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-30-: the very best columnist ever to grace the pages of a Texas newspaper has called it quits--but please don''t tell Blackie Sherrod I mentioned it.

Article Excerpt
THE RAILBIRDS AT THE STONELEIGH BAR keep asking the man on the corner stool what retirement is like. "Like a steam bath," Blackie Sherrod grumbles, copping a line from his final column in the Dallas Morning News, which ran just after the first of the year. "Once you get used to it, it's not so hot." Blackie is sporting a faded denim jacket and a week's growth of whiskers, and his hair, long ago frosted over with silver, is combed back and curling up his neck.

To our immediate right is a framed photograph of the legendary sports columnist. It has hung on the wall of the Dallas watering hole since his eightieth birthday, three years ago; the railbirds come to this anointed place to sit at the feet of the master and drink of his wisdom. Blackie pretends the photo and the worshipers do not exist. We are knocking down shots of tequila--me trying to conduct an interview, him grousing about the unwelcome attention his retirement has elicited. He's still pissed at the editors of the Morning News for making a page-one story of such an ordinary happening, thus inspiring similar stories and columns of adoration from writers all across Texas. "I told only two editors, and I swore them to secrecy," he complains. "The last thing I wanted was a big splash." So a man retires after more than fifty years of writing a column that is the envy of every sportswriter in the country,...