I Miss Pete Axthelm. Anybody Who Read Him Does, Too.

If you were a Newsweek subscriber when newsmagazines were all the rage in the '70s and '80s, before the internet and electronics strangled most of them, you knew about Pete Axthelm. And once evoked, you miss him, too, don't you?

Newsweek was the more liberal alternative to Time, the stodgy weekly from which conservative Henry Luce dictated foreign policy, culture, and all that he believed to be American. Supported by the Washington Post, Newsweek dodged and weaved around its older sister, jabbing and jiving, being alike yet not alike, and arriving at answers, not an answer, to most social and political questions. 

I loved it. I subscribed starting in college and saw it through to its fading and demise. It is back now as a electric newsmagazine, trying to find a place, but Politico and Axios and others of that sort have gotten out in front of that horse race.

Horse race: There's something Ax, as he was known, could cover like no one else. He loved the track and the betting that fused themselves to him. His angles always caught you by surprise; there was always more than just the races themselves. 

Sports, as he always saw it, was about people and their games. Games were a way to put people together. The latter were always more interesting.

His signature book, The City Game, about New York basketball, another favorite of his, was an inspiration. Those who mingled and played in those arenas, those with the New York edge about them, were prime territory. Axthelm latched onto a New York boy, Marquette basketball coach Al McGuire, and wrote some of the deepest insights on him. McGuire was that kind of person, a street fighter, an unorthodox underdog, that Axthelm loved.

He reveled in McGuire's grudge match with the NCAA, when with a 22-3 record fifty years ago, his Marquette team was going to be sent to Lubbock, Texas, though he believed it had earned a bid in the Midwest Regional. He flipped the NCAA off, went to the NIT in New York in the days when it still had some clout, and beat Pete Maravich's LSU team on the way to taking the title. Three years after Axthelm's death, in fact, Marquette University named a sports communications scholarship for him. (I looked at a book for an old quote from McGuire, and inside was a Newsweek article on him after he had closed out his career with an NCAA title. Written, of course, by Pete Axthelm.)

Axthelm wrote up pro football from the gamblers' viewpoint more than from a fan's. Those that claimed, and worked, an edge were far more interesting than those who posed for holy pictures. He knew the Mara brothers, owners of the New York Giants, well. I can't be sure--I looked but couldn't find anything--but he must have covered the mess that Lawrence Taylor created when he agreed with Rhymes With Chump, once owner of the New Jersey Generals of the now-defunct United States Football League (failing to be allowed to buy an NFL franchise is one of the bases for RWC's rant over Colin Kaepernick's now quite benign kneel-down, which persists because Kaepernick, aged 33, still deserves a chance to play), to accept a deferred payment of $1 million to play for four years. Then changed his mind, which allowed RWC to milk the Maras for three-fourths of it as well as get the million bucks back from Taylor. (RWC went on to become a major force in driving that league into bankruptcy. Taylor led the Giants to two Super Bowl wins.)

Axthelm influenced many sportswriters who followed him, including Yours Truly. I wrote sports in college, and people liked it. I went on to be a part-time, small-town sports columnist, trying new angles that might catch more attention. Occasionally, I caught them. I dreamed of being Pete Axthelm, but nobody could be Pete Axthelm but Pete Axthelm. Nobody could catch, or create, lightning in a bottle like he did.

The bottle: He could never get past it. There was always a fresh one waiting for him to dive in. He was such a good writer that it would take about twenty years for the drinking to finally affect his pieces. It got him as it does all drunks who won't, or can't, admit they've got a problem.

L. Jon Wertheim, who can spin a sentence or two himself and further distinguishes himself by doing reports for 60 Minutes, wrote a lovely piece on Ax for Sports Illustrated this week. If Ax have lived, he'd be only 77 (Only: that's not looking very old anymore), and we would have heard much more from him by now. He died in 1991, at only 47.

Ax drank himself to death. He was awaiting a liver transplant, wrote Wertheim, having pickled the one he had, but ran out of time. I had an uncle who also fell victim, due perhaps to nightmares after having served burial detail in the South Pacific during the Big One, and I saw his unconscious semi-corpse in the hospital. The image never left me. It's an awful way to go.

He rubbed up against other big names who were proud to have rubbed up against him: a fellow Yale classmate named Bob Woodward; the superb sports announcer Bob Costas; Tony Kornheiser, once a standout at the Post sports desk and who now co-hosts Pardon the Interruption, a daily sports talk show on ESPN; Mary Carullo, who announces tennis and is a regular on Real Sports on HBO, probably the best TV sports journalism. (This is purloined from Wertheim's article.)

He outwrote them all, often with little or no time left on deadline, Canadian whiskey and signature cigar nearby. The image is of slipshod, scattered works thrown together at the last second by someone who looked like he'd slept in his clothes (drunks sometimes do). They were actually marvelous, deeply thoughtful, even slick, written by someone who'd been somewhere you had never been and wouldn't think of being, with sources from digging deep within a sport to connect the unknown with the very known. They were gumshoe and regal at once. He did not back away from racism. Other names are better attached to the concept, but his writing was creative nonfiction at its best.

He was exemplary in so many ways except clean living. Had he realized that, he might have dried himself out. But he would have had to rally in self-recovery. Great journalists are too independent to be guided by anyone else's path; finding stories that matter means carving out The Road Not Taken. He would have been stunned that someone else really good went off the road for a minute to tell the rest of us how good he really was.

Damn. I miss him, especially today, after a pure con artist, the kind of guy he came to know well, actually became president. Ax would have seen right through him early on; I'm sure he did. It might not have mattered, but he would have tried to wave the banner of hypocrisy. He might not have bet on RWC's win, but he would have bet, and made it a point to keep saying, that so many of us were being conned from the start.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. One day closer to a vaccine. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark