EQMM, July 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "No golf stories!” he said.

  After a pause to take this outrageous statement in, I mounted a timid defense. “Mr. Glass, it's a popular sport. People like to read about it, and they're the kind of upscale readers advertisers like. There are seven courses in town. The LPGA may do a tournament stop here."

  "I know all that. And I know we can't ignore it completely, all right? I run a few golf items off the wires, print the tournament standings and all that crap, but I'll be damned if I'll put any special effort into it."

  "Why?"

  "To begin with, it's not a sport. Or if it is a sport, the guys who play it aren't athletes."

  "Mr. Glass,” I blurted, “just last week you ran a front-page article on a chess tournament."

  He gave me a hard stare. “It was a slow news day, and there was a lot of human interest in that story. Read my lips, Twining. No golf."

  At this point in my service at the Chronicle, I was not yet brave enough to press the point further, so I got off the subject of golf, and our meeting returned to a state of calm.

  When I got back to the sports staff's corner of the newsroom, all three of my colleagues were waiting for me. It seemed a one-on-one with the boss was a rare occurrence and they wanted to hear all about it. I gave them a selective account.

  Rex Burbage, gnawing the edge of a dripping cheeseburger, said, “I think we should have warned him off the g-word, huh, guys?"

  "Probably should have,” Bill Toolmaker agreed with a slight smile.

  "Oh, Gus, you poor baby,” said Sally Ashe. “Millard hates golf. Never propose a story on golf, never even mention golf, and you'll get along fine."

  "Why does he hate it so much?"

  "Maybe he played once,” Bill offered. “That does it for some people."

  Rex wagged his head. “That ain't it. I don't like to play myself. Nineteenth hole's okay, but the first eighteen you can have. But I still enjoy it. The constant frustration is what makes golf fun to write about. It humbles even the greatest. Years ago, I was on another paper, I got a whole story out of Arnold Palmer shooting a twelve."

  "On how many holes?” I said.

  "One. A septuple bogey, I think it was."

  "You don't write about golf at this paper, Rex,” Sally pointed out.

  Rex smiled, showing remnants of cheeseburger. “Hey, you guys may think my job is safe, but even I ain't that brave. As to why Millard hates golf so much, search me. I know where most of the bodies are buried around here, but not that one."

  Bill said, “Maybe there is no explanation. I can't stand green olives, but there's no deep hidden reason for it."

  "That you know of,” Sally said. “And you don't go off like a rocket when anybody mentions olives. Anybody know anything about Millard's father? Maybe he was destroyed by golf. Some people get addicted to it. Maybe he was a golfaholic."

  "Say, honey,” Rex said, “that hits too close to home.” And he waddled back to his desk, where he may (as self-fed legend claimed) or may not have had a selection of miniature airline booze bottles in his locked bottom drawer.

  For the next few months, I was the utility man of the sports page, writing on football, baseball, basketball, auto racing, horse racing, track and field, trying to invest them all with the kind of colorful writing Millard Glass was looking for. It paid off. Glass gave me a raise to something approaching a living wage and a column of my own. I started to get those out-of-town assignments. None of my colleagues seemed jealous of my growing status—even Rex congratulated me, despite (or maybe because of) his own column getting cut back to three a week. The sports page was on an upswing. Glass goosed the budget to hire two new reporters, both with the kind of stylistic flair he liked.

  Whatever else happened, we still didn't cover golf beyond the bare minimum. One day I was sitting at my desk looking at the first-round scores of the latest PGA tournament. I'm sure you know that for every hole on a golf course, the number of strokes a capable golfer should take to get the ball in the hole, three, four, or five of them, is called par. Add them all up, and you have par for the course, which for 18 holes usually comes to 70, 71, or in the case of this tournament, 72. I'm looking at this list, and I see the leader (let's say it was Vijay Singh) shot a 64, meaning he was eight under par. A bunch of others also shot under par, a few even par 72, and a few more over par. The worst round (terrible for a touring pro but great for a duffer) might be a 78 or 79. Thinking out loud to the room at large, I said, “How would a golfer do on the PGA tour if he shot par on every single round he played, all year long?"

