I knew from the time I was eight years old that I was going to be a writer. I don't really know where the idea came from. Most kids wanted to be a policeman, or fireman, or super hero, or a pro athlete. I knew I wanted to write. And eventually becoming a sports writer was inevitable, too, though I didn't know it at the time.

I grew up with a father who had been a good athlete and loved just about every sport. He took my brother Rich - two years younger - and me to all kinds of games. I vaguely remember being taken to a Cleveland Indians-New York Yankees doubleheader in the fall of 1948, when I was five. I don't remember the games, but I do have vivid memories of what seemed like millions of legs around me. That was obviously from walking up and down the huge ramps at old Cleveland Municipal Stadium with the crowd swarming around us.

There were football and basketball games and wrestling matches at West High in Madison, WI., where we moved when I was seven. There were football and basketball and baseball - yes, they still played baseball then - at the University of Wisconsin. We watched the UW hockey club team play at the ice rink at the Oscar Mayer meat packing plant before it became an intercollegiate team sport at the school. We even went to collegiate boxing matches at the UW before a tragic death ended that sport at the university.

And then there were the Friday night fights on TV. My dad loved boxing and he was crazy about Sugar Ray Robinson and Ezzard Charles. Who knew I would eventually get to write about and spend time with boxing greats like Muhammed Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard.

Of course, being huge baseball fans - dad briefly played in the minor leagues until he broke his ankle - there were trips to Milwaukee for Braves games and even occasional forays into Chicago to see the Cubs or White Sox.

Dad even let me skip school to watch the World Series with him on TV in 1956, and we were rewarded with seeing the New York Yankees' Don Larsen's perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

My best friend in junior high, Ralph Farmer, turned me into a St. Louis Cardinals fan. His dad worked for a Budweiser distributor and Ralph was a lifelong Cardinals fan. I remember playing catch in his driveway as the sun went down, straining to see the ball in the weak glow of a porch light and listening to Cardinal games on KMOX, being broadcast on his mom's car radio. Stan ``The Man'' (Musial) was our man.

It's funny, though, even as I told anybody that asked what I was going to be when I grew up that I was going to be a writer, I didn't really do any writing until I was in junior high. Until then, I was an avid reader, though. Chip Hilton, the Hardy Boys, Bronc Burnett, Sherlock Holmes and anything by Charles Dickens. I ate them up.

Finally, in eighth grade, I sat down and wrote a story about a cowboy rescuing a girl from a group of rustlers. I wrote it in longhand on a lined tablet and eventually showed it to Jack Reynoldson, my homeroom teacher, who also taught us English and Math at Cherokee Junior High. God bless that man, who I always considered the best teacher I ever had (he also moved with our class up to ninth grade and later was superintendent of schools in Madison). I'm sure the writing was awful, but he told me it was a good story, encouraged me to keep writing and show him my work any time.

There were occasional tries at writing after that, though they never went anywhere. But the first time I got paid to write was in the summer of 1961, between my high school graduation and starting classes at UW-Madison. I saw an ad in the Wisconsin State Journal for someone to write about City of Madison recreational softball games. I applied and, amazingly, got hired.

The job entailed driving to the downtown offices of the State Journal and Capital Times at about 10 p.m. on weekdays, picking up the box scores of that evening's games from a cardboard box in the lobby, deciphering the usually messy and often-beer-stained writing and putting out a short results story that appeared, unbylined, in both the morning and afternoon papers the next day.

It gave me the chance to sit in the newsroom of the State Journal, feeling like a real journalist for the first time. It was truly a labor of love, and it led to the State Journal hiring me during my freshman year in college as a part-timer in the sports department.

It was the first time I got to be around real journalists, and it was an eye-opener. Phones ringing constantly, deadlines to deal with, stories to write and edit. It was all very exciting.

By that time, I was also working as a manager for the UW football team. On the Saturdays when there was a home game, I would work the game and then head straight for the newspaper office, where it was my pre-computer-age job to put together the national scores. I would rip the scores off the AP and UPI wires as they came in, then alphabetize the scores by region - all done on a typewriter with lots of cut and paste (actually using a scissors and real paste). It was challenging, especially waiting for the west coast scores to come in sometime after 1 a.m.

It was the first step in what became the career that I dreamed of, even before I knew exactly what I wanted it to be.