THERE ONCE was a magazine called Inside Sports, an ordinary name for what turned out to be a star across the night sky of magazines. It was at its best, its most memorable, for perhaps 28 issues before flameout and penury set in. Of course, there was nothing surprising about that in the ‘70s and ‘80s when journalism burned brightly with passion projects. For every Rolling Stone that endured, there was a New York Times or a MORE or another of the myriad rock-and-roll rags that sought to make sense of In a Gadda Da Vida.
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Everyone who was hired on at Inside Sports understood the risks sooner or later. They plowed ahead anyway for the adventure and the creative freedom, convinced that this was going to be a sports magazine unlike any that had come before it. Sports Illustrated was all right – if you could tolerate what your father fell asleep reading on the sofa every week. But Inside Sports was going to become all things on a slant, funny like National Lampoon, smart and nuanced like Esquire and Texas Monthly. Better yet, at least from a business perspective, it was going to be bankrolled by Newsweek—Pepsi to Time magazine’s Coke—where the culture in the late Seventies was like Mad Men ten years on: mainly white, male, and full of the trimmings, including fat expense accounts, first class travel, four star restaurants and bureaus across the map.
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Newsweek was owned by the Washington Post company. In the wake of their explosive coverage of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, The Washington Post went from a regional newspaper to a national powerhouse in less than a decade. It also became famous, thanks in part to the movie version of All the President’s Men; the Post even gave free tours of the newsroom to admiring tourists. Led by Katharine Graham, the Washington Post Company was receptive when Newsweek President Peter Derow suggested the Post look to expand its empire. Time Inc. had launched two successful magazines in the Seventies—People and Money—and Derow believed the Post company could do more. After all, magazine publishing was still in its heyday and as difficult as it was to start a new title, it was easier—and cheaper—to start a title than buy an existing one.
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If anyone was poised to create something touched with magic it was at the Post Company. And so they launched Inside Sports, a monthly sports magazine, concentrating on the four major sports, which introduced the magazine public to the feature writing talents of Pete Dexter, Gary Smith, Tom Boswell, and Tony Kornheiser and offered a haven for literary-minded writers who were also sports fans—David Halberstam, Willie Morris, Mordecai Richler, and Richard Ford. Caught between decades, Inside Sports’ features had the downbeat vibe of a Hal Ashby or Robert Altman ’70s movie, but the columns and departments suggested the data-packed pop sensibility of the Eighties.

The debut issue hit the newsstands just a few days after an obscure all sports Cable TV network—an even more cockamamie proposition than a monthly sports magazine—named ESPN first aired. And even though it lived a short, bright life under the Post, the creative team behind IS understood, along with the folks at ESPN, America’s obsession was with sports culture, not just box scores. And so IS covered the industry of sports—TV, gambling, analytics, media, fandom. This was before USA Today delivered daily box scores and statistics, decades before the Internet. Free agency was in its infancy and while the big money had yet to start pouring into sports from cable TV, Americans’ interest in sports, their desire for information—more, faster—seemed bottomless. It was a magazine slightly ahead of its time and yet steeped in what had come before it.

THE LAST GREAT GIG

DONALD GRAHAM (WASHINGTON POST, PUBLISHER):

The difference between Time Inc. and The Washington Post company is that Time Inc. had a long record going back to Time itself, and Life, and Fortune, of successfully starting magazines and seeing them through to profitability and we did not. It is not totally irrelevant that Time had started People, which had taken off like a house on fire.

PETER DEROW (NEWSWEEK, PRESIDENT, 1977-’81):

One of the things we understood how to do was how to run a magazine. We had not proven that we could start them.
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Newsweek’s head of circulation, E. Dan Capell had been with SI and he remembered how well a Bear Bryant cover did on the newsstand in Alabama. He pitched Derow a monthly national sports magazine that would be sold regionally with different covers.

ED KOSNER (NEWSWEEK, EDITOR, 1975-’79):

Capell had noticed that Sports Illustrated always sold out in cities where a sports star from the area was on the cover. So he reasoned that a sports magazine that had six or eight regional covers each month with a local sports star out front would have 90%+ sell-through month after month. The magazine would have a core editorial well that would run in all editions; each regional issue would have its own cover.
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Derow liked the idea and turned to Newsweek’s sports department for someone to run with it. As the magazine’s lead sports writer for the better part of a decade, Pete Axthelm, who made his bones with the widely-admired New York basketball chronicle The City Game (1970), was an ace reporter and a deft stylist as a writer. He possessed undeniable talent, insight, and charisma.

VALERIE SALEMBIER (INSIDE SPORTS, PUBLISHER, 1982):

Ax was a star from birth. He came out of the womb being funny.

ROY BLOUNT JR. (INSIDE SPORTS, CONTRIBUTOR):

He was a high roller and lots of fun. When Axthelm was in his prime, sportswriting—magazine sportswriting at least—was a swashbuckling kind of thing. Stay up late drinking, chasing women—you didn’t even have to write every day. You tried to see how well you could write, try to handicap yourself by staying up all night drinking too much. Anybody could write sober.