  "Not well,” said Sally Ashe.

  "No, he'd do okay,” said Rex Burbage. “He'd make some money. Almost every tournament some guys finish well over par for four rounds, and they get paid."

  "He'd have to make the cut to play on the weekend,” Bill Toolmaker pointed out. The typical PGA tournament goes four rounds, Thursday through Sunday, but the field is reduced after the second round, and those eliminated go home empty-handed. “Par doesn't always make the cut."

  "He could even win one,” Sally said, apparently rethinking her snap judgment. “I mean, if the weather was bad enough and most people were shooting in the high 70s and 80s, a guy who shot par could actually come out on top."

  "Cory Pavin won a U.S. Open shooting par,” Bill said. “Doesn't happen often, though."

  By this time I was feeling secure enough at the Chronicle to propose a harmless hoax. We would invent a fictitious golfer named Sidney Paar and stick him in the standings for each weekly tournament. He would shoot par for every single round. If par didn't make the cut, he would disappear on the weekend. If par made the cut, he would finish the tournament and we'd credit him with the appropriate prize money. Anybody who follows golf would be bound to catch on quickly, but it would be fun to see how long it would take our golf-hating editor to figure it out.

  When I described my plan, Bill Toolmaker said, “I think I speak for all of us when I say that is an inspired idea, and when Millard Glass finds out, none of us knows a thing about it."

  I shrugged. “Millard has a sense of humor. Sort of. And he likes color and creativity, doesn't he? I'll be in charge of sticking Sidney in the standings every week, and, right, none of you know anything about it."

  I never figured the joke would last beyond the second weekend. Millard would find out, maybe laugh and maybe not, and instruct me to knock it off. But the career of Sidney Paar lasted through the summer, shooting par for every round in every tournament. Every golfer reading the paper had to be on to the gag, but nobody felt obliged to tell the sports editor.

  "Millard has to know,” I said to Bill in the newsroom one afternoon. “How could he not? He must just think it's funny, and he's letting it go on, not saying anything."

  Bill shook his head. “Remember, the guy hates golf. He pays no attention to it. Sidney's name only appears in a long column of names Millard has no interest in. You've never inserted our boy in an actual news story, have you?"

  I shook my head.

  "There you are. He may glance at the editorial content, but he sure doesn't look at the tournament standings. Believe me, Millard knows nothing about it."

  "How will he react if he finds out?"

  "When it's gone on this long, I think we can confidently say he'll be royally pissed.” Bill smirked at me. “Fortunately, you'll remember, I never look at those golf standings myself, and when your perfidy is revealed to the world, I'll be as shocked as anybody."

  As the year went on, the pressure built up. I was starting to worry. Was my position on the paper really secure enough to weather the fallout? Of course, it was always possible the whole year would go by without Millard catching on. And if Sidney didn't make enough on the tour to qualify the following year, I'd have to drop him, wouldn't I? Only one thing could guarantee Millard would find out: if Sidney got high enough on the leader board that he'd have to be mentioned in a story. But I could finesse that unless (gulp!) a score of par actually won a tournament.


  As I guess you've figured by now, that's exactly what happened. High winds struck an East-Coast tournament in late summer. Scores were high the first day and only got worse as the tournament went on. After Saturday, Sidney Paar would have been sitting two strokes off the lead, and at the end of Sunday, his closest competitor was two behind him. Sidney was a winner.

  What could I do? If par had won the tournament, I could have had Sidney lose in a playoff, but then I'd have had to fake the wire story. That would have compromised my journalistic ethics, if I hadn't already nuked them with the hoax to begin with. When Sunday's results were printed in Monday morning's paper, Sidney unaccountably disappeared from the leader board and some other guy, Retief Goosen, I think it was, was credited with the winner's purse. Ironically, it was a call to the sports editor from a little old lady who thought Sidney was real that finally revealed the truth to Millard Glass. She had started following Sidney's progress because Paar had been her mother's maiden name or she used to watch Jack Paar on TV or something.

