Sometimes The Bear Eats You: Confessions of a Sportswriter

In those halcyon days there was still a lot of booze in journalism. Writers were understood to be two-fisted drinkers. You wrote a story, you wrote a chapter; then you went out and bellied up to the bar. When I was The Kid, I was regaled with tales of the sportswriter who covered for his tosspot buddy by filing a story for him; the punch line was invariably that the sober writer’s editor called him the next day and asked him why he couldn’t write as well as his rival—when, of course, he had written the rival’s story himself.