DAN JENKINS (SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, WRITER):

On the scene in those days he was considered more of a “character” who liked to drink and gamble than as a sportswriter, but that was by those who didn’t know him well enough. He was a hell of a writer, fast and accurate. He loved to say stuff like, “A Bloody Mary doesn’t do you any good in the morning unless you can see through it.”

DIANE K. SHAH (INSIDE SPORTS, CONTRIBUTOR):

He could read you pretty quickly and then he could talk to you at your level without making you feel that he was talking down to you. It wasn’t uncomfortable to be around him. He wasn’t lording his knowledge over people. He was very approachable and fun to be with. I would go out to dinner with Pete and almost always people would come up to the table. “Oh, Pete can I shake your hand, big fan, what do you think is going to happen to the Redskins on Sunday?” He was constantly being approached by people. And he enjoyed that, he liked being recognized.

TONY KORNHEISER (INSIDE SPORTS, CONTRIBUTOR):

Ax was a made man. The City Game made Pete Axthelm a huge star in the sports writing fraternity. In the New York intellectual sports writing fraternity that people aspired to, Pete Axthelm was enormous. Everybody’s talking, ‘I did this, I did that, I did the other thing, what about that guy?’ Well, that guy had The City Game so fuck all of you guys cause he’s way up ahead of all of you.

“Ax would write the story in his head in the shower… sit down at his typewriter and type for five or six straight hours.”

SHAH:

Ax would have a cover story. The assignments came on Tuesday. The story would be due Friday night. Friday morning, Ax would write the story in his head in the shower, he’d come into the office, sit down at his typewriter and type for five or six straight hours.

BILL NACK (SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, WRITER):

He’d hand it to Bonventre and say, “Read this and weep.”

Pete Bonventre was Axe’s running mate; he joined Newsweek after early success at the New York Times earned him a recommendation from Times columnist Robert Lipsyte. Ax didn’t care about boxing which meant Bonventre followed Muhammad Ali first class, from Miami and Vegas to Zaire and Manila.
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When they were both in town, the two Petes hung out and were known simply as Pete A and Pete B. Standard uniform, a four-pocketed safari jacket, khakis, and Gucci loafers. Scotch in hand, Pete B holding a cigarette in the other, they were the best of pals.

ELLEN WALSH (INSIDE SPORTS, RESEARCHER):

They cultivated the sense of the two of them. They had this line where they’d go out and pick up women and be with women and they’d be on top of the world and I remember Pete used to say, “You know, Ax, can you imagine if we were good looking?”Just the fact that they were sports writers for Newsweek, that sort of carried them. I think Axthelm was a little more of a darker personality and Pete was a caricature but a totally fun, ebullient, positive, life-is-great, and I’m Frank Sinatra and what could be better, with my warm scotch—so, he was kind of a character and everybody understood it.

MARY MURPHY (NEWSWEEK, WRITER):

A very good friend of Axe’s once said, Pete Bonventre was a man who could find a silver lining in a tornado. That’s one of the things about Pete, he’s relentlessly upbeat. He didn’t have the kind of skewer that Axe did.

KORNHEISER:

Pete B lived a great life. Pete lived the expense account life. He could stay out until 3 in the morning. Pete knew how to drink. I mean, there are things that you see in someone. They know how to handle themselves in all situations. Guys like Pete Bonventre went around the world.

PETE BONVENTRE (INSIDE SPORTS, MANAGING EDITOR):

It was as good as it gets. It was the last great gig. I had no interest in editing a magazine or doing anything else other than what I was doing. Ax certainly didn’t. But we had a recommendation—this guy John Walsh who worked in the Style Section of the Post. Ax and I both knew him socially and respected him and we thought he’d be perfect for the job. So he came up and met with Derow and Capell, and they were intrigued but they’d never seen anything like him before.

THE WHITE MAN

Inside his office, the shades are drawn. Before your eyes adjust to the darkness—before you register the department store Santa sitting behind the desk—you see The Creature. More than a foot high and almost as wide, is a double-wheeled Rolodex, custom-made, with rainbow stripes painted on each side. Both wheels packed—must be 10,000 cards at least. It feels like a living thing and the White Man is forever running his fingers across it.

JOHN A. WALSH (INSIDE SPORTS, EDITOR):

It encompassed all my life. I’ve led the collective life and the basis of that was in the Rolodex. It didn’t matter who you were or what connection you were, you were in the Rolodex. Connecting people was a big part of my life.

GARY SMITH (INSIDE SPORTS, STAFF WRITER):

It felt like it had extensions, that’s how it seemed. A living thing.  Old thumb prints, fading print on some of the cards, odd combinations, if you’d start thumbing through it. John’s eclectic interest in writing and journalism and also literature—so he’d be reaching into that world and yet he knows Bill Murray so he’s into the entertainment world, too. Rock ‘n’ roll. So there’s all kind of people he’s bumped into and befriended along the line and so, the combinations as you rolling through that thing, you don’t know what’s coming next at you. If an idea was percolating, John’d be like, “I got the guy for you, I got the guy for that, I got the guy you should call.”

