Today’s entry comes from Stefan Fatsis, who became an actual member of the Denver Broncos—well, a placekicker—to write his new book, A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-foot-8, 170-pound, 43-year-old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL, which will be released next month. A decade earlier, on assignment for The Wall Street Journal, he got a tour of the Oakland Athletics’ weight room.

In the short story that follows, no athlete will overdose in front of me. The main characters took their medicine in private.

With just a few weeks left in the 1996 regular season, I pitched a story about what I brilliantly deduced was the overlooked reason for the record number of home runs soaring beyond big-league fences that year: weightlifting. Players for decades had eschewed weights because of an institutional conviction that big muscles hindered flexibility; “Built like Tarzan, throw like Jane,” the baseball man’s cliché went. Now, however, the newly bulked were mashing the ball. Sweetheart, get me copy!

My 1,691-word article led with an anecdote about a boyish Athletics leftfielder named Jason Giambi. Under the watchful eye of one Mark McGwire—who was wrapping up the first of four straight 50-plus-homer seasons—young Jason had added 25 pounds since reaching the majors a year earlier. Giambi had never hit more than 12 dingers in a season in the minors. In his first full season in the bigs, he had 20. “I attribute the year I’m having to the weightlifting,” he told me.

I happened to show up at the Oakland Coliseum on Jason Giambi Growth Chart Day. Kids got a life-size poster of the budding star to measure their progress growing up. I joked that the chart didn’t measure how much “Mr. Giambi” per Journal style was growing out. The piece got worse from there. It’s filled with quotes and details that make me look, in hindsight, like a complete idiot. After citing the contemporaneous conventional wisdom about the homer explosion—smaller ballparks, juiced ball, lousy pitching, etc.—I opined in the nut graph that “the missing component may be as obvious as Mr. Giambi’s biceps: Baseball players are pumped up and worked out as never before.”

Yup, the weights—and the “protein-enriched shakes”—must have been why Brady Anderson had smacked 46 homers so far and Todd Hundley had 41. I noted that McGwire, asked once to explain his home-run prowess, had cited bad pitching “and this”—his forearms. I did note a downside to the weight mania, however. All that lifting may have been why Jose Canseco repeatedly landed on the DL, why Juan Gonzalez suffered recurring back problems, why Dean Palmer ruptured a biceps tendon while swinging a bat.

Anyway, the locker room. Right after the game against the Baltimore Orioles, the Athletics filed into their small weight room. My chaperone was Bob Alejo, the team’s strength coach. Alejo, I recall, was well-built himself, the way some trainers are, and he had a swagger common among people who spend a lot of time with athletes and often confuse the players’ abilities with their own. We stood in front of a rack of dumbbells. McGwire—“who says he might open a bodybuilding gym after he retires,” I wrote—worked on legs and shoulder and talked real estate with B.J. Surhoff. Cal Ripken Jr. sprinted on a treadmill and did biceps curls. Giambi bench-pressed 185 pounds.

Alejo volunteered a piece of advice:

“You might want to back away from there,” he said.

“From where?” I replied, genuinely confused.

“From the weight rack. You don’t want to get hurt.”

I don’t want to get hurt? How exactly would that happen? Would I injure myself in a foolhardy attempt to use these, what did you call them? Dumb-bells? Would a 55-pound weight leap off the rack and knock me unconscious? Would I dissolve into a pile of sawdust if my elbow brushed against the heavy metals that these finely calibrated professional athletes employ to sculpt their mighty physiques? Or, seeing these big, hard bodies lifting all these heavy, heavy objects, would I swoon like Scarlett O’Hara and impale myself on a particularly pointy corner of the rack? I do declare! Such manly men! Fetch me a fan and a glass of iced tea!

Predictably, I didn’t respond. If a smirk and a chuckle passed my lips, I don’t remember; probably not. I didn’t tell Alejo that regular people also lifted weights. Or that I had spent the past three months maniacally rehabbing an ACL torn playing a sport that actually involves contact. I took a couple of steps away from the weights and continued asking the wrong questions, just like everyone else who covered baseball in the 1990s—until, that is, Steve Wilstein changed the conversation forever.

A decade later, as McGwire dissembled in front of Congress and Giambi made his non-admission admission and George Mitchell issued his Report, I thought fondly of the life-saving safety tip I’d received in Oakland. Finally, the rest of my fellow weakling reporters were in on the secret. We all knew as much about “weightlifting” as the strength coach of the team I described as “baseball’s most dedicated lifters.”

Mike Sielski is the sports columnist for Calkins Media, a chain of daily newspapers in suburban Philadelphia, and the co-author of "How to Be Like Jackie Robinson: Life Lessons from Baseball's Greatest Hero." The Newspaper Association of America has named him one of the 20 best newspaper people under age 40 in the nation. Today, Mike shares a revealing interview with Philadelphia Eagles' legend Chuck Bednarik.

I was sitting in Chuck Bednarik’s living room, stunned into silence, listening to a legend tell me who he really was.

It was January 2003. I was working for the Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., in a hybrid position as Philadelphia Eagles beat writer/columnist, and the Birds were in the midst of their most enchanted season since they had reached Super Bowl XV. Despite being without quarterback Donovan McNabb for the final six games of the regular season — McNabb had broken his ankle — the Eagles had gone 12-4 and were prepared to host the Atlanta Falcons in the NFC divisional round. The “last of the 60-minute men,” an Eagle for all of his 14 seasons in the NFL, Bednarik remained a franchise icon, a black-and-white image of him from his playing days looming on one of the walls inside the team’s practice facility. He was born in Bethlehem, Pa., and was still living in the Lehigh Valley. I called him and asked if I could come over to chat about McNabb and Andy Reid and the 2002 Eagles.

