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I was working as a sports editor in Corpus Christi when Mike Kahn called. It was one of the conversations you don't forget.

It was pure Kahnman, he was always thinking in grand visions and he was usually making a point, as he did on that occasion. It was through me that Mike came to join us at the Tacoma News Tribune when new ownership made the decision to go do battle with the Seattle papers on their turf.

I was attending a NFC championship game in Chicago when Mike walked up to me and introduced himself as a reporter from Fort Wayne. I'd never heard of him and, come to think of it, I still have no idea how he knew who I was, but he heard we were looking for reporters and he wanted to be a part of it.

Our first conversation was short, probably no more than an hour. If you knew Mike, you know exactly what I mean. He was like an ankle-biting mutt, each time I said something that could have suggested we needed to talk later he would throw something at me I couldn't resist talking about.

I swear it's the truth, flying back home to Seattle, I knew that wasn't the last time I'd be talking to Mike Kahn. I had no idea whether management would even talk to him, but we hit it off and I knew at the very least, I'd be talking to him again.

I didn't have the slightest idea he would become one my best friends, a reportorial brother, one of those few people you ever meet who always seems to understand where you're coming from and vice-versa.

Through me, Mike came to Tacoma. Through Mike, I came to Tacoma at the sportsline.com office there, from my job in Texas. There's the circle.

When he got to Tacoma, Mike and John Clayton and I bonded immediately. They were moving me off the Seahawks beat to a full time column and we hired Clayton at my suggestion after we met at Albuquerque at an NFL Player's Association meeting. This was a long time ago and it was considered a real scoop to get salary information. As it turned out, the Seahawks player representative gave me the complete list of every salary of every player in the NFL, complete with bonuses.

Once I shared it with Clayton, covering the Steelers at the time, everything fell into place. Clayton came to Tacoma to cover the Seahawks, Kahn became our Sonics reporter, then later we were able to hire the best college football writer on the West Coast, Don Borst, and we added Larry LaRue, a writer of beautiful baseball stories, to cover the Mariners.

We took on the world, or at least thought we did, and nobody loved the battle more than Kahn. We talked, it seemed, constantly about what we knew that the Seattle papers were doing and how we could attack and beat them. We analyzed the approaches of beat writers at those papers, acknowledged their strengths and searched for their weaknesses. Once we thought we discovered an opening, Kahn would go after it with everything he had, he would call anyone at anytime and he would not allow himself to get beat on anything having to do with the Sonics.

We traveled together and indulged our shared loves, music and food. Well, food, mostly.

All those times on the road, those memories of covering the Sonics in Houston when a player was arrested for a late night incident at a bar when the Sonics PR guy had taken a day off, will be with me forever.

If his wife JoAnn is like most wives, she may have wondered at times what we were doing out there on the road and I can tell her now, we were bad at times. Relax, it was all about food.

Something sparked with Kahn and me on the road and we would seek out great places to eat, and eat and eat. In Houston, for example, we always stayed at a place connected to a mall that housed a Marble Slab ice cream joint. I don't want to think about how many times we got back from a morning shootaround and before going up to our rooms to work we'd look at each other and a slow smile would emerge; we knew what each other was thinking and five minutes later we'd be wolfing down some exotic ice cream concoction.

I loved Mike so much it's hard to express. We saw the world in many of the same ways and while he was more involved in his faith, ours was the kind of relationship where you could throw us at any assignment together and we'd never step on each other's feet. We understood how fortunate we were to be involved in a profession we loved and more than that, to be able to get along so well with people we worked with so closely.

When the Seahawks came to Charlotte last year to play the Panthers, Mike stayed with Debbie and me at our place just down the road in Greenville, S.C. He was always trying to get me back to Seattle, which is something I've been trying to do, but these are not the good times they once were in newspapers.

There will never again be times as good as those heady, cocky, ass-kicking days in Tacoma when Mike Kahn led the way to our victories over the big city boys. Kahn loved to win those battles every bit as much as Clayton and I and those victories were never taken for granted; Mike knew each time he beat a Seattle paper they would be more determined not to let it happen again, but they were in a losing battle against this guy.

Mike was a winner. He showed us how it's done. He made us laugh and now his loss makes us cry

This loss is indescribable, but it's real and it hurts like hell. Not having him around leaves an aching hole that won't go away, but in another sense, I feel like he'll always be with me, like that circle he talked about is still unbroken.