It's Friday night. Nearing 10 p.m., the time, when I was a kid growing up in Easthampton, The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports came on. The sport was boxing. Don Dunphy was the announcer. ABC knew what it was doing. They chose an Irish guy to mouth off about two guys beating the hell out of each other. Between the hour of 10 and the 11th hour on a night that was the period at the end of this sentence:

I worked my ass off all week and now I'm gonna have a few beers and relax, but I'm not real happy how that moron at the end of the bar is looking at my girl.

It's Friday night. There's a boxing match on ESPN 2. But I'm watching the Phoenix Suns beat up on the Spurs. I'm watching basketball. Professional basketball. The playoffs. Which is to the regular season what a walk in the park is to roller derby.

And I'm reading some old columns written by the late sportswriter, Red Smith. In one of these columns, the late Red wrote about the late sportswriter Jimmy Cannon.

Red wrote: " He ( Cannon ) could begin a column about a boxing match: ' Once, dreaming with morphine after an operation, I believed the night climbed through the window like a second story worker... The night had the dirty color of sickness and had no face at all as it strolled in my brain... ' "

You read stuff like that - if you fancy yourself some kind of writer - and you think: What's the use? Writing doesn't get any better than that.

Does it?