It’s new and it’s coming soon and it’s about words.

For that, we have testimony from Project X’s first word man, Joe Posnanski.

“The best way to define Project X,” Posnanski says, “is that it will be a multi-platform project with, we hope, great sports writing on all fronts. . . . the idea is to marry great technology and great writing.”

Both MLB Advanced Media and USA Today Sports Group were named in TheBigLead.com’s first report of Posnanski’s hiring. Those organizations are parents of Project X, which will operate as a separate entity with no editorial connection to baseball or the newspaper. Posnanski said he couldn’t go into more detail, “not so much because it’s secret but because we are in the early stages of development and nobody really knows what will fly and what won’t. But I think I can honestly say it’s about the written word, which is why I’m thrilled to be part of it.”

Wait. Thrilled? Here’s a guy, Posnanski, who was a star at Sports Illustrated. He wrote cover stories. He did the back-page column. SI gave his personal blog prominence on its website. All this and only five minutes before, it seemed, he was a columnist in Augusta about to get a job in Cincinnati on his way to Kansas City. Now he leaves SI for Project X? I ask you, does a reasonable man check out of a Ritz-Carlton to check in to a Hotel to be Named Later? We’ll get to Posnanski’s explanation in a bit, but first I need to drop in a fat paragraph that will help explain why I love his explanation.

If only I were 25 again – I’ve said that in many places, for all the obvious reasons and for reasons of journalism. For anyone 25 years old who is susceptible to the charms of journalism and invulnerable to its curses, these are exciting times. We live at the birth of a media revolution unlike anything since Gutenberg perfected the printing press. Only imagination limits the possibilities. Maybe I’d want to be a documentarian because now, more than ever, we live in a world presented visually. More likely, I’d be a reporter/writer again. Even that basic work of journalism is full of opportunities that didn’t exist in the Neanderthalian days of newsprint. Back then, if you didn’t start your reporting career at a newspaper, you didn’t start at all. Now every niche in sports is covered online and usually covered more effectively than any newspaper ever did it. Every sports-related organization has its own reporters for its own website. And if you can’t get a job at any of those places, you start your own blog and wait for the world to catch on.

When we spoke during the Masters in early April, Posnanski said leaving SI had sent him into “a horrible, horrible depression.” Earlier he’d said in his blog: “I’ve written this before — my dream, from the time I was just starting out in this business, was to write for Sports Illustrated. My first story was about how tall Dustin Pedroia was, and seeing that in print was one of the joys of my life. My first cover story was about Albert Pujols, and that took me to an even higher high. I talked writing with Gary Smith, podcasted with Peter King (twice — my technology skills aren’t the best), chatted baseball with Tom Verducci, hung out with the awesome golf guys and listened to jaw-dropping stories at dinners with the legendary Terry McDonell. And much more. At least 100 times, I looked around and thought, ‘Is this really happening?’ It was three of the greatest years of my life, and leaving has been a persistent kick to the stomach ever since I made the decision.”

It’s a decision made in favor of “an opportunity that’s really exciting,” he told me. Project X will create work available online, on tablets, on all the current mobile devices and, if anyone perfects technology that will imprint words on the back of your eyelids during sleep, X will probably use that, too. “The best part,” Posnanski said, “is that everything will be built around the written word. I’m not a TV guy. I’m not a radio guy. I write.”

He sounded like a man who made a decision based on the future rather than on the past or even the present. As good as SI has been, is, and will be, it yet is part of a legacy media that is attempting, without notable success so far, to adapt its values and retro-fit its practices to fit a 21^st-century template.

Meanwhile, Project X will simply start anew in the 21^st century.

If in fact it’s the words that matter most, X has started well with Posnanski. It since has hired Tommy Tomlinson away from Charlotte Observer. Posnanski said, “They’re being very aggressive,” and he suggested the project could be up and running by fall.

Until then, Posnanski won’t be idling.

There’s his biography of Joe Paterno biography. For a month or two now, Amazon.com has advertised the book with a publication date of August 28 and with this description:

“By America’s premier sportswriter, written with full cooperation of Joe Paterno and his family, Paterno is the definitive account of the epic life of America’s winningest college football coach. Published to coincide with Penn State football’s first season without their legendary leader.

“Born in Brooklyn in 1926, Joe Paterno was a first generation college student who became a star quarterback while attending Brown University. After graduation in 1950, at age twenty-three, he was hired by his former coach as assistant coach at Penn State. Over the course of sixty-two football seasons, Joe Paterno’s influence was felt as the Nittany Lions won 409 games, a Division I record for a coach. He was honored with every distinction the sports industry has to offer, from being the coach to receive Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year Award, to the Associated Press College Football Coach Award, to the NCAA’s Gerald R. Ford Award.

“Joe Posnanski spent the last two years of Paterno’s life with him, getting to know the man and his family, and was there as the scandal broke that eventually consumed him. Written with unprecedented access, Paterno gets inside the mind of one of America’s most brilliant and charismatic coaches.”

All great and wonderful, except for this:

Posnanski hasn’t written it yet.

“It’s a little daunting to see it for sale,” he said, “when I’m roughly halfway through.”

We spoke, remember, in early April.

“I’d like to have it finished by the end of the month,” he said.

By Posnanski’s arithmetic, that meant he had to write 50,000 words in three weeks. Put a pencil to that, it’s about 2,500 words a day. Talk about daunting. But there’s always wiggle room in a book’s deadline. And anyone who has read the way-past-prolific Posnanski – especially on his blog famous for its “Curiously Long Posts” – knows he’s capable of 2,500 remarkable words on most any subject most any day.

Still, this is Paterno. When Posnanski began reporting the book, Paterno was by acclamation a saint among sinners. His life story was in Posnanski’s wheelhouse, an inspiring saga of achievement that brought the coach admiration, respect, and love from fans, players, coaches, even American presidents. Not so much now.

“It’s a very, very different book now,” Posnanski said. “But, in many ways, it’s still the same. It’s still about his life – a life that changed dramatically at the end. And in the last three months of his life, when nobody else had access to him, I was with him quite a bit.”

So, in the last days of April, the question every writer comes to hate: Done with the book?

He said he hoped to be finished in the next couple weeks. “Whether or not I make it . . . well, you’ve written books, so you know.”

Even by email, I could hear Joe’s sigh.

“Let me know if you need anything else,” he wrote. “For me, it’s back to typing.”

Dave Kindred’s latest book, “Morning Miracle,” is an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached by email at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s the last one, published March 7.

History, perspective, fun.

You tell me.

Why should that writer ever retire?

Retirement was not in Bisher’s plans. But newspapers these days have no clue. It’s about numbers, not stories. They dump people to get smaller payroll numbers. If by dumping people, they lose stories, they don’t much care. If by dumping a Furman Bisher, they lose integrity, they don’t much care. And newspapers wonder why readers don’t much care about them.

Pick any column: Ed Hinton, lyrical. Jeff Schultz and Mark Bradley, colleagues who learned at the master’s knee. Larry Dorman, who saw the great man work. Scott Michaux, poignant.

Then tell me.

Isn’t Bisher a guy you’d want in your paper and on your paper’s website?

He probably would have written for free. He didn’t need the AJC’s money; he’d made his and he handled it well. Edwin Pope, later a columnist at the Miami Herald, was a kid on Bisher’s first staff in Atlanta. “One year Furman went back home to North Carolina,” Pope said. The Bisher family owned a hosiery mill. The boys in sports asked him to bring them back some socks. “Bisher, to our surprise, because he was so damned cheap, returned with a barrel full of socks and told us to take all we needed. We dived in – until Bisher started counting the pairs of socks we’d taken and said, ‘That’ll be 35 cents a pair.’ We threw ‘em back in the barrel.”

The limbo, Pope said, was invented when Bisher first came to a pay toilet.

I didn’t know that Bisher.

“Hell on wheels,” Pope said.

With Jeff Schultz’s column, there’s a mocked-up newspaper page in the background of a Bisher photograph. The page carries a big headline drawn, I’d guess, from a Bisher quote delivered in that booming Bisher voice at a moment when he, if no one else, cared about the AJC: “This Ain’t No Goddam Magazine, It’s a Newspaper.”

That’s the Bisher I knew.

A reporter.

He took great notes. He wrote them longhand. He wrote in complete sentences. His southpaw’s cursive was sweeping, legible, and pressed firmly on the notebook page. Next to his, my notes looked like scribbled Sanskrit abbreviations. At an event, I watched him do that beautiful thing. The next morning, I looked in the paper. There they were, those complete sentences, so vivid and so shrewd that they seemed to have been written not in the heat of battle but long after, perhaps after a bourbon or two, the cadences created in cool contemplation. Only Bisher could do that.

