HOW TO SUCCEED IN SPORTSWRITING (WITHOUT REALLY TRYING)

I wrote and narrated my memoir for Audible in 2022. Recommendations came from a wild assortment of readers.

From Bill Scheft, David Letterman’s former head writer and a former sportswriter with ESPN and Sports Illustrated: “The only thing I miss about being a sportswriter, and I mean the only thing, is sharing stories with other sportswriters late at night, ten minutes before last call. All the stuff that never saw the light of print and never made it pass an ass-covering editor. Now thanks to Gare Joyce and his singular, vivid, wry prose, I don't have to miss it anymore. And neither do you.”

From Robert Lipsyte, the New York Times: “Just another sports hack's scam, pretending to offer a loser's advice, then unloading a bunch of terrific stories. Call his bluff. Read this book. Listen to the bitter end. Pure fun.”

From Peter Golenbock, author of Dynasty: The New York Yankees, 1949-1964 and The Bronx Zoo: “A rare talent and an absolute hoot. My favourite sportswriter working today.”

From Michael Farber, Sports Illustrated: "This is the writer's life, a sparkling memoir of the stories behind the stories behind the well, other - even better - stories. Gare Joyce is a more compelling character than the people he has chronicled through the decades. They were lucky to have had him at a keyboard. So are we."

From Mike Sacks, New Yorker humour critic: "I love books about worlds I know very little about, in this case the down-and-dirty universe of a sportswriter. What I like even more are the honest books about the writing life, with zero bullshit to get in the way of the stories. And there are plenty here. I say this as someone who hates reading about sports but loves the characters behind them: with 'How to Succeed in Sports Writing,' the amiable Gare Joyce has most definitely found his 'arm slot.' Highly recommended.”

From Wright Thompson of ESPN.com: “"Gare Joyce absolutely nails the strange, hilarious, poignant, obsessive world of sportswriters."

From Gene Weingarten, Washington Post humour columnist emeritus and the only journalist to win two Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing: "Okay, it's official. You are a very good writer."

 

 

Here's the first chapter from How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying).

 

Chapter One

DON’T WORSHIP FALSE IDOLS

 

THIS is how I fell in love with newspapers and how I fell in love with sportswriting:

I raced through the grade-one reader in the first month of kindergarten, the grade-two reader by Christmas. At the end of the school day, I would run home in my short pants and pick up the afternoon newspaper off the steps. The broadsheets were so big back in those days you could have used them to line the cage of a condor. I was too small to hold up the paper, so I laid it on the floor like a drop sheet and crawled over it. In the beginning, I looked for words I could sound out, then words I could connect. In short order I put sentences together although I didn’t have a clue about the events and issues in the stories. My knees and hands turned black with ink coming off the page. I looked like I had been pushed through the press at the end of the late edition. And on any given day, I would wear history:

JFK SHOT, DEAD;

GLENN CAPSULE SAFELY IN ORBIT;

KHRUSHCHEV, “WE WILL BURY YOU”;

TWO-HUNDRED-THOUSAND MARCH FOR CIVIL RIGHTS;

SORE THROATS THREATEN BEATLES’ TOUR.

You could have stood me in front of the mirror and read the front-page news.

My mother once made me a peanut-butter sandwich and told me to wash my hands after crawling on the paper. I didn’t. I couldn’t pull myself away for even a minute to clean up, so when I picked up the sandwich, I left a big ink thumbprint on the Wonder Bread, like I’d been booked at a police station. I couldn’t fess up to not washing my hands—there’d be hell to pay for wasting food and I’d get my mother’s sermon about “starving children in India.” So, I ate the sandwich, thumbprint and all.

I saw the headshots and line drawings of the columnists, the famous writers on the broadsheets’ pages. I saw them staring at me. I wanted to dive into those pages. I wanted to be transported where they wrote those words I was reading.

