DON McDERMOTT MORE COLUMNS Advertisement

For the next couple weeks, Mark Smith will be on the road, revisiting old haunts, renewing old acquaintances, and taking advantage of some well-deserved time away from the daily chores associated with helping to produce one of the world's greatest products -- a newspaper.

In his absence, it will be I (me, we, us, y'all) who will be doing his job.

Yes, I am the sports guy, but working in the newspaper profession is something I have been doing seriously for most of the last 56 years. (I had my first, by golly, for real, byline when I was 15 years old and had to be driven to the assignment (a high school football game in Canton, Ohio) by my father, who was my BFF (biggest fan forever).

Over these past six decades, I have worked as a sports editor, a beat reporter for a major Eastern daily covering the NHL (including the Stanley Cup playoffs, the NBA (including a 76ers team that lost 73 games one season), MLB (the Phils, Orioles, Reds), NASCAR (which enabled me to be an extra in a commercial produced for a chain of hamburger joints owned by Richard Petty), IndyCars (including the irrational Indy sanctioning-body split in 1995), harness racing (including the Little Brown Jug), college basketball and football (the Atlantic Coast Conference -- UNC, Duke, N.C. State, Wake Forest ... then Ohio State).

I was on the beat for two big basketball moments -- Adolph Rupp's last game as the Kentucky coach and the final single-class high-school boys' basketball championship game in Indiana in 1997 at the now-long gone RCA Dome in Indianapolis.

Things happen in this business no one ever expects, like winding up in the Great American Desert, covering prep sports for the Pahrump Valley Times.

In the eight years here, Pahrump Valley High School teams have won 11 state championships ... Tonopah has won one ... Dominique Maloy won 15 individual track titles ... and hundreds of other memories have been generated.

All of which has made life a joy for someone who is a chili-cooking, poker-playing, History Channel/National Geographic/PBS television-watching, Ludlum/Dan Brown/James Patterson/Stuart Woods-reading, Star Trek/Star Wars/Terminator-viewing, Nicks/Styx/Eagles/Seger to-hum-along-with (after appreciating Gershwin/Glenn Miller/Berlin ... ice cream-loving son of an Irishman, who loved to wander and wonder, and a Hungarian mother who was as patient as a saint and played golf until she was 83 years old (and could shoot her age over 18 holes...)

Politics? Conservative/liberal/independent/libertarian ... it all depends on what the topic is. One thought lingers, however ... Government officials (read that politicians) would do us all a great service by shutting up and listening -- wouldn't that be awesome?

There is the annoying radical right and the equally obnoxious looney left; hardly a brain exists between them, so it is no mystery why they can't understand the most simple of premises/solutions/theories/comments/facts.

Anyway, that's who is putting the Times (and Tonopah Times-Bonanza/Goldfield News) together for the next couple weeks.

Have comments? Email to donmacd@excite.com ... that's the best way to let them be known.