My Life in Sports

BY BOB MARKUS

They said it would be easy, like climbing back on a bicycle. But they are the same people who told me my golf game would get better after I retired and had more time to play. It's been nearly 12 years since I've written anything except a Christmas letter and nearly 30 since I last wrote a sports column for The Chicago Tribune.

I was pretty good at it once. Good enough to win a National Headliner award as best sports columnist in the country. Good enough to win three Illinois sports writer of the year awards and a double handful of wire service best story awards. But that was then and this is now. Do I still have a little hop in my fastball? Is there still a little bite in my curve?

I'm going to try to find out. Don't ask me why because I haven't the faintest. Maybe after 12 years of playing golf and bridge and reading and working crossword puzzles I'm ready to try something meaningful again. Not that writing about sports is necessarily meaningful.

But it's what I do--or did--and lately I've had this urge to do it again. I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this. I'll probably talk some about my own career, even if it is ancient history. But what the heck, we still study about the Greeks and Romans don't we?

And it hasn't been THAT long. Chris Chelios, who was a graybeard when I last talked to him while covering the Blackhawks, my last assignment for The Tribune, is still playing. So is Gary Roberts, whose career appeared to be in jeopardy way back then because of a back problem. Evander Holyfield, whose fight with an over-the-hill Larry Holmes I covered in Las Vegas, is still fighting, well over the hill himself by now.

It's quite likely that you never heard of me unless you lived in Chciago. Even there I wasn't exactly a household name. But, the people I wrote about were the super stars of their time. Muhammad Ali. Bobby Hull. Joe DiMaggio. Hank Aaron. Arnold Palmer. Willie Mays. George Halas. Don Shula. Sugar Ray Leonard. And, like a real life Forest Gump, I was present at some of the most storied sports events of my era. I was there when Franco Harris made his immaculate reception. I was there when Garo Yepremian kicked the game-winning field goal on Christmas day to end what was at the time football's longest game in the second overtime. I was there when the Russians beat the United States in the gold medal final in Munich on what I wrote was "the greatest three-second violation in the history of the sport."

I was there in New York when Joe Frazier beat Muhammad Ali for the undisputed heavyweight championship and I was there in New Orleans when Ali won the title back for a second time against Leon Spinks.

I have been at World Series and Super Bowls (I once won the writer's pool at two consecutive Super Bowls, thus becoming, if not rich, at least famous for awhile.) I saw Billy Jean King turn Bobby Riggs into an old man in the time it takes to play three sets of tennis. I saw A.J. Foyt, Al Unser and Rick Mears each win his fourth Indianapolis 500.

I have been invited to duke it out behind his closed manager's office door by Leo Durocher and threatened with bodily harm by enigmatic baseball player Alex Johnson. Once, while covering the Baltimore Colts' training camp I was saved from being gunned down by an irate saloon keeper, who objected to a column I had written about his establishment.

In weeks to come I might write of some of these things, or I might write about how I became a columnist in the first place--and how I became a noncolumnist in the second place. Along the way you'll meet an interesting cast of characters, like Jimmy Segretti, a makeup editor, whose hatred of writers was so viceral that he stopped speaking to his best friend, Roy Damer, the day Damer was promoted from the copy desk to become The Tribune's Big Ten writer..

But I don't intend to simply wallow in the past. If I'm going to do this I'll have to be prepared to comment on present day sports topics as well. I'll be interested to see if I still can do it. It might, indeed, be as easy as climbing back on a bicycle. But I wouldn't know because, you see, I've never ridden a bicycle.