacking up with his students and convincing them how important poetry was by boinking the daylights out of them in its name. He has described this to me as a failure to remain “intellectually pliant.”

But we were both stuck like kids who had reached the end of what they know they know. I did not, in fact, know how people felt about most things—and didn’t know what else to do or where to look.