Three times during our phone conversation, Bednarik called Jeff Lurie, the team’s owner, a “son of a bitch.” He agreed to meet with me two days later. Needless to say, I was curious.

The walls of Bednarik’s living room were festooned with photographs and plaques, remembrances of the 1960 season — the last time the Eagles won an NFL championship, the year Bednarik played center and linebacker and became a hero to a generation of Philadelphia sports fans. The room was impressive. I turned on my tape recorder, and Bednarik started to talk. He was not impressive.

He was rooting for the Eagles to lose to the Falcons, he said. He had been in a dispute with Lurie, and he wanted nothing more to do with the franchise. Years earlier, Lurie had refused to buy several copies of Bednarik’s memoir and distribute them to the current players because the purchase would have violated the NFL’s salary-cap rules, and Bednarik was furious at the perceived slight. “Hey, f—- it,” he said. “It would have been a gift from me!” Concrete Charlie, bitter and angry, wishing the Eagles ill? No, this was not impressive, but this was a story.

Then Bednarik offered an unsolicited segue, saying, “And you know what really ticks me off? Put this in headlines. …”

With that intro, Bednarik began to rant, for five to 10 minutes, about the “n—--r bull—-t” in present-day pro football. Deion Sanders, end-zone dances, guys who weren’t tough enough to play both ways — he took a blowtorch to all of them.

He knew my tape recorder was running. I asked him if he really wanted those words in the story. He said he didn’t care. Other writers had quoted Bednarik on these topics before, on his resentment over the million-dollar salaries that players now made and the way that they acted on the field, but in none of those stories had Bednarik used the sort of language he was wielding now. It was one of those moments you rarely encounter these days as a sportswriter, in which the people you cover show you how different they can be from their public images, how self-centered and removed from reality they really are — and really always have been. It was thrilling and horrifying at the very same time.

Bednarik used that language, but in the end, I didn’t. I didn’t print a word of the rant in my column. For one thing, it wasn’t relevant to the primary thrust of the piece: Bednarik’s dispute with the Eagles. For another, I felt sorry for him. Here was an old man trapped in his sad, antiquated way of looking at the world, and I didn’t want to embarrass him more than he already had embarrassed himself. One terrible sound bite can drown out the music of a man’s life.

Understand, though: As irresponsible as it can be to judge someone’s full character based on a single word or phrase, it’s just as reprehensible to tolerate a superstar’s bad behavior out of adulation, to excuse Bednarik’s loutishness because he once damn near decapitated Frank Gifford on a crossing route. For no athlete, then or now, is pure as our visions of his triumphs suggest he is. People loved Bednarik for how he played football, for his Concrete Charlie persona, but what I learned in that interview was that Concrete Charlie had given Chuck Bednarik a lifetime pass to be a boor. I had seen the hero in his home, heard what he had said, and he wasn’t worthy of worship. He wasn’t close to being the man I thought, or hoped, he would be.

After the Morning Call published the column, Bednarik called me to say that he had sent a letter of apology to Lurie. The gesture seemed sincere — maybe there was still a soft heart beneath that bitterness — and I felt better about Bednarik … for a while. Then, in January 2005, Bednarik announced in an interview with the Associated Press that he was rooting for the New England Patriots to beat the Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX. He was telling the same how-dare-Lurie-not-buy-my-book story all over again, with the same outrage, as if the apology had never happened. A year and a half after that, in August 2006, he showed up at Eagles training camp one day and said of Reggie White, who had died the previous year: “There was something about him I just despised.” Later, he appeared on a radio station and claimed he was talking about Terrell Owens, not White.

Me, I just shook my head at what Chuck Bednarik had said and kept saying. I didn’t feel sorry for him anymore. There comes a time in this business when you realize that the legends of yesterday are as flawed and fallible as the mercenaries of today, and the pity runs out.

Today's story comes courtesy of Barry Petchesky, a young buck freelancer who gives us this wonderful little diddy about his first experience with the mesmerizing, intimidating largeness of Phillies first baseman Ryan Howard.

They say players never forget their first major league game. The same goes for reporters because, believe it or not, we were fans before watching baseball became a job. It was 2005, and I was a senior at Temple University, interning at the sports section of the Philadelphia Metro, which you may recognize as the newspaper that closes so early it doesn’t have time to run anything other than the AP story for night games. But it was the Sunday afternoon before the All-Star break, the Phillies beat reporter was out of town, and the editor decided it would be nice to send the intern to cover the game as a way to make up for the fact that they weren’t paying me.

I pretty much shat myself with excitement. I didn’t know the dress code for the press box, so I went with a long-sleeve button down, slacks and dress shoes. On a hundred-degree day. I wanted to be respectable, and I suppose it worked, since the Daily News reporter asked me if I was coming from a wedding. It was when I noticed that he was wearing jorts and a t-shirt with an ice cream stain that I first felt out of place.

It was a great game: extra innings, a win for the home team. But the real story was Ryan Howard’s game-tying home run. Jim Thome had gone down with a season-ending injury the week before, and heir apparent Howard had stepped into the starting lineup with the overblown expectations of a hope-starved city on his shoulders. If you don’t remember the hype from his rookie season, picture Jesus walking across the Schuylkill.

