Essay Paul Hemphill (bio) For many males of my generation who would turn out to be writers, this is a familiar tale. We grew up wanting to become athletes, but then, having failed, we opted to write about sports. In my case, the dream was to become a major-league second baseman. I was stopped in my tracks early on, being cut after less than a week in spring training with a woeful minor-league club, a failure at the age of 18, and only then did I begin to consider any sort of life beyond baseball. That led to college, which led to a kindly English professor at Auburn who opined that I seemed to have "a way with words." Thus emboldened, told for the first time there was something I might be good at, I rushed out and bought a flimsy portable typewriter and became a writing fool. I taught myself how to type and how to write. Write what you know was the mantra then, as now, and since I had read more of The Sporting News than of Shakespeare, I chose sports writing. Soon I became sports editor of my college newspaper, the very year that Auburn's football team won the national championship, and that led to a half-dozen years of writing about sports for daily newspapers in medium-size southern cities. But as I grew up and out, reading serious literature and having serious thoughts for the first time, I developed the notion that writing about sports was child's play, a painless way to make a living, something we do before graduating to real writing. Somewhere in that period I came across a collection of pieces by Paul Gallico, wherein he recounted the precise moment when he decided to quit his job on a New York newspaper, as the highest paid sports columnist in America, in order to address "the real world." It was a Sunday afternoon and, faced with having to crank out a thousand-word column by sundown, he got off the elevator only to be greeted by a hairy, cigar-smoking pressroom foreman: "Well, Gallico, is that crap of yours gonna be late again tonight?" That about did it. Gallico marched straight to his typewriter, knocked out an essay entitled "Farewell to Sport," quit his job, and nearly starved until he got the hang of writing without using sports as a safety net. Such novels as The Snow Goose and Mrs. 'arris Goes to Paris would follow, but in the end he would admit, as we all do, that writing every day in the service of the toys and games department had been the perfect preparation—boot camp, as it were—for everything he would write afterward. After all, the only people on a newspaper who are allowed to actually write are the sports writers, who are given free rein to describe scenes and quote dialogue and dramatize action and, as a New York sports editor once famously said, "tell us how the weather was." All of this was a variation on something Ernest Hemingway once said of newspapering in general: "On the Kansas City Star you were taught to write a simple declarative sentence. This cannot be harmful to anyone. The trick is to know when to quit." [End Page 96] What came after those early days of writing sports for newspapers was what I call a natural progression. I had spent my time in boot camp as a sports editor and columnist in such outposts as Augusta, Georgia, and Tampa, Florida, and I knew only that I'd had enough of writing about sports on a daily basis. I had done my time. What might follow I didn't know until sometime around 1963 when I came upon the New York Herald-Tribune and saw that Jimmy Breslin, who had produced a hilarious book about the original New York Mets entitled Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?, had moved over from the sports page to write a general column in what today's papers call the style section. Instead of writing about athletes, the new and reconstituted Breslin was taking to the streets to write these...