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.

Good for him.

It’s time somebody stood tall.

The last time, it was a little guy whose name is now lost to history.

He was Dick DeVenzio. He was a 5-foot-9 point guard at Duke University, an academic All-American in 1971. “He wasn’t especially quick and didn’t jump well,” the Pittsburgh columnist Ron Cook once wrote of the coach’s son who grew up in Western Pennsylvania. “But he made himself one of the finest schoolboy players of all time.” After Duke, he played professionally in Europe, wrote five instructional books, started a series of basketball camps across the country – the Point Guard Basketball College – “and taught youngsters who could only dream of seeing and playing the game as well as he did.”

Taylor Branch’s life’s work has been a trilogy on the American civil rights struggle. Those were books built around the life and times of Martin Luther King, Jr. As we talked about athletes’ rights two weeks ago, I was about to ask Branch what the great man would think of our colleges’ exploitation of athletes. But to speak of King in a debate about entertainment seemed to trivialize him.

Instead, I asked Branch, “Did you know Dick DeVenzio?”

“Sounds familiar,” he said. “But, no.”

When I met DeVenzio in 1987, he was deep into revolutionary mode. His manifesto came in a book entitled, “Rip-off U.” He had created the Revenue Producing Major College Players Association and every week mailed fire-breathing newsletters to 300 players. The North Carolina coach, Dean Smith, said, “Dick’s a good thinker. He overstates things, but then he’s a crusader.” LSU’s Dale Brown said, “Dick has to keep up the good fight. He’s younger than us.”

He was 38 years old. I visited him in Charlotte. His townhouse was the nerve center of the revolution. Boxes of envelopes and pamphlets were stacked five feet high on a kitchen table. A tiny second-floor bedroom served as his office, papers scattered everywhere. The previous four years, he had been the Don Quixote of college athletics, an eccentric filled with idealism. He called himself “a kook running his mouth to make noise nobody wants to hear.” I came away a believer because DeVenzio had handed down an inarguable bill of indictment. For the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I wrote that “Rip-off U” was a “compendium of NCAA abuses performed in the name of amateurism and good intentions tainted by self-interest.”

Those words a quarter-century old could have been spoken this year. In essence, they were, for DeVenzio’s indictment of college athletics is the same made by Branch in his Atlantic piece, “The Shame of College Sports.”

The shame is that colleges get rich off work done at cheap wages by people with no say in the process. They’ve done it for a hundred years, they’ll do it for another hundred – unless there is revolution. DeVenzio believed that only a revolution by players would end it. So he advocated dramatic action. He called for strikes. He urged players to sit out big games.

Charlie Pierce, in his Boston Globe blog, took note of a paragraph from Branch’s piece that spoke of a possible boycott of the 1991 Final Four championship game. It never happened and whether it was even planned has not been reported. Four years earlier, though, DeVenzio told me, “I’d love to see Dale Brown and Dean Smith in the NCAA championship game. I wish they’d take their teams out of the arena and leave it empty for the TV cameras. Go play the game in a junior high gym somewhere.” The year before, he asked Oklahoma football stars Brian Bosworth and Spencer Tillman to delay by a half-hour the start of their game with Nebraska. They considered it, but in the end agreed only to kneel with Nebraska players at midfield in a pre-game prayer to bring attention to athletes’ rights.

When I spoke to Tillman in ‘87, he said he could not envision a players’ strike. “Not as long as that strong arm of the administration hovers over the players. Not as long as the coach dominates the players. In some situations, like ours with Barry Switzer at Oklahoma, where it’s more a professional situation with the coach willing to hear what you say, maybe it could happen someday.”

After my conversation with Taylor Branch – when I hesitated to bring up Dr. King – I re-read a DeVenzio pamphlet entitled “Time NOT To Play.” To his credit, the crusader did not hesitate to bring up Dr. King. His face is on the pamphlet’s cover under the headline, “Game Delays and Strikes by Major College Athletes: Considered through the WORDS AND WISDOM of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

DeVenzio called for action:

“We believe that it may make sense for you, big-time football and basketball players, to delay or to refuse to play in bowl games and NCAA tournament games THIS year, unless the NCAA and the universities agree to make dramatic changes in your behalf.

While it would be wonderful not to have to resort to delays and strikes, there seems to be no other way to bring about constructive action. The attitudes and philosophies of those in power are, in most cases, as rigid as those held by slave-holding plantation owners before the Civil War. The people who have helped to mold (and who benefit from) a particular economic system are rarely willing to change that system without being forced to do so.”

Then came DeVenzio’s arguments supported by 20 quotations from King, among them these:

“Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than the absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Those lines are from King’s letter to fellow clergymen written from a Birmingham jail cell.

Dick DeVenzio died of colon cancer in 2001. He was 52 years old.

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.

Yet, in the darkness before dawn on November 26, 2010, he drove toward Tuscaloosa for the bloodletting known as Alabama-Auburn.

To get a feel for the day ahead, he turned on the car radio. Among the Roll Tide/War Eagle callers, he heard one sleepless man babble “that he couldn’t stop thinking about the coin toss.”

