Geniuses will always return to their roots

In 1986, at the very height of his powers, John Schulian left his job as a sports columnist in Philadelphia to see if he could make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

It was like — fill in the blank with your favorite superstar, say Brad Pitt or Tom Brady or maybe Lady GaGa — just up and sashaying away in the prime of their career.

Because Schulian was good. How good? Good enough that The New York Times wanted him to be Red Smith's successor.

Know what he told them?

No.

He turned them down.

He was that good.

I knew of his prodigious talent not from hearsay but because I was also writing sports back then, living the dream, watching games and getting paid to do it, and when I heard that he was chucking it all to write movie scripts, with no guarantees, I gasped along with the rest of the sports writing fraternity.

What was he thinking? Newspapers fired you, not the other way around.

Of course he succeeded in L.A. He was top piranha there for a while. He worked for one TV series after another. Remember "Xena: Warrior Princess?" That was his baby. None of it existed until he first put it down on paper.

But sooner or later, the geniuses always return to their roots, and in Schulian's case I mean that in a literary way.

After all these years, he has returned to sports writing, and in very Hollywood-like style — with a re-release.

An anthology of his sports columns and feature stories, called "Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand," has been published by the University of Nebraska press.

The selected stories run the gamut from the very famous (Willie Mays and Muhammad Ali) to the very obscure (a boxing promoter named Paddy Flood and a high school basketball star shot to death named Ben Wilson). There's material from the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Daily News, Sports Illustrated, GQ, the Philadelphia Daily News — the many places Schulian labored.