Why I Joined The Athletic: A life of covering GOATs, started by an original Goat

A door swung wide in a mosque above an Indiana cornfield.

Muhammad Ali came straight at me. Wide-eyed.

The Louisville Lip was biting his as he threw a series of jabs in the close vicinity of my face. Playful jabs, thank heavens, because those hands still seemed awfully fast years after the one and only had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

This was a cold Saturday morning in March 1995, 15 minutes after Mike Tyson had been released from a nearby prison and 10 hours after Michael Jordan had played the first home game of his NBA comeback. To cover both events — Jordan’s return to Chicago and Tyson’s return to society — I spent a sleepless night driving about 200 miles from the United Center to the Indiana Youth Center and then waiting for Tyson’s predawn release with reporters from around the globe.

A number of us hopped into rental cars and followed Tyson’s limo caravan to the prayer service, where Ali appeared out of nowhere to join the freed former champ. What a scene. What a trip. Jordan on a late Friday night, Ali early the following morning. These were arguably the two greatest athletes in the history of American sports, and as I finished writing in a $60-a-night motel, I realized there was no place I would rather be, and no job I would rather hold.

I have written about sports in five decades, covering many unforgettable teams and moments. Duke-Kentucky. The Yankees dynasty. The Nineties Knicks. Wayne Gretzky’s final game. Mike Piazza’s homer after 9/11. The 2004 ALCS. Super Bowl XLII. The 2019 Masters.

Tiger Woods has won the Masters.

His 81st PGA TOUR win.His 15th major title.His 5th green jacket.#LiveUnderPar https://t.co/xC8165hypE

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) April 14, 2019

It’s a hell of a way to make a living, though hardly a normal one. The life of a sports journalist — or at least my life as a sports journalist — can be summarized by a 1991 weekend I spent with Jerry Tarkanian and his 34-0 Runnin’ Rebels, the defending champs and the finest college basketball team I’ve ever seen. Tark invited me onto the UNLV plane for the trip to Indianapolis and the Final Four and told me during the flight he didn’t have anyone to guard Christian Laettner. On cue, the Duke star scored 28 points in an upset for the ages.

Enraged by something I had written about his precarious standing at UNLV, Tark made an early-morning call to my hotel room and profanely and repeatedly threatened to have me “taken out.” He simmered down over the course of the day, decided my piece wasn’t so bad after all and, by nightfall, invited me to the lobby bar to buy me a drink.

You experience a little bit of everything in this business, the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good: Everything from scoring the last interview of George Steinbrenner’s life — he threatened to fire Joe Torre in the middle of a playoff series, of course — to fielding a thank-you call from Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League, who thought a column I wrote helped get him inducted into the Hall of Fame.

The bad: After Bill Belichick had quit the Jets only 24 hours into his tenure as their head coach, I wrote that the Patriots would regret hiring him, a haunting prediction that I will take to the grave.

The ugly: For the sake of a full and honest portrait of the man, I felt obliged to ask an aging Arnold Palmer about the longstanding rumors of his infidelities while sitting right next to him. Pointing to his hearing aid, Arnie asked me to repeat the question (ugh) before assuring me those rumors were “more the talk than it was an action.”

Earlier, I found myself sitting in Jack Nicklaus’ Gulfstream jet at 40,000 feet — halfway between Calgary and Palm Beach — as lightning bolts exploded around us. I saw fear in the eyes of a fearless competitor as he grabbed his armrests for dear life. We made it to Florida in one piece, but it always fascinated me to see these titans as vulnerable. Human.

Just like us.

Except they are not like us. When you cover Tiger Woods, Tom Brady and LeBron James, you see the drive and focus that borders on superhuman. The actual physical talent? It’s almost always a complementary force.

The term “GOAT” (Greatest of All Time) was coined by Muhammad Ali’s wife in the 1990s. LL Cool J later popularized it, naming his 2000 album “G.O.A.T. featuring James T. Smith: The Greatest of All Time,” crediting Ali and street ballplayer Earl Manigault for inspiring the term. pic.twitter.com/XTMWzZFeBn

— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) September 14, 2024

I’ve spent so much time around GOATs that a story about the original, Earl “The Goat” Manigault, comes to mind. I had a job in the 1980s as a New York Times copy boy and clerk who answered phones and fetched lunch for the pros working the sports desk. The faraway dream back then was to become a “Sports of The Times” columnist the likes of Dave Anderson, George Vecsey, Bill Rhoden and Ira Berkow — class acts all. A gofer in my position could report and write on his or her own time and, if lucky, get published without the cherished byline that was reserved for writers on staff.

I wrote such an unbylined story on Manigault, the troubled New York playground legend, that led the section and caught the eye of another GOAT, Frank Deford, who was starting America’s first all-sports newspaper, The National. Deford called The Times to find out who authored that unbylined piece. I got the job offer at age 24 and figured no wife, no kids and no mortgage added up to no reason to pass on a new adventure.

HBD to the late great Earl Manigault, the original 🐐 of basketball and the man Kareem used to call “GOD.”

At 6-0, he was rumored to be the inventor of the double dunk and could “make change” off the top of the backboard.

(Video: @bycycle) pic.twitter.com/jsHsYbnCkZ

— Ballislife.com (@Ballislife) September 8, 2018

A distinguished Times editor advised me that it would be a grave mistake to leave behind a potentially long career at the paper of record for an all-sports outlet. I took the gamble anyway, never thinking that the journey might someday take me to an all-sports outlet owned … by The New York Times.

In college, I started training for this work when typewriters and rotary phones were still the tools of the trade. Then the most primitive computers imaginable arrived, followed by the Internet and cell phones and an industry that no young journalist could’ve fathomed back in the day. If you told me even a quarter century ago that I’d have to confront A.I. before I was done, I would’ve assumed you were talking about a future dustup with Allen Iverson.

But despite everything that has changed about the business, one thing has remained a constant — the feeling you get when contributing something to a winning team. I left the daily game two years ago to finish my sixth and seventh books, and to make the (seemingly) permanent move from longtime columnist to full-time author.

And yet to work exclusively as an author is to hunt and gather in solitude. The endgame rewards are there, but they aren’t shared with colleagues who grinded with you during this Super Bowl week or that Masters week or that World Series run. You can’t replace that on your own.

So that’s why I took this job at The Athletic as a columnist. I’ve been fortunate to be a part of some tremendous teams over the years, but The Athletic has the best and deepest roster of reporters and storytellers I’ve ever joined. I feel a bit like Shaun Livingston on those championship Golden State Warriors teams.

I’m just hoping to make some meaningful plays off the bench.

(Photo of Muhammad Ali: Nick Ut / Associated Press)