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Let me tell you a quick story about a 19-year-old kid lying back on his bed in a makeshift bedroom in his parents’ home. According to the house blueprint, the bedroom was supposed to be a garage. But the kid was still living at home, trying to figure out my life.

And so it became a bedroom.

The kid was reading a collection of sports stories by Frank Deford. The kid had some idea about becoming a sportswriter himself. The collection was lamentably called “The World’s Tallest Midget,” and it featured a number of stories Deford had written for Sports Illustrated. There was one about Jimmy Connors called “Raised By Women to Conquer Men.”

There was one about the football coach Robert “Bull” “Cyclone” Sullivan called “The Toughest Coach There Ever Was.”

And there was one — the one the kid was reading that day — about Billy Conn titled “The Boxer and the Blonde.”

The kid, as mentioned, had this vague notion of becoming a sportswriter. He had no idea how that worked, though. He did not know any sportswriters. He did not even know anyone who knew any sportswriters. He imagined that a job so wonderful — imagine writing sports for a living? — had to be handed down from up on high, like a knighthood and ambassadorship.

He was reading the Deford book not for enjoyment — though he was enjoying himself — but as an instruction manual. How did Deford do it? How did he write stories so good that they would appear in the pages of Sports Illustrated? It seemed simple enough. One word followed another. One sentence followed another. Periods and commas and question marks fit in the blank spaces.

And then he came upon a paragraph. Forty years later, he could still recite that paragraph exactly. It came at the end of the 11th round of the Billy Conn-Joe Louis fight on June 18, 1941, at the Polo Grounds. Conn had just landed a titanic left hand that left the champ reeling. Conn was winning the fight.

Here’s exactly what Frank Deford wrote.

Everyone understood. Everyone in the Polo Grounds. Everyone listening through the magic of radio. Everyone. There was bedlam. It was wonderful. Men had been slugging it out for eons, and there had been 220 years of prizefighting, and there would yet be Marciano and the two Sugar Rays and Ali, but this was it. This was the best it had ever been and ever would be, the 12th and 13th rounds of Louis and Conn on a warm night in New York just before the world went to hell.

The kid read sat straight up on his bed, as if given an electric shock. He read the paragraph again. And again. And again. He got out a notebook. He wrote down every word and then stared at what he’d written. Then he wrote it down again.

That was the moment when I decided that I didn’t really have a choice.

I had to become a writer.

I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

This is JoeBlogs. This is where I do that writing.