I had only one thought in my mind: I was so focused on being a professional reporter and not seeming star-struck, I got lost making my way from the press box to the locker room. When I finally made it the press was already surrounding Howard’s locker, so I elbowed my way to the front. That’s when I had an entirely new thought dominating my mind: oh, look, it’s Ryan Howard’s cock.

The locker room at Citizen’s Bank Park is right off the showers, so most players were milling about in towels, or changing into street clothes. Not Howard. He was chatting with the press, smiling that man-child smile that makes him so endearing, and – oh yeah, waving his Louisville Slugger around like he was in the batting cage.

I’d like to tell you I kept a veneer of professionalism. I’d like to tell you I looked him in the eye and asked the hard-hitting questions. But I was channeling Boon from Animal House: “Is he bigger than me?”

I didn’t have it that bad. I’m tall enough to be almost eye level with him, but the poor WIP reporter must’ve been about 5’2”. If he had been a vampire, Howard could have impaled his heart with a quick pelvic thrust.

I don’t want you to think I was being homophobic, or prude, or maybe a little turned on. This was more than casual nudity. This was flaunting. For every question, Howard would rotate his body to face the reporter, as if calling on them with his baby arm.

I stammered some stupid question about how he felt to hit his first big homer (note to aspiring journalists: “how does it feel?” is the laziest, least interesting question you can ask someone. So go ahead and ask it, you’ll fit right in with the rest of the press). That’s when he turned his weapon to bear on me. When you’re looking down the barrel of something like that, you’re damn straight there’s going to be no follow-up question.

The press circle broke up, and, shaken, I went to do a sidebar on the players’ All-Star break plans. I, being a goofy, unathletic-looking white guy, naturally sought out the two goofy, unathletic-looking white guys on the team, pitchers Billy Wagner (flying to Detroit for the game) and Jon Lieber (going fishing at home in Mobile).

I had noticed them watching Howard’s interview with interest, so I decided to do my first real investigative journalism of the day.

“Is he allergic to towels or something?” I asked.

They cracked up laughing. “You noticed that?” Lieber asked. “You press guys really make this an uncomfortable environment for the team.”

That hurt. There I was thinking I was going to be a sportswriter, and my first time in the Big Show I ruined it by not knowing how things were apparently done. If I was going to be thrown off my game by something so insubstantial as a giant black penis, how could I ever make it in this business?

That’s when Wagner threw his arm around my shoulders.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “He made a bet with Jimmy [Rollins] in Spring Training. Ryan said if he didn’t hit 10 home runs by the All-Star break, he’d go naked for the media. Sorry you had to see that.”

I’ve seen athlete dong since then. But you always remember your first.

Today's submission comes courtesy of Mike Fisher, who writes about the Mavericks, the Cowboys, the Dallas sports scene and whatever he damn-well pleases at DallasBasketball.com.

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Charles Haley spent a decade trying to kill me, in spirit and ultimately in body, which is more than I can say for all these other "Dark Side'' sportswriting pussies' encounters. I first encountered Haley in 1988, when I was new on the San Francisco 49ers beat. First day: I saw him grab his manhood with his fist, shake his Dark Sith in the direction of a hapless young female reporter (her crime? Femaleness, and maybe haplessness) and scream/bellow, like Brando up the stairs, that the "fuckin' bitch was staring at my cock! Get that bitch outta here! She's a fuckin' perv! She wants my fuckin' cock!''

Ensuing Chapters of Charles: I saw the first-hand evidence of the All-Pro pass-rusher using his Lil' Haley to water the hand-crafted wood floors in the office belonging to team president Carmen Policy. (A versatile body part, that thingee.) I learned that Charles attempted to strangle coach George Seifert during a film session. I learned that one of the great Ronnie Lott's official jobs was to keep Charles tamed. And I learned something that still disturbs me: On my final 49ers experience with Haley at the Pro Bowl in Honolulu, when I was on a team bus one seat ahead of his, eavesdropping as he plotted to arrange from the 49ers' front seven to be a "Soul Patrol.'' Meaning, he wanted to orchestrate the departure of his white teammates. (Joking, you say? OK. But will you at least trade me bus seats next time?)

In 1990, I moved to Dallas to cover the Cowboys. Haley would be nothing but a nightmarish memory, somebody else's problem, a guy I was pretty sure skipped taking his medicine. (For two full years!) I would be free to empathize ... from a distance.

And then, in '92, Charles Haley came to Dallas.I was the first and only reporter to greet him at his locker.

We were one-on-one. The tension built. No media members wanted any part of it. Charles got revved up, opening by braying something about what an asshole I was in San Francisco (he was/is right. ... but how'd he know?), and he was hooting something about how Aikman couldn't carry Montana's jockstrap and I was writing it all down.

And Haley barks, "Hey, motherfucker, I didn't say you could write this down, motherfucker! DO YOU HEAR ME, MOTHERFUCKER?''

The verbal barrage continued. I kept writing. A notepad full of "motherfuckers.''

I did not opt to reason with a man who would, a few weeks later, find a huge bushel of bananas in his locker, a jokey gift from defensive-line mates who admired his ... um ... Neanderthalic approach to life. I absorbed the MFs, and somehow located, deep in my fashionable cargo pants, the resolve to say:
"Charles, you keep talking. Please. Say anything you want to me. Call me anything you want. And you know what? I'm going to write down every word. And if my editors allow it, this interview, word-for-word, is going to be in the gah-damn newspaper tomorrow morning. Go.''