I sat with Bisher at a basketball tournament the first month we worked for the same newspaper. I was a veteran, but still decades the junior officer to the southern legend. I had been advised, “Don’t ask Furman what he’s writing.” But that day we both would write for the Sunday paper. It seemed silly not to ask. It might also be fun to hear what he’d say. So I nudged him and asked, “What’re you writing, Furman?” He looked at me. He looked again. And he said, “Judas priest! General observations on the day’s events.” Only Bisher could make general observations sing.

I rode with him in a limousine maybe 20 years ago. Jim Murray sat across from us. Time had been at work on Murray. He was blind in one eye. He had broken a foot crossing a room in the dark. He had been in surgery 12 hours for repairs to his heart. When he finished the laundry list of his physical woes, Murray pointed to the mighty Bisher, even then old enough to be dead. “And that sonuvabitch,” Murray said, “can’t catch a cold.” Only Bisher would live forever.

The April of his 86th year, Bisher sat in the interview room at Augusta National Golf Club. Jack Nicklaus was on stage. Midway through the Nicklaus session, Bisher rose and shuffled down a row of the assembled literati, headed for the exit.

Nicklaus noticed. “Furman, don’t you want to hear me?”

Only Bisher would say, “Jack, when you get to be my age, you respect your kidneys.”

Every one of those April evenings in the big-numbered years of that extraordinary life, his wife, the luminous Lynda, checked in by phone at dinner time. Bisher’s voice often carried from his Row C seat to the top of the press auditorium. But never in conversation with Lynda. He was a kid in love. “I just finished, honey,” he said, meaning he’d just filed the day’s column She must have asked if he liked it. “It wasn’t much,” he said. “I keep trying. I’ll do that perfect column someday.” He was 88.

Only Bisher.

Only Bisher ever sat with Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Henry Aaron.

Only Bisher did roadwork in hotel corridors. I saw him, when the streets were icy, pounding back and forth in a Marriott hallway. In Calgary for the 1988 Winter Olympics, the AJC’s Tom Stinson was awakened in the paper’s rental house by sounds he described as “a horse giving birth.” He followed the noise to its source. There was Bisher frolicking in sweats with a towel stuffed into his shirt, Rocky Balboa, only older. “Oh, I do this every morning,” Bisher said. It was 6 a.m.

“Furman’s a force of nature,” Bill Millsaps said. A fellow geezer columnist out of Virginia, Millsaps saw the young bull in the old man, the barrel chest, the thick arms and hands, a man perpetually energized.

“The amazing thing,” Glenn Sheeley said, “is how long Furman was able to do it – and to stay ornery the whole time.” Sheeley wrote golf and the NFL for the Atlanta papers. He worked alongside Bisher hundreds of times. “The U.S. Open, first day at Oakmont in ‘94, Tom Watson shot 68 and Nicklaus a 69, but the paper got, like, only eight inches of my story and Furman’s column on the front,” Sheeley said. “Furman saw it and said, ‘Judas priest! That’s an outrage. Don’t they know how long it’s been since Nicklaus and Watson were at the top of an Open leaderboard?’ He got on the phone to the office. ‘Give me Robert Mashburn!’ The sports editor. ‘Give me Ron Martin!’ The executive editor. He wanted to bitch at everybody. That was so cool. To see him,75 years old, fighting for us that hard.”

To quote Blackie Sherrod, who was to Dallas what Bisher was to Atlanta: “Mr. Bisher has a chemical makeup that allows him to wax warmer than most, so much so that bystanders are occasionally flecked with a light froth.”

“For a sports columnist,” said Tom Callahan, one of the best, “it’s not the legs that go first, it’s the enthusiasm. Furman kept his.” Callahan counted Bisher as one of a lost kind, the gentleman columnist identified with his city, the elder who made sure the cub reporter met the baseball team’s manager. “With the column, Furman had a way of introducing the parenthetical remark that made you smile. He saw the overgrown golfer, Craig Stadler, as ‘a carnivorous moose stalking his breakfast.’ He could say the most impolitic things, the way a man would who was born in the South the month World War I ended. But he was no raging bigot. He was a softie. When my paper, the Washington Star, died, he called to ask how I was doing. A generous man.”

Read this column, on a son gone too soon, and you’ll get a sense of the Bisher some of us were lucky enough to know.

Read this one, on his leaving the AJC, and you’ll be reminded, again, of what newspapers should be.

I was watching television the other night when I noticed the flashing red light on my BlackBerry. I clicked on the email and saw words I never expected to read.

“Sportswriter Furman Bisher dies at 93.”

A heart attack. He had planned to watch golf that afternoon, but felt ill and was taken to a hospital where he went to sleep a last time.

What a life, Furman Bisher’s.

Geezers mourn.

Dave Kindred’s latest book, “Morning Miracle,” is an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached by email at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

1) Is sports journalism doomed?

2) Are sports columnists doomed?

3) Is there a better interviewer than Bob Costas?

The answers…

1) Not in this century.

2) Not in this century.

3) Not in this century.

Now, elaborations…

1) The question of sports journalism’s future came up in conversation with a friend and on the message board, Sportsjournalists.com. My friend, once an accomplished sportswriter, was all gloomy after speaking to a dozen students in a sports reporting class. He had asked, “Who’s your favorite sportswriter?” The answer came back, Bill Simmons.

That should have been no surprise. Across the last decade, Simmons has risen from the obscurity of his own blog to national notice on ESPN.com and now is editor-in-chief of his own ESPN website, Grantland.com. Good grief, his Twitter feed has over 1.6 million followers. Still, the mention of Simmons put my friend’s knickers in a twist. He believes that Simmons is, as Simmons once wrote of Roger Clemens, the anti-Christ.

So he cross-examined the students and learned they liked Simmons’ stuff because it is written from a fan’s perspective. These were young, talented, ambitious students in a private, elite university’s school of journalism. Yet they named as their favorite sportswriter a man who has never reported a big-time news story. These best and brightest opted for an obsessed fan’s expressions of agony and ecstacy. “A generation from now,” my friend said, his tone a long, low moan, “there will be no journalism.”

I suggested he take a chill pill.

Journalism has been here since the first Cro-Magnon reporters came back with news of long-toothed tigers in the neighborhood. People need news, want it, demand it. Journalism is here to stay.

Simmons is just playing a different game. He’s not about gathering and publishing information. He’s an essayist. He brings his worldview to ideas, events, characters. The irony of my friend’s distress is that he criticizes Simmons when the best of traditional sports columnists have always turned the same trick – with one difference. They have enriched their little essays with reporting done on the scene in accordance with Red Smith’s first commandment: “Be there.”

Simmons’s way — working at a remove from athletes, coaches, and the usual run of a reporter’s sources — is not my way, nor is it my friend’s. But it’s self-defeating to see his success as a sign of the apocalypse. A believer in the power of journalism works with the confidence that new readers created by the Internet will come to appreciate the value that a reporter’s work brings to an essayist’s thinking. Simmons himself understands that; his website is shaping itself into a destination for all genres of sports writing. A couple weeks ago, I wrote this for Grantland.

2) The question of sports columnists’ viability came up after my recent column on The New York Times decision to live, at least momentarily, with one columnist rather than the five it once used. The message board, Sportsjournalists.com, summarized one set of opinions under the topic title: “Columnistosaurus.”

One user said it was only common sense that young writers would migrate from newspapers to the digital world because, primarily, it was easier work with greater opportunity for becoming Bill Simmons-rich-and-famous. Besides, he wrote, “Young folks read so much online, and they see these 5,000-word paeans to whatever, and think: ‘I want to do that.’ Then they see that the columnist at their paper has another 15 years and they think: ‘Don’t want to wait. Can’t wait.’ Smaller dailies aren’t much different and are, in fact, worse; it’s a like a Supreme Court appointment at some of those. You might grow up in the town, set your heart on staying there, and write like Thomas Lake . . .” But the dinosaur keeps the job.

The correspondent then directed a sentence to me: “It’d be neat if you identified 20 people under 40 — at newspapers — who ought to have their own columns.”

He seemed to be suggesting that young people with talent had already abandoned newspapers. (Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that newspapers have their own websites. Young talent today has many ways to express itself even in a building once home only to ink by the barrel and paper by the ton.) So I asked four well-connected friends who know these things to help me make up a list of 20-under-40 at newspapers who could be columnists.

In an hour, I had 27 names.

In a day, my list carried 45 names.