When I was in Grade 3, I told people that I was going to work at a newspaper someday— not some head-in-the clouds dream, either. I was more certain of my professional destiny than a first-born prince was of his place on the throne. I was fully swallowing the sports section. I read about Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay and a punch that no one saw in Lewiston, Maine. About the unstoppable running of Jim Brown in Cleveland, Vince Lombardi’s steel grip on the Green Bay Packers and Don Meredith leading the Cowboys into the playoffs in Dallas. About 500-foot home runs Mickey Mantle hit practically out of Yankee Stadium, Sandy Koufax’s no-hitters in Los Angeles, and the impossibly high leg kick that launched Juan Marichal from the mound in San Francisco, about Jean Beliveau’s elegance in Montreal, Tim Horton’s heavy bodychecks in Toronto and Bobby Hull 100-mile-per-hour slapshot in Chicago, about an Ethiopian winning two Olympic marathons, the first barefoot in Rome, the second wearing shoes in Tokyo, the Canadian-bred who set a record of two-minutes-flat at Kentucky Derby in Louisville and a tragic crash that claimed the lives of two drivers at the Indianapolis 500. I knew the names of the boxers, the running backs and halfbacks, the hitters and the pitchers, goal scorers and goaltenders. I committed them to memory.

By Grade 4, my mother picked up a near-complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and a hardcover copy of The Sweet Science. The former became a necessary study aid to the latter, A.J. Liebling’s stratospherically highbrow writings about boxing drawn from the pages of the New Yorker. Published in the year of my birth, The Sweet Science was rife with $10 words that had me scrambling through the dictionary and looking through the available volumes of the encyclopedia for the references to poets of Ancient Greece and battlefields of the Great Wars. In one paragraph on the fight between Rocky Marciano and Archie Moore, I hit, in order, references to Ahab and the White Whale, Churchill’s bid to take Gallipoli in 1915 and “a Euclidian without faith in the 180-degree triangle.” As I worked my way through each impossibly erudite essay, I immersed myself deeper in the demimonde of Stillman’s and other grotty New York’s gyms, training camps at Grossinger’s and other Catskills resorts, and of course, rings under the bright lights at Madison Square Garden—or in more dismal venues befitting boxing’s sleeze.

And by Grade 5, I was nose down in back issues of Sports Illustrated. My mother picked up two boxes of them at a lawn sale, and after I’d read and re-read them often enough to commit passages to memory, she started giving me loose change every week to buy the latest copy at the corner store.

I loved Sports Illustrated so much that it landed me in the hospital. Mark Kram, the magazine’s resident boxing specialist and Lieblingian slinger of prose, profiled Lou Nova, a journeyman heavyweight in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and health faddist. Nova was perhaps the only yoga practitioner in ring history and certainly the only one devoted to a yogi who went by Oom the Omniscient. In retirement, Nova developed an unusual headrest, one that you wore upside down. The Nova Yogi facilitated hands-free headstands. I never bought a Nova Yogi but I used couch cushions to prop myself up in a corner of the living room and set to reading the latest issue of SI, my cranium pressed to the rug. I wound up standing on my head for almost two hours. When I descended from this stance that was supposed to cure all that ails you, I couldn’t stand up. In fact, I crashed face first into the TV screen. The blood rushing to my head had ruptured both my ear drums, sending me to a hospital ward for three weeks. I landed in a room next to some poor ten-year-old cursed with genetic conditions. When his parents asked me how I ended up in hospital, I told them, “Sports Illustrated and Lou Nova.”

I didn’t directly implicate Mark Kram but I knew his name, AJ Liebling’s name, and the names of those men who wrote about the famous athletes like Ali and the forgotten ones like Lou Nova. I knew exactly what I wanted to do at newspaper someday. The decision was made. I can’t even remember a time when I wanted something else. Not even when I was lying in that hospital bed wondering if I’d ever stand up again.

 

AT 17, I made another life decision. I went vegetarian. Despite a name that evoked a deli sandwich, Lou Nova had been a vegetarian; this, however, didn’t factor in my decision to go meatless. Given my history of taking disastrous directions from Nova’s road map, I did research that went well beyond Mark Kram’s profile of the ring eccentric.

Many go vegetarian or vegan these days—both my daughters have followed me into a meat-free life. Back in the early Seventies, though, it was a novelty choice, wholly incomprehensible to those who had bacon for breakfast, chicken salad at lunch and roast beef for dinner. I’d explain to those I’d meet that the idea of sustainability and humane treatment of animals weighed on my mind. I wouldn’t get into a couple of bad experiences with hot dogs I’d had in the past.

