2005 has been a bad year for just about everything in sports.

Baseball is slowly spiraling into the orbit of a juggernaut named steroids. The men's basketball team seems finally to be coming down from 2003. Worst of all, my role model, freelance sportswriter, political reporter and "gonzo journalist" Hunter S. Thompson, shot himself two days ago.

To characterize my relationship with Thompson's writings, and in turn, give shape and form to a day that certainly feels worse than the day I found out that Kurt Cobain had opted for a similar legacy, you'll have to understand where I'm from.

Watertown is a small town. There isn't much to do on the weekends if you're a high school student, much less if you're the kind of bitter cynic that I was in high school. I won't go into detail; it suffices to say that petty vandalism, given enough time and practice, gradually evolves into an art form that eats up countless hours of otherwise dead time.

In countless ways, shapes and forms, average blue-collar folks tried to thwart the antisocial escapades of my high school drinking buddies and me. To us, they weren't average or blue collar at all; they were the worst grotesque monsters that Ralph Steadman could ever have penned in eye pencil for Rolling Stone. We were relatively young and desperately stupid, and we were fighting what we saw as the power.

It was there, where I have officially lived for only six years, (but which seems to me to be the place I am from, if anywhere) that I first discovered the cult stoner classic that ushered countless generations of American public high school students through their fickle experimentation with illegal drugs; "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas"

It was Thompson that first put a name on what I wanted someday to be, long before I knew how. I knew when I had finished the book, and assorted other works, that I wanted to be a journalist. What was more, I knew after I read "Fear & Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" that I wanted to be a political journalist. It was after "Fear & Loathing at the Superbowl" that I knew I could write sports if I had to.

Thompson was the guiding force behind a lot of my writing career. In his guidance and untimely demise, there's something to be said about self-expression and destruction and the blurry line that separates the two.

I'm a little bit older and little wiser than I was then, and I've put the drugs, and a lot of the other eccentric, more self-destructive behavior behind me, but the nihilistic desire to self-express, to put into concrete words what is at first abstract and ethereal, persists. It's the last of the legacy that Thompson left with me, and I wear it, like my silly hat, proudly.

As Hunter S. would write, Mahalo.

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on Feb. 22 2005.,”Brian O'Connor”

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