The best thing about the list is that it came together so quickly, proof that talent is at work. The list’s weakness is that it’s so big-city heavy with an East Coast bias. It’s certain to have left out dozens of future stars. Also, some of these people may be over 40, some may be columnists, and some have moved out of sports. Still, the list was instructive because the people on it – if I trust my sources, and I do – are young, good, and committed to journalism, be it done in newsprint or on a website.

Alphabetically: Kent Babb, Kansas City Star; Rachel Bachman, Wall Street Journal; Judy Battista, New York Times; Amalie Benjamin, Boston Globe; Greg Bishop, New York Times; Ben Bolch, Los Angeles Times; Sam Borden, New York Times; John Branch, New York Times; Jerry Brewer, Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Scott Cacciola, Wall Street Journal; Nathan Fenno, Washington Times; Mike Garafolo, Newark Star-Ledger; Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal; Rachel George, Orlando Sentinel; Israel Gutierrez, Miami Herald; Chico Harlan, Washington Post; Baxter Holmes, Los Angeles Times; David Haugh, Chicago Tribune; Patrick Hruby, Washington Times; Lindsay H. Jones, Denver Post; Adam Kilgore, Washington Post; Michael Kruse, Tampa Bay Times; Michael Lee, Washington Post; Stefanie Loh, Harrisburg Patriot-News; Juliet Macur, New York Times; Rick Maese, Washington Post; Brady McCollough, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Sam Mellinger, Kansas City Star; Jeff Miller, Orange County Register; Ben Montgomery, Tampa Bay Times; Brian Murphy, Boise’s Idaho Statesman; John Niyo, Detroit News; Bill Oram, Salt Lake Tribune; Steve Politi, Newark Star-Ledger; Eric Prisbell, Washington Post; Jason Quick, Portland Oregonian; Ian Rappaport, Boston Herald; Josh Robbins, Orlando Sentinel; Eli Saslow, Washington Post; Dave Sheinen, Washington Post; Ethan Skolnik, Palm Beach Post; Brian T. Smith, Salt Lake Tribune; Dan Steinberg, Washington Post; Barry Svrluga, Washington Post; Pete Thamel, New York Times.

3) Bob Costas long has been television’s best sportscaster. The gap between him and whoever’s second became even wider the night he interviewed Jerry Sandusky. On NBC television, with a network audience in the millions, speaking to Sandusky’s disembodied voice by telephone, Costas did an interview extraordinary in form, content and tone. It was a textbook example of the craft that is the foundation of all journalism. Costas summarized the news, asked open-ended questions with follow-ups, moved quickly to new topics and somehow expressed rage and incredulity without raising an eyebrow, let alone his voice. Only Costas could have done it.

Only Costas would have had allowed the silence that followed his shortest, most chilling question: “Are you a pedophile?”

Sandusky said nothing. The temptation for an interviewer would have been to ask the question again. Instead, Costas said nothing until, at last, Sandusky said, “No.”

Then, Costas: “Are you sexually attracted to young boys, to underage boys?”

Sandusky: “Am I sexually attracted to underage boys?

Costas: “Yes.”

Again, silence. Again, Costas waited. He gave Sandusky no relief, no way out of an answer to a closed-end question.

“Sexually attracted, you know, I enjoy young people,” Sandusky finally said. “I love to be around them. But, no, I’m not sexually attracted to young boys.”

Yeah, right.

The New York Times columnist has Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s long face with the jawline beard going gray. He has the lean and hungry look of a man given to books rather than to eats. He also shares the Russian’s distaste for tyrants, as he reminded us each time he spoke of Steinbrenner’s Yankee Stadium as “the House of Evil.”

One of a kind, Vecsey was. I bring him up today because he is also one of a kind that is disappearing from sports journalism.

The Times once had five columnists doing its “Sports of the Times” column. Within the newspaper’s confines of taste and style, those five wrote whatever came to mind however they wanted to write it. Their columns appeared at an address so prestigious that three previous residents had won Pulitzer Prizes. But Vecsey’s retirement last month means the Times is down to one columnist writing SOT once a week. This is gruel so thin as to be a rumor of water, and I, if no one else, offer up a lament: Where have you gone, Red Smith?

It’s not just the Times. Columnists are vanishing all over the map. They’ve long been miniaturized at USA Today. They were nuked en masse at Newsday and fired by phone in the Camden Yards press box. Feeling the garrote at their necks, some scribes escaped to Internet sites, leaving behind jobs that are yet to be filled.

Editors and publishers justify those vacancies by invoking economics. Yes, yes, all right, OK, yes, these are hard times. But newspapers have compounded the problem. In their apparent rush to commit every mistake possible, they have decided that the star columnist is not only paid too much, that person isn’t necessary, anyway.

Not necessary?

Piffwaddle.

I am a columnist. Always have been. A reminder came at 4:41 this morning. I went looking for the first thing I ever wrote for publication. It was 4:41 because that’s when I thought of it; a columnist never sleeps, he only stops typing for a couple hours. The story was about my high school’s basketball team. Our local weekly dressed it up as news. Ha. In the first paragraph, I expressed five opinions.

I was 17 years old and wanted to be Red Smith. I knew nothing about him except that his columns appeared in my daily paper. They were about heavyweight fights, a Kentucky Derby, the World Series. I didn’t care who won. Red Smith took me to happy places. He wrote with a wink and a smile. He made words dance.

Fun to read that stuff, and wouldn’t it be fun to do it?

It’s easy, Red said. Just open a vein and bleed.

Been bleeding ever since.

Jim Murray made the column necessary to the Los Angeles Times. In their towns, they were necessary reads: Jimmy Cannon, Dave Anderson, and Robert Lipsyte in New York, Shirley Povich in Washington, Ray Fitzgerald in Boston, Jack Murphy in San Diego, Furman Bisher in Atlanta, Edwin Pope in Miami, Blackie Sherrod in Dallas. What John Schulian did, Tom Callahan, David Israel, Leigh Montville, and Ira Berkow did. Call the names: Leonard Shecter, Wells Twombly, Dick Young, Stan Isaacs, David Condon, Bob Verdi. These columnists did the brightest writing in their newspapers.

Fitzgerald talked to The Green Monster before the Sawx played the Reds in the ‘75 World Series.

 ”Who’s Cincy pitching tomorrow?” The Monster asked.

“Billingham,” Ray Fitz said.

“Yummie,” The Monster said.

There’s a long history of this stuff. The Spectator ran columns by Addison and Steele before anyone knew what a column was. Thomas Paine’s columns breathed fire into American revolutionaries. Montaigne’s egocentricity gave rise to centuries of thumb-sucking columns. In 1917, the Kansas City Star sent out a teenage kid to do a feature. He wrote it. It was a column. Ernest Hemingway, from then on, used the Star’s stylebook as his guide: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”

Red Smith knew how to make a column work. He told Jerome Holtzman for his “No Cheering in the Press Box” oral history of sportswriting: “The guy I admire most in the world is a good reporter. I respect a good reporter, and I’d like to be called that. . . . I like to report on the scene around me, on the little piece of the world as I see it, as it is in my time. And I like to do it in a way that gives the reader a little pleasure, a little entertainment. I’ve always had the notion that people go to spectator sports to have fun and then they grab the paper to read about it and have fun again.”

Red seduced us with “the purest, most crystalline, most delightful fresh running prose in sports,” to quote Lipsyte. But it was Lipsyte himself who showed us that the column can be a grown-up’s conversation. Lipsyte wrote about race, class, religion, homosexuality: sports as metaphor for life. Bryan Curtis, in an essay on Lipsyte’s memoir, “The Accidental Sportswriter,” called him a “swaggering sociologist” whose heroes were not athletes but the counter-culture figures Jack Scott, Harry Edwards, and other “troublemakers . . . trying to pull sports out of antiquity.”

Newspapers need more Smiths, Lipsytes, and Vecseys, not fewer. They need men and women who know a world outside the lines. One reader of Vecsey’s farewell column said she had never cared about sports. Then she wrote, “So how is it that I . . . must have read any number of your columns? I don’t know! Can it be because you write about sport as the human condition? Can it be because you take the banality out of endless competition and focus on the humanity of sport, sportsmen and sportswomen? . . .”

Columnists lose value when they’re little more than sidebar writers at Super Bowls, World Cups, Stanley Cups. They should be there, but for good reasons: 1) to give a thoughtful, provocative take, and 2) to break away when the game matters less than what’s happening around it. Concussions? Steroids? Gambling? A strong columnist can write those pieces in ways a beat reporter can’t. Better yet, the columnist can return to the subject, hammering away, keeping a critical eye on it, becoming what Lipsyte thinks of as “a sharp light through the information fog.”

