Michael Wilbon of 'Pardon the Interruption' pens goodbye letter to his Washington Post readers

"Pardon the Interruption" star Michael Wilbon publishes his farewell column in the Washington Post.

Everybody in the sports world knows Michael Wilbon. He's the ying to Tony Kornheiser's yang on "Pardon the Interruption," the fast-paced ESPN show that features two of the most literate and opinionated columnists in athletics.

Oftimes, Wilbon comes off as the calmer of the two, with Korneiser's penchant for rants that make him sound like a saner but no less striden Skip Bayless (and yeah, we're name-dropping to beat the band here; so what?).

Wilbon has been a sportswriter and columnist for the Washington Post for 31 years. Today, he writes his final column. He's devoting himself full-time to ESPN.

Here's an excerpt from that farewell column:

There's no "favorite" or "best" interview, no "greatest" game because there were simply too many, thousands of each, over the years. But there is a favorite moment: Aboriginal hero Cathy Freeman winning track and field gold in the Sydney Olympics in 2000, leaving me to write through tears the only time in my career.

There is a favorite athlete: Michael Jordan, because he had and continues to have the greatest impact on the culture of sports since Ali and because, as Scott Turow wrote, "Michael Jordan played basketball better than anyone else in the world does anything else."

There is a biggest influence outside the profession: Coach John Thompson, whose 2 a.m. return phone calls would often begin with, "You want to sleep or you want a scoop?" and evolve into 90-minute conversations that usually had nothing to do with the Hoyas but everything to do with what was right or wrong with the world.

And most definitely there was and is a most important story in my career: the death of Bias, a young man with godly physical talents who was so much more than a headline to me because I covered just about every game he played his first two years at the University of Maryland. My friend Jay Bilas observed a few years ago that those of us of a certain age mark time with Bias's death the way the generation older than us does with the death of John F. Kennedy - and Bilas wasn't exaggerating.

Wilbon also talks about spending time at the home of Browns great Jim Brown:

I don't recall ever being told "no" if I wanted to write about something, even when it had little to do with sports. Probably my favorite enterprise assignment, one I viewed skeptically in the beginning, was going with Dave Sheinin to Los Angeles during the riots in the aftermath of the Rodney King drama in 1992 to try to find out whether there was any correlation between the decrease in funding for community programs related to sports and recreation and the increase in gang-related activity in the city.

Oh, yes there was a correlation. Kids who wanted to be running backs, center fielders, sweepers and shooting guards had become, largely through civic neglect, gang leaders. There was nothing quite like being invited one night to the Hollywood Hills home of the one and only Jim Brown to join members of the Crips and Bloods who had accepted his invitation to stop the violence for at least one night to talk about their differences.

Don't get me wrong; I loved covering some of the greatest events of the end of the 20th century, like the game where Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig's streak for consecutive games played. But the stories like the one in Los Angeles were the ones that separated The Washington Post from 99 percent of daily newspapers, and those issues were the ones that began to reshape the discussion of sports in America, the ones that led people to look to columnists essentially as discussion leaders. The complex stories, the ones that made people examine their own values and beliefs, were so far removed from box scores and game analysis, but they now drive viewership and readership.

It's a good column, not sad but poignant and honest. Pretty much as Wilbon's writing has been all these years. For Starting Blocks, the sadness is in knowing that we won't be able to online and read a Wilbon Washington Post column.

Good luck, sir.