One night my high-school buddy Gus and I went to the. Groaning Board, the lone vegetarian restaurant in Toronto, and were defoliating the salad bar when in walked a beautiful young woman and beside her, Dick Beddoes. Dick Beddoes: The famous and infamous and fabulous and splendiferous and ever conspicuous wordsmith at the Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper of record. By comparison other sportswriters in town were merely competent stenographers.

With some celebrities, recognition will slowly dawn. “Looks like him … is that him … can’t be him?” With Beddoes there was never doubt. A bantamweight, he had a bemused chipmunk’s features and glasses with such oversize frames, I’m sure they made his head bow. You could have picked him out of a crowd 100 yards away in a dense fog: with his fedora adorned with a fluorescent feather of a Day-Glo parrot; a pastel tie and a mismatching paisley shirt beneath a Harris tweed jacket; slacks in some checkered pattern that, if you looked at them more than a second or two, made your head spin. He looked like the sports correspondent based in Wonderland.

Beddoes was a sight gag, determinedly so, but he was considerably more than that. He was a marvelous writer, if your taste in newspaper copy ran to the florid and purple, which mine did. More than that, he had a performative aspect. He played the role of a sportswriter to the hilt. Reporters found in other sections of the newspapers affected a solemn gravity. Beddoes seemed to be having fun on the job and let everyone know it.

Case in point: Only a few years before I spotted him at the Groaning Board, Beddoes had made the national news with a slapstick stunt. Like many he had predicted that Canada’s pros would sweep the Soviet amateurs in hockey’s Summit Series.

He wrote:

 

“Make it Canada eight games to zero. If the Russians win one game, I will eat this column shredded at high noon in a bowl of borscht on the front steps of the Russian embassy.”

 

After a single game, a 7-2 loss in Montreal, it was clear that Team Canada and the nation itself had mistaken bears for meek lambs. In a response Beddoes had taken a copy of his column, mashed it into a bowl of borscht and ate it, not at the Soviet embassy (that would have been a security hassle) but rather on the sidewalk the Hyatt Regency where the Soviet contingent was staying. A reporter from Pravda mixed the newsprint into the borscht with the team watching.

As they say in show biz, you gotta respect the commitment.

 

 

Beddoes’s prose that day was not scarlet so much as a blend of glossy violet and Day-Glo mauve:

 

All the grain is wormy on the Western Canadian plains, ravaged by a wheat-stem sawfly smuggled in from the Ukraine. Canadian back bacon has gone rancid on the hogs. All the maple sugar has vanished down the trees to become bitter-root. Sharpshooting agents of the Soviet Union's feared NKGB secret police have drilled holes in all those Smokey the Bear hats worn by the RCMP. All the Hudson's Bay blankets have moth holes. The Rocky Mountains are mere pebbles beside the towering Urals. Anne Murray can't carry a tune in a Kremlin coal scuttle. The North Pole is a lousy toothpick. The Northern Lights are dimmer than a mole's boudoir in a Siberian Salt mine at midnight. The Soviet Borscht Belters beat Team NHL 7-3, and suddenly Canada's dish is crow.

 

Other sports-nerd teenagers would have been starstruck had they spotted a famous star of field, diamond, court, or ice. I was starstruck in the physical presence of a man whose likeness—a fedora-clad caricature—had looked back at me from the page all those years.

I left my friend in the booth, and with a napkin in hand and a pen borrowed from a waiter. I nervously headed over to the table where Beddoes was regaling the young woman with tales from the road, the cities across the continent and the amazing places in Europe where he had travelled, entirely on the company dime.

Voice cracking, I said, “Mr Beddoes, I’m a big fan of yours. Could I possibly get your autograph?”

I feared that he’d be annoyed by the interruption, but he reveled in the moment.

“What’s your name, son?”

I was so awed that it took me a second to come up with the correct answer.

He began scrawling away, not content to merely put his John Hancock on the flimsy facewipe.

I didn’t ask but he felt like he had to explain: “Robert Marvin Hull once told me, when you’re signing, always ask for their names, personalize it.”

Yes, hockey’s greatest scorer gave a tutorial to Beddoes on politely coping with celebrity.

“Are you in university?” Beddoes asked me. I was taken aback that a legendary newspaperman would have any interest in me.