The best columnists do the best reporting. They drop that hard work into writing that makes reading a pleasure. Vecsey did at the Times, Sally Jenkins and Tom Boswell do it at The Washington Post, Bill Plaschke at the Los Angeles Times, Bob Ryan and Dan Shaughnessy at The Boston Globe.

Why then, at The New York Times, our best newspaper, is there silence from the columnist’s gallery?

Vecsey says he was not rushed to the exit. He is 72 years old. After eight years at Newsday when it was an ambitious, wonderful newspaper, Vecsey worked the next 43 years at the Times. Retirement was “totally my choice.” He had two years of salary available in a buyout offer. Happy and healthy, he thought it was good sense to leave now. (In addition to an invitation to write for the Times occasionally, he has created a blog at Georgevecsey.com.) The Times has no heir apparent just as there has been no one moving in to the other columnist’s slots left open previously.

So I asked the Times’ sports editor, Joe Sexton, if the day of the brand-name general columnist is over. By email, his answer:

“I’ve come to no conclusion about the future of the general sports column – in our pages, or in the wider world. But I think reckoning with that question — that future — is one of my great obligations. I’ve invited a discussion about it among my staff, and there are already a variety of viewpoints. Some passionately believe a column, as traditionally understood and experienced, is more vital now than ever. Some think, in the vast and often inane and obnoxious echo chamber of ‘opinion’ we inhabit these days, the column is done, or has been at least badly drowned out. Once a week? Online only? Longer? Shorter? Interesting stuff, and important choices to be made going forward.”

All I know is that when I read a newspaper, in print or online, and it has no column, I feel cheated.

I can get news in a hundred places. I want more. The morning of Jan. 5, the Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman showed readers that Mitt Romney is dishonest in claiming he creates jobs and Barack Obama destroys them. No histrionics from Krugman, just good, reliable, fair, thoughtful reporting, analysis, and opinion on a subject of national interest. There’s every reason that such work should appear in the sports section as well.

Make me think. Make me laugh, make me cry. Make me eager to hear what the danged fool says next.

Dave Kindred’s latest book, “Morning Miracle,” is an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached by email at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

For New York Times sports editor Joe Sexton, the news was more than another story of an athlete dying young.

“I knew from the first hours after Boogaard’s death I wanted to go deep,” Sexton told me by email. He had learned the bare bones of the Boogaard legend, the giant from the western Canada plains hired and trained for one purpose, to bust heads. “I’d played the sport,” Sexton wrote, “cheered for fighters, loved Bruin/Ranger melees. I’d covered the sport, and often found the fighters to be modest, introspective, instinctively honest. But Boogaard, who I’d never heard of before his death, seemed to reflect a new development in the fighter’s role, and it seemed awfully cynical.”

If hockey fighters once were romantic figures – knights errant in pursuit of justice – the creation of a Boogaard changed that. He was on the ice to satisfy the crowd’s bloodlust. Half of the 600 NHL games last season were put on pause for two-man brawls. In a minor league, his team sold Boogaard bobblehead dolls – the fists bobbled, too. When Minnesota Wild officials did a memorial tribute for Boogaard, they put together a video rich in hypocrisy: it showed each of his three NHL goals – and not a single punch. In his last, truncated season, one hockey-fights website gave Boogaard’s won-lost record as 4-2-1; fans called him “Sasquatch,” declared him “the true definition of a GOON!” and begged divine intervention, “God bless Boogaard.”

Joe Sexton wanted that story.

He wanted to know how Derek Boogaard lived and died.

Over the next six months, in extraordinary work, the reporter John Branch put together the pieces of a bizarre puzzle that was the young man’s life.

“John Branch was a gifted, proven pro with an appetite for a challenge,” Sexton said. “He was a natural to turn to.”

Branch, 44, grew up in Golden, Co., thinking he’d like to be a sportswriter. “Typical,” he said, “reading the sports sections over your cereal.” Instead, with a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Colorado, he spent six years in retail sales. To get back to his cereal-days dreaming, Branch earned a master’s of arts from Colorado’s journalism school. In 1996, he joined the Colorado Springs Gazette as a business reporter; two years later, he slid over to the sports department, there covering the Colorado Avalanche’s 2001 run to the Stanley Cup. He was the sports columnist at the Fresno Bee when the Times hired him, in 2005, to cover the Giants. Because the Times covered the Giants only occasionally in the off-season, Branch was free to do enterprise pieces – and that became, in essence, his beat.

Branch was in Paris, covering French Open tennis, when Sexton’s deputy, Jason Stallman, sent an email with an attachment of Boogaard stories. The email of June 6: “Let’s talk once you get back and are ready to get back on the horse.”

The story quickly became complex. His family agreed to an autopsy of Boogaard’s brain. The Times’s Alan Schwarz had done unprecedented reporting on football injuries that, on autopsy, showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, C.T.E., a disease closely related to Alzheimer’s; some researchers believe C.T.E. can be caused by repeated blows to the head. The autopsy agreement, linked with the drug-overdose death, made the Boogaard story one the Times had to do and do well.

With Stallman as his editor/partner, Branch worked on the story six months. He traveled to Minneapolis, to Boogaard’s home grounds on the endless prairie of Saskatchewan, to Ottawa, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston – wherever the story led. He spoke with Boogaard’s parents, his brothers, coaches, friends, enforcers. He heard people describe Boogaard as an ungainly child, always outsized for his age and bullied by smaller boys. But with nothing else to do on the prairie, what’s every kid do? He plays hockey. Improbably, Derek Boogaard found a way to the NHL. He became a bully. John Branch heard people say of Boogaard: “a monster,” “terrifying,” “a sense of invincibility, “gotta fight.”

Branch also experienced one of those serendipitous moments which occur more often for good reporters than poor ones. He was given 16 pages of notes hand-written by Boogaard himself. They were invaluable for a writer working to understand a man he’d never met. The notes were Boogaard’s recollections of his life, written maybe two or three years earlier, perhaps notes for a book. A teammate had moved Boogaard’s belongings into a New York apartment they were to share. He gave the notes to the family, which shared them with Branch. (They are in the Times’s online package.) Lines from Boogaard’s own hand, then, appear throughout the series.

“Of all things – interviews, highlight clips, other stories – it was the notes that seemed to bring him to life,” Branch told me by email. “I don’t think I ever felt like he ‘was in the room’ with me, but the notes probably came closest. They felt so unguarded. A trick to the story, as in any story, was to break past people’s first level of description. Everyone told me that Derek was a nice guy, a gentle giant, a teddy bear. But those are vague veneers, surface characterizations, to a real person. Fortunately, I found a lot of people who were willing to break through that and wade into the complexities of life. But it was the notes, I think, that showed Boogaard most fully. They feel so real. They demonstrated, in his own words, the full range of emotions he felt in his life – the tender memories and the angry outbursts, the hurt of rejection and the need to be respected. They really helped reduce that degree of separation you have when you’re talking to someone about someone else. And being in his own handwriting – seeing the occasional misspellings, the scratch-outs, the curse words, even what appeared to be long passages written all at one sitting – really brought Derek to life in a way nothing else could.”

Then, and only then, could Branch write 15,000 words that must be read.

Read them and weep.

Go to the first piece, there with a photograph of Derek Boogaard at sweet, innocent age 2. Five paragraphs in, reporting from Boogaard’s notes, Branch quotes a player telling Boogaard, “I’m going to kill you.”

Instead, Boogaard broke the thug’s nose with one punch.

He was 16 years old.

“Boogaard was exhilarated, exhausted, relieved,” Branch wrote. “Maybe the fear was extinguished, but it always came back, like the flame of a trick candle. One fight ended, another awaited. It was a cycle that commanded the rest of his life.”

Go to the third piece, steel yourself for these words about phone call to Boogaard’s parents, Len and Joanne: “It was a researcher asking for the brain of their son.” And these: “The brain was carved out of his skull by a coroner in Minneapolis. It was placed in a plastic bucket and insides a series of plastic bags, then put in a cooler filled with a slurry of icy water. It was driven to the airport and placed in the cargo hold of a plane to Boston.”

The brain was vibrantly pink. It weighed about 3 ½ pounds.

“On a stainless-steel table in the basement morgue, Dr. Ann McKee cleaved it in half, front to back, with a large knife. Much of one half was sliced into sheets about the width of sandwich bread.”

Months passed, then the news:

“Boogaard had chronic traumatic encephalopathy . . . It can be diagnosed only posthumously, but scientists say it shows itself in symptoms like memory loss, impulsiveness, mood swings, even addiction.”

