King Kaufman's Sports Daily

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Aug. 22, 2007 | The best thing about this column, I feel comfortable saying, is the part I don't write, which would be the letters. OK, mostly don't write. I do chime in. That's the worst part about the best thing.

Back in the dark ages of the Internet, kids, letters to Salon used to take the form of e-mails, which some poor editor -- you're not going to believe this -- used to have to collect and edit and cut and paste and go get coffee and come back and publish as one big bunch, under the old-media title "Letters to the Editor."

I used to advocate publishing every letter, which Salon now does, not because I suggested it or anything but just because it became possible and obvious to do so. The reason I used to suggest it was that my in box was the best damn thing I read on most days.

It was so good I used to scoop up some of it and publish it as a column from time to time, which was nice because on those days I'd get to go get coffee.

I mention all this because I don't do that anymore, but I'd love to have you go back and read some or all of the 150-plus letters that came in in response to Tuesday's column about Michael Vick copping a plea to dogfighting charges.

Here we had an issue involving crime, class, race, cruelty to animals and football, a recipe for Internet message-board trolling and flaming if there ever was one, and instead there was an incredibly enlightening and interesting conversation. The readers of this site, if I may pander for a moment, are fabulous.

I respond to some letters most days, and I did that Tuesday, but I didn't answer, or think much about one signed Pickie Beecher. But it stayed with me.

"It must be weird to be a sportswriter these days," it began. "I guess I used to think of sportswriting as kind of a fun job; yeah, there were scandals from time to time and sometimes sad things or bad things, but even without waxing dreamily nostalgic about 'the good old days,' it sure seems like the topics that take up so much of your 'sportswriting' time these days are just so awful and have not so much to do with 'sport' but with the disastrous effects of egregiously poor socialization of human beings."

Next page: What's weird is being a fan, not being a sportswriter