300 words a day and every last one of them counted

Some of Clay Thompson’s former colleagues are writing this week about their memories of him.

Reporter Richard Ruelas worked with Clay going back to their days at the Phoenix Gazette. This space holds about 300 words. Maybe as a high-school student, you had to write a 300-word essay. And after every sentence or so, you would stop to check how many words you had left to go. And, if you were out of steam and still short of the required word count, you would sprinkle in some adjectives, hoping the teacher would believe you were being sincere in calling something very, very important.

Clay Thompson didn’t treat this space that way.

His columns might have read as if they were tossed off the top of his head without much effort. In truth, there was a lot of craftsmanship behind the paragraphs. That it appeared effortless was a sign of how well their creator mastered the written word.

“Words are my business, kid,” Thompson would say after a reporter — usually me — sat agog looking at how he had transformed a story.

Since 2000, this column was his business. And he tended to it well.

Every so often, the newspaper’s masters would bring a consulting group into the Dark Tower. They would trot out results of the fictions readers answered when queried in surveys.

I often wondered how a focus group would respond to a description of Thompson’s column. Would you read a column that provided random bits of trivial information, sometimes wrong, and frequently mocked you for reading it?

The survey answer would be: no. In reality, the answer was yes. Hundreds of times over 18 years, yes.

Thompson died Sunday. He wasn’t able to fill this space today with carefully chosen words. His “masters” have decided to let some of his newsroom friends use this space for the next few days to write about him.

I’m the first out of the gate. And, for that, I feel very, very humbled.