All that confusion was evident in Boogaard long before his death. Study the Times video of the brain dissections. There, maybe for the first time, you will see brown stains scattered throughout a man’s brain. Those are tangles of cells destroyed by blows to his head. It is evidence of Boogaard’s C.T.E. It is also evidence of the truth in what one researcher told Branch about hockey players who fight, and by extension the crowds that demand the fights.

“They are trading money for brain cells,” he said.

The Boogaard series is a journalistic tour de force by the Times, a state-of-the-art performance showing what ambition, talent, and resources can do. The series dominated the sports section’s front three straight days. Photography by Marcus Yam appeared in print and online. Shayla Harris shot and narrated a three-part video that ran 37 minutes; there were 10 other video elements. As the project’s lead reporter, Branch sat in on meetings where the entire print/online package came together. “There were maybe 20, 25 people involved,” he said. “It was awesome.”

Let’s name those people. Branch was fully engaged for six months. Yam and Harris came on early. Multimedia: Josh Williams, Jackie Myint, Andrew Devigal; video senior producers: Dave Rummel, Justine Simons; photography editor: Becky Lebowitz Hanger; design director: Tom Bodkin; page design: Wayne Kamidoi, Sam Manchester, Ann Leigh; transcription: John Otis; editors: Stallman, Sexton, Phil Coffin, Victor Mather; graphics: Graham Roberts, Joe Ward; web design: Andrew Kueneman.

The coda to Branch’s series describes a moment with Boogaard’s father. Doctors had told Len Boogaard that his son’s C.T.E. was so advanced that he likely would have suffered dementia in middle age.

“For months,” Branch wrote, “he could not bear the thought of his son’s death. Suddenly, he was forced to imagine the life his son might have been left to live.”

Read all 15,000 words. Watch every minute of video. Weep for Boogaard, his family, his friends, and, if you’re the forgiving sort, for hockey itself.

Dave Kindred’s latest book, “Morning Miracle,” is an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached by email at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

This was before Fine got fired and before Boeheim began CPR on his reputation as a good, bright guy. This was in an NIT Season Tip-Off session with reporters  pressing the Syracuse basketball coach for comment. When someone asked if the media had “jumped the gun” in reporting the story, Boeheim at first demurred. Then he said the silly sentence, “Read Jason Whitlock.”

In criticism of ESPN’s original story, the Foxsports.com columnist Jason Whitlock wrote that reporter Mark Schwarz and producer Arty Berko had used “irresponsible ‘reporting’” to “unfairly smear Bernie Fine and boost ESPN ratings.” He called Schwarz’s reporting “juvenile” and said the reporter had “acquired just enough information – two vague, mumbling on-camera interviews from Fine’s accusers – to protect ESPN from a lawsuit. . . . Was his story sound journalism? Was his story remotely fair? No, and hell no.” To button up his argument, Whitlock quoted Deadspin.com editor A.J. Daulerio, who took time from his work as a purveyor of penis photographs to say, “Honestly, no,” he wouldn’t have run the Syracuse story.

A basketball coach of Boeheim’s stature cannot be fired for adopting a columnist’s thinking as his own. He might be well advised, however, to change his reading habits. Perhaps he should mix in another Foxsports.com thinker, Mark Kriegel. “I love beating on ESPN,” Kriegel wrote a week after the Whitlock beating. “But not this time.” He had good reason for restraint. The interviews that Whitlock disparaged as “vague” were on-the-record interviews of two men claiming to have been sexually abused by a prominent college basketball coach. In the superheated atmosphere created by the Penn State goings-on, an intern doing prep agate knows that’s a story. No need for a third accuser, though he came along, and no need for the Laurie Fine tape recording, though that too came along. ESPN’s Schwarz and Berko had a story, and they did what good journalists do: they reported it.

That’s when Whitlock did what some columnists do. He made noise.

A month earlier, Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post did what the best columnists do. She made sense.

Jenkins provided context in her reach for understanding of what happened at Penn State. “The truth is,” she wrote, “youth coaches from California to Rhode Island have molested children at every level, sandlot to USA Swimming, and we hardly ever recognize the pervert.” He comes disguised as a friend, a colleague, a nice guy. Jenkins talked to Ken Lanning, a former FBI agent who spent 35 years profiling pedophiles. “We would prefer he have some kind of trait,” Lanning said. “That he be ugly or pockmarked so we can say, ‘Oooh, look out for him.’” Instead, pedophiles are expert at seducing us, all of us, at any age. Lanning’s rhetorical question: “How do we say to kids, ‘The only way these people differ is, they will be nicer to you than most adults. They will listen to you, and shower you with attention and kindness, and so I want you to watch out for this evil bastard.’”

The day after the Bernie Fine story broke,  Jeff Jacobs of The Hartford Courant wrote a reasoned column that ended, “After Sandusky, you want to empower the helpless, empower those who have been so brutally deceived. You want to forever change a power structure that would allow brutality to be covered up in the name of religion or education or athletics. Yet all the time you trust that the abused are telling the truth. You cannot endorse witch hunts. You cannot allow those who would make up stories of horror for a huge payday to ruin an innocent man’s life. . . . and now Bernie Fine of Syracuse. More victims, or are they liars? I don’t know. I do know that is a national nightmare and that Jerry Sandusky, a man who insists he is innocent, haunts our every waking and sleeping moment.”

Here, let’s play a little journalistic what-would-you-do….

What would you do with the Laurie Fine tape recording provided by one of her husband’s alleged victims?

He made it secretly during a telephone conversation with her. She seems to confirm the claims of sexual abuse. He gave copies of the recording to both the Syracuse Post-Standard and ESPN in 2002 and 2003. Neither organization reported the tape’s existence because they could not corroborate the story.

After a second and third alleged victim came forward, the tape was made public by both the network and the newspaper. Inevitably, the layman’s question became: If ESPN and the Post-Standard wanted to protect the public against a pedophile, why didn’t they give the tape to the police? Implied in the question is the judgment that both organizations failed their moral obligation if not their legal responsibility.

No, they didn’t. The men who wrote the U.S. Constitution decided that a long time ago. They insisted on freedom of the press because they had seen authoritarian power used against defenseless people. They knew the press must be free of governmental control to serve the people’s interests. In turn, it’s the press’s duty to stay at arm’s length from that government lest it be seen as a tool of oppression. In short, the police have their job, reporters have theirs.

A Canadian lawyer said it well this summer on behalf of six media organizations which refused the Vancouver police department’s demand for videotape of a rampage on that city’s streets. “Our clients, like all other right-thinking citizens, appreciate and support the VPD’s efforts in uncovering crime and bringing wrongdoers to justice,” Dan Burnett wrote to the police department’s legal team. “At the same time, you will appreciate that journalists are not evidence gathering agents for police. If they are treated as such, or perceived a such, there are significant implications for journalist neutrality and the safety of journalists.”

The Syracuse Post-Standard‘s executive editor,  Michael J. Connor, wrote to the newspaper’s readers, “To us, handing over to police materials we didn’t feel confident enough to publish was unimaginable. Look at it another way. When police or the district attorney gather evidence and decide they don’t have enough to charge someone with a crime, do they deliver their evidence to us and say, ‘Here you go, we don’t have enough to prosecute but you might get a heckuva story out of this’? Of course not. We have separate and independent purposes and are often locked in an unsteady dance around information that one has and the other wants.”

Connor also asked his readers to imagine a different world. “Imagine a news organization, failing to lock up a story, fueling police investigations by passing along leftovers from its reporting. Imagine how quickly we would lose the trust of sources we rely on and readers who turn to us if we turned from watch dog of government agencies to lap dog at their call. . . .We serve the public best by keeping an eye on local law enforcement, not by working up their cases. If a police investigation follows our work, it ought to be because of what we published, not what we didn’t.”

The editor didn’t make much noise. He chose to make sense.

Dave Kindred’s latest book, “Morning Miracle,” is an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached by email at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

I have read those words in polemics from Buzz Bissinger at The Daily Beast and Charles P. Pierce at Grantland.com. I have read Joe Posnanski, the Sports Illustrated star who went to Happy Valley to write a book but not this one. I have read Gregg Doyel of CBSSports.com, the columnist at turns angry and understanding, and I have read Sara Ganim, the Harrisburg Patriot-News crime reporter whose old-school working of sources identified Jerry Sandusky seven months ago. Then, this month, Ganim, 24 years old, put us with the anguished mothers of two men who once were young boys and innocent.

Reading a lot, I also read a dead man’s column.

Jim Murray wrote it for the Los Angeles Times in 1997.

It began: “Only a few football coaches achieve the status of legend in their lifetimes. Knute Rockne, Howard Jones, Fielding Yost, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Bear Bryant, Vince Lombardi. And, of course, Joe Paterno.”