He kept motherfuckering me. I kept writing. Now, I was nervous ... but it wasn't that hard to take notes: How hard is it to simply scribble "MF'' over and over?

It is a credit to my employer at the time, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, that the piece really did run. As a straight news story, with no embellishment and no judgment. Just my questions and his answers, jagged but pure, all serving as Charles Haley's introduction to his new community. Welcome to Dallas, motherfucker.

Why did I go through with it? Three reasons:

1) The result was a revealing story that offered great insight into the star the Cowboys had just acquired.
2) Hey, I promised him!
3) Critics of the media often come at us because we "buy ink by the barrel,'' and all that shit. But actually, in any battle between "the jocks vs. the media,'' the geeks with pencils don't usually win. So when truth is on our side — plus, you mentioned my mom, you prick! — we can't be blamed for swinging that truth like it's a medieval flail.

Chucky & Me spent the rest of his playing career in an unholy truce. Meaning, I think I went seven years without every even venturing near another Cowboy D-linemen. But then, around 2000 or so, I inadvertently encountered Charles Haley ... and it was a near-death experience.

I was at a local saloon called Humperdink's on a "date'' (probable sportswriter translation: She Was A Prostitute) when Charles and I exchanged icy glances from across the room.

And toward me he charged.

What was in my mind? "Soul Patrol'' ... "bananas.'' ... "no meds.'' ... "bananas.'' ... "motherfucker.'' ... "bananas.'' ... I knew that people had died in a puddle of their own urine, but reflecting on Carmen Policy's floor, I pondered whether I would be a victim of a first: "Death-by-drowning-in-somebody-else's urine.'' ...

And toward me he charged. ...

What was in his mind (besides dementia)? In a literal flash — bright lights and beer pitchers and prostitute screams and a mushroom cloud of four huge bodies swooping over my booth — I and the entire saloon found out what a Grinch is capable of when he has a heart two sizes too small and the benefit of NFL weight-training.

The menacing Haley, fueled by liquor and anger at being pestered for 10 years by some pencil-wielding motherfucker, had lunged toward me, up and into my booth, only to be intercepted by his evening escorts, Leon Lett, Erik Williams and Michael Irvin.

Lett (6-7, 280) and Williams (6-5, 330) are two of the largest athletes in Dallas Cowboys history. Irvin is the franchise's all-time sweetest talker. Good for me. Leon and Erik wrestled Charles away, while Michael, I assume, sang him a lullaby while plucking a thorn from his paw.

I lived.

This is the art form at which I've bumbled around for 28 years and which has afforded me the ability to put no children through college. Newspapers, books, radio, TV and now the internet. I'm a hack-of-all-trades. Writing can be blogging and blogging can be writing and the only big difference is locker-room access. Which has its less-than-omnipotent value.

Is it an "absolutely horrible job''? Nah. Is it one big Axe commercial that makes horned-up vixens take off their wet blouses when in the alluring midst of me 'cause they mistake me for a drunken NFL quarterback? Nah.

But when I'm old(er) and gray(er), one of the skillion tales I'll be able to tell the kids that I'm "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.'' Or at least I'll inform them that I persuaded the apologetic saloon manager to put my charges on Haley's tab.

Today, Luke Burbank, the host of "Too Beautiful To Live" on 710 KIRO in Seattle, tells the tale of his career-changing run-in with Lou Piniella and the 1996 Seattle Mariners.

I was a really nervous, still-pimply 20 year-old trying to pretend I was some kind of real sports reporter.

My internship at the college NPR station was enough to get me press access to the Mariners' locker room, but that non-laminated day pass with "NBR" written on it wasn't exactly blowing Lou Piniella's mind-grapes the way I'd thought it would. It was August 1996, and the M's were locked in a tight division race with The Rangers. They'd come home for a make-or-break nine game stand. Somehow, I'd conned my way into an assignment doing a story about the insane breakout year A-Rod was having. This was going to be easy, just get some quotes from Piniella, and Griffey and Buhner and A-Rod and be on my way. Why wouldn't they want to talk about his awesome season? Well, because theirs was about to go to complete shit, that's why.

During the home stand, the M's managed to go 1-8 and fall completely and utterly out of the race. Every day I would go to the locker room hoping that they would not be in a super-pissed mood, and every day it would get worse. Baseball players (more than any other athletes, in my opinion) are total fucking babies when they lose.

Finally the last game arrived. The clubhouse was like a morgue. I was determined to get that goddamn tape no matter what. Here is a minute by minute account of that night:

6:02 pm (Pregame): In the trainer's office I can see A-Rod getting a rubdown or something. This is great. The clubhouse is totally empty and I am going to get my quote as soon as he emerges. There's only one problem. For some reason, my peeking into that room infuriates Mike Jackson. He runs up to me and starts screaming at the top of his lungs, 'WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING!!!?' 'THE MAN IS GETTING TREATMENT!!' "I'm I'm just trying to to get my my quote" I stammer (literally holding back tears). 'GET YOUR ASS BACK HERE AFTER THE GAME LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!!"

Never mind that MLB requires teams to open their locker rooms before games so that reporters can get quotes. Apparently Mike Jackson takes a dim view of this rule. One other problem, it wasn't even A-Rod in there. It was Rafael Carmona. His back was to me and they look like the same guy. I'm racist and I don't have a quote and Mike Jackson wants to rape me. Awesome.