  When I heard Millard had found out, I felt a combination of relief and dread. All that day I waited for the axe to fall. Clearly wanting to make things as miserable for me as possible, he waited until nine o'clock that night to order me to meet him at his office. The session wasn't pleasant.

  "Lying to your readers is not the guiding principle of journalism on this paper,” he said, his voice lowered, the calm before the storm.

  "It was just a joke, Millard."

  "Not very funny."

  "No, I suppose not. But try to think of it as a statistical experiment. A lot of readers wondered, like I did, how a golfer would do who shot only par."

  "I didn't hire you to run experiments on my sports page,” Millard said, voice rising. “Maybe you'd like to take your test tubes and Bunsen burner to the unemployment office!” He was getting into it now. He really liked to yell. And yeah, I contributed to the noise pollution a bit myself.

  The upshot of all our yelling: I was out on the street. Was I mad at Millard Glass? At that moment, sure. Did I want to kill the guy? For a few hours, maybe. But within a week, things started to turn around for me. I got an offer from a golf magazine to write up my Sidney Paar hoax. They paid me well, they asked me for some more articles, I got a book contract, and I got interviewed on TV flogging my book, as a result of which I got an offer to join the network's golf-commentary team. My stock was rising like dot-coms in the bubble.

  Here's the kicker. When the magazine with my Sidney Paar article came out, I sent a copy to Millard Glass with a conciliatory note. And he replied with an e-mail: “Nice piece. And I do get it now. But I still hate golf.” So you see, we weren't enemies. Whoever the Sidney Paar was who killed him, he wasn't referring to me.

  When I finished the story, the two cops looked at me impassively, absorbing it. Finally Ortega said, “So who was he referring to if not you?"

  "Let's kick that around a little,” I said, inviting myself in on their investigation. “Maybe he was incriminating somebody who reminded him of Sidney Paar in some way. Or it could be it was an indirect reference, that he thought the Sidney Paar hoax somehow set in motion the events that led to his death."

  "If it's something that subtle,” Nakamura said, “what was the point of telling the nine-one-one operator? Glass was dying and saying what he said was the most important thing to him. He was sending a message. I think he was trying to tell us who killed him."

  "He was sending a message, all right, but maybe not to you."

  "You'll have to explain that."

  "It's the kind of thing that always bothers me in stories. If he's trying to tell you who killed him, why make it so damned cryptic? It's not as if he was writing something down, and he feared the killer would come back and find it. What he said to the nine-one-one dispatcher would be safely recorded away from the crime scene. Why get cute and attribute the crime to Sidney Paar, a guy who didn't even exist? Why not just say the killer's name?"

  "You tell us,” Ortega said.

  "Millard didn't think he needed to identify his killer. He was sure the person who shot him would be caught. The killer only got away through a freak of luck. Millard didn't know Frank's stomach flu would keep him out of the lobby. I think he was sending a message to his murderer, an in-your-face way of letting the killer know with what contempt Millard regarded him."

  They looked unconvinced, but Nakamura asked me, “You have anybody particular in mind?"

  "No, not really,” I said.

  After the cops left, I decided to do a little detecting on my own. Not any that involved leaving the condo—running into Ortega and Nakamura again in the course of their own investigation might prove awkward—but through a twenty-first-century combination of Internet and old-fashioned land-line telephone.

  First I did Google searches on all my old colleagues. Sally, as I expected, produced the most hits. As I already knew, she had joined me in the visual-media world, working as a sideline reporter on college football games. Perfect job for her, always more impressive in person than in print. Rex and Bill were both still at the Chronicle and some of their stories were accessible on the paper's Web site. Surprisingly, the tribute to the fallen sports editor wasn't written by either Rex or Bill but by Darren Rademacher, that kid who had gone to Stanford for four years and joined the sports staff when he came back. One paragraph held special interest for me:

  "Millard Glass never stopped expanding his horizons as an editor and a man. When I proposed an interview with my fellow Stanford alum Tiger Woods, he said it was the first golf story he had okayed in years. He had never cared for the game until he started to see it as a metaphor for life."