Walsh began compiling the Rolodex at Newsday in the early ’70s. It grew when he was the managing editor of Rolling Stone and expanded still when he got to the Post’s ballyhooed Style section. But to appreciate its roots you have to go back to Scranton, Pennsylvania, because to understand the White Man you always end up in Scranton.

WALSH:

My father was a mortician. He and his brother inherited the business from their father. There was a police radio behind the dining room table that was on constantly. Scranton was—and I think still is—a very social city. I think it’s part of the nature of what Scranton is. Everybody knows everybody. My father would pride himself if he took you on a tour of the city, he would look at each house and tell you who lived in each house.

CLARA TRAMPE NASH (INSIDE SPORTS, SENIOR EDITOR):

It’s very Irish, big families. Everybody knows everything about everybody except the secrets they don’t know but they’re aware of that there are secrets. John knew everyone in town, everyone had a nickname, everyone had a story. And it was his nature to find out everything about a person.

WALSH:

As a child I was razzed about being an Albino and it was embarrassing to me. Then at a certain point in my life—when I couldn’t get a driver’s license, and I couldn’t do certain things—I basically said to myself, “This is who you are, this is what you are. Just take advantage of it instead of being embarrassed by it.” Then it turned into something a) to be proud of and b) to take advantage of and have fun with.

ANN KELLY (CHILDHOOD FRIEND):

Being an albino, he couldn’t play on the teams but he has a photographic memory. He became the statistician at the University of Scranton for the basketball team [He was the radio analyst—Ed], so he was able to travel with them, which was terrific for him because he could hang out with all these players, get to know them.

WALSH:

I got a Master’s of Journalism at the University of Missouri in 1969  and did three years as the sports editor. I came to Newsday in 1970, started the same day as Tony Kornhieser. And I did so much there, worked on the overnight copy desk, was the editor of the Op-Ed page—which is where I got to know David Halberstam—and for The Weekend magazine, and also sports for five months.

NACK:

You could tell he was up-and-coming. He didn’t have a newspaperman’s mind. He had a more expansive view of things, a larger vision than most people. Walsh was really good at spotting trends before they were trends.

WALSH:

I was only at sports for a little while when Jann Wenner called and offered me the managing editor’s job at Rolling Stone.

PAUL SCANLON (ROLLING STONE, WALSH’S PREDECESSOR AS ME):

John was at Rolling Stone for slightly less than a year, but he brought some specific improvements to a magazine that, even by 1974, was still used to flying by the seat of its pants. He established a real copy desk to replace one editor stuck with that task, and created a fact-checking department where there had been none.

He hired Marianne Partridge, an intelligent and energetic editor, to run the copy desk. There were a number of smart women with excellent academic backgrounds working at Rolling Stone, but nobody ranked higher than editorial assistant. John and Marianne staffed the new departments with these assistants and one part-time receptionist. The magazine’s overall professionalism improved accordingly. John also gave Hunter S. Thompson his dream assignment: Covering Super Bowl VIII in Houston.

Walsh’s run at Rolling Stone was brief—he lasted a little less than a full year, not uncommon under Wenner—but he stayed in San Francisco for the next three years, freelancing. It wasn’t until 1977 that Walsh landed at the Stylesection of The Washington Post.

SHELBY COFFEY (WASHINGTON POST, STYLE EDITOR):

Ben Bradlee loved Walsh from the start, and always called him “White Man Walsh.” John wore T-shirts to work, which in Washington of the late ’70s was quite a departure.  But John, because he had come from San Francisco, was cut a little slack. John was a very good psychologist, measuring the writer, what they needed, but also conceptually very smart about what you would make a good story.

“Some editors view editing the way bad cops view police work.

TOM SHALES (WASHINGTON POST, WRITER):

He never edited with a pickaxe. Some editors view editing the way bad cops view police work. They think they are supposed to leave you lying bleeding in the gutter and your story with you. And I’ve had some terrible editors but John Walsh was not one of them. The amazing thing is he could barely see what he was reading, which makes it especially impressive.

LUCY DANZIGER (INSIDE SPORTS, INTERN, 1979-’80):

You always wanted him to laugh. Reading in this dark room with a white light behind him. His laugh was a little girlish—like he couldn’t help it, like it escaped him.

“They thought he was insane. But he had great ideas and a great Rolodex.”

SMITH:

This real giggle, this high-pitched giggle when he’s amused himself. But also an almost conspiratorial whisper like the Priest in the confessional. The whisper. The old Irish Catholic stuff he grew up with. Very low and conspiratorial and father confessor, definitely the hushed thing was going on there. Between you and me I got this idea for you…

Walsh had run across the Two Petes in his adventures and he struck them as the ideal guy for Inside Sports, so he came up to New York, met with Capell and Peter Derow.