7:15 (Game time): Terrified by my encounter with MJ, I figure I'll just lay low and hope to Jobu that they win. Then they'll have to be in a better mood. I leave a bucket of KFC in front of my Jobu shrine. It totally works. They win.

10:13 (Post Game): The Seattle Mariners are more pissed than ever. Pissed like Blazer fans in 1986 realizing Jordan was going to be Jordan just as Sam Bowie picks up another three in the key. I still don't know why this was. Probably residual anger from the previous eight games or something.

10:14: Ken Griffey Jr. is sitting, fully reclined, in a barca lounger in front of his locker. This is a bad spot for this huge-ass chair, because his locker is also right next to the only narrow hall out to the field. This means everyone trying to go play in the baseball game has to hug the wall to try to get around his chair. He is playing Nintendo on a flat screen TV (very, very fancy for 1996) and eating a chocolate bar. Five different times I try to ask him a few questions. Not only does he not respond, he is totally unaware that another human being is trying to talk to him. I am basically Bill Murray during the ghosty part of Scrooged. I finally give up.

10:16: Still terrified of a "Mike Jacksoning," I cower behind a huge empty couch. Apparently I also accidentally lean on it, because from across the room Chris Bosio starts hollering. "WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!!" "GET OFF THAT COUCH!!" I stumble, dazed, towards a completely naked Jay Buhner.

10:18: During his time as a Mariner, Jay Buhner was known as quite the prankster. Of course, as me and my friend Bill often discussed the line between "prankster" and "total asshole who purposefully vomits into your work hat" is kind of a fuzzy one. So anyway, Buhner is completely completely naked. No towel. No undies. Nothing. And that's not even the creepy part. He agrees to talk to me (jackpot!) but during the entire interview he refuses to look at me. Instead, he goes to work on, and is completely fixated with, an ingrown hair literally ONE MICRON from his dong. If I want to interview Jay Buhner, I will also be interviewing his dong. That is just how he rolls. Desperate, I do the interview. It actually goes OK.

10:23: Wonder of Wonders! A-Rod is clean, showered, not Rafael Carmona, and walking out of the locker room by himself. I run out to talk to him. He is totally polite, and professional, and cardboard. But he's not yelling at me, or ignoring me, or naked, so I consider the interview a big success.

10:37: I'm just one interview away from having my story: Sweet Lou.

10:48 : All hyperbole aside, Lou Piniella is the most terrifying man ever in history ever. And he really needs to buy some new underwear. He's sitting in his office behind his desk. No shirt (what is this with the nakedness?), just some tattered tighty whities, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. The office is very small. The beat reporters (these dudes are plenty grizzled themselves and have interviewed him a thousand times) seem terrified of him. They stand with their backs up against the wall and nervously call him 'Skip.' He's like a tiger that you raised from when it was a little cub. You feel mostly certain he remembers that you two are cool, but on the other hand, he might bite your face off out of sheer boredom.

After everyone else has asked their questions, I finally summon the nerve to squeak mine out.
"Um Skip?" I say meekly. "Could you um, talk about the amazing season Alex is having?"

'Huh?' Piniella asks, his head cocked, perfectly angled for a face-biting.

"Um, could you talk about how well Alex Rodriguez has been playing this season?"

Piniella gets up slowly, and comes around from behind the desk. The rest of the reporters scramble to get out of his way. He's heading right for me. He gets up right next to me, I can see his balls through a hole in his underwear. He puts his arm around my shoulders, pulls me in so close I can count each individual whisker, and says... "Not tonight kid, not tonight."

"Perfect," I think. "That's the final memory of my sportswriting career: Lou Piniella's balls."

I never went back there again.

Today, Yahoo! Sports' Jeff Passan gives us a first-hand account of what it was like cover Fresno State's failed phenom (and convicted murderer) Terry Pettis during one of his scary and unpredictable moments. Passan is the baseball writer for Yahoo! Sports, and an award-winning reporter who previously was the national baseball writer for The Kansas City Star.

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I punched 911 into my cell phone, stuck it in my pocket and primed my thumb on the send button. Next to rows of prefab college apartments in Fresno , Calif. , I thought I was going to die at the hands of a man who later put a bullet through an innocent girl's head.

Sorry. This one doesn't take place in the locker room. Most of Fresno State basketball's memorable moments don't. There was Avondre Jones with his samurai sword, Chris Herren with his nose candy, Rafer Alston with his fists, all legends of the country's most corrupt program. And all looked like altar boys next to Terry Pettis, who was ignoring a restraining order and pacing around the apartment complex, robotic, determined, cold.

I was there to talk with Melissa Cenci, Terry's former girlfriend. She had broken up with him two weeks earlier. He did not think that was a good idea, so he punched out a window at her apartment, traipsed over to her car, jumped on the roof, snapped off a side-view mirror and sent her a text message:

"Take that."

Because I was covering Fresno State basketball, I pulled duty on Terry's arrest for vandalism and battery. One of the follow-up stories necessitated talking with Melissa. It took some time before she finally agreed to meet me. I said I'd pick her up at her apartment.

When I saw Terry there, I didn't believe it was him. I circled around the parking lot to get a better look. Yep. Him, all right. Six-foot-2, 190 pounds, jacked to the gills. Or: 5 inches taller, 25 pounds heavier and filled with plenty more anger than me.

Two more laps around the lot quelled my nerves. I couldn't wuss out. I needed this story. So I readied my 911 call and walked toward the apartment. Terry emerged from around the corner. I put my head down. He walked faster. I was scared. He was 10 feet away.

