On fouls, headbands, momentum and hopping on PopBecause this is a full-service Blob (and because, as I continually remind you Blobophiles, it's my Blob and therefore I make the rules), I'm venturing outside my little sports box here for matters of, shall we say, more import.
Mike Dooley has died.
The longtime reporter for both The Journal Gazette and News-Sentinel passed today at Parkview Hospital, after a long battle with declining health. With him goes an era, perhaps, when reporters got their best tips from the wearing out of shoe leather and the bending of elbows, and from working sources developed through long hours of the aforementioned.
In other words: Dooley (I can't ever recall anyone calling him "Mike") was a journalist's journalist, and, well, this is just a damn shame, because an entire generation of pseudo-journalists could have learned a thing or two from him about how to work a beat.
If I know Dooley -- and we were colleagues between 1987 and 1992, by which time he was already a local legend -- he'd have said the first rule of being a journalist is getting off your tuchis and getting out into the world. Merely being fluent in Press Release won't get it done. Leave that to the hacks of the profession.
Know this about Dooley: Not only was he a great reporter, he was a champion teller of tales that might or might not have been true. I can still remember, one night when the hour was late and the adult beverages were flowing, Dooley sitting in my soon-to-be-wife's kitchen, holding all of us spellbound with gruesome tales of (if memory serves) working counter-intelligence in Vietnam. Supposedly he had to shoot a guy one night.
My soon-to-be-wife burst out laughing when I told her later.
"Oh, please, I don't believe that for a second," she said. "Dooley's just having fun with you guys."
Maybe he was and maybe he wasn't. All I know is, it sure was entertaining.
And now, all of that is gone.
Rest in peace, Dooley.
