Thompson’s Journey Led Him Back to ‘Gonzo’ Gig

There’s nothing wrong with golf, Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his final column for ESPN.com last week, that couldn’t be cured by a blast of double-aught buckshot.

“Shotgun Golf,” Thompson called his invention, a new sport for the masses that combined the fine arts of golfing and shooting and was destined, he believed, to rule the world.

The objective of Shotgun Golf, Thompson said, “is to shoot your opponent’s high-flying golf ball out of the air with a finely tuned 12-gauge shotgun, thus preventing him [your opponent] from lofting a nine-iron approach shot onto a distant ‘green’ and making a ‘hole in one.’ Points are scored by blasting your opponent’s new Titleist out of the air and causing his shot to fail miserably. That earns you two points.

“But if you miss and your enemy holes out, he [or she] wins two points when his ball hits and stays on the green.

“And after that, you trade places and equipment and move on to Round 2.”

Thompson figured Shotgun Golf would “mushroom or mutate -- either way -- into a real craze. And given the mood of the country, being that a lot of people in the mood to play golf are also in the mood to shoot something, I think it would take off like a gigantic fad.”

It was classic Thompson: crazed, wired, funny, framed around a 3:30 a.m. phone call with Bill Murray that may or may not have really happened -- and inarguably a better idea for NHL replacement programming than celebrity poker and round-the-clock reruns of “The Best Damn Sports Show Period.”

It also will be remembered as Thompson’s ultimate foray into black humor, given the events of last weekend.

On Sunday at his home in Woody Creek, Colo., Thompson, 67, committed suicide by shooting himself.

His profession at time of death: sportswriter.

That wasn’t quite how we expected Hunter to go out. As a result of a self-inflicted gun wound? OK, that was always plausible, even likely. But as a sportswriter? As a member of the “rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks whose only real function is to publicize and sell whatever the sports editor sends them out to cover,” as Thompson famously wrote in the early 1970s?

Actually, there’s a weird symmetry to Thompson shutting it down as a sports columnist for ESPN’s website, for which he had worked, on a semi-regular basis, since late 2000. The cult of Thompson rose from the addled ashes of a failed sportswriting gig, an assignment to cover the Mint 400 desert motorcycle race that launched his gonzo manifesto, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

Before ESPN, Thompson dabbled in sportswriting often enough to get under its skin, electrical-prodding such sacred cows as the Kentucky Derby and the Super Bowl and annoying the media establishment entrusted with maintaining those reputations. This is Thompson on Super Bowl week:

“For eight long and degrading days I had skulked around Houston with all the other professionals, doing our jobs -- which was actually to do nothing at all except drink all the free booze we could pour into our bodies, courtesy of the National Football League, and listen to some of lamest and silliest swill ever uttered by man or beast.”

Thompson wrote those words in 1974. Thirty-one years later, only the game’s site has changed.

Reporting on that same Super Bowl, Miami over Minnesota, Thompson groused about the game’s plodding pace by setting his sights on the greatest NFL icon of all.

“[The] gig is over now, and I blame it on Vince Lombardi,” he wrote. “The success of his Green Bay approach in the ‘60s restructured the game entirely. Lombardi never really thought about winning; his trip was not losing.... Which worked, and because it worked the rest of the NFL bought Lombardi’s whole style: Avoid Mistakes, Don’t [Mess] Up, Hang Tough and Take No Chances....

“Because sooner or later the enemy will make a mistake and then you start grinding him down, and if you play the defensive percentage you’ll get inside his 30-yard line at least three times in each half, and once you’re inside the 30 you want to be sure to get at least three points....

“Wonderful. Who can argue with a battle-plan like that?”

Certainly no one in today’s NFL, now ruled by a New England Patriot team that has won three of the last four Super Bowl by abiding by pretty much the same strategy.

Thompson’s work for ESPN was erratic but typically cantankerous, wild shotgun blasts of keyboard-driven invective aimed at the NFL, the NBA, boxing, baseball and the Bush administration, sometimes all in the same column. A collection of Thompson’s ESPN columns was printed last year, and the title fairly represents the tone and the sprawling territory covered within: “Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.”

Some viewed Thompson’s alliance with ESPN as a sellout, an easy paycheck. Others saw it as an ingenious guerrilla tactic. It was nothing less than amazing to read Thompson hammering away at the “Profoundly criminal Bush conspiracy” on the same Disney-owned website devoted to plugging “Dream Job” and polling fans about the “hottest female athlete.”

Thompson took John Kerry’s election defeat hard, having predicted in a Nov. 2 column that Kerry would defeat George Bush “handily.” Thompson was depressed about the result, but enough so to kill himself? According to various reports, Thompson was troubled about his health, suffering from chronic back pain and the aftermath of hip replacement surgery and a broken leg.

Thompson was cremated Tuesday, and friends are trying to fulfill his request that his remains be blasted out of a cannon. Really. It will happen, friends say, assuming they can get legal clearance -- and find a cannon.

In the meantime, which programming-starved network takes the first shot at Shotgun Golf?