(January 4, 2010) I got the news during the first quarter of the Bears-Lions game Sunday.

''Dad has gone to the great typewriter in the sky,'' Marty Gleason said in an e-mail.

Marty is Bill Gleason's son, one of Bill's five children, and when we talked later, Marty was fine until he mentioned Bill's hospice request that there be no big Irish wake, no weeping and sadness, and that the legendary sportswriter's passing be celebrated next spring on the South Side with a jazz band, drinking and great merriment.

Funny how happy words can make a man break down.

Oh, Bill Gleason was unique and beloved. He must have been a wonderful father! He was a wonderful journalist, I can tell you that.

He lived life the way a poet/scholar mixed with a flamethrower might -- full of passion and truth-seeking and scorched earth all around.

World War II, in which he fought as a Browning rifle-toting soldier, and for which he was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action, was a seminal and philosophical time for him.

''I'm always amused when some 22-year-old starts telling me about the pressure at the free-throw line,'' Bill told me a while back. ''The free-throw line is not pressure. Pressure is knowing you may get your freaking head blown off. But even before the war, I never second-guessed myself. Even before Satchel Paige said, 'Never look back,' I knew something was gaining on me, and I decided to ignore it.''

'I'm not professional Irish'
He ignored it by following his own muse, by starting in the newspaper business as a teenager, staying in the racket for over a half-century and writing what he thought was right, anybody else's opinion be damned. He ripped Notre Dame so many times as a columnist, for instance, for so many perceived athletic venial and mortal sins, that he nearly had his Irish Catholic ancestry dug up and transferred to Lucifer's tree.

''I'm not professional Irish,'' Gleason explained one day at Miller's Pub, cigar clamped in the crook of his mouth, as usual. ''But I am professional South Side. It's all there. If it weren't for Wrigley Field, I rarely would have crossed Madison Street.''

When Gleason and producer John Roach asked me in late 1985 to be on their new and clearly absurd television show ''The Sportswriters on TV'' -- print and radio faces on screen? -- I was honored if dubious.

As Roach said of my addition to the group that included sports-talk founder Gleason, sportswriter Bill Jauss, and moderator and former ring announcer Ben Bentley: ''We need somebody without a prostate problem.''

For Gleason -- who had started in 1975 on WGN Radio with Jauss, Bentley and former Tribune writer George Langford arguably the first ongoing sportswriter round table in the history of global sportsdom -- having me, the Sports Illustrated kid, on his new show was merely a tip of the fedora to youth.

Gleason was opinionated, but he was not old-fashioned, even if he brought homemade bologna sandwiches on white bread to Bulls and Cubs and Sox and Hawks games, and ate them in the press box or at courtside and downed each meal with a single bottle of beer which he had transported into the arena wrapped in a long, white tube sock. Usually he tucked a white napkin into his shirt collar before dining.

Far ahead of his time
Gleason knew Ty Cobb. He watched Babe Ruth play.

He talked to athletes, ball boys, managers, owners. He never shied away from anybody or anything. If you were a coach or player and you had a beef with him or his writing, he was there to face you.

To hide behind your typewriter or hair gel was to be a coward of laughable proportions in Gleason's world. He'd drop the gloves, if you wanted that. A punch compared to a bullet? Ha!

Gleason saw sports develop from its mythic and under-reported early days to the point where -- hello! -- no amount of discussion or analysis of the events or their symbolism or ensuing gossip was too much. Indeed, his round-table shows were so far ahead of their time that they are still the blueprint for cutting-edge material in the electronic media. Blogs? Chat rooms? Gleason and Roach had fans come onto our show and sit with us -- live, on air -- and give their dot-com rants two decades before Twitter was a verb.

Gleason was already a legend when I was playing football at Northwestern in the early 1970s, and one afternoon, as he interviewed me in a coach's office, he stopped, puffed on his cigar and said after a time, ''You should be a writer.''

No one had ever said that to me before. I had never told anyone I wanted to be a writer. Encouragement, validation were what I craved. And Bill Gleason gave them to me.

There were his crazy Panamas and fedoras, his writing skills, his love for Bill Veeck, and his favorite word: ''singularity.'' Oh, and did I mention cigar smoke?

But I'll remember him for his kindness, his spirit, his wisdom, and his graciousness to a kid. Many times over.

To Marty Gleason, to all of Bill's family and friends, I say what you already know: We have lost a great one.

Our hats are tipped.