Chuck Culpepper@ChuckCulpepper1
So on the 4,167th and final day of a job so exhilarating that I'd swear at least 4,000 of the days qualified as very good or better, the coffee came with whooshing thoughts of the 11 years and the four months and the 27 days.
The brain tore through the datelines from 17 countries and 43 states, the three World Cups, the four Olympics, the 10 tennis majors, the 20 golf majors, the 11 men's Finals Four, the 28 College Football Playoff games, the 10 Kentucky Derbys, the tour of Jordan-Oman-Kuwait-United Arab Emirates, the 46 days in the peerless Australia -- I mean, come on, really? -- the depth of the beauty of South Koreans, and those times when I looked in the mirror (briefly) and saw a lunatic.
Maybe the looniest would be covering a game in Seattle on a Friday night, then a game in Clemson on that Saturday night (with Lamar Jackson on the field looking even more dizzying than usual). Or was it the Boise on a Friday night, the students swimming into the frigid river for a goal-post chunk after midnight, then the one hour of sleep, then the Indianapolis on a Saturday night? No, wait, wait, it had to be this: Novak Djokovic winning the French Open in Paris on Sunday early evening, then U.S. Open golf preparations starting on Tuesday . . .
. . . in Los Angeles.
Non-deranged people might find such a sequence unfair; for whatever metabolic reason, I just kept giggling.
Well, something surpassed all of that, somehow. To be part of the Washington Post Sports department was to be a part of an exemplary human experience, a rarefied collegiality, a beacon of collaboration and a near-bewildering scarcity of envy. For just one thing, I never, ever thought, way back last century, that I'd inhabit a world and a staff where everyone would treat my husband as one of the group, where a deputy sports editor would say, in a kitchen, near the end of a holiday party, "Alfonso! Come over here and hug me!" All of it reinforced that on the medal stand of life, human collaboration deserves a spot and maybe even the gold, for its curious capacity to bolster seemingly all 35 trillion of our cells.
I love these forever teammates all so much it probably annoys them, and they call to mind a relic of a show always worth unearthing. It's Episode 168 of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," the episode she titled, "The Last Show," when the WJM newsroom staff works a final news show and has a last group hug, and Mary wishes to emote, and Lou wishes not to emote, but then Mary gives a stirring speech and then the ever-gruff Lou relents and, in a quaking voice, says something resonant all the way clear into February 2026:
"I treasure you people."