BONVENTRE:

They thought he was insane. But he had great ideas and a great Rolodex—he knew every writer in the goddamn country. They liked him, but Peter Derow came to me and said that he’d feel a lot more comfortable if there was a Newsweek person there, too.

DEROW:

To me, the French have it right. The definition of a bureaucrat is someone who’ll never do anything for the first time. There are commercial pilots and test pilots. Test pilots look to take up a plane that’s got one wing and half an engine and see if it’ll fly. And that’s very different from a commercial pilot who gets on the plane, doesn’t talk to the people in the back, takes the plane to Chicago. You know the plane will fly to Chicago. The test pilot is figuring out where Chicago is. That’s a very different group of people.

Bonventre still wasn’t sold on magazine editing, but when Walsh was hired in December 1978, he heard the call to arms. A test issue was planned for the fall of ’79; an office had to be set up. Asked to lend a hand, Bonventre thought, “Why the hell not? It might be fun.”

TESTING ONE, TWO

By the end of the spring in 1979, a small editorial staff of eight worked out of the “New Ventures” department on the 17th floor of the Newsweek building at 444 Madison Avenue. The magazine still needed a name: Grandstand, Spectator Sports, Box Seat, were all floated; then, during a meeting with Katharine Graham, Walsh explained his vision and she said, “I see what you’re doing. You’re trying to get inside sports.”  That was it. She’d nailed it.

DANZIGER:

Walsh wanted to portray athletes in a new way as opposed to just heroic or iconographic terms. It was going to be something that went deeper than SI, beyond the straight-ahead story, something conceptual.

BONVENTRE:

We just wanted to be really different from SI. We wanted to be the alternative. The aspiration was to be as well known and as good as them. And to make as much money—now I don’t know if we’d ever be able to do that because they were a weekly—but that was the goal. The goal was to be just as big, just as famous, just as good.

TOM BOSWELL (INSIDE SPORTS, CONTRIBUTOR):

Inside Sports was trying to find the sweet spot above Sports Illustrated. The conscious goal was: We’re beatin’ them. We’re better than they are. They’re really good, but we’re going to be better. Now that might be comic in retrospect but that was the conscious goal. We’re gonna knock them off.

WALSH:

We wanted to cover the vast industry and culture of sports. That’s why our columns were different than the ones you found in SI. “The Good Doctor” was Lewis Grossberger’s funny take on “Dear Abby.” We had Ray Sokolov, The New York Timesfood critic, writing about food, Roy Blount—who had been with SI—doing “Style,” Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Powers doing “Media,” Michael Ruby on sports business and Ax on gambling.

STEVE HIRDT (INSIDE SPORTS, CONTRIBUTOR):

Statistics were not as ever-present as they are today or as accessible. There was no Internet. Finding interesting things to talk about was not a problem. It was just deciding which one of these things is the best. Modern day analytics seem very slanted toward how a particular team can improve its chances of winning. I wouldn’t say John limited himself to that or was any more interested in that phase of things than anything that was just interesting or off-the-wall.

BONVENTRE:

We’d have story meetings—I forget the frequency—but they were hysterical. Someone would throw something out and it’d get knocked down—that’s fucking terrible—but that would lead to another idea. John encouraged everybody to come in. Researchers could sit at the table. He wanted everyone to have ideas. It was a great way to run anything. At those meetings, everyone was invited, everybody.

WALSH:

You could have anybody come in and say anything they wanted about any aspect of the magazine. We were that small and we were a monthly, so there was plenty of time for feedback, there was plenty of time for suggestions, ideas, and alternations.

KERRY SLAGLE (INSIDE SPORTS, SENIOR EDITOR):

Bonventre was a good balance to Walsh, who was odd in certain ways and could be abrupt. Pete was more diplomatic, specifically with the writers. Not to take anything away from Walsh but he doesn’t have as much patience with people. Because he is so smart, he can come across as being a little brusque. He’s always a little ahead of your thinking.

BONVENTRE:

I came there, I was a sports writer. I was a weekly guy. I wanted to get a story done. I knew a good idea and I just wanted to pursue it and bang it. Let’s just get it done, let’s bang it out, I want to go out to dinner, and I want to go for a cocktail.

CAL FUSSMAN (INSIDE SPORTS, CONTRIBUTOR):

You’d find Walsh walking around in a white straw hat; Bonventre dressed elegantly, listening to Sinatra. And there was Teddy Bietchman, the house Republican, wearing a bow tie, suit, and Bass Weejuns. Imagine sitting around John’s circular desk with all these outlooks, but underneath it a love of sports and literature. So to come in and get these four very different takes was great.

KOSNER:

At Newsweek, they kept the Inside Sports development team sequestered from the rest of us in a kind of skunk works.

Five regions and five covers were targeted for the test issue—Philadelphia (Mike Schmidt), Boston (Larry Bird), New York (Yankees), Washington (Jack Pardee), Pittsburgh (Lynn Swann)—as well as a national cover featuring Swann.

