There was a time when Harvey Mackay and a sports columnist with the modest podium of the St. Paul Dispatch were at opposite ends of most sports issues.
There was the whole moving Gophers football to the Metrodome thing, where I was aligned with vocal opponent Bill Semans, and Harvey and the group then referred to as the Big Cigars of downtown Minneapolis were determined to make it happen.
They won, of course, and then a couple of years later Harvey and some cigars were able to make the deal to bring Lou Holtz to town as Gophers football coach.
Five minutes into his first news conference, Holtz was sounding as if he had arrived in Minnesota with Father Hennepin. Lou was so over the top that he soon was being referred to in those St. Paul columns as "the Music Man."
A promotional outfit came up with the idea of having a Lou Holtz look-a-like contest. One weekend night, I convinced the gent putting together the sports section that we should run a photo of Robert Preston with a Goldy Gopher decal on his Music Man hat as my candidate to win the contest.
This gave me quite a hoot, until being called into the office of feisty editor Deborah Howell the next day. "We don't alter photographs," said Howell, with fist-pounding on her desk included.
There was enough back-and-forth with Mackay in those days that later, in one of his post-Swim With the Sharks books, Harvey mentioned seeing the eventual grimace on my oval mug as his inspiration during the darkest days of the political fight to build the Metrodome.
Proud as I was of that passage, it actually was my radio partner Joe Soucheray, then of the Minneapolis Tribune, who wrote all the anti-Dome columns when the battle was being fought in the late '70s. It was the Gophers leaving Memorial Stadium that had me pounding out anti-Big Cigar columns.