"Terry," I said, nodding my head, unsure what else to say or do or think.

He kept walking.

I knocked on Melissa's door and she let me in. I asked if she knew Terry was outside. She said she didn't. I asked if I should worry. She said not to, and that she was thirsty for some coffee, so let's go.

When the door opened, a familiar voice barked.

"What the fuck are you doing with him?" Terry said.

He wasn't done.

"Bitch, get over here!" he yelled. "Move on, Jeff. Move on. Move on. Move the fuck on!"

I looked at Melissa. She motioned me away and walked over to Terry. He started screaming. I thought he might hit her. She kept shooing me away. I peeled around the corner, out of sight, and called an editor to ask what, exactly, I needed to do. Trust your common sense: If he hits her, step in, take the punches and hope someone calls the cops.

Thankfully, he didn't. By the time I got off the minute-long call and peeked back at them, Terry was down on his knees, his fingers interlocked, trying to make puppy eyes through his tears, begging Melissa not to let him go, apologizing for all he had done to her, promising never, ever again.

"I love you," he said.

We left him on the ground. At the coffee shop, Melissa told me Terry "really needs help. Seriously." No one seemed too concerned. Further charges for violating the restraining order weren't pressed. Terry pleaded out and was supposed to enter a batterer's-intervention program that he never attended. Fresno State let him back onto the basketball team anyway and won its first seven games with Terry in the lineup. During the winning streak, he told me: "No more mistakes for me. Straight and narrow."

Less than a month later, he was kicked off the team after a heated argument with the coach. In early April, I left Fresno to start covering baseball in Kansas City and figured I would never hear his name again.

I remember the day. May 11, 2004.

"Hey, Jeff," the voice said, "it's Jeff Shelman."

He was an acquaintance who covered colleges in Minneapolis , where Terry went to high school.

"Guess what your boy Terry Pettis did?"

I figured it was benign. Terry was probably the smartest kid on the Fresno State basketball team. He had a great dad who tried to raise him well. With the right people surrounding him, Terry could have been a lawyer. He was that engaging and charming. He had two problems: bad friends and a bad temper. Those couldn't get him in too much trouble, could they?

"Murder," Jeff said.

According to police, Terry had tried to rob a drug deal. He walked up to a car where a guy was buying about an ounce of weed for $280. Terry asked for the money. The dealer told his girlfriend, in the driver's seat, to gun it. Terry pulled the trigger on his Glock. The bullet went in the girl's head and exited the other side.

I didn't know what to say. Murder? Terry? The kid I had talked with almost every day before or after practice? He capped a girl, and left his fingerprints on the top of the car, and ran home to Melissa and told her that he "shot something," and then went back to Minneapolis to hide?

I did know what to think: That could've been me. I didn't verbalize it, of course, wary of sounding too self-absorbed. A girl named Rene Abbott had died. She was 18. I was still alive. I had to forget.

It wasn't that easy. Soon after murder charges were pressed, I received a subpoena to appear at the trial. My old newspaper got it quashed, though I kept up with the case the whole way, from Terry's extradition back to Fresno to his murder conviction and life-without-parole sentence.

Some of the details that surfaced throughout the trial made me shake my head. Terry allegedly wore a red basketball jersey while committing the crime. Fresno State coaches took heat for not cooperating with the investigation. One of Terry's teammates, Chris Adams, told police he had spent the evening with one guy name Dreike and another named Dante, and that he didn't know their last names. Adams went to Fresno State with Dreike Bouldin for almost a year and had spent an entire season at a junior college with Dante Sawyer. The stories at Fresno State , even the grisliest, usually carried some black humor.

But one in particular made me sad. On August 3, about three months after the shooting, Melissa gave birth to a baby girl. The father was Terry Pettis.

Today, author Jeff Pearlman shares his tale of contentious triumph over former major leaguer Will Clark. Pearlman is a columnist for ESPN.com and the author of an upcoming biography of the 1990s Dallas Cowboys. The book, being published by Harper Collins, is scheduled for an August 2008 release date. Working title: Boys Will Be Boys.

It was spring training 2000, and Sports Illustrated had me roaming Florida for the upcoming baseball preview issue. On this particular day I was down in Ft. Lauderdale, trying to uncover some insights into the wild, wacky, Pat Rapp-led Baltimore Orioles. While standing by a buffet table in the clubhouse, I was approached by Will Clark, who gazed at my press credential with a curious sort of expression.

"Why's your pass turned over?" he asked.

I looked down. "Oh," I said. "You're right."

When I flipped it to the proper side, Clark leaned toward me and read the small writing.

"Jeff Pearlman?" he asked.

"Yup."

"Jeff Pearlman! Jeff fucking Pearlman!" Clark's voice grew increasingly loud — the famous, cat-choking-on-a-lugnut Will the Thrill cackle in full bloom.

"Uh, yup."

"Jeff fucking Pearlman! Now why the fuck would anyone in here want to talk to you? Why the fuck would we wanna talk to you, after what you did to (John) Rocker? Why?"

I just stood there, feeling sort of naked. I was 27 years old, and had yet to fully grasp that men like Clark were actually schoolyard bullies hiding behind a loud voice and the uniformity of a major league clubhouse. Truth be told, I was also naively unprepared for the backlash that followed the John Rocker profile. Though the story generated a fair share of controversy, all of it had come during the offseason.

Clark continued. "No wonder you have your pass backward, you fucking coward! Nobody here is ever going to talk to you. No fucking way!"