RICHARD ALOISIO (INSIDE SPORTS, ART DIRECTOR):

The Philly cover was shot by Francesco Scavullo, one of the most famous fashion photographers in the world. Walsh said, “It’d be a good idea to get somebody like Scavullo. We want to do something very different.” I had to make this call to Scavullo, which is like calling Ansel Adams. I got an assistant and she said, “What’s the day rate?” I said, “Well, it’s kind of a labor of love.” She said, “Francesco doesn’t work for a labor of love.”

Tony Kornheiser was dispatched to profile Mike Schmidt, then halfway through a Hall of Fame career (and memorably photographed by Scavullo), Bonventre wrote about the ascending stardom of Sugar Ray Leonard, and Axthelm weighed in on what went wrong with the Yankees, whose season had been marred by the death of team captain Thurman Munson in a plane crash. But perhaps the most revealing piece was Diane K. Shah’s profile of Larry Bird, then in his rookie NBA season.

SHAH:

I was supposed to have this interview with Larry and he didn’t show up. So the Celtics were apologetic. “He’ll be here tomorrow can you be here at 7:30 in the morning?” I said okay. So I show up at 7:30 in the morning and Larry Bird does not show up. And they said, “We promise he’ll be here Friday at 8:00.” So I get there on Friday and there’s no Larry Bird. I had to get back to New York, and I remember I called Pete Axthelm and I said, “I don’t know what to do, Larry doesn’t show up and I’ve got to do the story and get back to New York and who the hell does he think he is and this is ridiculous, what a jerk.” I’m carrying on and Pete says, “Now, Diane, it’ll be okay.” He’s talking and I turn around and Larry’s standing in the doorway. He didn’t smile, he didn’t say anything. And I’m sorry, he was a hick from French Lick.

I did a lot of digging. He was married, had a kid, left them and then his father committed suicide. I verified all of that and wrote the story. I was sure enough of my facts that I could write it and apparently the writers in Boston had been working on this and hadn’t been able to verify it and Larry absolutely wouldn’t talk to them about it and when the story came out the writers, Dan Shaughnessy and Bob [Ryan] got together and said, “Hey, Larry, it’s out so let’s just talk to you about it, get it over with,” and he said okay. And then he said, “If I ever see that girl again, I’ll spit in her face.”

The test issue went to press on September 10, 1979—just three days after ESPN debuted—and hit newsstands five days later, first in the Northeast and then in other test markets. Of 125,000 printed copies, 100,000 or 80% of the run sold, encouraging enough for Katharine Graham and The Washington Post to give a green light and the first issue was scheduled to launch in April 1980. Reason to celebrate. Not that Walsh or the Two Petes ever needed a reason.

THE WRITER WHISPERER

Walsh assembled an editorial staff of about 20. His managing editor, Bonventre, had no experience in that job, and he wasn’t alone. Richard Aloisio, a graphic designer at Penthouse, was hired as art director though he had never been one before, and Jim Drake, a staff photographer at SI, was hired as photo director though he’d never done that, either.

WALSH:

Just because smart people haven’t done something doesn’t mean they can’t do it. I had never edited before when I went to Missouri, never worked on a copy desk before Newsday. Take the smart people and trust your judgment that they can do what you think they can do.

BONVENTRE:

Tony Kornheiser calls and says, “I’ve got a guy that I went to school with, you’ve gotta meet him. He’s really good.” Jay was working for something called Hardware Store News. I said, “How can we hire a big editor when he’s working at Hardware Store News?” Tony says, “You gotta believe me, this guy is brilliant.”

KORNHEISER:

Jay’s a few years older than I am. Jay was just sort of legendary. One of these guys who was in this snack bar area 22 hours a day, hanging out. Smarter than everybody else. Larry David before Larry David but he wasn’t as loud. More wry. You could talk to Jay. But he was working for Hardware News Weekly. He went to openings of Piggly Wigglys and shit. Jay was in a circumstance where his intellect wasn’t being used.

JAY LOVINGER (INSIDE SPORTS, ARTICLES EDITOR):

I never knew I was going to be an editor or a writer. I thought I was just going to be an acid head my whole life. I had written a few things, including something in Sport. When I went to see Walsh, I didn’t know if it was to get an assignment as a writer or what. I got all dressed up.

I never knew I was going to be an editor or writer. I thought I was just going to be an acid head my whole life.

WALSH:

He rented shoes and a three-piece suit. To this day, all Jay wears are T-shirts. Only on his wedding day did he have a suit. And here I am in a T-shirt and he’s in a rented suit.

LOVINGER:

Walsh was dressed in salmon-colored jeans, a black t-shirt with “Albino Power” written in white letters, and a floppy leather hat. Before I could sit down, he started leading me out. “Jay, I’m afraid I can’t hire you,” he said. “I’m only hiring people I know.” Before we got to the door he asked me what I thought about the test issue. I was pissed off and embarrassed, so I ripped everything in it. He must have been fascinated because everyone else was patting him on the back.

