My friend Johnny McGill died Saturday night. A little more than a year ago, we had met in Lexington and gone to the Kentucky-Tennessee basketball game together. We had a wonderful time, sitting in the upper pressbox and talking about old times. Over the years, no telling how many pressboxes we had shared, typing feverishly to meet unrealistic deadlines. Neither of us knew it at the time, but this would be the last one.

Only a few weeks later, John called to tell me that he had developed some physical problems. He went to the Vanderbilt University Hospital to have knee surgery for what he thought was bursitis. It turned out to be cancer. And so began a year of moving in and out of hospitals, getting treatments and surgeries, digesting news both hopeful and scary. But the cancer just kept spreading.

John’s dad and namesake, who died a couple of years ago, was a legendary sports writer, espeecially in Eastern Kentucky. Born in Olive Hill, the elder McGill became sports editor of the Ashland Daily Independent. He left there to become assistant sports editor of the Lexington Herald in the early 1960s, and succeeded Billy Thompson as sports editor in 1966.

The elder McGill was, well, different. He was maybe the most private person I’ve ever known. The only time I ever heard him raise his voice was when he got mad at us for playing “eraser ball” in the office when we should have been editing stories and writing headlines. Otherwise, Johnny’s dad would come and go quietly, almost like a ghost.

Johnny was never close to his dad. Nobody was. It didn’t help that Johnny turned out to be a more talented writer. His father was more of a stats guy, so his prose often was dry. But Johnny always deferred to his dad and liked to talk about the days in Ashland, when he would wake up and find the Harlem Globetrotters sleeping his living room. To his enternal credit, his dad was color-blind at a time when many Kentuckians weren’t.

The son inherited his father’s sense of justice and fairness. Johnny always pulled for the underdogs. He hated bullies and phonies. He always enjoyed the African-American athletes that he covered.

When the elder McGill became sports editor of The Herald, he named me his assistant. I was still in my senior year at Transylvania University, but I already was a veteran, having worked at the morning Herald or the afternoon Leader since the fall of 1959. Looking back, those were some of the happiest times in my life.

We had quite a sports staff. Ed Ryan went on to become the respected political editor of the Courier-Journal; David Vance became a pro basketball executive, then a racetrack executive; David “Butch” Thompson, son of Billy, has enjoyed a long career as executive director of the Kentucky Press Association; Mike Ruehling became a top aide to U.S. Senator Wendell Ford; and David Hawpe, who then assisted Bob Cooper in the Lexington AP bureau, became a big-shot executive at The Courier-Journal, where he’s still editorial director.

And then there were Johnny, Rick Bailey, and I, who decided to be ink-stained wretches, as Red Smith once called newspaper stiffs, for the rest of our lives.

Johnny was a sensitive soul and a gifted writer. He also was an astute gin-rummy player, as Hawpe discovered late one night in the AP office. As I recall, Hawpe ran up a big lead, causing him to light up a victory cigar, a la Red Auerbach. But Johnny came from far behind and won the game. Rather than eating his cigar, as he had promised, Hawpe fled into a stairwell where he cracked his head on a low-hanging pipe. We rushed him to the emergency room, bleeding profusely and cackling hysterically.

In the late 1960s, Johnny went into the U.S. Army and was sent to Vietnam. I never knew what happened to him over there because he never talked about it. But he was different when he came back. Gone was the happy kid who had followed me by a few years at Henry Clay High School. In his place was a troubled man given to spells of silence, sadness, moodiness, and even paranoia.

Still, Johnny could write like a dream. In the early 1980s, when he was working at the Herald-Leader and I was sports editor of the C-J, we hired him to cover University of Louisville sports and auto racing. Happy for awhile, he eventually became withdrawn and distant. Nobody ever knew what kind of mood he would be in on a given day. Once, U of L basketball coach Denny Crum called me and asked, “Why won’t John talk to me?” In my experience, it was the first and only time a beat writer ignored the coach he was covering.

After a few years, Johnny left us to join a car-racing magazine. He had become close to Danny Sullivan, the Louisville native who won the Indianapolis 500 in 1984, and he loved the fast-lane racetrack lifestyle. He wrote great stuff for the auto magazine, but left it to return to the Herald-Leader as a sports columnist.

He found a kindred spirit in fellow sports columnist D.G. Fitzmaurice, who always seemed able to make Johnny laugh when nobody else could. They shared the same sense of humor, the same cynicism, the same appreciation for all things wierd and wonderful. Shortly after Fitz decided to leave the business, I left the C-J and became Johnny’s co-columnist in Lexington.

We got along well, but it wasn’t the same. Johnny’s moodiness had returned. Some days he was the funniest guy in the office, others he would go weeks without talking to his colleagues, myself included, for reasons real or imagined. In the early 1990s, unhappy with his bosses, Johnny quit the Herald-Leader to become a free-lancer.

We didn’t see much of each other for many years. But that changed when Johnny’s father died and I wrote an obit about him for the Commerce Cabinet News Digest. Johnny saw it on the internet and wrote to thank me. We began talking, electronically, and both discovered we had regrets about the unfortunate turn our friendship had taken.

When we got together to work on the Kentucky Almanac for Clark Publishing, I was happy to see that Johnny again was fun to be around. The moodiness seemed mostly gone. He was working for the Kentucky League of Cities and doing freelance stuff on the side. He seemed happy with himself and his life. It was good to see.

When Johnny was disagnosed with cancer, we had been talking about doing some projects together. At first, he was optimistic that it had been caught in time, so we told each other that we would put off our projects until he got well. But he never got well. I wish I had saved the e-mails where he described the pain. But he always ended on a positive note. He thought about using his gift with words to do a book about his experiences in the hope it might help other cancer patients.

One day a few months ago, Johnny called to ask if I would give one of the eulogies at his funeral. “I don’t mean to be alarming,” he said. “Things are going pretty well and I don’t plan on checking out anytime soon. But, you know…” And, yes, I did know. He was hoping for the best but planning for the worst.

Tentative plans call for Johnny’s funeral service to be held at 10 a.m. Friday at the Lansdowne Presbyterian Church in Lexington. I suppose, in a way, that it’s fitting that Johnny die during March Madness, a season he relished during his writing days. He was there when UK won the 1978 national title in St. Louis, when U.S. Reed of Arkansas hit a halfcourt shot to eliminate U of L in 1981, and when Rick Pitino began rebuilding UK in 1989.

He loved his hoops, as most Kentuckians do.

The night we went to the UK-Tennessee game, Johnny listened patiently while a pro scout ticked off all the reasons that the Vols’ Chris Lofton, a Maysville native, couldn’t make it in the NBA. Johnny listened quietly, not saying anything. When the guy finally walked off, Johnny chuckled.

“All he can do is put the ball in the basket,” he said. “That’s still the point of the game, isn’t it? To score more points than the other guy?”

We laughed at the silliness of it all, tossed down some pressbox popcorn, and went out to watch the last half of college basketball that Johnny McGill, gifted sportswriter, would ever see in person.