The best thing was that I got to speak with Mike Lupica, which was a good thing because I greatly admire his writing, and really, really respect his hustle.
And he is definitely a hustler in the finest tradition of my old man, who might still hold the modern record for holding any job, doing any type of gig, in his never-ceasing pursuit of yet another buck.
Lupica calls his job as a sportswriter for the New York Daily News simply his day job.
In addition to the day job he has held for more than 30 years, the man writes non-fiction books, co-anchors “The Sports Reporters” on ESPN, has written for numerous magazines and has been a regular on radio and on more morning TV shows than he can recall.
What he now calls his passion, what he hopes they put on his tombstone when the time comes, is what brings him to Denver on Tuesday.
“I love being a guy who gets kids to read,” Lupica said in a interview. “There is no cooler thing in the world.”
He writes young-adult novels now, an avocation that he says completely snuck up on him on the day, several years ago, when one of his boys and his buddies got cut trying to make their seventh-grade travel basketball team.
He gathered the kids who were cut and started his own team, which he coached. These kids were horrible at first, he recalls, but they never quit, never lost their love for the game or had a better experience in sports.
A month after the season, he wrote “Travel Team,” a young-adult novel about the experience that became a New York Times best seller.
He will be at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Lower Downtown at 5 p.m. Tuesday to promote his latest young-adult novel, “Million Dollar Throw,” the tale of young, football-obsessed Nate Brodie, whose father is unemployed and whose best friend is facing the challenge of her life. Nate wins a chance to throw a pass through a target at a New England Patriots game for $1 million.
His publisher, as part of the book promotion, is staging the Million Dollar Throw Contest, in which any kid who can throw a football through a target from 15 yards away will get a chance at $1,000 at the book signing.
“In the book, Brodie has to do it from 30 yards,” Lupica said. “We figured that was a bit too much.”
The first 200 kids at the Tattered Cover will get throw tickets.
There was nothing he ever thought would be better than writing a sports column, Lupica said as we put business aside and began chatting.
After “Travel Team,” he said, books became his passion, as he discovered that young people, like everyone, love a good story.
What he learned in this line of work, he said, is that everything he thought about kids and reading was wrong.
“What is not declining is children reading books,” he said. “What I’ve found is I can’t write down to them, I’m writing up. There are few people more hip, knowledgeable and aware than young people. You have to keep up.”
Does he still like the task of column writing? He thinks about it awhile.
“I can tell you this. When I get up in the morning and sit down to write my novels, I can make sports and the world come out exactly the way I want it. I can’t do that with my column.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