WALSH:

I asked him to give me a list of 25 stories he would assign and when we got the list back, Pete B and I were blown away. But we didn’t have the headcount. We were all staffed-up. We had to beg Dan to give us an extra head count to hire Jay.

Lovinger had never edited a story and had no connections in the business, but Inside Sports needed a bonus piece for its debut issue. David Halberstam was working on a book about the Portland Trailblazers (Breaks of the Game), so Lovinger called the author. Halberstam wasn’t home, but after some pleasant chitchat with Halberstam’s wife, Jean, she gave Lovinger her husband’s number on the road. When the two men spoke, Halberstam suggested a profile of Pete Maravich, the NBA legend then at the end of his career.  The piece would rely on reporting Halberstam had done for his book but wasn’t going to use. Lovinger said the only thing he could to a Pulitzer Prize-winner: Yes.

LOVINGER:

The piece comes in at 10,000 words and it was supposed to be 4,000. I cut it down, made a hundred little changes. I send it back to him and I get a phone call a couple of days later. He’s screaming into the phone about how I betrayed him. I listened to him for a couple of minutes and then said, “David, you’re being totally irrational. Why don’t you call me back when you’re in your right mind.” And I hang up the phone. Now, we have no back-up plan. So I go in and tell Walsh the story and as I’m telling it to him, his head is getting lower and lower and finally he bangs it on the desk. I say, “I guess I fucked up.” And he looked up and said, “Don’t worry about it.”

The next day Lovinger got a call from Halberstam, who apologized at length. They went over the piece anew, starting with the 10,000-word version, and when they were finished, they were close to Lovinger’s original edit.

LOVINGER:

Couple of years later I found out what had happened. He was talking to his wife about how mad he was, expecting her to say, “That guy’s an asshole.” And she said, “You call that nice young man back and apologize.”

BONVENTRE:

Everybody’s got some skill. Jay’s is editing. He just has that instinct. You just can’t learn some of that stuff.

LOVINGER:

I had an affinity for it right away. I really liked it and I was supremely confident that I could do it. I understand the way something should flow. How it should start, how it should end, what about a story is profound, how it fits in the world.

ROGER DIRECTOR (INSIDE SPORTS, CONTRIBUTOR):

Jay usually talks very slowly and carefully and he reads slowly and carefully and then he’ll puzzle over something for a second and you’ll wonder why he’s puzzling over something but in that moment of his puzzling or hesitating or questioning something, he’ll begin to unravel some bigger issue that’s just beneath the surface and kind of buried or muted or not totally investigated or unearthed. And Jay will slowly pick away and unearth something deeper and better and get something more precisely, more carefully explained. Jay never had anything less than a very calm, reassuring, confidence in the writers that he was working with and the process that everybody was going through.

RICHARD FORD (INSIDE SPORTS, CONTRIBUTOR):

He seemed like one of those eternal City College guys. Whenever I would talk to him about something I was writing or something that I was doing it wasn’t that we were having an editorial conference, we were just having a conversation. He would have read it and he would have ideas, which were more than just ideas that he had but they were ideas that he thought were complimentary to work that was underway. Jay didn’t have, when he assigned you something, an idea that was so specific in terms of its form as to be a constraint on what you might develop on your own.

ROBERT LIPSYTE (INSIDE SPORTS, CONTRIBUTOR):

Jay finds a way to submerge himself in your story, figure out what you were trying to say—and perhaps failed—then helps you reconstitute your original vision without imposing his own idea of what the story should be about.

GREG KELLY (INSIDE SPORTS, RESEARCHER):

He could talk people off a ledge if they were struggling. He would just see what was wrong with a piece. I wrote something for them, they took it, made it better, and I was sulking that they changed my text. Jay sat me down and said, “What makes you think you’re the only one that gets to have any fun working on this piece?

A-Z

FUSSMAN:

It was just this energy, ideas, the people Walsh surrounded himself with. I met David Halberstam and Pete Dexter, Gary Smith, and Hunter Thompson. If you’re a young writer, you could not imagine a better place to throw yourself into. You can’t imagine how much learning was done, just going to the office, at the Cowboy, then later at night at Runyon’s or Smith & Wollensky. All the beat guys would come in. So you’d know everything that was going on in sports. It had your mind spinning.

WALSH:

The Dallas Cowboy was Newsweek’s version of the Sports Illustrated bar Ho Ho’s. Remember, Pete A had worked at SI. The Cowboy’s bartender was this Italian guy from Brooklyn named Tony. He was a bookmaker. Ax would go to The Cowboy and lay down some bets with Tony and then he’d be going to the pay phone calling Sports Phone every half an hour checking the scores.

SHALES:

He’d call everything a “Kecktail.” He’d say, “Let’s have a Heineken Kecktail.”

LARRY SCHWARTZ (INSIDE SPORTS, SENIOR EDITOR):

People would hang out, and once we went out—whether you were a secretary or managing editor—you were equal.