Murray’s portrait of Paterno was familiar. He gave us Joe Pa as the thinking man’s coach, the literature major who considered law as a career, the teacher, philanthropist, humanitarian, wit, an intellect so committed to the academy that he turned away from the temptations of professional football. As old men will – Murray was 77, Paterno 71 – they spoke of things past and things new, among them the way college football was no longer Frank Merriwell’s game.

Paterno told Murray, “Before you get down to game plans, you have to call the squad together to meet with agents and lawyers. You have to discuss drugs and alcohol, date rape, sexual harassment, things that have nothing to do with football. Or maybe everything to do. Girls are more aggressive today. So are agents. They all see that pot of gold, the professional contract, in the distance. It’s hard to keep your feet. You have all these things to get out of the way before you can teach a line about football. I make more money than I should, but it’s the future of the game I worry about.”

Murray talked about “yeah-but” coaches, as in this dialogue:

“Coach, he raped four nurses!”

“Yeah, but he runs the 40 in 4.3!”

Then he asked if Paterno would recruit a “yeah-but” rogue who could take Penn State to the Rose Bowl.

The coach shook his head no. “You know it’s going to be trouble down the line,” Paterno said. “You don’t need that.”

Those Paterno words – “trouble down the line” – now ring of prophecy. The first week of November 2011, a grand jury bombshell turned Happy Valley sad. We may be years away from an understanding of what happened there and why it happened. Juries will hear the stories and they will return verdicts and the verdicts will add to the confusion. The only certainty is that Penn State has created a Rubik’s cube of morality and legality with pieces that can be arranged a thousand ways.

Paterno’s words – “trouble down the line” – may have nothing to do with today’s miseries and they may have everything to do with today’s miseries. In any case, they stand as foreshadowing of Paterno’s troubles today. There is evidence suggesting that Penn State became a “yeah-but” place. The coach seems to have taken a rogue here, a pirate there, gambling that a miscreant would behave. From 2002 through 2008, according to ESPN reporter Paula Levigne’s analysis of police reports and court records, 46 Penn State football players were arrested on 163 charges. Of those players, 27 were convicted or pled guilty on 45 criminal counts. Penn State cultists may believe it was coincidence that those crimes occurred in a decade that began with Paterno’s teams posting losing records in four of five seasons. Skeptics see a “yeah-but” connection.

Of today’s troubles, Paterno has said that in hindsight he wishes he had done more. Loyalists presume he meant “more” to save the children. Skeptics reckon it was “more” to save himself – but he was too late by years for that. There is systemic rot at Penn State. The signs were first obvious in ESPN’s study of the football team’s rap sheet. The rot was there when the Penn State board of trustees – ultimate guardians of the university’s welfare – could not persuade Paterno to retire in 2004 and did not have the nerve to fire him. Every time the old man got run over on the sidelines and was forced to take his broken body upstairs on game days lest he be run over again, he walked with a cane, a palpable symbol of the rot.

The first week of September this year, in a time so long ago we barely knew Jerry Sandusky, a Pulitzer Prize winner wrote that Joe Pa should just go away. Bissinger won his Pulitzer reporting on Philadelphia politics. On the more important issue to Pennsylvanians, Bissinger wrote of Paterno: “The whole last decade had not been very kind to the old man. He had had four losing seasons. That’s because he was an old man. He had lost the grace. He would not recapture it.”

Trouble down the line is what Paterno had said to Jim Murray. Sadly if inevitably, the trouble was of his own making. A student of classic literature – the young Joe Paterno maybe – would recognize the trouble as signs of hubris, a great man destroyed by pride, ambition, and arrogance, the very forces that created him. Bissinger told me this week, “In 2004, when the board wanted him to retire, he said, ‘Forget it, I’m Joe Paterno, I’m the most powerful man in Pennsylvania.’ Even at the end, even with this horror, if they hadn’t fired him, he’d have kept coaching until he died.”

I read my friend Posnanski’s stumbling admission of confusion, his book on Paterno no longer what he thought it would be, and I wished he had said: Whatever the truth is, the book is more important now than ever and I’ll write the hell out of it. I read Bissinger and I read Pierce and I loved every icy, furious word. Pierce’s only regret is that he couldn’t get to State College.  “Woody Allen said 80 percent of life is showing up,” Pierce told me, “and 100 percent of journalism is showing up.” Being there, maybe, he might have found Mike McQueary talkative. Being there, he could go to Sandusky’s hometown, as ESPN’s Liz Merrill did, and write about a time a half-century ago when Sandusky was a little boy and innocent. I read a half-dozen Doyel columns, written in anger from ground zero at State College, especially on the night of melees after Paterno’s firing. And then I read the thing a columnist does when he is good and honest. The day after some students ran wild, Doyel went to a journalism class and listened to other students who made sense.

One, Ryan Van Wagner, “didn’t ask me; dared me,” Doyel wrote, “to find a better way to gauge the Penn State reaction to this tragedy: Ignore the lowest common denominator, Ryan said. Don’t lean on the people tipping media trucks. Ask someone rational. We exist. Exactly, Zach Dugan said. Ask a student walking across campus. Pick somebody. Anybody. ‘Don’t go to the deranged people to see how Penn State students feel,’ Ryan said. ‘That’s not me, and that’s not us. We’re as heartbroken as anyone.’

“Actually, I’m not sure it was Ryan who said that. It could have been Zach. It could have been Rebecca or Sarah or someone else inside Room 206. Whoever it was, his identity is a blur at this point — and maybe that’s for the best. Whoever it was, he wasn’t speaking just for himself. He was speaking for another side of Penn State, a mostly ignored side. He was speaking for the best of Penn State.”

From State College, during his week of deadline writing, Doyel sent me an email: “Being here changed me, in two ways that never would have happened from afar. From afar, I never would have changed. I would have thought what I thought, wrote it, and felt strong about it. Unchanged. What could change me from my home office in Cincinnati?”

“But being here changed me. At first it made me even angrier at Paterno, Penn State and the fans. I came here angry, and only got angrier as I saw the rally on Paterno’s lawn, the cold way Penn State people canceled his weekly press conference 45 minutes before it was to start, as if they honestly had no idea how BAD this story was until they saw 200 media members standing outside, waiting to get in. And then the riot after Paterno was fired. I was furious, and the tone of my writing changed from my normal mode of hot-headed screaming into something closer to cold seething. And when I’m seething, coldly, I’m close to losing it.”

Then Doyel went to that class. “And I was changed again, because I was confronted with realities that others can’t see from wherever they were. And that changed me. And walking around the tailgating lots, listening to Penn State fans apologizing to Nebraska fans — just apologizing for being Penn State, I guess — was heart-melting. This story could have been written from anywhere. But the most fair perspective was here in State College.”

I read a lot on this story, all of it dark, most of it dead certain of Jerry Sandusky’s guilt, and if we needed another sign of Joe Paterno’s complicity, he provided it this summer by transferring ownership of his house to his wife for $1. The coach seemed to be guarding against the possibility of losing the house in any lawsuit brought against him — this long before the grand jury’s findings were made public. Joe Pa knew the worst of the “yeah-but” troubles were about to arrive.

Dave Kindred’s latest book, “Morning Miracle,” is an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached by email at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s what sportswriting used to be . . .

Hard work, done in a hurry:

Before a baseball game, the beat writer filed a few notes gathered during batting practice and in casual clubhouse chatter. During the game, he wrote a running account of the action, inning by inning. Afterwards, he hurried to the clubhouses for quotes to insert into his running story. Back in his press box seat, he rewrote it all into a new story. All that work, done at speed, was counter-productive to good reporting, let alone keen observation of a game that rewarded such attention. As for writing anything of a quality much higher than a ransom note, the workload made that impossible.

Here’s what sportswriting is today . . .

Hard work, done at warp-speed:

“From the time I get to the ballpark, four hours before a game, until I’m done two hours or so after, I’m writing constantly,” said Wally Matthews of ESPN New York. He is a veteran newspaperman, long a boxing reporter and columnist who in 2010 became a baseball beat reporter for the first time. Everything he heard in the clubhouse and dugout was fodder for immediate Twitter feeds and live-blogging. He tape-recorded everything, transcribed the interviews, and reread the transcripts so if he happened to miss a “news” item while thumbing into his hand-held device, he could drop that essential nugget into his next tweet. He said, “I tell my wife, after 3:30, don’t call me unless it’s an emergency because I don’t have time to talk.”