Then, in the daylight, Branch saw what he had never seen before.

“RVs everywhere, all the way to the outskirts of Tuscaloosa.”

He had arrived in Alabama as innocent as an American male could be.

“Some RVs had been there for days,” Branch said. “When I asked tailgaters without tickets why they’d come so early – just to watch the game on TV from the parking lot – they looked at me like I was crazy. One said, ‘If you have to ask why, you wouldn’t understand.’” From the tailgaters, Branch walked to the Bear Bryant museum packed with pilgrims paying respects to the Bear’s hounds-tooth hats.

After being locked in libraries, writing rooms, and other detention centers for nearly three decades, Branch had asked The Atlantic magazine for an assignment that would get him into the daylight. They failed to come up with an idea until Branch mentioned the spate of scandals around college sports. Bingo. Juicy stuff. A departure for a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.

“So, it began as a kind of a lark,” Branch said.

It ended with 15,000 words in The Atlantic‘s October issue under the headline, “The Shame of College Sports.”

The innocent had become a sophisticate.

This is not the Pettus Bridge at Selma. But there is common ground. The movement to reform big-time college athletics is building to a force against which lies cannot stand. There will be meaningful reform. When that time comes, Branch’s piece will be remembered for its part in provoking change. He wrote it with an historian’s measured gait and tone. His indictment of the men and women who rule big-time college sports is so brilliant, well ordered and reasonable as to defy rebuttal.

The indictment is built on two truths:

1) Amateurism is a lie. “There is no such thing,” Branch wrote. “….(T)he NCAA’s ersatz courts can only masquerade as public authority. How could any statute impose amateur status on college athletes, or on anyone else? No legal definition of amateur exists, and any attempt to create one in enforceable law would expose its repulsive and unconstitutional nature – a bill of attainder, stripping from college athletes the rights of American citizenship.”  Which is the NCAA’s standard procedure.

2) Big-time college sports are exploitative to the edge of slavery. “Slavery analogies should be used carefully,” the MLK biographer wrote.  But there is no ignoring the elephant in the room. Corporations and universities make billions of dollars using the cheap labor of college athletes, many of them African-American. Those athletes are not allowed to profit from the sale of their images or names. They are held up to the public humiliation of suspension if they so much as bum a ride to town; meanwhile, in 2006, NCAA panjandrums spent nearly $1 million of player-produced revenue to charter private jets. At Tuscaloosa, Branch noticed that Auburn’s Cam Newton suited up in apparel that carried 15 corporate logos advertising sponsors that paid the university for the use of his body as a billboard. To Branch, there was the “unmistakable whiff of the plantation.”

He doesn’t share the outrage over the latest scandals. “The real scandal,” he wrote, “is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence – ‘amateurism’ and the ‘student-athlete’ – are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.”

Universities make billions of dollars on athletics. They give scholarships and nothing more to the young men and women whose performances earn the money. Studies have shown that the average scholarship doesn’t cover the cost of attendance. USA Today put the median basketball scholarship package at $27,923 (while also reporting the real value of the deal at $120,00, for coaching, training, et al.). NBA and NFL players get 57 percent of league revenue; using that number, HBO’s “Real Sports” decided that Duke basketball players last year were worth $1.2 million each.

Branch is at his best uncovering the NCAA’s camouflage of its exploitation. Step by legal step, he dissects the sham involved in the NCAA order that member institutions and representatives refer to players as “student-athletes.” The label was not designed to emphasize the primary value of education. It was built as a firewall against liability litigation. If players are “students,” they are not employees. They are not eligible for an employee’s protections and benefits.

Read Branch, if you will. Read “The Scandal Beat,” Daniel Libit’s good stuff in the current Columbia Journalism Review.  Go to the archives and read sportswriters who have batted their heads against the NCAA stonewall for decades. Read them all and you will come away wishing there were laws against sham, cant, and hypocrisy, for if those were crimes, we could throw the entire NCAA in jail. It could share the billionaire-thieves wing with Bernie Madoff.

Here is Taylor Branch, no longer an innocent:

“The time has come for a major overhaul.” (He would end the pretense of amateurism. The Olympic model suits him.) “And whether the powers that be like it or not, big changes are coming. Threats loom on multiple fronts: in Congress, the courts, breakaway athletic conferences, student rebellion, and public disgust. Swaddled in gauzy clichés, the NCAA presides over a vast, teetering glory.”

Here is Branch, the sophisticate:

He now can pick Sonny Vaccaro out of a lineup.

Branch, who knows how to tell a story, chose to begin his with Vaccaro’s voice. That all-time champion hustler, famous as “the sneaker pimp,” tells the unshirted truth to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. When one distinguished former university president demanded to know why a university should be an advertising medium for Vaccaro’s shoe and apparel clients, Vaccaro says:

“They shouldn’t, sir. You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir, but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

No news there. Only the dollar figures have changed. No enterprise based on a lie can be anything but corrupt. And the lie of amateurism has been created, nurtured, and sustained by universities from the start. Walter Camp graduated from Yale in 1880, became “the father of American football,” and soon set up a $100,000 slush fund for Eli football players. Chump change now maybe, a hundred years ago a hundred grand was real money. How perfect, that football’s daddy was also its first sugar daddy.

