"Fred Exley was maybe the most difficult writer I ever dealt with. He was such a drinker that by nine in the morning he’d be totally drunk. He was also one of those guys who wanted to argue about every change. He wrote a piece for Inside Sports about his relationship with his high school coach. Really nice piece. You couldn’t tell if it was a short story or a reported piece and we didn’t claim it as either one. The piece comes in, it’s about 6,000 words long and Walsh tells me to cut it to four and I say, “John, this is a short story by one of America’s greatest writers. You don’t cut it.” Walsh insisted that we make the cuts.
"So in order to do the piece I had to get up at seven for a couple of months and call Exley. I could hear him getting drunk on the phone and I’d argue about the story and the cuts with him. By nine he was totally out of it."
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