The hustle began, for Matthews and all beat reporters covering the Yankees, when the team’s third base coach, Rob Thomson, walked from the clubhouse toward the dugout. He carried that night’s lineup card. Routine stuff, that card. It’s always posted on the team’s dugout wall and has been since Connie Mack was Cornelius McGillicuddy catching without a mask. Yet the assembled literati snapped to attention when Thomson teased them by waving the card in their faces. They fell in line and followed him to the dugout, that way they were present the second he taped the card up.

“Then,” Wally Matthews said, “thumbs start flying.”

The reporters thumbed the night’s lineup into their hand-held devices because, if they didn’t get the lineup into the ether immediately, they heard lamentations from their Twitter followers, their Facebook friends, and that crowd of fanatics who want the lineup now and know they can get it now and won’t be happy until the reporters satisfy, if only momentarily, their lust for information.

“Hours before the game,” Matthews said, “I’m getting tweets asking, ‘Where’s the lineup?’ It’s crazy. The beat guys, it matters if we get the lineup posted first by 45 seconds. We go around saying, ‘Look at the time code, I had the lineup way before you.’ It’s now a world of flying thumbs. It’s like those video games I used to get on my 12-year-old son for playing – I’m 53 and now I’m doing it.”

Sportswriting has taken more than an evolutionary step. It is in a revolutionary period that is at once inspiring and poignant. A harsh economic climate, exacerbated by the flight of readers and advertisers to the Internet, has forced newspapers large and small to reduce their staffs, their expenses, and their ambitions. We are alive to hear the death rattle of an American institution. At the same time, we are present at the birth of a new world of media.

For two years, I worked on a book about The Washington Post. The night Barack Obama was elected President, the Post’s newsroom was a scene of controlled chaos, adrenaline running high. I heard the newspaper’s executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., say, “News matters” — as if to assure himself his world would last forever.

The work had put me with reporters who risked their lives to tell stories. The foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid told me about being shot by an Israeli soldier at near point-blank range; his colleague, Steve Fainaru, was caught in a firefight the day he arrived in Iraq. I spent months listening to dedicated men and women — among them Dana Priest and Anne Hull, Gene Weingarten, David Broder, David Maraniss – who worried that journalism itself was at risk.

So today’s young reporters are at a turning point in journalism’s history. For them, if not for wizened reporters left over from newspapers’ golden age, these are thrilling times. Those young journalists will thrive if they:

*Master the fundamentals. Learn to recognize a story, learn to tell it with a beginning, middle, and end.

*Master today’s tools. A good story well told remains the gold standard, but the technology has given us a hundred ways to tell our stories more vividly.

Imagine if I had carried a video camera on July 8, 1974. I interviewed Muhammad Ali as he drove a Cadillac at frightening speed down a narrow, rutted logging road in the eastern Pennyslvania mountains. Trees passed the door handles in a blur. It seemed a good time to ask, “Muhammad, you afraid of dying?” “You don’t ever want to die,” he said. I said, “Glad to hear that.” Then he went into a wonderful Ali soliloquy: “But the man who built this road is dead now. The man who built that farmhouse over there is dead. There are guys I fought, Sonny Liston, Zora Folley . . . dead . . .”

Good stuff. With video, better. The reporter who avoids today’s flip-cam training is a reporter left behind tomorrow. The day Steve Jobs died a television reporter in Washington, D.C., Neal Augenstein, wrote a tribute of sorts to the Apple genius. He said that since Feb. 2010 he had done all his field production on an iPhone and iPad. No longer did he schlep around a laptop, digital recorders, microphones, cables, video and still camera.

“No more carrying heavy equipment, waiting for a laptop to boot up or transferring files from a recorder to an editing device,” Augenstein wrote. “Now when I leave the relative peace and convenience of the newsroom, my tools to cover news in the nation’s capital are an iPhone, iPad and a charger.”

The strangest happened, he said.

“Having a tool that facilitates multi-platform reporting.” He could shoot video, snap pictures, tweet them immediately, write a story for the station’s website. And it “frees a reporter from the challenges of technology to concentrate on storytelling.”

As Augenstein has done, every reporter should become his own video editor. Learn web design. Be funny on Twitter, post links to your own stuff, post links to all the good stuff you learned from. Do a blog explaining your processes. Here’s what an old sportswriter did as a kid – everything that could be done in a newsroom. Here’s what today’s young sportswriter must do – everything that can be done on your laptop, your BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, and, especially, on whatever gizmo they invent tomorrow.

To my question — “Is all this good or bad for reporting?”– Wally Matthews wasn’t sure. “Well,” he said, “it’s certainly thorough.”

It’s thorough in a way that journalists know is not conducive to their best work. It records everything with little regard to context, perspective, or narrative. It’s thorough in the way a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle is thorough; it’s all there, you just have to put the pieces together.

Whatever the negatives, such work will be the beating heart of the new mass media. Warren Buffett, who knows about making money, once said that no one ever built an audience without making money from that audience. So journalists know what they must do. Build the brand. Drive traffic. Draw an audience, all the while hoping that someone figures out how to make the money that makes it possible to do journalism at a pace that allows for the thought essential to storytelling.

The revolution that has splintered our familiar media universe has created thousands of new outlets in global TV networks and the Internet. Those outlets exist because, for all the change, there is a constant:  people want to know what’s happening. Men scratched pictures on cave walls to tell their buddies about big cats out there with big teeth. People need to know their school board’s squabbles, when the city will fix their street’s potholes, what their commander-in-chief wants done in Afghanistan. And as much as we need news, we need stories. Hearing the drama of daily life, we learn about our world. Telling the stories of our lives, we teach each others how to get through the day.

How best to tell those stories?  I think of William Strunk and Red Smith.

My favorite little textbook on writing is “The Elements of Style.” Strunk, a Cornell University professor, wrote it in 1917. Of his many rules of usage, the most important is rule 17: “Omit needless words.” The New Yorker essayist E.B. White, a Strunk student who did revisions to the book, wrote that Strunk, in teaching, omitted some words with such eagerness and such relish that he often found himself with nothing more to say and class time to fill. He wriggled out of the predicament by uttering every sentence three times. “When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class,” White wrote, “he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and, in a husky, conspiratorial voice, said, ‘Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!’”

Smith, the great sports columnist, once said, “I made up my mind that every time I sat down to a typewriter, I would slash my veins and bleed and that I’d try to make each word dance.”

Those pieces of advice worked a long time ago.

In today’s new mass media world, they still work.

Dave Kindred’s latest book, “Morning Miracle,” is an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached by email at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

About the Pujols game, I had one question.

Really?

Didn’t it matter to anyone that the home runs came in a 16-7 laugher?

Didn’t it matter that in the two previous games Pujols had no hits? And that he had none in the two games after? And that his team lost three of his oh-for games?

To me, it matters.

But then, I’m the guy who can’t tell you which of the Phillies pitched a no-hitter against somebody in some phase of baseball’s playoffs last October. The next morning, I felt a twinge of embarrassment (it passed quickly) when I read a column saying that we all would remember where we were when this happened. As if it were JFK’s assassination, or a moon landing, or the night grandpa’s bed fell down.

Well, I remembered where I was. In a bar, near a television set showing the game. But I don’t remember the pitcher’s name or which team he shut out because I was more interested in conversation with a great American, the humorist and reformed sportswriter, Roy Blount Jr. Combined, we looked over our shoulders at the teevee maybe three times.

“No-hitter,” I said.

He said, “Want another beer?”

What I remember best about that night was Blount recounting the time he got shot. It happened in New Orleans. He had been up and down Bourbon Street more often than is good for a man.  He almost remembered getting back to his hotel, but the next morning, when he looked in the mirror, he by damn sure didn’t remember getting shot.

Still, there it was. Blood in the middle of his forehead. “I saw that,” he said, “and I thought, ‘I don’t remember getting shot. I’m going to have to change my lifestyle.’”

Then, to study the bullet wound, Blount put on his glasses and moved nearer the mirror.

“Turned out, I had not been shot,” he said. “I had slept on the mint.”

Why would a sportswriter remember Blount’s misadventure and take little note of a playoff no-hitter?

Because the no-hitter was just another game for baseball’s most powerful team, another expected victory against an over-matched opponent in the Phillies’ drive toward the important games of a World Series to come. In short, the no-hitter had no dramatic context. Besides, sports marketers and media promoters have become ubiquitous, relentless, and shameless in their efforts to brand every event as The Best There Ever Was. It’s sales, it’s hyperbole, and we tune it out. So, please. Don’t expect us to go into raptures about a no-hitter that meant nothing outside Philadelphia.

ESPN.com’s Jeff MacGregor did a column last week suggesting that sports news flashes before our eyes in such a blur that nothing lasts in memory. He cited Pujols in Texas, the Michigan State Hail Mary, the bad Tim Tebow finally replaced by the good Tim Tebow, and the Saints scoring a zillion.

