National Sports Journalism Center

Because newspapers hold nickels in death grips, Chuck Culpepper knew his happy days with the Los Angeles Times were over. He’d been the paper’s European sports correspondent for three and a half years, and who needs a man in Prague when your prep writer can’t get mileage to drive across town? But as Culpepper sat in a friend’s New York apartment – this was May, a year ago – the real fun was about to begin.

There came an email from a friend at The New York Times about a job at a newspaper in a land far, far away. Culpepper had never heard of the paper, The National, though the name was familiar. Twenty-one years earlier, he was on the original masthead of The National, the first all-sports newspaper in America. That National was long dead. This National lived in Abu Dhabi.

“Obviously, among friends and acquaintances, I must have some reputation as a devoted – or perhaps eccentric – adventurer,” Culpepper said by email. So the adventurer flew across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and alit on the shores of the Gulf of Oman. On September 3, 2010, he became The National’s sports columnist. “Seeing it now, I should have accepted in five minutes and quite possibly four.”

He sees a city that may be the world’s richest. It’s the capital of the United Arab Emirates. Skyscrapers gleaming in the Middle East sun, it’s a Xanadu for our times. The National is an English-language newspaper produced by western expatriates, Indians and Sri Lankans, Saudis and Lebanese, UAE natives, and, just last week, its first Pakistani in sports. Its website lists its sports coverage: Formula One, Cricket, Golf, Horse Racing, Tennis, Rugby, Motorsport, North American Sport.

“Sometimes,” Culpepper said, “when I walk through the 21st-century newsroom with its shining Macs and its western faces, I briefly forget I’m not in London or Toronto or New York. But then the call to prayer will go up from the lovely little mosque on the premises. That reminds me that I have strayed far . . .  “

It’s 6,842 miles from New York to Abu Dhabi.

“. . . and I do relish straying far.”

I first read Chuck Culpepper’s stuff in 1989. The National’s Chicago bureau chief, Bud Shaw, gave me Chuck’s clippings from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Six paragraphs in, I said, “Hire this guy now.” From The National, he moved to Kentucky, Oregon, and Long Island. Each time he admitted to a wanderlust not satisfied, and soon it was clear that he could not be confined to one continent. After too many Super Bowls and World Series, after all those Final Fours, after one too many Janet Jackson breasts and one too many Ray Lewis murder charges, Culpepper had reached his limit of American excess.

He went looking for what he had loved about games. He went to London and there wrote a picaresque book, “Up Pompey,” about a clueless American sportswriter having a bloody good time as an English football fan.  One reviewer (me) wrote, “I’ve read the book and it is Culpepperian, which is to say it’s delightful, it’s delicious, and it’s laugh-out-loud funny. Damned if, by mid-narrative, I wasn’t rootin’ for the Pompey and their blue bear, whatever they are.” Then came freelance work in Europe for American newspapers. And now The National: three columns a week, two 1,600-word features a month.

We have our fantasies. I would live in a different place every year the rest of my life; occasionally, I would put aside the novel to parachute in to a news story. Not that Chuck Culpepper would say any such thing – self-effacement is his default position – but, in a way, at age 49, the wanderer born in Virginia lives that fantasy. His beat has been the world. He has filed from 21 countries on five continents. (Check out his Facebook photo gallery. Priceless.)  When I tracked him down this week, he replied by email, first with this:

“I am saturated with lovely wonderful Paris as two friends I introduced married one another last evening . . . One more wedding function to go in a few minutes here – picnic beneath Eiffel Tower, all envy welcome – and then can talk or type anytime about my persistently peculiar life.”

Next: “Have been roaming Germany reporting two stories and visiting friends.”

Then, en route to Italy: “Boat race, if you can believe such a thing.”