"Did you have a problem with the way I wrote that story?" I asked (dumbly).

"Are you kidding me?" Clark replied. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

With that he huffed off, seemingly satisfied that he had outed me to his peers. My head tucked to my chest, my confidence at an all-time low, I shuffled over to good ol' Delino DeShields, hoping he didn't share Clark's feelings.

"I guess you saw that," I said, referring to the browbeating.

"Yeah," said DeShields, grinning slightly. "But you've gotta consider the source."

A quick epilogue. In the spring of 2006 I was in Tucson to do some reporting for a book I was writing on Barry Bonds. Upon entering the Diamondbacks clubhouse one morning, who was the first person I saw?
Will Clark — a special assistant for the team. This being six years later, I approached Clark, re-introduced myself ("Oh, I remember you.") and asked if I could borrow a few minutes to talk Bonds.

"I guess so," he said.

"OK, well, what was your initial reaction when the Giants signed Bonds as a free agent?"

"Yup."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Yup."

"Yup?"

"Yup."

"You're not gonna talk to me, are you?" I asked.

"Nope. I would never talk to you. Look at what you did to Rocker. You think I forgot that? You think you could just walk in here and talk to me? You think ..."

For the record, I'm not saying my reaction here was righteous. Or, for that matter, professional. But I was now 33 years old; married, a father, a locker room veteran. I certainly didn't feel the need to take any more abuse from an obnoxious, beer-gutted has-been (nothing against beer-gutted has-beens).

"You know what," I said, "I don't have to listen to this shit. You don't wanna talk to me, don't talk to me. I don't care. But what you did back with Baltimore was bullshit, and it was cowardly. You obviously had the right not to talk to me, but to call someone out — someone you didn't even know — in front of the entire team was just pathetic ..."

"Screw you," Clark said. "You ..."

I interrupted him. "No, screw you. What are you doing here, anyway?"

We sparred for a few more minutes, and as Clark walked away I realized this was the first time I truly stood up to a ballplayer.

It felt great.

This week's tale comes from former Dallas Observer reporter John Gonzalez, who shares this run-in with former Texas Rangers outfielder Carl Everett.

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—--

I've never been able to forget what happened to Ryan Leaf when he screamed at that poor slob in San Diego way back when. The reporter tucked-tail and backed down, forever cementing his place among other ignominious, legendary SportsCenter videos.

That's what I was thinking about when Carl Everett squared off, put his fists up and asked if I wanted to box. And that's what I was thinking when I puffed out my chest, squared off and told him he didn't want any part of me. It probably wasn't the brightest idea I've ever had, but I couldn't shake the image of the shamed Chargers reporter, forever doomed to re-watch his impotence like some horrible, ink-stained Bill Buckner. I kept thinking: If you're going to piss yourself, wait until no one is watching.

At the time, Everett was an outfielder with the Texas Rangers, and I was a columnist for the Dallas Observer, a paper owned by Village Voice Media. This was in 2003. My job back then, as with most alt-weekly monkeys, was to merrily fling feces at my targets and maybe eat a banana if there was time. With Everett, though, I was actually trying to play it straight at first. Considering his volatile reputation, and the fact that he had about 65 pounds on me, I approached him gingerly and asked if he might have time to chat. Plus, considering we were at Spring Training in Arizona and most players were more worried about tee times than inquiring journos, I thought things would be fine.

Nope.

Almost immediately, Everett got pissed that I bothered him. In the clubhouse. During media hours.

He claimed to have never heard of my paper. Now, the Observer wasn't the Dallas Morning News, but it wasn't fucking Car Shopper, either. We had been covering the Rangers for years. Plus, we had hooker ads in the back of the paper, which clearly made us better than the Morning News. But Everett wouldn't let it go and made a point of asking the clubhouse attendants if they had ever heard of the paper. Of course, they said no — possibly because, oh I dunno, they were from Arizona and not Texas.

In an attempt to smooth things over, I asked him about Roy Jones Jr. moving up to heavyweight. Everett supposedly loved boxing. That turned out to be another misstep in a day full of them. There's no reaching out to someone that off his nut. So, with that, things went from uncomfortable and testy to flat out heated:

Carl Everett: You don't want to talk boxing. You wanna box me? (Turns to me, squares off, puts fists up by his head.)You don't wanna box me.

Me: (Getting pissed now.) No, you don't wanna box me...now can we talk or not?

CE: Go ahead, man. (Rolls his eyes.)

M: OK...are you ready for the center field duties?

CE: Am I ready for the center field duties? (Long pause...clearly irritated.) Yeah, man, I'm ready for the center field duties, that's my job.

M: Some people have talked about your weight. Is it an issue? Does that bother you?

CE: That's just y'all. That's the media. That's you guys. You don't know me.

M: Well, you don't know me, and you were lumping me with the other media and giving me a hard time about my paper.

CE: I don't like the media. I don't like them. I don't like the media.

M:OK...all right...(Searching...backpedaling.) Have you talked to [manager] Buck [Showalter] much? You know, what's it like playing for him?

CE:We haven't played any games for him yet.

M: (Getting more pissed.) OK, then how is he different from the other managers you've been around?

CE: How's he different? (Very sarcastic.) That's what you're gonna ask me?

M: Yeah.

CE:: Everything's OK.

M: OK...What about last year? Was that tough for you?

CE: Nope.

M: The losing wasn't tough?

CE:Nope.

