No. 47: PETER ROBBINS / The Dirty Ghostwriter

Me and the nine-year-old child actor who normalized pre-adolescent depression in the Peanuts Christmas Classic.

Occasionally, How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying) will break away from the press box for writing of a different sort. In this instalment, it’s a piece of personal history timed with the Christmas season. A sports connection? Tenuous at best. It does feature a sad-sack athlete of a sort: a perpetually frustrated field-goal kicker and a pitcher who kept taking the mound for decades in the vain search for his first victory.

I wrote this earlier this year to mark a very sad occasion—in retrospect, one that I feared was coming. Early in the New Year, I’ll be talking about it on Sirius Radio—when I have details, I’ll drop them in the feed here.