  Now I was sure my first guess had been right: The killer reminded him of Sidney. From there it was easy. What were the characteristics of Sidney Paar the golfer? Steady, reliable, unspectacular, and ultimately a little boring. Sidney could never surprise you. It fit one of my old colleagues like a glove.

  The first call I made was to Sally. She was a celebrity now, and if I hadn't been in TV sports myself, I probably couldn't have gotten to her. Chances were, the police hadn't talked to her yet.

  "Sally, after I left, did Millard Glass ever mention the name Sidney Paar?"

  "One time he did. It was at some party, the only time I ever ran into him away from the office. He was a little drunk, a lot more talkative than normal, and I seemed to be one of the few people there he knew. So he kind of monopolized me. Some of the stuff he said was way off the wall. He looked me up and down—guys do, I'm used to it—and told me if I could get my boobs or my legs into a story for the paper, I'd be sensational."

  "He didn't say that!"

  "He sure did. Sexist pig, huh? I let it slide, but how do you think it affected me?"

  "It could have affected you into a sexual-harassment suit."

  "Yeah, I suppose so. Not my style. Weirdly enough, it kept me at the paper a year or two longer than I would have stayed otherwise. If it weren't for that crack, I would have moved into TV sooner than I did, but I was stubborn. I didn't want to prove my old sexist editor right! Maybe he'd heard I'd had offers and wanted to keep me, used reverse psychology. That made it a compliment, huh?"

  "But what did that have to do with Sidney Paar?"

  "Not a thing. But that same evening he confided to me a bunch of stuff about the people on the paper. There was one colleague of ours Millard had always wanted to get rid of. But he could never find an excuse. He was cooperative. He got along with everybody. He always met his deadlines. His work was always accurate. He was a damn good reporter. He could do anything perfectly but write a lively sentence. He did his job by the numbers, no style, no flair, no originality, none of those things Millard admired. He was Sidney Paar."

  "And after these messages, you'll tell me who that was,” I said playfully.

  "Gus, you know who it was. I don't have to tell you."

  Rex Burbage added to the story. “He finally screwed something up. He attributed an inflam
matory quote to a coach that some other coach said. It was embarrassing, and the wronged coach even threatened a libel suit. Millard was livid, wanted his head. I think he was ready to fire him, but he didn't."

  "Are you sure he didn't?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "What did Millard do when he wanted to fire somebody?"

  "You should know better than anybody."

  I decided to talk to my third former colleague face-to-face. Bill offered me a drink, and we sat in his den.

  "Did you hear about Millard's supposed dying message—'Sidney Paar killed me.'?"

  "I hope you had an alibi, Gus."

  "Didn't need one. Sorry to hear about your little problem at the paper."

  "It'll blow over. We printed a retraction. Coach cooled off. Everybody makes mistakes."

  "But you were famous for not making them, Bill. I guess with Millard's death, they'll need a new sports editor now, huh?"

  "I really hadn't thought about it."

  "That surprises me. You'd be a natural choice. How's your wife?"

  "About the same. Good days, bad days."

  "Did you cover your tracks, Bill? Can they trace the gun to you? Did you expect to get away with killing Millard?"

  "I didn't go there to kill him."

  "But you carried a gun."

  "City streets, late at night. It's just prudent."

  "You knew what Millard used those late-night meetings for. And even if Frank hadn't been sick, you had every right to be in the building. If Millard hadn't told anybody else he intended to fire you, you could probably get away with it. I'll bet you covered your tracks well. I'll bet you expect to get away with it even if I tell the police you're Sidney Paar."

  "I am?"

  "Think about it."

  He looked at me sadly. “I'm not Sidney. Not anymore. I got a bogey."

  (c)2007 by Jon L. Breen

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  OVER THE EDGE by James H. Cobb

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