What my golf coach taught me about writing

What a few decades — and many rounds of golf — with Rick Edmonds taught me about writing and teaching the craft

When my friend and colleague Rick Edmonds died after a traffic accident, I began to think about all the things I had learned from him: about the news business, about crafting clear sentences, about raising daughters.

Rick and I were good friends, but not close friends. Close friends share meals and have phone calls, sometimes late ones. They help each other solve personal problems. Rick and I did none of that.

We were contemporaries. Born a year apart. Graduated from college a year apart. Married a year apart, in unions that would last more than a half century. Over the last decade, we found ourselves sharing space in the Poynter library — his desk near mine, without the privacy of a door.