This spring, he flew to Manila where, one scary morning, he found himself in a bus lurching along a mountain road. Here’s the first sentence of a four-part series on the fighter Manny Pacquiao: “Any minute now, this bus will teeter and then topple off the mountainside. The driver has been steering it since 1 a.m., when it lurched out of the Manila chaos down south, and now in the first quiet flecks of dawn five hours later in the northern Philippines, he curls it around cliff edges that could daunt a skydiver.”

He writes it all. . . . He believes it’s time that golf spreads its major championships around the world, as tennis has. . . . While explaining to Abu Dhabi readers how it’s almost ordinary in America for a university basketball coach, John Calipari, to be paid great sums (in this case, $36.5 million), he added: “Exit the United States and mill around the world a bit, then a bit more, and this tradition begins to take its rightful shape among all the cultural behaviours of the seven billion members of humanity: It is highly unusual and deeply eccentric, which can be good or bad or  – as in this case – both.” . . . He has noted the agony of River Plate football fans when that historic Argentine powerhouse found itself relegated to a lower level of play: “Some home fans cry. Some away fans cry. Some players cry. Some people walk pavements and cry.”

Culpepper says The National sports department’s top editors, Robert Mashburn, hired from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Kevin Affleck, an English expert in world-sport, “have spoken of having a world sports section . . . With so many world sports coming through Dubai and Abu Dhabi these days, it’s like one small and bold and ambitious country tethered to the world. So you can cover local events while addressing world sports.”

American sports now seem “like global niches,” he said. “They’re mysterious to so much of the world. We’re almost an island nation. I went to India in April, and there are so many people, and so many consumed with the multi-national sport of cricket, that when TV news shows used headlines like ‘Joy of a Billion’ upon the nation’s World Cup triumph, they were rounding off India’s population by 200,000,000, or two-thirds of the population of the United States. In particular, though, the college sports which consumed so much of my work – and which I still follow as zealously as I can – have taken on, within my mind, a new sheen as weird. That’s because, in a world sense, they are.”

What’s next for our favorite peripatetic sportswriter, perhaps a return to America?

Culpepper’s answer could be set to music . . .

“I reckon I could turn up anytime between next year and never. . . .I have come across an unforseen feeling. I suddenly crave living in multiple countries. . . . It’s as if, once you get out here wandering, and then wandering more, you realize there’s so much wandering it’s overwhelming. For example, did you realize that the Gulf nation of Oman is a gem? I did not, before this. Spain and Thailand are my two favorite countries, and I would relish living in either or both. Then again, I went to Buenos Aires and yearn to live there while learning tango and Italian-tinged Spanish. Then again, I find Colombia a largely undiscovered star as it recovers from such protracted strife. Then again, I’m one of the world’s most devout Canada-philes, always putting those three big cities in my North American top five. Then again, if somebody confined me to the limits of Paris for the duration, I should not complain as it’s my favorite place. Then again, Sydney –  if only the Australians weren’t so stingy with the visas. All that said, I do know the United States best, having visited all 50 states and slept overnight in 49 while still hoping to snooze even one night in Nebraska. We all need fresh goals.”

So go the happy lyrics of a sportswriter without borders.

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An old friend has died. For 25 years, George Kimball was a must-read columnist at the Boston Herald. We met in 1982, the Bahamas, Ali’s last fight. As he walked toward the first tee, I saw him and thought, “My God, a pirate!” That red beard, one eye, wild hair leaping off his head, that belly hanging over a tiny waistline, always in jeans, disheveled on his good days. For years, we played golf at every fight. The better he played, the wider his stance got until on putts that belly all but scraped the ground. I saw him, in Perth, chase a kangaroo who’d come onto a green and hopped away with his ball. Last time we played, at a Kentucky Derby, we were partners winning big until the 18th hole where, through some convoluted wagering system that only he understood, we contrived to lose big.

George loved the business, loved the column, loved life. A sweetheart in pirate’s disguise. The one and only.

Here is a tribute written by his Herald colleague, Michael Gee. Here, the boxing author, Thomas Hauser. Here, his Boston running buddy, Charlie Pierce. Here, his partner in literature at the end, John Schulian.

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.