“Now that you’ve been here awhile, what do you think of our sports department?”
Awkward question. How frank did he want me to be? A fair amount of the sports page came from the wire services, and some of the local stuff was the work of stringers, often high-school and college journalism students. I had only three full-time colleagues.
Lead columnist Rex Burbage was old, fat, and lazy and had been there since the year one; rumor was he had something on the publisher and couldn’t be fired. Rex wrote a pretty good story when his heart was in it, but he was prone to careless mistakes. He drank a bit and liked to feature that particular reporter stereotype, but his inherent indolence went deeper than that. As a columnist, he wrote about everything, but he favored horse racing, boxing, and football.
Sally Ashe was small, cute, up for anything (at least in the journalism line), and so energetic she made you tired just watching her dart around the newsroom. A decent writer and good at breaking stories, Sally could exploit the advantages and accept the disadvantages of being an attractive young woman in a profession dominated by middle-aged, beer-bellied men. The newsroom hadn’t freed itself of a long tradition of sexism, and I think even those who practiced it most constantly admired her ability to take it in stride. Her main beats were hockey, basketball, and tennis.
Bill Toolmaker was about my age, thirty, but he seemed older and not just because of the thinning hairline. His wife had some kind of degenerative disease and caring for her told on him. Bill was already a veteran on the Chronicle and became my closest friend there. Thanks to him, I knew where the extra office supplies were hidden, whom to call for accurate information (the university athletic director’s secretary was especially good at providing deep background), and what red flags to keep off my expense account in the unlikely event I got sent out of town to cover a World Series or Super Bowl or Breeders’ Cup. Bill’s main beat was baseball, the local minor-league team close up, the majors at a respectful distance.
I gave a diplomatic, guarded answer to Glass's question about the Chronicle’s sports operation, letting him know I had my eyes open without blatantly asking why Rex was kept on. When I praised Sally’s investigative talents, Glass just said, “Nice ass, huh?” When I told him Bill was clearly his best reporter, he grunted under his breath, “No style.” He didn’t seem that enthusiastic about anybody, apart from Darren Rademacher, a high-school stringer we were going to lose to Stanford the following fall. (“Kid can write. I’d hire him full-time right now. Who needs college?”) He asked me what sports I would like to specialize in, where I saw the sports section going in the future, and other general questions, all very friendly and calm until I mentioned golf.
“No golf stories!” he said.
After a pause to take this outrageous statement in, I mounted a timid defense. “Mr. Glass, it’s a popular sport. People like to read about it, and they’re the kind of upscale readers advertisers like. There are seven courses in town. The LPGA may do a tournament stop here.”
“I know all that. And I know we can’t ignore it completely, all right? I run a few golf items off the wires, print the tournament standings and all that crap, but I’ll be damned if I’ll put any special effort into it.”
“Why?”
“To begin with, it’s not a sport. Or if it is a sport, the guys who play it aren’t athletes.”
“Mr. Glass,” I blurted, “just last week you ran a front-page article on a chess tournament.”
He gave me a hard stare. “It was a slow news day, and there was a lot of human interest in that story. Read my lips, Twining. No golf.”
At this point in my service at the Chronicle, I was not yet brave enough to press the point further, so I got off the subject of golf, and our meeting returned to a state of calm.
When I got back to the sports staff's corner of the newsroom, all three of my colleagues were waiting for me. It seemed a one-on-one with the boss was a rare occurrence and they wanted to hear all about it. I gave them a selective account.
Rex Burbage, gnawing the edge of a dripping cheeseburger, said, “I think we should have warned him off the g-word, huh, guys?”
“Probably should have,” Bill Toolmaker agreed with a slight smile.
“Oh, Gus, you poor baby,” said Sally Ashe. “Millard hates golf. Never propose a story on golf, never even mention golf, and you’ll get along fine.”
“Why does he hate it so much?”
“Maybe he played once,” Bill offered. “That does it for some people.”
Rex wagged his head. “That ain’t it. I don’t like to play myself. Nineteenth hole’s okay, but the first eighteen you can have. But I still enjoy it. The constant frustration is what makes golf fun to write about. It humbles even the greatest. Years ago, I was on another paper, I got a whole story out of Arnold Palmer shooting a twelve.”
“On how many holes?” I said.
“One. A septuple bogey, I think it was.”
“You don’t write about golf at this paper, Rex,” Sally pointed out.
Rex smiled, showing remnants of cheeseburger. “Hey, you guys may think my job is safe, but even I ain’t that brave. As to why Millard hates golf so much, search me. I know where most of the bodies are buried around here, but not that one.”
Bill said, “Maybe there is no explanation. I can’t stand green olives, but there’s no deep hidden reason for it.”
“That you know of,” Sally said. “And you don’t go off like a rocket when anybody mentions olives. Anybody know anything about Millard’s father? Maybe he was destroyed by golf. Some people get addicted to it. Maybe he was a golfaholic.”
“Say, honey,” Rex said, “that hits too close to home.” And he waddled back to his desk, where he may (as self-fed legend claimed) or may not have had a selection of miniature airline booze bottles in his locked bottom drawer.
For the next few months, I was the utility man of the sports page, writing on football, baseball, basketball, auto racing, horse racing, track and field, trying to invest them all with the kind of colorful writing Millard Glass was looking for. It paid off. Glass gave me a raise to something approaching a living wage and a column of my own. I started to get those out-of-town assignments. None of my colleagues seemed jealous of my growing status—even Rex congratulated me, despite (or maybe because of) his own column getting cut back to three a week. The sports page was on an upswing. Glass goosed the budget to hire two new reporters, both with the kind of stylistic flair he liked.
Whatever else happened, we still didn’t cover golf beyond the bare minimum. One day I was sitting at my desk looking at the first-round scores of the latest PGA tournament. I’m sure you know that for every hole on a golf course, the number of strokes a capable golfer should take to get the ball in the hole, three, four, or five of them, is called par. Add them all up, and you have par for the course, which for 18 holes usually comes to 70, 71, or in the case of this tournament, 72. I’m looking at this list, and I see the leader (let’s say it was Vijay Singh) shot a 64, meaning he was eight under par. A bunch of others also shot under par, a few even par 72, and a few more over par. The worst round (terrible for a touring pro but great for a duffer) might be a 78 or 79. Thinking out loud to the room at large, I said, “How would a golfer do on the PGA tour if he shot par on every single round he played, all year long?”
“Not well,” said Sally Ashe.
“No, he’d do okay,” said Rex Burbage. “He’d make some money. Almost every tournament some guys finish well over par for four rounds, and they get paid.”
“He’d have to make the cut to play on the weekend,” Bill Toolmaker pointed out. The typical PGA tournament goes four rounds, Thursday through Sunday, but the field is reduced after the second round, and those eliminated go home empty-handed. “Par doesn’t always make the cut.”