I said, “High school. I’ve got my application in to journalism programs for next year. I’d like to work for a newspaper someday.”

That amused Beddoes and he relished the opportunity to offer lessons from his own professional life well lived.

Beddoes said: “I’d never recommend to a young man that you should pass up a chance to go to school but it’s all about your work experiences in the newspaper business. What a professor in a classroom would teach you doesn’t start to compare to the education you get working in a newsroom, going out there, hustling for stories. There’s no getting your feet wet. You have to dive right into the pool like you’re going off the high-board.”

At that moment I would have stripped bare and cannon-balled from the 10-metre tower into a janitor’s murky pail.

And then Beddoes really started talking and my jaw slackened, my chin eventually hitting the laces of my Converse Chuck Taylors.

I came for a salad that wasn’t simply head lettuce and a tomato wedge with Kraft dressing. I came away with not just an autograph from my hero but a sense of purpose. I was now bound and determined to become a sportswriter. Not that I could ever achieve the heights in biz that Beddoes had—that was beyond mere mortals, never mind a 17-year-old slug like me.

That said, I hadn’t put complete stock in Dick Beddoes’s disparaging of journalism school. It seemed archaic. Maybe it had been true in simpler times. This, however, was the era when the image of a newspaperman was shaped by Woodward and Bernstein and All the President’s Men, when the hard-hitting investigative work on 60 Minutes was the most watched show on television, when a teleprompter philosopher like David Brinkley might allude to Ancient Rome or Einstein’s theory of relativity on the NBC Nightly News. I figured a college degree was the necessary pedigree, what you needed just to keep up with the intellectual elites. You couldn’t acquire the necessary gravitas for major-league media by covering house fires and school-board meetings for a small-town daily.

 

SOON after I received Dick Beddoes’s wisdom, a trend began: my applications to journalism schools were landing in slush piles. One school declined completely; the other brought me in for an interview but put me well down the waiting list. Thirty-two kids would have had to opt out of the program to open a spot for me. Seven hundred applied to the program and 120 were accepted. The math was my enemy. Nonetheless, I held out faint hope—that a few among the 120 would have a wide array of options at bigger and better schools and the 31 on the waiting list above me would elect for the next best thing in the interim.

I was young enough not to recognize the difference between hope, faint hope and delusion. What money I was making from part-time jobs, I squandered at racetracks. Out of youthful hubris, I allowed myself to believe that I was leading a charmed life. On one occasion while I waited for word back from journalism school, that notion seemed quite real.

Investing with a friend, we hit a big exacta bet at Woodbine Racetrack—my memories here are quite vivid. For a Sunday afternoon session, the Ontario Jockey Club had flown in a celebrity rider, Steve Cauthen, then the wonder-boy of thoroughbred racing who as a mere apprentice graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. For the last race of the day, my friend and I pooled our resources and bet a long shot (jockey Gary Stahlbaum in the saddle) in combination with Cauthen’s horse. We ended up splitting the better part of a grand, almost retirement money back when. The following weekend I drove my ‘68 Meteor to Kentucky for Derby Day and we managed to score infield tickets, fifteen bucks if I remember correctly. Infield tickets sound promising but really, they gave us a view of just a short stretch of the first turn over the shoulders of a sweaty, drunken mob seven or eight deep along the rail. We could better hear the horses than see them.

I thought I knew hype when I saw it and so I laid off the lightly raced favourite, a horse of humble breeding that sold for $17,000 as a yearling. Instead, I bet the second choice at 5-to-1, the entry of Run Dusty Run and Bob’s Dust. Both were the offspring of Dust Commander, who won the 1970 Kentucky Derby, the race that Hunter S. Thompson wrote about in “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.” In high school I had happened upon Dr Thompson like many had, through this story’s appearance in The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe’s anthology, and from that moment on I was a devoted reader of his gonzo canon. Wagering on the sons of Dust Commander was like connecting with Thompson. Mine wasn’t entirely a hunch bet, mind you—Run Dusty Run was in pretty good form, had won or placed in all but one of his career races. I hedged my bet: fifty dollars across the board, win, place, and show.