SHAH:

All the drinking, the smoking. It was all fun. And we worked like hell.

SALEMBIER:

I had been with Newsweek many years before but I had left to join Ms. And then I went from Ms. [Associate Publisher] to Inside Sports. The testosterone was overwhelming. It was definitely a boy’s club but for that time those guys were hugely respectful of women. Feminism already has its name but these guys were really different, I must say. Because they were very cool about women. There was none of that office hanky-panky stuff going on. Nothing like that at all. I was both relieved and very happy that I was in the company of those guys. They were all about sports. That’s all that mattered.

DANZIGER:

Walsh knew everybody. He knew Iggy Pop and he knew the Winters Brothers because of the whole Albino thing. He was very good friends with Bill Murray who would just randomly come by the office and party.

At the office, there were drop-in’s from Walsh’s famous pals: Hunter Thompson, David Halberstam, Jimmy Buffett, and Kinky Friedman. Nik Cohn was close friends with Pete Townshend and was rumored to be the real life pinball wizard. Cohn visited Inside Sports one day and Lovinger asked how good a pinball player he really was.

LOVINGER:

Nick was always very critical of other people but very modest about himself. He said, “Pretty good.” So I said I’d like to see it, and took him down to an arcade on Broadway. He’s on some machine that I’m sure he’s never seen before. He’s talking to me and playing with one hand. And he’s not even really looking at the game that much. And the machine is about to explode. He flies past the previous high score by hundreds of thousands and finally gets bored and just stops. And we go back and I say, “That was really amazing,” and he says, “You should see my wife, she’s really good.”

JOHN MURRAY (INSIDE SPORTS, PUBLICITY ASSISTANT):

One time Jay grabbed Bob Phillips and me and said, “I have to tell you something I really enjoy doing. I like going to Meatloaf concerts and smoking lots of joints.” Really? So we went out to Long Island, we sat in back row at a Meatloaf concert and smoked about 20 joints and went, “Ooookay. All right. I get it.”

Walsh’s favorite music spot was the Lone Star Café, a Country Rock club on 5th Avenue in the Village that sported a giant Iguana on the roof, a joint that rocked to the sounds of his buddies like Jimmy Buffett and Kinky Friedman. The annual highpoint was the A to Z Bar Tour, which Walsh began in San Francisco and continued in D.C. before taking it to the Big Apple. The idea was simple: a bar crawl designed to hit one establishment for each letter of the alphabet. Walsh was the captain, decked out in a varsity jacket with the word “Coach” on the front and a whistle dangling around his neck. The boozy pilgrims traveled by bus and Walsh kept things moving with precision and without compassion for stragglers.

BOSWELL:

Walsh was the organizer and instigator of wild men.

WALSH:

The key to keeping it all running smoothly was that I had very little to drink until the end of each tour. We went to places where they served food, where there was dancing. We would descend upon New York hotels in the late afternoon, prime time. Bill Murray and Tim Russert came along. John Belushi helped us get into one bar. We had a wave of people who would come in. They tried to kick to us out of the Oak Room at the Plaza but couldn’t. The next year, they saw us coming and locked the doors. They remembered because Bill Murray had stood on the bar and sung “God Bless America.”

ALOISIO:

John knew I loved sweets and ice cream, knew I loved butterscotch shakes in the big container with a straw. One year for my birthday he bought shakes for everybody to come and give me in my office. So it was like, “Hey, Richard, Happy birthday, here’s a shake.” I had like 30 shakes and two giant tubs of butterscotch ice cream.

KELLY:

Walsh loved characters, big and small. There was Frank Ross, aka Sky Lab, who would provide all the NFL intel to Ax. Joel Horowitz was an early version of Howie Schwab, ESPN’s sports trivia savant. Joel helped with fact checking and proofing the magazine.

PETE DEXTER (INSIDE SPORTS, CONTRIBUTOR):

I really liked the kid, too, Bill Murray’s brother. I thought he was a good guy and genuinely funny. I mean, a lot of guys would be trying to be Bill Murray themselves and wouldn’t be able to do it. But Johnny was a good guy.

FUSSMAN:

All we did was talk about writing. That’s something Jay particularly loved. You might leave Runyon’s and then walk around the streets until three in the morning with Jay talking about stories. It was an education that you couldn’t get in journalism school.​

There was perhaps no greater connection made than the one between Lovinger and Gary Smith, a young writer who came to Inside Sports after stints at the Philadelphia Daily News and New York Daily News. Smith didn’t have aspirations to be a magazine writer or even a sports writer. Smith read Hesse, Camus, and Kundera but that didn’t stop him from making a fast name for himself covering the Eagles for one of the best sports departments in the country at the Philadelphia Daily News.​

JOHN SCHULIAN (INSIDE SPORTS, CONTRIBUTOR):

I read Smith for the first time on a visit to Philadelphia and was impressed. When I saw him work the locker room after an Eagles game, I knew instantly that he was a reporter, too. He’d zero in on the player he was writing about and stick with him like gum on a shoe.

