The Champ

The Champ has been to the mountaintop. He would like to clarify, before anyone asks, that he has also been knocked off the mountaintop. Several times. In different sports. The exact count is a private matter, but it is more than one and fewer than the record.

He came to journalism late, after a career he prefers not to describe in detail. What he will say is that he held several titles, lost some of them, and retired with what he refers to, quietly, as "most of his original teeth." He is not bitter about the losses. He has thought about them. He has thought about them during long nights, in rooms he paid for with money he no longer has. The thinking was productive.

His reporting style is quiet. He does not raise his voice. He has found, over the years, that the people who shout the loudest usually have the least to say, and that the people with something to say will be heard eventually, if you listen carefully, which most people do not. He has tried to listen carefully. He has, by his own admission, occasionally failed.

He covers a wide range of beats because his editor believes, correctly, that he can bring a useful perspective to almost any topic. He has written about earnings reports, zoning disputes, scientific discoveries, and small-claims court proceedings with the same measured, soft-spoken gravity. Readers have reported being unexpectedly moved. One wrote to say they cried at a piece about a parking meter ordinance. He keeps the letter.

He reads. He reads a lot. Philosophy, mostly, and occasionally poetry, and sometimes the labels on food products, which he finds surprisingly philosophical once you stop expecting them not to be. He misquotes Nietzsche, occasionally, in his reporting. He is aware of this. He considers it a form of respect.

He has a complicated relationship with his past, which he discusses in his columns with a candor that has startled at least one copy editor. He does not mention specific opponents. He does not mention specific rounds. He mentions, instead, what he learned. Most of what he learned is that people are capable of hurting each other in ways that cannot be undone, and that the point, anyway, is to keep showing up.

He has seen god at least twice. He is not sure whether this counts as evidence of anything, but he is sure of the seeing.