“All of it once-in-a-lifetime stuff,” MacGregor declared.

Except no sooner did the stuff arrive than . . .

“Already gone,” he wrote.  “How? . . . Because maybe the endless avalanche of postmodern media in every form deadens memory rather than sharpens it. We bring less brainpower to bear generally on imprinting more moments, in part because so many move past us so quickly; in part on the assumption that someone or something else will store them for us. Good. We all get to see more and experience more and share more this way. But only briefly. And how do you separate the iconic from the ordinary when everything is weightless? We don’t.”

What’s lost in the rush of moments is the attention span necessary to grasp context. It’s one thing to pitch a no-hitter in the playoffs; it’s another to throw a perfect game in the World Series. As thrilling as Pujols’s home runs were, the truth is they’ll be a footnote in baseball history unless he does something more. The Washington Post‘s Tom Boswell framed it perfectly: “Whether or not this is actually regarded, in time, as the best offensive game in World Series history – or a spectacular, come-to-the-party star turn in a blowout – may be determined by whether it is a punch to the gut from which the Rangers cannot recover.”

Reports from the next two games: Rangers recovered.

To measure how far Pujols must go to match Jackson and Ruth in the context department, let’s dig into the archives.

After Reggie’s three first-pitch home runs in a Yankees victory over the Dodgers that won the 1977 World Series, Jim Murray wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “One of the homers was a line drive that would have crossed state lines and gone through the side of a battle ship on its way to the seats. The other two were booming Jack Nicklaus-type tee shots, high and far, the kind that pitchers wake up screaming in the middle of the night over.”

Babe Ruth hit three in a game twice, first in 1926 to beat the Cardinals in Game 4 and even the Series, eventually won by St. Louis in seven games. That game produced one of sportswriting’s memorable lines, by Richards Vidmer of the New York Times. At the end of a sidebar on Ruth’s day, Vidmer wrote, “And, after all, the Ruth is mighty and will prevail.” Only after the Series did anyone mention that a hospitalized boy, 11-year-old Johnny Sylvester, had received an autographed ball from Ruth with a promise “to knock a homer for you on Wednesday.” That Wednesday, the Babe hit the three.

In 1928, Ruth did it again, this time in the finale of the Yankees’ four-game sweep of the Cardinals. Ruth’s stature in those days was such as to cause a certain breathlessness among the knights of the keyboard, as seen in this excerpt from James R. Harrison’s game story in the New York Times:

“If there was any lingering doubt, if anywhere in this broad land there were misguided souls who believed that Babe Ruth was not the greatest living ball player, they should have seen him today.

“They should have seen him, hooted and hissed, come to the plate three times, twice against Wee Willie Sherdel and once against the great Pete Alexander, and send three mighty drives whistling over that right-field pavilion.

“They should have seen him swaggering and waving a friendly fist at the world as he romped out to left field – the play boy of baseball. . . .They should have seen him at the very end of the game as he drove an injured knee forward at top speed, dashing down the foul line and past the field boxes to make a one-hand catch while St. Louis partisans threw paper and programs at him to blind his vision.

“They should have seen him, that great catch completed, continue to run in, holding the ball aloft in his gloved right hand – the picture of triumph and glee and kindly defiance of the whole world.

“It was thus that the world’s series of 1928 passed into history – with Ruth triumphant, with Ruth rampant on a field of green, with Ruth again stranger than fiction and mightier than even his most fervent admirers had dreamed he would be.”

Now, that is context.

Dave Kindred’s latest book, “Morning Miracle,” is an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached by email at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

Make no mistake, it’s all in “Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton.” The difference is, Pearlman’s reporting prepares the reader for it. In recreating Payton’s world – from the segregation of 1960s Mississippi to 1980s National Football League celebrity – Pearlman makes the long, sad denouement of the star’s life seem inevitable.

Before the book went on sale, SI‘s excerpt became a news story. The news was Pearlman had trashed the hero. Michael Wilbon, a veteran columnist and television commentator, was among the riled-up Chicagoans. “The point isn’t to question Pearlman’s accuracy,” he wrote, “but to question his purpose in writing the book. What’s the literary mission here?”

The mission was to tell a man’s life story. If Pearlman’s 180,000 words went too far or not far enough, each reader has to decide. In such cases, I always fall back on the advice of the late, great San Diego columnist Jack Murphy. “We should write,” he said, “with the restraint born of good taste.” To my taste, Pearlman’s book was out of balance: too much travail, not enough triumph. But Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports wrote that he “found it to be an incredible, thoughtful, deep and profound read.” ESPN.com’s Jeff MacGregor wrote that Payton “was great not because he was more than human or less than human, but because he was fully human. Beset by the same fears and weaknesses and appetites that overtake us all, he was able to outrun himself to create beauty and meaning.”

My pal John Schulian, once a Chicago columnist, was asked by Bronx Banter‘s Alex Belth if Payton’s troubles surprised him. “I was sorry to read about what had become of Payton’s life,” Schulian said, “but not necessarily surprised.” After all, every athlete dies twice, first as a player. “And when the athlete is a star of Payton’s magnitude, the withdrawal can be crippling. . . . Just think of the emptiness in Payton’s life – the cheating, the painkillers, the mountains of junk food, the inability to latch onto something that would give him a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And this was a hero whose name will always be revered in Chicago. But fame couldn’t save him any more than the doctors who treated his cancer could. That should tell people how much fame is worth, but they’ll forget as soon as the next hero comes along.”

For all of Pearlman’s reporting, I wanted more. If ever a story called for close examination of the physical costs of football, Payton’s did. A teammate, Dave Duerson, killed himself with a gunshot to the chest rather than to the head – so his brain might be studied for the damage it suffered in his decade as an NFL player. Here was Payton, whose toughness was legendary – a toughness symbolized by his choice to run into defenders rather than minimize contact by running out of bounds. For 13 seasons, almost four times the average NFL running back’s career span, Payton sought out collisions. Yet, if Pearlman’s book even mentions Duerson, I missed the reference. It certainly never asked, “How did thousands of blows to the head affect Payton’s behavior?”

I was around Payton only once.

It was an icicle of a day, January in Chicago.

It was the last game of his career. After all the other Bears had gone to the locker room, he sat alone on the team’s bench in Soldier Field. From somewhere came a woman’s shout, “Chicago loves you, Walter!” An old man called out, “One more year, Walter. You can still do it.” As Payton rose to leave, tens of thousands of fans chanted, “Walter . . . Walter.” He never looked up until he entered a dark tunnel. Then he blinked against tears.

I followed him to his cubicle in the locker room.

He stayed in his uniform. He wore his helmet. He let his head fall back against a wall, and a player said, “You OK?”

Payton’s eyes were closed. His voice was tiny. “I’m just taking my time taking it off. This is the last time I take it off.”

An old Chicago newspaperman, Bill Gleason, sat by him. Of two dozen reporters  there, none spoke. Then Payton said to Gleason, “You going to miss me?”

“Absolutely,” Gleason said, and then asked, “You going to miss this?” He meant the locker room.

“No, not too bad,” Payton said.

“What I’m going to remember,” Gleason said, “is how much fun you were.”

Payton said, “That’s the main reason I was playing, to have fun.”

I wrote most of those words that day. But I didn’t use another piece of the day’s locker room dialogue. A photographer called out, “Hey, Walter . . .” Payton said in a whisper meant to be heard,  “Thirteen damn years, and I’m still Walter, not Mr. Payton.”

How odd, I thought. Odd, that on a day when he seemed universally loved, Payton would allow himself a moment of bitterness. I had no idea what it meant except that it meant more than I, a stranger to Payton’s manner, could explain on deadline. Now, almost 24 years later, I understand that moment – because now I have read Pearlman’s book.

It shows Payton not so much as an enigma as a puzzle with pieces missing. He had talent that he raised to its highest levels. He earned fame and wealth. Yet there was in him an emptiness that nothing could fill. The more he accomplished, the greater his need for affirmation; the more he was loved, the greater his need for love. He knew glory. He never knew contentment.

That day in the Bears’ locker room, Payton slowly put his gear into a bag. He pulled on jeans and clicked shut the clasp of a diamond-studded watch. He touched his neck with a spray of perfume. Then he sprayed a few puffs of the stuff onto the sportswriters, the perfume locked in combat with smoke rising from Bill Gleason’s cigar. Twelve years later, at age 46, Walter Payton was dead.

Dave Kindred’s latest book, “Morning Miracle,” is an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached by email at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.