"Are you going to take credit for Drake hiring him?" he asked.

"Why do you ask?" I said.

"Because you wrote that the athletic director should see if Davis would be interested in retiring from his golf career so he could pump some life into the Drake program," he explained.

On April 11, after Kurt Kanaskie quit or was fired after seven seasons of losing basketball at Drake, I wrote this in a column about who should succeed him:

"Did someone mention Jim Harrick’s name?

The rest, as they say, is history. Last week—10 days after I suggested Davis’ name--I got a call from the famous "source close to the Drake scene" telling me that the man who is the winningest coach in University of Iowa basketball history--would be introduced as the Bulldogs’ coach the next day.

If I had anything to do with influencing Dave Blank to give Davis a call, fine.

Now, the rest is up to Davis. It’ll take a couple of years, but I think he’ll be a winner at a place that deserves one.

It’s been a long wait.

"Too much going on," I said. "Spring football came and went, Drake hired Tom Davis, the Drake Relays and the NFL draft were held and one or two people are getting excited about Tonya Harding bringing her boxing gloves to Osceola.

"Besides, the paper is too easy a target. I get lots of tips from reporters and editors who work there, and used to work there, about the goofy goings-on at the place.

"As usual, the best stories at the paper are those that never get into the paper. But, really, it’s a pretty pitiful scene at 8^th and Locust.

"I mean, when they start giving away the Sunday paper on Tuesday, when people can get a free paper by buying gas at a convenience store and when nobody wants the papers they’re trying to give away at the Iowa-Iowa State football game, it’s time to call the place a laughingstock."

"Laughingstock or not, people like to read that newspaper gossip," the guy said.

He’s probably right about that. The local paper has Rob Borsellino writing smart-ass stuff about people at the TV and radio stations, but never a word about the idiotic things that happen on the fourth floor at the paper—and, believe me, there are plenty of idiotic things. More on that later.

If Borsellino wrote smart-ass stuff about the paper, his bosses would make sure his next job was driving a pickup truck so he could deliver free papers to the next Iowa-Iowa State football game.

Maybe a better guess is that he’d find himself out the door and on the streets, begging his tiny pal to help him find another job.

So there’s certainly plenty of opportunity for me to write smart-ass stuff about the paper. And it just so happens that I’ve got a long list today. My sources have been busy. So here goes.

Evidently, a former editor and reporter at the local paper is still waiting for his excitement.

He sounded off on a few things with this e-mail.

"I got a good laugh out of Paul Anger’s column the other day announcing the latest changes in Datebook. He said a group of staffers got together to do the job and to ‘have fun’ doing it.

"Then he said that Diane Graham and Jeanne Abbott would lead the group. Now there are two people you certainly would want to have on hand when you are having ‘fun.’ Neither knows the meaning of the word.

"It seems they change the design of Datebook every couple of years and they make it harder to read each time."

If that’s not bad enough, they kept the old Datebook editor, the food-critic-who-isn’t-a-food-critic and Reel World [what the hell ever that is] in the so-called new Datebook.

Talk about bad writing and editing.

Where are Walt Shotwell and Bill Maurer when we need him?

I didn’t figure I could trust the guy, and it turned out I couldn’t.

Borsellino had noticed that select columns of mine are appearing on the WHO-TV website, and he was eager to find out what was going on.

So he e-mailed me, and I e-mailed him back. Then we talked on the telephone twice.

Among the things I mentioned to him on the second call was that I wasn’t happy with something he did four years ago when I retired from the newspaper business.

In May, 1999, he called me. I wasn’t home, so he talked to my wife. He said, "I think Ron got screwed by the paper and I’d like to write something about it. Have him give me a call."

On the "screwed" part, Borsellino was 100 percent correct. And he obviously was echoing the thoughts of many, many people. Certainly me.

When I got home, I called him and we talked a while.

"I’ll get back to you on this," he said.

Four years later, I’m still waiting for him to get back to me on that subject.

A couple of days later in 1999, Marc Hansen called me. He wanted to have lunch. Hansen is a man I worked with a long time and someone I trust. He wrote the Sunday column about my retirement, and did his usual superb job.

I didn’t hear from Borsellino again until after he was finally able to talk his way into another job at the local paper after apparently being thought of as some sort of secondary act in Florida.

After reading some of the stuff he’d been writing since his return, I criticized him in one of my columns for doing what I considered to be some shabby reporting work.

It turns out he’s also thin-skinned. He can dish it out, but can’t take it. No columnist can afford to be that way.

He e-mailed me to complain about the review I did of his work.

I also said I planned to continue doing the same thing he and every other columnist is supposed to do—express opinions.

A couple of former editors from the local paper e-mailed me recently about Borsellino. One said he’d like to sneak into the newsroom and steal the "I" key off of Borsellino’s keyboard, saying he couldn’t write a column without it. A second e-mailer agreed, then added that the quality of Borsellino’s writing had dropped since his return from Florida.

In our recent phone conversation, I couldn’t believe what I heard. When I told Borsellino I was unhappy he didn’t get back to me in 1999, he told me he couldn’t remember the call he made to my home or the follow-up call I made to him.

If that’s the case, he’s showing some serious signs of memory loss—and not the short-term variety.

What Borsellino hasn’t yet lost, thank goodness, is his ability to be an outstanding cheap shot artist. That was illustrated again in the column in which he mentioned—among others--Mike McPherson, Jimmy Lynch, Kathryn Prichard and me. Great stuff.

