David Kindred / National Sports Journalism Center

For the hell of it, I’m going to write 800 words by 10:30 a.m. because it’s a column about writing on deadline. It is now 9:52 a.m.

I thought of this because I bought a card the other day that had a drawing of a computer monitor above the words, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

I don’t know who said that, but it was not a daily newspaper hack.

We hackers – no matter my disguise today, I am and always will be a daily newspaper hack – can not afford to miss a deadline. Deadlines exist for good reason, sometimes ignored by artistes who believe they are a construct of wicked editors out to sabotage their art for the cackling good fun of it. Well, on deadline, I don’t want artists, I want mechanics. Get the thing done.

To miss a deadline is to make a page late. Then the presses start late, the trucks can’t get on the road without the papers, carriers stand around in the dark cursing because they can’t deliver the paper before everybody leaves for work, and, next thing you know, the industry is dead, finished, kaput, -30-, and will the last guy to leave the press box please turn out the lights?

OK, yes, of course, I exaggerate. I do it to make the point that it’s a better paper with your stuff in it than without. And anytime we can make today’s paper better than yesterday’s is a good day.

A hundred years ago, the New York Post columnist Milton Gross gave me the best piece of deadline-writing advice ever.

“Always be ready to write,” he said. We were at a heavyweight championship fight. “Be thinking, if this ends on the next punch, ‘What can I write?’”

That question works for everything. I have worked with one of newspapering’s best sportswriters, a brilliant, gifted guy. But it often was hours after the event before he could write. He tape-recorded everything. He made notes that filled pages. Then he transcribed the tapes and re-read the notes. He made the writing an act of masochism. He typed in five possible adjectives for every noun and then went back later to delete the four he didn’t need. If he ever filed on deadline, it was not in my presence.

He was never ready to write.

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