LOVINGER:

When Gary talks to you, he makes you feel like you’re the only living thing in the world and he really cares about you.

SCHULIAN:

Gary wanted to get inside his subject’s head and turn what he wrote into a study of the human condition. A damn lofty goal for anyone, but for a kid just out of college, stratospheric. Gary got what he wanted, though. And he wrote it with magic in his fingertips.

GARY SMITH:

When you are young, you are working the muscle, developing your voice. You got to give yourself over to the piece and see what comes up. What might be the most interesting way to write this individual piece and this particular material? There’s always the challenge: Is there a different way to do this story?

Nolan Ryan, the first baseball player to earn $1 million a year, was on the cover of the first issue and profiled expertly by Kornheiser. And there was the familial portrait of Philadelphia 76ers center Darryl Dawkins by Pete Dexter, a warm-up for what was to come. Walsh knew he had a gem in Dexter who, writing for the Philadelphia Daily News, had become one of the most distinctive columnists in the country. There was the influence of Flannery O’Connor in his work, a hard beauty and mordant humor. Dexter had street savvy but unlike other city columnists, he didn’t seem to be influenced in the least by Royko, Breslin or Hamill, the three reigning heavyweights of the day. He was his own man and his own writer.

SLAGLE:

We saw this brief about [LeeRoy] Yarbrough’s arrest for trying to kill his mother, and he’s charged with attempted murder. Pete Dexter would be ideal for this. So I called Pete up. This was about a week before deadline. I said, “Would you go to Jacksonville and see what you can find out? We think this could be a hell of a story…” Wednesday to Sunday is when he did the reporting and writing. So we’re talking four days. I’m living outside of Princeton and commuting into the city. Pete is living in a little hamlet outside of Philadelphia. I said, “I’ll come get it from you.” I got there about 10:00 in the morning. He didn’t meet me at the door, his wife did. She said, “He’s wiped out. He’s been writing solid for 24 hours.” I’m thinking, This has got to be right. We don’t have time [to make major changes]. There was one typo in the manuscript, one typo, and we added a comma. That is the only thing we did to that story. I never had a piece that came together like that by any writer.

Here’s the lede:

The child in the child is somehow faded. She is eight years old but there is nothing in her manner to say she isn’t nineteen, with a house full of screaming babies and a high school sweetheart who doesn’t always come home at night anymore.

She walks the front yard like walking is already a chore, collecting the mongrel puppies. There are nine of them and her fingers disappear into the long coats as she picks them up, then puts them in a cardboard box next to the front door.

The house is a shack, about a block from the abandoned half-mile dirt track where LeeRoy Yarbrough, the most famous man ever to come out of west Jacksonville, Florida, got his start racing automobiles. About three blocks from the place where, a month before, cold sober, he tried to strangle his own mother.

“He live right up that road there,” she says, pointing a puppy. “Him and Miz Yarbrough, but they ain’t there now. Everybody knows LeeRoy, sometime he come by and sit on the steps, but now he wrung Miz Yarbrough’s neck, he ain’t home no more.”

The screen door opens and a woman in white socks steps halfway out the door. Missing teeth and a face as narrow as the phone book. “You git them puppies up yet? You know what your daddy tol’ you.”

The door slams shut, but the woman stays there, behind it in the shadows. In west Jacksonville it always feels like there’s somebody watching behind the screen door.

“We got to take the puppies down to the lake,” the girl says. “Daddy got back from the country [farm] and says so. He goin’ take them out to the lake with him tonight.”

I ask her why she just didn’t give the puppies away. She shakes her head. “I tol’ you,” she says. “Daddy got back from the country.”

I’m going to tell you right here that I don’t know what picked LeeRoy Yarbrough off the top of his world in 1969 and delivered him, eleven years later, to the night when he would get up off a living room chair and tell his mother, “I hate to do this to you,” and then try to kill her. I can tell you some of how it happened, I can tell you what the doctors said, what his people said. But I don’t know why.

It has business with that little girl and her puppies, though. With not looking at what you don’t want to see, putting it off until you are face-to-face with something unspeakable.

And tonight those nine puppies go to the bottom of the lake.

This is not the kind of story you’d find in Sports Illustrated.

Shortly after it was published, Lovinger was awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call. On the other end of the line was Nik Cohn, the coruscating British writer with an exacting sense of taste in pop culture. He said, “This Dexter fellow, they really should be carrying him around on the streets of New York on their shoulders,” and hung up.

A few months later, Dexter’s published a feature on the NFL stars Lee Roy and Dewey Selmon, another piece set in the South. Lovinger was again awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call. This time Cohn said, “This Dexter fellow, they’re really all quite the same, aren’t they?”

LOVINGER:

We had a lot of great writers but Pete was the best. I didn’t edit him, but I once read one of his pieces and asked what he was thinking with a particular scene. “Jay,” he said, “I don’t think about it, I just write it.”

It was sad in indescribable ways. There was a real sense of loss.“