Sporting Life's writer: Honorary good ol' boy

Jim Chapman

Or maybe it was a photo of an arm or leg all busted up. Probably from the legendary rodeo bull ride.

Something was banged up, that part I remember.

Washburn has pulled off risky feats in his tenure as a columnist, involving things like ice-climbing, hand-grabbing catfish, nude volleyball, sky-diving and bull-riding. There's often some heinous consequence if his column research goes awry ... a sharp horn, a long drop, a lost finger, etc.

And now he's heading for China to teach English. Say what?

At first, in the newsroom, we didn't quite know what to make of his announcement. Had he crashed one mountain bike too many?

Understand, newsrooms are like big dysfunctional families. We try to accept each other's eccentricities in the nail-biting enterprise called a daily newspaper.

The paper business is much like the process of making homemade sauerkraut: Few are enthusiastic about the prospect. It's tedious, messy and you come out of the kitchen bleary-eyed.

Yet, Dan, in his almost four years here, has made the process much more interesting with his collection of often oddball stories.

And being a Northerner, he has taken to the South like no Northerner I've ever seen.

He should probably be made into an honorary good ol' boy.

Maybe we could take him down to Lula Bridge Park and dunk him in a barrel of luke-warm lard and have him read some lines out of a James Dickey poem while Wilson Pickett howls in the background. And get him a certificate with a hound dog's footprint stamped on it to make it official.

Unlike some visitors to our area, Dan has embraced the full-tilt lunacy of the Old Southern ways with nary a sneer.

He never fails to make friends with colorful characters. People like "Freight Train" Mills of the Redneck Games in East Dublin, for example, seem to open up to Dan.

As a writer, Dan has a keen ear for the strange music of living.

And as a fellow columnist, I'm sad to see him go. Sad to see the carnival tent fold up on a really good column. And that's what a columnist really is, in my mind, like a sideshow.

A little sideshow to the big news show that you duck into briefly to get another take on the matter.

With Dan, he's willing to go down roads the rest of us might shudder to risk traveling.

As the world shapes itself into a committee-driven, homogenized and bland drill where everyone willingly climbs into the cookie mold and takes the heat until he is baked into a cinder, Dan reminded us to lighten up.

And maybe that's the nut. Maybe taking an occasional walk on the wooly side keeps us sane and unbaked in some way.

The committees will never buy into that logic. But ... ah ... the rest of us know the truth, eh?

So thanks, Dan. Keep your chin in the wind and plenty of bandages in your shaving kit.

Godspeed, you right honorable good ol' boy.

Jim Chapman is presentation editor and columnist for The Times. He also writes "Hometown Artists" a column that runs bi-monthly in the Weekends section. E-mail: jchapman@gainesvilletimes.com.