Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, 96-year-old Jack Miller looked back on a life well-lived. This week, Peter Richmond, 72, explains how switching careers gave his life renewed purpose.
I couldn’t make the roster of my fourth-grade basketball team, so I wrote about its games instead. Mrs. Shea let me use the mimeograph machine with the purple ink. I’ve always had a way with words, and a devotion to sports, so becoming a sportswriter seemed like a no-brainer. At Yale, I wrote for fringe campus journals because I wasn’t Yale Daily News material, then got a job covering a minor-league hockey team because I would have covered Roller Derby for a paycheck. After that, luck and fate were good to me. I covered five World Series in a row. Frank Gifford and I (well, me) wrote a New York Times bestseller. I spent 18 glorious months in the early 1990s writing for the sports journalism all-star team known as The National Sports Daily (edited by the legendary sportswriter Frank Deford), until it ran out of money and folded. But it landed me, in 1992, at 39, one of the great jobs in magazine journalism: staff writer at GQ.
It’s been well-documented, in The Free Press and elsewhere, how freely Condé Nast, which owned GQ, spent money during that gilded age. Over 13 years I more than contributed to the reputation.
But it wasn’t just $500 bottles of burgundy that made GQ a great place to be a writer. I profiled Muhammad Ali and Kobe Bryant, interviewed Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. My story about the tragic death, from AIDS, of Tom Lasorda Jr., son of the legendary Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, was deemed worthy by editor David Halberstam to be included in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century.
GQ’s greatest gift, though, was letting me stretch out and write stories that had nothing to do with sports. By my 40s, I needed to broaden my scope, so I went far afield, to the Solomon Islands and Barneys New York, telling tales that ranged from nuclear radiation to tailoring.
Another out-of-my-wheelhouse story was about how to age gracefully, assigned to me in 2002, right around the time I turned 49. Among my interviewees was 86-year-old Walter Cronkite, the retired CBS Evening News anchor; the main thing I recall about those liquid lunches was Cronkite remarking that the club we were dining in was no longer men-only. “Hear that?” he said, sipping a bourbon. “That high-pitched sound? Women’s voices. Didn’t sound like that before.” (It was innocently muttered, but it stuck with me.)