Camp knew the system was a fraud and that the players deserved more. A century and more later, our great universities continue to abide scandal because it’s cheaper than doing right by the players. In fact, my only quibble with Branch and The Atlantic is over the headline, “The Shame of College Sports.” The editors and the historian may find the universities’ behavior shameful. But the universities themselves?

If they had even an iota of shame, they’d pay reparations to every Division I athlete of the last century.

With a full measure of shame, they’d climb to the top of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library and throw themselves to the feet of Touchdown Jesus, there asking forgiveness.

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.

But when the magazine became the subject of a journalistic fuss, I exhumed it. There was Vick looking into the camera, face blank, arms crossed, his black T-shirt serving as a backdrop to words projected across him and the cover page: “Criminal.” “Humbled.” “Spoiled.” “Doesn’t Deserve.” “Inspirational.” “Monstrous.” “Loyal.” “Gifted.”  “Cursed.” “Heroic.”

Of the several Vick-centric pieces dominating the magazine’s NFL preview, one had drawn most of the attention. Its headline:  “What If Michael Vick Were White?” A photo illustration showed Vick in his Eagles uniform with his face Photoshopped white. Under the main headline, these words: “Since the day he was arrested, people have been asking that question. The answer isn’t what you think.”

Really? People have asked that question? Which people, when, where? Perhaps because my Midwestern social circle does not include people who practice the criminal enterprise of breeding, training, and killing fighting dogs, I had not heard that question. But let’s give the magazine the benefit of journalistic doubt. Let’s play along with its straw-man argument. Let’s assume that inquiring minds have wondered what would have happened if Vick were white.

So I turned to page 144 to read the piece that came with all the controversy. The writer, Toure, a single-named New York novelist and essayist, tap-danced for two paragraphs on Vick as the apotheosis of black swagger. Then, this:

“Race is an undeniable and complex element of Vick’s story, both because of his style as well as the rarity of black QBs in the NFL. A decade after he became the first black QB to be drafted No. 1 overall, about one in five of the league’s passers is African-American, compared with two-thirds of all players. But after his arrest for dogfighting, so many people asked: Would a white football player have gotten nearly two years in prison for what Vick did to dogs?”

As a veteran writer of bad paragraphs, I know one when I see one, and that one by Toure is bad.

For one thing, it makes the straw-man argument again. Who are these “so many people”? The greater mystery is the paragraph’s last sentence. It introduces a topic that has no connection to anything in the essay’s first 200 words. It has the feel of a sentence written for one purpose  – to justify the magazine’s race-baiting headline, a question set in emergency exit-red type filling all of page 142, the question literally given as much space as Toure’s essay. (With the Photoshopped picture taking up all of page 143, the art and graphics consumed twice as much space.) The sentence even has the feel of a line an editor might have added to a writer’s work. Not saying that happened here, just saying it has been done by other editors for other writers, probably even by Perkins for Hemingway. It’s a sentence of the type that has left many writers wondering, Where the hell that come from? If not made queasy by that sentence, Toure was at least uncomfortable, as he wrote in the next paragraph:

“This question makes me cringe. It is so facile, naive, shortsighted and flawed that it is meaningless.”

Oh, so we’re supposed to read 1,400 words on a question that the author thinks is meaningless?

He did go on:

“Whiteness comes with great advantages, but it’s not a get-out-of-every-crime-free card. Killing dogs is a heinous crime that disgusts and frightens many Americans. I’m certain white privilege would not be enough to rescue a white NFL star caught killing dogs.”

So, there we were, four paragraphs in, and the headline’s question had been answered.

End of story, put a -30- on it.

Well, not quite.

Toure added another thousand words – and they’re worth reading.

Once he moved past the lowest common denominator question of race, the essay became valuable. He argued that every piece of a person’s life is integral to that person’s identity. It’s not just a matter of race, or of class, or of family structure. It’s all that. No one, he said, suffers Vick’s “stunningly stupid moral breakdown” without that breakdown being the result of every circumstance of his life. Toure wrote,  “Alter any of those elements and everything about him and how the world sees him would be unrecognizable.”

Finally, instead of seeking an answer to the magazine’s unanswerable question, Toure proposed we look at Vick another way. He suggested we see Vick’s life as an epic movie playing over Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” The arrogant star is humbled. He defeats his personal demons. In the closing act, he realizes his athletic promise. Toure wrote, “And to those who believe we should judge a man by how he responds when dealing with the worst life has to offer – with how he climbs after he hits rock bottom – Michael Vick has become heroic.”

Wait, wait, wait. Wait. Learning to slide, going through your progressions, buddying up with your teammates and coach and owner, becoming an NFL star, signing for $100 million, getting to the Super Bowl – good stuff, all that, and good for Michael Vick that he can make it happen. But, please. Don’t tell me that is hero stuff. Sing me no redemption song. We’re talking about football here. Football. Its jersey number 7 doing what it does. Nothing else.

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.