Twenty years ago, my wife and I made a miscalculation. We managed to get ourselves kicked out of one apartment before a new one was ready. I was a first-year sports writer for the Deseret News at the time and "prep writer" Lee Benson took us in.
At night - as our families slept - we talked sports writing into the wee hours.I left sports writing within the year. Benson stayed with it for 20 years.
He had found his vocation.
And in "The Best of Benson," that sense of vocation fills the pages.
Like the "name brand" legends of Utah sports writing - Les Goates, John Mooney, Hack Miller - Benson knows a sports column is not about creating a definitive record. A sports column is about tone, style and point of view.
And part of the fun of "The Best of Benson" is seeing the tone, style and viewpoint evolve with the years.
In 1979 Benson would write:
Earvin Johnson of Michigan State - The Magician - and Larry Bird of Indiana State aren't players, they're passing artists. Calling them a guard and a forward is like calling Rembrandt a painter and Beethoven a piano player.
It's early work. The swagger seems borrowed from Hack Miller and the knack for metaphor lifted from Jim Murray. There's no personal voice. No attempt to make connection with the reader. It's the kind of column that runs every day in a dozen papers in a dozen cities.
What has made Benson's writing noteworthy is how quickly he got beyond that. Typical Benson work can be found in his profile of Manti High basketball coach Wilbur Braith-waite:
. . . He didn't care about winning as much as he cared about character and discipline and above all about boys.
For his entire career he got two technical fouls, which has to be even more of an accomplishment than lasting 37 years as the high school basketball coach in your home town.
He never worried more about the record than the boy.
Benson was a quick study.
And as a collection, "The Best of Benson" is as good as Utah has gotten from its "sports scribes." The profiles of great athletes (Duke Snider, Johnny Miller, Nancy Kerrigan), meditative "thumb suckers" ("Nicknames," "Olympic Behavior," "Roger Reid's Firing") eyewitness accounts (The Masters, The Series, The Final Four) all breeze by with customary Benson aplomb and ease. As university "writing coaches" would say, "There's always pressure behind the prose."
And there's also fire in the belly.
"Writing without passion is like cooking without salt," Benson says in his introduction.
Concerns are few but worth noting: Too many men, not enough women. The lack of a larger context for some people and places. A self-assurance that at times creates a blind spot or refuses to deal with complexities.
But taken as a whole, "The Best of Benson" is a remarkable record. No history of Utah athletics could be complete without taking it into account.
It is the personal journal of one of Utah's future Hall of Fame journalists.
It's one man's meat.
Salt and all.