Read Parker Field for Free Online Page B

because they served him shrimp, and he doesn’t like shrimp? Well, what did you all serve him? … Yeah, I think I’d stay away from all kinds of shellfish, if I was you.”
    He talks for another five minutes. I gather the person on the other end is either some assistant coach Bootie’s on drinking terms with or a jock-sniffing donor, and the other party is giving him the skinny on the latest high school moron Virginia Tech wants to pass off as a student-athlete. The schools that want to be “big time” in college football, meaning they get pounded by Top Ten teams instead of Podunk U, all have to save a few places in the freshman class for kids with “special talents.” The talents usually trend toward 4.4 times in the forty-yard dash or thirty-nine-inch vertical leaps.
    Bootie’s system works, for him. People tell him things they don’t tell the mass comm grads who do it by the book. They tell him things because they like him, and because they know he won’t print about nine-tenths of what he knows.
    “Willie!” Bootie says as he sets the phone down hard enough to make it ring. “How the hell are you? Long time, no drink.”
    Yeah, we’ve had a few together. Like golfers, drinkers tend to gravitate toward each other, even if they don’t have much else in common.
    I tell him what I have in mind. Bootie’s probably the least professional journalist occupying the ever-shrinking newsroom. He’s been here for forty-one years, since the day he walked in fresh out of Washington and Lee. The old sports editor, another W&L man, hired him on the spot, and he never left.
    Bootie does a column three times a week, most of which focuses on things that happened before many of our would-be readers were born. Wheelie and Grubby would probably give up their corner offices to get rid of Bootie Carmichael. He’s the opposite of the kind of employees they want: multiplatform news gatherers who work like dogs for peanuts because they don’t know any better. They, like everyone else in Richmond, know Bootie’s sometimes on the take.
    But Bootie is popular, especially among our ever-diminishing Baby Boomer readers who can relate to a column about Secretariat or Pete Rose, two of Bootie’s favorite causes. At least twice a year, our readers are reminded that Secretariat is the greatest horse that ever lived (he has a point) and Pete Rose was unjustly railroaded by baseball (bullshit). Every time they do a readership survey, Bootie comes out as more popular than any hard-hitting reporter or thoughtful news-side columnist we have. So, while perfectly good journalists are sent packing in the latest layoff, Bootie survives.
    They’ve tried to make him quit on his own. He doesn’t get to spend a week in Louisville drinking bourbon before the Kentucky Derby any more, and he doesn’t get to go to the World Series and play poker with his cronies who also are too popular to fire. Like for most of us, raises are only a fond memory to Bootie, and he has to occasionally write what his bosses want him to write. No one can forget his epic of cluelessness on the X Games two summers ago.
    He still carries the title of sports editor, but they hired a thirty-five-year-old with a future instead of a past and gave him the title of executive sports editor, which means he runs things. Everybody but Bootie concedes that executive SE outranks sports editor.
    But Bootie, while he wails and moans about real and imaginary slights, has no plans to quit. He’s sixty-three and says he wants to do this until he’s eighty. Sally, Jackson, I and a few other old-timers have a pool on who’ll go first, Wheelie, Grubby or Bootie. My money’s on Bootie sitting fat and comfortable in his comfy chair eating the stale cake they’ll serve at Wheelie’s and Grubby’s going-away parties.
    I start to lay out my proposal to Bootie.
    “Have you heard the latest?” he asks, interrupting. “About the company cars?”
    Yes, I’ve heard. This one did kind of defy