I think the person who led me to distrust authority was Richard Nixon. In my formative years, I trusted him, and then I found out he was lying about almost everything. In high school, I became obsessed with reading everything I could find about Nixon and I devoured everything from Jeb Stuart Magruder’s One Man’s Road to Watergate to Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight. They all pointed in one way or another to Nixon being a rat.

There are, of course, those who still like him. Their sons and grandsons – and let’s not leave out daughters and granddaughters – invaded the Capitol. This could be a slight exaggeration.

Then, in college, there were still two politicians, President Jimmy Carter and Governor Dick Riley, whom I deeply admired and still do. I watched as Carter tried to do what was right and found out the hard way that it had nothing to do with running this country.

Somewhere along there, it became impossible for me to imagine being a lawyer and running for Congress and becoming president by the time I was 40.

Thus did I flee to sports writing, a safe harbor in which I still weigh anchor.