M:(Had enough now.) Why are you being so standoffish?

CE:I'm not.

M:You're not?

CE:Nope. You're just mad because I don't kiss the media's ass. I won't kiss your ass.

M:That's fine because I don't kiss ballplayers' asses...Now, the losing didn't bother you?

CE:Nope...I play hard anyway...that was the first time I ever lost.

M:So then it must have been different at least, right?

CE:(Huffing again.) Man, I said I play hard anyway.

M:All right...do you think you can contend this year?

CE:Did you watch the games last year?

M:Well, I wasn't in Texas, but, yeah, I watched some games...

CE:(Cuts me off.) No, you didn't. You didn't watch any games last year, 'cause if you watched some games last year, you'd know that we were a tough ticket. We didn't lay down for anyone.

M:How can you say that? You guys were 31 games out [of first place in the division]...

CE:(Really mad now.) First you ask me some fucking ridiculous questions, and then you're gonna ask me why I answered the way I did...

M:(Also really mad now.) Yeah, that's what I'm supposed to do; that's my job.

CE: (Screaming now...people watching.) If you're gonna ask some fucking ridiculous questions, then I'm gonna give you some fucking ridiculous answers...I mean, that's just fucking ridiculous.

M:(Also screaming now.) Why, because you don't like the fucking question?

CE: No, because I don't like the fucking media. That's it. Get up on outta here. (Motions toward the door.)

M: So that's it, huh? You're not gonna talk to me anymore?

CE:Yeah, that's right. That's it. Get the hell outta here. Go on, get out.

M:Well, this was productive. So that's it...that's the end?

CE: That's what I said. (Does shooing motion toward the door. Tries to get me to leave. I don't. He walks to other end of clubhouse. I go to middle of clubhouse and lean against a table.)

CE:(Mocking me now; yelling across clubhouse.) Asking me, how do I like Buck? Asking me, can we contend? (Makes grand sweeping motion, stares at me.) That's some stupid fucking shit. That's some shit your editor told you to come down here and ask.

M: (I yell back across the clubhouse.) My editor didn't tell me to ask anything. Those are my questions...you must be really mad at something.

CE: (Walks back toward me.) That's right. I'm mad because I don't like the fucking media. Keep it up. Go head, keep it up. Keep talking back. I'm gonna have you escorted outta here. And you better get up off that fucking table. You're gonna learn to respect us. This is our house. You're gonna learn. Get up off that table. (I don't move.) I said get up off that table. (I still don't move.) You better get up.

John Blake, Rangers PR chief: (Nods at me.) John, please get up. (I stand up, but I don't leave.)

CE: That's right. This is our house. You're gonna learn.

The truly weird part was that, a few weeks later, back in Dallas, I was in the clubhouse when I walked by Everett's locker and he started a spontaneous conversation with me. It was completely cordial. At the time, I had long, shaggy hair, and eventually Everett offered to shave my head — just like his. I wasn't sure if that was his way of making amends, or if he didn't remember me. I'm still not sure.

In the end, I didn't let him cut my hair. Something about letting a guy who doesn't believe in dinosaurs take a razor to the back of my head felt like a bad idea. That's probably just me, though.

First up, current Boston Daily editor Paul Flannery, who was an Eagles beat reporter with the Delaware County Times, and had this unfortunate run-in with former Eagles defensive end Hugh Douglas.

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—--

Hugh Douglas just called me a motherfucking asshole. Not just an asshole. Or a motherfucker. A motherfucking asshole. Now, Hugh Douglas is a large man. That's a given, but it's hard to comprehend just how big NFL defensive ends actually are until you are being called a motherfucking asshole by one.

On most days, Hugh was a great quote. He's smart and very funny, and he also completely understood that you were going to ask him some dumb-ass questions, and he was going to give you something good. And when he did give you something less than his A+ material, he'd laugh to let you know that he knows that it's crap, but that's all you're getting, probably because Andy Reid had told him to stop being so damn funny and smart.

Not on this day, though. Hugh is pissed, and I'm the one who pissed him off. The Eagles had just lost on a last-second field goal. Maybe that's why he was mad. I don't really know, but I also don't have time to figure it out, because he picked me out of the pack and now I have a bigger problem. Again: How does one respond to a 270-pound man calling you a motherfucking asshole? I ran through the various scenarios until I settled on Hold your ground. Yeah. He'll respect that.

But I didn't. Instead I said, "What?"

There are a million different comebacks I could have come up with, but "What?" probably wasn't my best option, because now Hugh is really screaming at me and everyone left in the locker room is now staring at us. Meanwhile, I'm still frozen. They didn't offer this class in journalism school.

Finally, a friend yanked me out of the way, and a couple of the veteran beat guys got between us, but Hugh still yelled over to me, "You're telling your friends that I'm an asshole now, aren't you? You're the asshole." I was really in no position to argue that point. Finally, he left and I went back upstairs to bang out a few stories.

I still don't know why I pissed Hugh off, but I know that I did because this story has a coda. A couple of months later, I see Hugh and Hollis Thomas whispering and looking in my general direction, which I figure is probably bad news. I decide to lay low and continue with my busy schedule of standing around and waiting for Koy Detmer. Still, I know something's coming, and when it finally does, I'm not entirely surprised.

What happened was this: Hollis snuck up behind me and let loose with a blood-curdling scream mere inches from my right ear. Then Hollis laughed. Then Hugh laughed. Surveying the scene, a columnist from the Inquirer just looked at me and said, "Huh."