Sports-crazed columnist goes 0-for-13.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

I did it, dear readers: I went an entire month - March 24 to April 24 - without writing a single sports-themed column.

Oh, sure, I made a few athletic references - three, if you're keeping score - but my 13-column streak of sportsless topics is notched firmly

in my personal record book, reminding me that I can live without the stuff. I am fully in recovery.

Some warned me to not even write this column, that even touching on the subject of sports could bump me off the wagon, like the Jenny Craig follower who's suddenly plowing through a Hometown Buffet line with all the reserve of party-hardy John Riggins, the former Redskins running back who, at a banquet in Washington, D.C., told Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: "Come on, Sandy, baby, loosen up" - then passed out under the table.

Hey, I can handle my sports.

No, my improvement hasn't been Beamonesque; Register-Guard sports editor Ron Bellamy, I suspect, will still keep chiding me with "Whataya got for us today, Welch?" a reference to my column's lineup card being liberally sprinkled with football, baseball and the like. But while more than 7 percent of my 1999-to-2003 columns were sports-themed - hey, I'm a sports guy; of course I keep stats - that number has dipped to 3.8 percent in the two-plus years since. And, of course, 0 percent in the past month.

Those are big-league numbers, folks.

Any therapist, of course, would suggest I proceed with caution, that I have lots of baggage - sports baggage - to unload. At 5, a family photo attests, I was already hooked on a Tudor Tru-Action electric football game; at 12, subscribing to Sports Illustrated; at 14, wall-papering my room with photos from the magazine.

In junior high, I was the guy who phoned in the results of our school's basketball games to the Corvallis Gazette-Times. To see that line score in the newspaper later the same day - it was an afternoon paper - was to sense I was an MVP in this journalistic magic show. I was hooked.

At 16, I was writing Little League baseball stories for the same paper, two years later heading off to the University of Oregon to study for a career in journalism. Instead, I ran smack into the Seattle Bowl of my life. Assuming I would be a star on the Oregon Daily Emerald sports staff, instead I found myself fourth-string men's gymnastics reporter.

I toyed with the idea of bagging journalism altogether. I was going to move to the country and become a milkman. But then something happened: In UO's School of Journalism, I took a sportswriting class from a graduate teaching fellow, a guy who had worked for the Sacramento Union and had interviewed Reggie Jackson. A guy who reignited my interest in sportswriting.

His name was Ron Bellamy.

I became sports editor of the Oregon Daily Emerald, later sports editor of The Bulletin in Bend. But in the early '80s, well after Bellamy moved from sports to news reporting, I was doing something similar. I went from being a Sunday editor to a features writer to a features editor to a columnist.

Bellamy got back into sports. I did not. Well, I sort of "did not."

Even though I wasn't technically a sportswriter, I kept the soul of a sportswriter. I was like the guy at a four-star restaurant, looking at the menu but craving a stadium hot dog heavily doused with mustard.

Which is why when I write about seeing a Shakespeare play in Ashland, the column's subplot winds up being about the NCAA basketball tournament.

Sports are a great microcosm of life. To watch a blind 800-meter runner at Hayward Field, as I did in 1993, is to understand courage at its deepest level. And, besides, though some readers wish I'd avoid sports altogether, Eugene-Springfield is a fairly "sportsy" community.

So if my one-month sports fast taught me I could live without it, why would I want to? It's not going to kill me. And, hey, I'm just practicing what my old GTF preached.

Bob Welch can be reached at 338-2354 or at [e-mail].