Category Archives: Sportswriting

Seedy K Scoops: Every Once in a While

Basketball, College Sports, Rumor & Innuendo, Sportswriting

By dumb luck and circumstance, I beat the crowd yesterday to the exciting positive news for U of L baskeball fans.

The NCAA had declared waiting in limbo PG Ty-Laur Johnson immediately eligible.

A guy in the gym texted me immediately after Kenny Payne told TL-J and the team.

You’ve seen those videos where a football coach announces that a 4th string walk on punter is now on scholly, and the locker room erupts in cheers and hugs? Well, I’m told that’s what happened.

Fortunately, when I got the text, I was sitting at my keyboard, and immediately posted the news at the Chron. With the proviso that I hadn’t been able to officially confirm it. Soon enough that happened, so I edited my original post, then remembered to post it at my own sports blog.

Received a pat on the back from Glorious Editor. Always appreciated. Since it wasn’t always the case years ago at another venue, which you will learn if you continue with this “tell all,” such as it is.

I’ve never considered myself a reporter. I’m a pundit. A commentator. A retired barrister with too much time on his hands and his key to the posting app. Someone who is familiar enough with the writings of local icon Dr. Gonzo, to understand fabulists often speak the truth. Or, so we delude ourselves.

But yesterday’s gotcha got me thinking of the very few times it’s happened before. All during my “Rumor & Innuendo” days at LEO. Continue reading Seedy K Scoops: Every Once in a While →

“The Pacific was a Home Run”: My Favorite Sportswriting

Sports, Sportswriting

I’ve been known to steal ideas before, and here it comes again. Deal with it.

At theathletic.com the other day, writers covering different sports listed their take on the best books about each.

OK, there’s a nifty idea, I says to myself.

At which juncture, I perused the bookcases in my condo, donning one of my Covid masks, so I wouldn’t choke on the dust stirred up, and pulled out a few of my faves.

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I’ll start with my favorite sports book, and my favorite story by my favorite sportswriter. My favorite writer period, the fellow whom I would aspire to emulate, while understanding I really am not worthy of toting his inkwell.

Murray, Ky. — You run up Route 641 to get here from Paris in Tennessee, because that is the closest place to Murray where there are any hotel rooms. You run past the browned fields, hawks, and vultures riding the thermals at different levels, and you run past the ponds, as still as Sunday morning. You go through Camden, where Patsy Cline’s airplane went down, and all the little farm roads off the highway seem to lead to churches, many of them the least common denominations. One of them, two miles up the road, calls itself The Church of the Living God of the Holiness of Holiness, which certainly ought to narrow things down. The way you know you’ve passed from Tennessee into Kentucky is that all the liquor stores and roadhouses seem to have disappeared. Continue reading “The Pacific was a Home Run”: My Favorite Sportswriting →