We couldn’t see the horses break from the gate. We couldn’t see the gate at all. And when the field made it to the first turn, we could see jockeys in silks, a few bobbing heads but nothing much otherwise. Once the leaders made their way counter-clockwise to the backstretch, the crowd on the rail ran clockwise, rushing to get a view of the finish line. My friend and I were scared shitless that we’d get trampled, so we stayed in place. The horses crossed the line—we heard the call, the favourite’s name and then, yes, Run Dusty Run.

The crowd had departed the first turn, so we were leaning on the rail at the point where the jockeys stood up in their stirrups and powered down their rides. When I saw the winner—Seattle Slew looked nothing like the other horses. He glowed, as if black marble could sweat a glossy lacquer. I could hear Slew—when he breathed, it sounded not like something that would come from horse flesh but fire-driven heavy industry. This was and remains the nearest thing I’ve ever seen to athletic perfection. I would have laid my life savings then and there that Slew would win the Triple Crown, which he did. Nonetheless, though I had bet against a horse who’d enter in the conversation for the greatest thoroughbred of all time, I somehow managed to, almost, break even. My place and show on Run Dusty Run returned about $140 of the $150 I left at the window. I’d lost money but felt like I had won. If that’s not a charmed life, it’s semi-charmed.

Alas, semi-charm didn’t cut it with gaining entrance to journalism school. I held my breath and held out hope through the summer until the first day of classes, but no luck—everyone had shown up.

I had gone all in with j-school—I hadn’t applied anywhere else. And so, while friends and classmates headed off to college, I started on a succession of greasy blue-collar jobs to mark time before I could apply once more.

On the midnight shift, I worked for White Knight Maintenance, pushing brooms and swinging mops for an outfit that cleaned bars downtown. In the morning I worked as a clerk in a liquor store, stocking shelves and bagging cheap whisky for rummies bent on self-annihilation.

That winter I applied again to journalism school. The application suggested that candidates supply clippings of past work—having none, I submitted an essay about the biggest sporting event I had ever witnessed, the 1977 Kentucky Derby. I didn’t mimic Hunter S. Thompson—quite the opposite, I wrote in some high literary mode and compared Seattle Slew to the Houyhnhnms, the wise, rational, human-like breed of horses featured in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. No copy of that essay survives, thankfully. Though I received no feedback from the faculty who reviewed, their opinion of it can be gleaned from the fact that, on my second attempt to gain entry to the journalism program, I didn’t even make the waiting list. I was losing ground.

I found a slightly better paying job, one I thought might be a fallback if school and my dreams of writing sports were to fall through—which seemed like a sure thing. I worked in a Coca-Cola production plant, piling cases of pop onto pallets on tough shifts and on easy ones, daydreaming while watching bottles coming out of the washer and flying down the line, like Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams in the opening of Laverne and Shirley.

I applied to journalism school for a third year in a row, though not after some deliberation over whether the expense of the application could be better spent on lottery tickets and a six-pack. To my shock, I was called in to write a test and later for an interview. The head of the department remembered interviewing me two years before and listened sympathetically as I told him my story. He didn’t make me wait for a letter of acceptance and let me know right on the spot that I had made the cut. He even went one step beyond that. I was a working-class hero to him and understanding my financial hardship, he even favoured me with a part-time job when school started that September: clipping out-of-town papers and sorting files in the journalism department’s dungeon-like library. Starting at six a.m. and finishing at nine, four mornings a week, I’d pore through dozens of papers from across North America and the U.K., everything from the Wall Street Journal to the Manitoulin Expositer, looking for stories of interest. Sports wasn’t a priority in the library’s filing system, but no matter. I read the sports pages on my own time.

It was like I was in grade-school all over.

I read everything and when doing that I wondered where I could be my fit in the mix. I was sure it would be more Manitoulin than Wall Street.

 

INSTRUCTORS in journalism department recruited guest lecturers, most of them the usual newsroom fauna, but I remember only one sportswriter coming to talk to our first-year reporting class: Earl McRae, who walked into the room wearing a leather bomber jacket and a unconvincing bad-attitude sneer, like he was an extra on the set of The Wild One. I knew him by reputation, though I doubt anyone else in class did. McRae’s byline surfaced regularly in Sport Magazine back in the ‘70s, when Sport was a hipper, younger and snarkier alternative to Sports Illustrated. McRae was the only Canadian who wrote for the monthly and, of course, exclusively about hockey, an irreverent voice alas dedicated to an irrelevant sport to most of Sport’s audience.

