The Sportswriter

Scott Hamelin and I go to Placer High School together 1982-1984. We are friendly. The friend I make is his father.
Joe Hamelin is the Sports Editor of the Sacramento Bee (he used to be a beat writer assigned to the San Diego Clippers). He’s remarried and he has six sons. He covers the pros. He writes about the best players alive, and his peers honor him for it. None of that is why I call him. I call him because he picks up, and once he picks up he stays on the line.
The calls run long. A weekday afternoon, the receiver warm against my ear, Joe on the other end with the patience of a man who has nowhere he wants to be more. We talk about journalism. We talk about the career I want before I have done a thing to deserve wanting it. He gives me his afternoons. Over the months the hours pass a hundred. He tells me that Coach Hubie Brown called his players cocksuckers. He tells me that there is no white basketball and black basketball, that no race is faster than any other, that the Sacramento Union won’t be a real competitor until they put in more resources.
Then he gives me more than talk. For two years (1983-1984) we sit together in a community access cable booth and call Placer High men’s basketball. Wood benches. A gym that smells of floor wax and sweat. A camera my classmate Eric aims at the court. Joe has sat courtside for the finest players in the game, and now he calls a high school contest beside a teenager as if more than 10 people watched it (“Nobody ever comments to me about these broadcasts,” he tells me).
Then he gives me the thing that turns a boy into a professional. He hands me an assignment. Cover a high school basketball tournament (Kendall Arnett) for the Bee. They pay me. My reports run in the paper that lands on driveways across the valley. A man who could have spent that assignment on anyone spends it on me.
A classmate mocks me for my hero worship of Joe Hamelin. I don’t mind too much. I have this thing inside of me that needs to worship some people, and it is embarrassing, but Joe is kind to me and he doesn’t make any demands. I’m not fodder for a cause. I’m a smart kid who knows more about sports than any kid he’s known because I learned it from reading books and all the back issues of Time, Newsweek, Life and Sports Illustrated magazines (read the summer of 1977 at Pacific Union College). My home didn’t get a TV until 1980.
I intern at the Auburn Journal Sports Department for six months (late 1983 and early 1984) but my editor Rob Knies doesn’t want a Joe Hamelin profile. “We compete with the Bee. We’re not going to help the Bee.”
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote The Denial of Death in 1973. He says a man cannot live with the knowledge that he will die and rot and be forgotten, so every culture hands him a hero system, a set of roles and rules that let him feel he counts, that some part of him outlasts the body. The hero system tells a man what a good life looks like, what earns honor, what a worthy man does with his days. Inside it he can be a hero on a small scale. Outside it the same acts read as nothing.
Joe lived inside the hero system of the American daily newspaper. Its temple is the sports desk. Its scripture is the box score. Its sacrament is the deadline, the nightly small death after which the day’s work sets and cannot be revised. Its sacred value, the one that orders the rest, is credit.
Joe wrote a column three days a week. It was good.
Credit, in the newsroom, means honor assigned by the record. The score does not lie. You name the man who scored and you name the man who missed, and you do not root in the press box. The byline is the reward and the receipt at once, a man’s name fixed in type, a small immortality on cheap paper that yellows but sits in a library for good. To give a man a byline enters him in the book of those who were here and did the work.
The word changes at the border. Carry credit into other hero systems and it grows a new meaning.
A Benedictine copyist in a cold scriptorium spends his life on a single manuscript and signs none of it. Credit, for him, is sin. The work rises to God, and a name in the margin steals from Him what is His. The monk earns his place by erasing himself from the page.
A Plains warrior counting coup cannot be given credit and spits on the offer. Credit is the blow struck on a living enemy before witnesses, seized on a horse, never assigned by an editor at a desk. What Joe hands across a table the warrior takes in the open or never holds at all.
A loan shark keeps a different book. Credit is what he extends so a man will owe him, leverage dressed as kindness, a line in a ledger that ends in a broken hand. He gives credit to own you. Joe gives credit to free you.
A cadre at a struggle session learns that claiming credit is the deviation that gets a man denounced. The achievement belongs to the collective, the Party, the Chairman, and the man who signs his own name has confessed a crime. The byline Joe prizes serves, in that room, as evidence against you.
A Reformed preacher tells his flock that credit is grace, unearned and unearnable, imputed by God to men who merit nothing. Salvation comes as a gift because no work can buy it. Joe’s faith runs the other way. In his church you earn the line of type. The kid covers the tournament, files clean copy, and the name is his because he did the thing.
Joe’s hero system holds that credit is earned. The score adjudicates. The byline belongs to the man who reported the game. Yet what Joe does for me is advance credit to a boy who has earned nothing, the way a banker advances a loan to a borrower with no history, on faith, against future work. The honor economy of the newsroom and the gift economy of the mentor live inside the same man and the same word. He believes credit must be earned, and he lends it to me before I can earn it, because that loan is how the hero system reproduces. An old man recruits a young one by advancing him significance he has not yet paid for. The hundred hours, the cable booth, the tournament byline: an initiation. Joe does what his religion asks of its elders, which is to make more of themselves before they die.
The hard part comes after. The hero system Joe served thins out. Sports desks empty. Papers fold or shrink to a website and a skeleton staff. The permanent printed record, the byline that was to outlast the man, proves as mortal as the man. Joe advanced me credit in a currency that lost most of its value. The driveways stopped getting the paper. The libraries cleared the bound volumes. A young man who built his life on the byline found that byline worth less each year.
The gift held anyway. The thing that transferred in that booth was never the byline. It was the standard. You name who scored. You do not root in the press box. You file clean and on time and you let the reader have his own reaction. A man carries that into work the newspaper never imagined, onto platforms Joe never saw, long after the desk he loved goes dark. The currency failed. The faith it taught did not.
In 1990, Joe wrote To Fly and Fight: Memoirs of a Triple Ace about Clarence E. Anderson, an Auburn resident who was buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery on March 30, 2026.
Around 1990, Joe quit his job to write books full-time. I don’t think he published another book, and eventually he went back to writing for newspapers, retiring around 2005.
In 1988, I came down with what some doctors called chronic fatigue syndrome. Tossing and turning on my bed circa 1991, I get up and call Joe and he visits me. All of my friends my own age keep their distance, but everyone over 40 treats me with compassion.
In 1994, I return to two-thirds of a normal life, and once I get regular internet connection starting in 1997, I hunt Joe down to exchange emails.
There lies the strange grace of a hero system. It hands a man a project that death defeats, and in the handing it makes him more than he becomes alone. Joe knew, on some floor of himself, that the paper would not save him. He sat in the gym anyway and called the game as if the wire were waiting, and he gave a job that paid, and he made a writer. Forty years on I am still spending the credit he advanced. He never asked for it back.