News' Hamilton a true pioneer

Some days I wish I could stop the relentless march of time.

My children are outgrowing me. My dog is developing arthritis. My grandfather is becoming forgetful. And my parents, well, they're just getting old.

And now I must face the loss of Linda.

It is difficult to believe that Linda Hamilton is no longer a full-time sportswriter at the Deseret News. The first woman sportswriter in Utah, her presence in our newsroom and on our staff is for me like the sunrise or the North Star. It is the way I know there is still order in the world, that chaos has not yet consumed civilization. I just have to look around the press room and there is Linda, notebook in hand, and I can exhale.

And as disconcerting as the possibility of no sunrise or a fallen northern guide, I find the future of sportswriting without my friend and mentor who retired July 31.

I first worked with Linda when I was assigned to cover a Grizzlies hockey game in 2000.

I was a news reporter who thought I might try my hand at sportswriting. After all, I'd played about every sport imaginable, how hard could covering games be?

Linda had been the Grizzlies beat writer, something she juggled with gymnastics and University of Utah football, softball and volleyball coverage. I didn't dare tell her I had to buy "Hockey for Dummies" to brush up on my hockey rules, but she didn't even ask me what I knew anyway. She did what Linda always does, she explained the organization, who the best interviews were, how to decipher the standings and who their big rivals were in the league.

Oh, and then, without ever changing gears, she said how great it was to have someone help her. She left me one starry-eyed, very grateful dummy.

Linda is one of those tough-on-the-outside, sweet-as-sugar-on-the-inside people. She's not given to sentimentality the way I am, and she doesn't ruminate on the meaning of her trailblazing career.

"I guess it was unusual," is her response to my questions about her doing what no woman in Utah had done before her.

She started her career at the Chicago Day Publications just as publishers there were trying to cover the suburbs of Chicago with a daily paper that would be distributed with the Chicago Daily News, an afternoon paper struggling to survive. It was the mother-of-all zoning efforts, and she got a job right after graduating from Northern Illinois in 1967. She started as a courier and then sold classified, for "about 15 minutes," and then she started writing part time for the suburban papers.

"They liked what I was writing so they created a position for me," she said. "Three days a week on the news desk and two days as a sportswriter. Six months later I was the sports editor."