McRae told us he had dropped out of school and fast-talked his way into a job at a newspaper. Or actually conned might be a better term, with his claims of previous employment out west at a newspaper that went under and a M.A. from an Ivy League school among other implausible turns that wouldn’t have stood up to the most cursory background check. (Think Kirk Douglas as Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole.) Journalism school, well, McRae had no time for it and, in so many unminced words, we assembled in front of him were snot-nosed suckers. The appalled expression on our reporting instructor’s face evoke Edvard Munch’s best-know work. For his generous honorarium, the guest speaker was shit-talking the institution that was putting food on the table for the journalism-department staff, which was mostly comprised of gone-to-seed newspaper folks who were no longer up to the wearying work on a daily.

“The worst job in a newsroom is better than a degree from the best university,” McRae said.

I didn’t take McRae completely at his word. He seemed a bit of a peacock, in love with his own voice, no false modesty, no modesty at all. Others would be shamed by the bold-faced lies he told to work his sources and land his stories, but McRae shared them enthusiastically and found them all hysterical. Yeah, he was one of those self-styled funny guys, who laughs hardest at his own jokes. He stood at the front of the class in his leather bomber jacket and jeans, sneering at us with chin elevated. No true rebel has to try that hard. He was an act.

No matter. I took the con man’s message to heart.

 

SEPTEMBER 1980. With a C-minus in Reporting 101, I limped into the hump year of the three-year-degree program. I was coming around to Beddoes’s and McRae’s line of thinking: just put in time in a newsroom, no matter how undignified. Not because I saw the wisdom in it. Simply because I was an academic washout.

So it was that at age twenty-three, I walked into the newsroom of the Toronto Sun, a tabloid with the aspect of over-size comic book, targeting Joe Sixpacks, true-crime devotees and paleo-conservatives. The Sun wasn’t a paper I loved, but I figured I had to work my way up from the bottom of the city’s three-newspaper market. I was looking for a part-time job—another—that I could combine with my full schedule of classes.

I handed the receptionist the half page that was my resume. She didn’t bother to look up from the switchboard and notepad when I said I was prepared to do anything. The city editor happened to be making a run to the coffee machine and overheard my offer.

“We need someone to work four to midnight,” he growled.

It was 3:30. No interview, no experience, no matter. I was hired.

I didn’t even bother ducking out to put quarters in the meter and wound up getting a ticket for double parking.

I was a copy boy, a job fit for a high schooler maybe, a level or two below the kid in the mailroom. After filling out the form at reception I was given a minute’s worth of instruction:

“Pick up the layouts here from the copy editors and shlep it to the paste-up room in the back.” Yeah, my job was less complicated that a paper boy’s. At least a guy working at a corner newsstand has to make change.

Once my shift started no one really spoke to me. Certainly no one asked my name. After a while I wondered if they could even see me.

That first shift I found out the editor’s idea of midnight was one-thirty and overtime was unpaid, unacknowledged, and fully expected. I was making minimum wage and would have done it for nothing. Effectively that’s what I did that night, after paying off my parking ticket.

At 1:30 a.m., whoever was in charge told me: “Four o’clock tomorrow”

I’m sure it doesn’t sound like a glamourous apprenticeship but no matter—I figured I was on my way

Like Beddoes had advised me. Like McRae spelled out.

My euphoria for wedging a foot in the newsroom’s door was tempered. I still had classes to get to the next day, and before that, I had to get up early for my morning job in the journalism department’s library.

Since the start of classes that fall, I hadn’t seen Dick Beddoes’s column in the Globe and Mail. I had kept track of his writing—the editors had shifted him over to news side as a political columnist, but the cross-over was strained at best. His station demanded a certain dignity--there was no dining column-seasoned borscht outside City Hall. He clearly struggled and ceased to be appointment reading. In fact, I found his column hard to read beyond the first paragraph or two—he was a boxer in his twilight, a faint resemblance of his former self.

And then Beddoes was nowhere to be found and I had no idea what was behind his absence in the paper. Until September 16. The morning after my first shift at the Sun.

The Globe and Mail that day ran a column by Beddoes, his first in over two weeks. The headline read:

 

"Out of a day of turmoil, my mistake"