If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough.
- Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
They found him in a refugee camp in Tibet. Twenty-two. Six-and-a-half feet tall. An Aspen native, he had spent a year studying with monks in South Asia, of course, preparing to write about prep sports and mountain-town extreme athletes in this start-up sports rag offshoot of the Aspen Daily News..
He arrived on a BMW motorcycle last summer, his face torn and blistered from riding his hog to Aspen under an unforgiving desert sun.
For the first issue, he went basejumping with Dav. Then he chronicled Aspen High's almost-Cindarella football season. And followed the Roaring Fork b-ballers to the state championship tournament.
Along the way, he peppered his sports prose with buckets of 10-cent words and literary allusions - sort of like a younger, less-aggro Jim Lampley.
And, now, after a year, the editor of this nascent valley institution, Jonathan Bastian, will get back on his motorbike and ride into the sunset, handing over the Roaring Sports reins.
The blonde-haired boy allowed me an unusual breadth of creative freedom on this column page. Under his editorial guidance, I could cuss, I could and did write about crack and pre-op trannies and prominently quoted Inspectah Deck on "porno-flick bitches."
If the sportsworld muse failed me, I didn't even have to write about sports. Which is rare in the sportswriting game.
I recall one stressed-out afternoon - nearing the deadline hour - I went into the sports suite of the Daily News building. Bastian was sitting in lotus pose on a woven Tibetan prayer mat, chanting oms with a sepia scroll rolled out before him.
His spine was straight and his eyes were closed.
"Yo, J.B. Got a sec?"
His eyelids slowly rose and a smile crept onto his face.
"My friend. Come. Sit."
"I've got nothin', man," I pleaded. "No column ideas this week. You got anything?"
He was silent for a few seconds. Then: "When the conch shell is clogged, it is best to blow through it."
"Of course."
"Andrew. Liberate yourself from this mire of cyclic existence. Only then is true compassion possible."
"Oh, yeah, yeah. Thanks, boss. What're you doin' for this week's issue?"
"The Basalt High girls volleyball team is facing a dire challege from the Aspen Skiers."
And such was life at Roaring Sports over this past year.
For the last few months, the Talented Mr. Bastian has lived out a Han Shan-like existence in an abandoned mining cabin up in Lenado, without electricity or plumbing.
For a while, though, we were co-caretakers at a ranch outside town. It was isolated and quiet, and may have struck outside observers as a bit Brokeback.
But for two young writers searching for their voices, it was an ideal setup. We'd sit in the kitchen late into the night, cracking Flying Dog ales and passing books between us, talking about how to tell a good story, reading aloud from T.S. Eliot and Thomas Wolfe, scouring thesauruses for new words ("'Protuberant,' wow, that's hot shit." "How 'bout 'lithe' - like a 'lithe dancer?'").
Bastian is, as the bard said, one who worships language and forgives all by whom it lives.
My guess is that the lanky bastard will put his stamp on the world of American letters somewhere down the line. Failing that, his polysyllabic sportswriting will always have a home in these ragged pages.
Andrew Travers will continue writing his column under the new Roaring Sports administration. Keep his feet to the fire at andrew@aspendailynews.com
