Tom Henderson, author of "Boomer's Tale," is a Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame inductee, whose work has appeared in the Detroit Free Press, Crain’s Detroit Business and numerous publications, including Runner’s World Magazine.
His book is described in a press release as a "candid and often jaw-dropping memoir chronicling a life that spans sports journalism, true crime, addiction, redemption and a front-row seat to Detroit’s most colorful personalities.'
Chapter One
By Tom Henderson
I quit the Detroit Free Press in the spring of 1979, stressed out over the long hours required to cover two beats, regret at the sexual stupidity that had blown up my marriage, and needing to devotemore time and resources to buying and selling cocaine.
The author Tom Henderson
The fall of 1978, I had become the first Free Press sportswriter to be the beat reporter for the Detroit Red Wings hockey team and the University of Michigan football team at the same time. I also did travel pieces, movie and book reviews, and was the backup columnist to the two main sports columnists, filling in when they were sick or on vacation, being groomed to one day replace one of them.
At the end of that year, one of the Free Press’ librarians told me I had the most column inches published that year by any writer at the paper by far and more than anyone in years.
In those days, the librarians clipped stories out of the paper and put them in large envelopes. She said mine for the year was by far the thickest she had ever seen.
All that meant mostly seven-day work weeks the last four months of the year, job stress made exponentially worse by my pending divorce, and the woman I left my wife for (she was my wife’s best friend and my best friend’s wife) seemed about to break up with me, too.
Friday, Feb 12, 1982, I got a telephone call from Neal Shine, the managing editor of the Free Press, who one day would become the paper’s publisher. He was a beloved editor, arguably the most popular of any in the paper’s long history.
Neal Shine, my mentor and future publisher of the Detroit Free Press “Hey, Hendo, Shine here. Just read your piece. Great stuff. It’s going to have everyone talking. You sure you want to have a pseudonym on it?”
“Yeah.”
“It” was a first-person account of my cocaine addiction and dealing. While sitting on a hillside in Negril, Jamaica, the winter before, I had written a letter to Dave Lawrence, the Free Press’ executive editor. I told him I had a hell of a story for the paper’s Sunday Magazine, a first-person tale of cocaine excess.
He told the magazine editor to buy it. It told the tale of me repeatedly delivering large volumes of cocaine to professional poker players in Las Vegas, and of the rampant, frenetic drug snorting and dealing among reporters and editors at the Detroit News and the Free Press and on-air celebrities at one of the local ratings-giant rock and roll stations.
“There’ll be a lot more reaction if your name is on it,” said Shine. “People know who you are in town. Put your name on it, and it takes on a different life. Make it mean as much as you can. Be proud of it. Take ownership.”
“Easy for you to say,” I said.
“It is easy for me to say. It’s your call, obviously. But it’s good writing. You should claim it. It’s a better piece with your name on it.”
“Fine. Tell ‘em to put my name on it,” I said, and three days later, I left for Key West. I’d spend a few weeks sleeping on the beach there, then head north to Lakeland, Fla., the spring-training home of the Detroit Tigers, freelancing some baseball stories for the
Free Press and hiding out from folks in the cocaine trade.
The story, with my real name at the top, ran on March 7, 1982, the longest piece the magazine had ever run at 10,000 words and took up nearly the entire issue.
Doing me harm? Far more likely with my real name on the story. I had changed the names of everyone in the story, those selling me coke and buying. With my real name, people were going to be freaking out, and some of them were not characters I wanted worried that I’d give them up when the police came calling.
But that’s getting ahead of the tale. Other trips came first.
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