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They called my young coworkers and me Nighthawks. At first I took scores and dictation and answered the trivia questions of Boston drunks over the phone. Within weeks I was being sent on photo runs, sitting underneath the hoop or on the catwalk high above the parquet floor of the old Boston Garden, watching Larry Bird and Dr. J. while waiting to rush the staff photographer’s film back to the paper in time for the first edition. I sat ringside for the Marvin Hagler versus Vito Antuofermo middleweight championship fight. I took dictation from and line-edited Bud Collins live at Wimbledon and shot the shit with the old-school pasteup guys wearing folded newspaper hats putting the paper together on the lower level. Some nights after we put the paper to bed, we would hang out on the roof of the building and talk and drink and sometimes shoot fireworks out high above Dorchester’s Morrissey Boulevard until dawn. This is where I was told that if I played my cards right, I would be given a chance to be a reporter for high school games in a year or so. But it was not a sure thing. There was a waiting list, a pecking order. Then one day for journalism class I wrote an essay about a seventy-mile canoe race I’d participated in—the World Flatwater Championships*2—that spring in Cooperstown, New York. On a whim I submitted it to Bob Duffy, a cantankerous, hilarious editor who also happened to be an exceptional writer. Duffy ran the piece, “Paddling into the Past,” accompanied by a pen-and-ink illustration, in the following Saturday’s Sports Plus section. They paid me $75, and my favorite writer on the paper, Leigh Montville, went out of his way to congratulate me. This was the first time—okay, at least since my yearbook-signing days—that I felt the satisfaction and pull of being a writer.

Soon I was bumped in the cub-reporter pecking order, and I had a regular byline in the paper, mostly covering high school sports. This led to another part-time job, as a stringer for the Associated Press, covering Boston Red Sox home games.

The extent of my responsibilities for the AP job at Fenway Park was to hustle up and down stairs between the press box and the winning and losing clubhouses to record quotations for an aging beat writer to slug into the second version of his wire service story. At first I was impressed by the effortless way in which he would sometimes dictate a game story in his Boston Irish twang seconds after it ended: “The Bahstan Red Sawks, cawma, led by Cahney Lansfud’s three RBIs, cawma …” But then, after realizing that he had been at it for more than forty years and that within a few weeks I was able to do the same thing in my head, I wasn’t so impressed. For this (and keeping said writer’s gin-and-tonic glass filled) I got $50 a game, all the food I could eat at the press buffet, and the privilege of leaning against the batting-practice cage for three hours before first pitch and watching players, reporters, coaches, vendors, and owners prepare for the game. Often I found watching these hundred-year-old rituals unfold as the antique ballpark came to life more fascinating than the game itself.

In two years I’d gone from drinking on top of Babe Ruth’s grave while cutting class to covering the likes of Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice, Cal Ripken, and Reggie Jackson and listening to the likes of the diminutive, beer-drinking, corn-on-the-cob-eating Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver spew a poetic litany of profanities while he was sitting behind a postgame clubhouse desk, naked.

However, even though I was a lover of baseball and the beat was fascinating, especially for a twenty-one-year-old, the Red Sox clubhouse was not the most hospitable place in the world, and with a few exceptions the players treated most writers (and often with good reason) as something (not infield clay) to be scraped off the bottom of their spikes.

Without a doubt it was easier and more glamorous than mixing cement, and it certainly had its moments, but after a while I