Now if somebody can just improve his reporting skills and do something about his memory problems, he has a chance to get off of Page 2 and into Hansen’s and John Carlson’s league.

Among the others were John Carlson, Lee Rood, Bill Reiter and Bryce Miller. No word on whether Diane Graham was a write-in candidate.

However, nothing has come of it—which shouldn’t surprise anyone. First of all, the paper waited too long to consider sending someone to Iraq. Hell, the war was about over when the boss finally woke up and got the idea.

But the clincher, I’m sure, was when the boss figured out how much money it was going to cost. The money factor is always decisive at that place.

Don’t forget, it’s the only paper in the nation that has a Sunday travel section with no staff-written stories. That’s because the bosses don’t want to pay for a tank of gas—and certainly not an airplane ticket and a McDonald’s lunch--to send a reporter on the road.

I know this. I’d have plenty of people eager to vote.

Poynteronline reports that the Cleveland Scene recently did a "Worst Columnist" poll and the runaway winner was David Giffels of the Akron Beacon Journal. But, sadly, Giffels declined to accept the award.

Borsellino’s recent work would certainly make him the leader in the clubhouse if such a poll were to be conducted in Iowa.

Another strong candidate would be the guy at the local paper who, after an event that started at 8 p.m., couldn’t get a column written in time so it could be put into the city edition, which goes to press at about 1 a.m. When the column finally ran, it was two days old.

That, folks, is horrible. I know some news editors who would have said, "Spike that damn thing!" [in other words, kill it] if the guy couldn’t get it done in time for the edition that is circulated in Des Moines and the suburbs.

People at the local paper tell me the guy frequently has big-time problems with deadlines, and has been warned by his bosses.

Too bad they didn’t assign her to the group that doesn’t know the meaning of the word fun and couldn’t bring Datebook back from the dead.

Also continuing to crank out good stuff is Tom Witosky, who is the paper’s best investigative reporter.

He wanted to become one of the sports columnists when Marc Hansen left that department, and I wrote that he deserved the opportunity. He may not be Grantland Rice or Red Smith, but the columns he’d write would fit in at the local paper.

After seeing what has developed since, the bosses made a bad decision by not giving him the job.

"How about that sports cover item on Hayden Fry?" he wrote in an e-mail. "It mentions Jerry Levias also being inducted into the Hall of Fame, but doesn’t link the two into the obvious lead on the story."

The man was referring to another huge oversight on the sports copy desk. Jerry Levias was the first black player in the old Southwest Conference, and he was recruited by Fry when he coached at Southern Methodist.

But evidently no one on the desk was aware that Fry recruited Levias or that Levias was the first black football player in the league. As far as the desk was concerned, they were just two guys named Hayden and Jerry.

In reference to the three referees, who looked like they came off the unemployment line and screwed up more calls than a guy in his first day as a cab dispatcher, I wrote:

The guy from the local paper made this comment: "Sounds like something Jim Bain might try."

Bain, you’ll recall, is the former Big Ten ref who called a phantom foul against Iowa a number of years ago that resulted in a loss to Purdue at West Lafayette, Ind., and sent then-coach Lute Olson into a rage.

After the Iowa-Purdue game, Bain hurried to Kansas City to referee a Big Eight tournament game that night.

Schweizer spent 35 years in various positions at Luther College. He had a 150-79-4 record in 26 years as football coach, also coached track, was athletic director, taught psychology and was dean of students.

"He was one of the good guys," my correspondent writes. "I sent you the item about him because I didn’t think you would read anything about his death in The Newspaper Southern Polk County Depends Upon."

Editor & Publisher reports that Kirk Anderson, the part-time editorial cartoonist at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, has been laid off.

The cause? The famous "budgetary reasons."

Isn’t that always the reason at newspapers?

The magazine reports that there are now fewer than 100 editorial cartoonists at daily papers in the U.S. because of budget problems or—and this is really sad—trying to avoid controversy.

"No more trips to Arizona or Europe and other places. You are going to have to start saving your money so you can afford to have an obit in the Register.

"Geez.

"Just look at any obit in the paper and count eight lines and you’ll see that they plan to get paid for every one they publish.

"By my calculations, the shortest obit in the paper today would cost nearly $40. Some would have cost more than twice that much. I wonder how they came up with the per-line cost.

"Obits used to be considered news. Not anymore. They are going to be handled by the advertising department and the buyer will control the content.

"But I’ll bet they are still listed as news on the web site.

"Another thing I’ll bet is the only reason they are putting them in all editions of the paper is because that will increase their chances to sell obits to people in the outer reaches of the state, too.

"Anything for a buck."

"All they have to do is fire Rob Borsellino and Rekha Basu," she explained of the husband-and-wife columnist team.

Not so fast on that. Borsellino and Basu got $80,000 salaries when they came to the paper. That’s paltry when compared to salaries of columnists at other papers the size of the one here.

Of course, the woman’s letter never appeared in the local paper. Those kind never do.

An e-mailer sent this:

"Every week after I read that section, I have to ask myself if Chad Graham and Dawn Sagario are as stupid as their columns. This week’s was the worst groaner of all.

"Chad can write some smart articles. I’ve seen them. However, I tend to flip the page when I see his byline now."

Well, I’ve got bad news for you. Graham [Chad, not Diane] has surfaced in the so-called new Datebook, which means you’ll have to flip even more pages now.