Herb Gould began his professional sporting career as a caddie at Briarwood C.C. in Deerfield, Illinois, where his deft reading of greens helped his team capture a Calcutta and earned him a $50 tip. Good but not great. In 1969, he was called up by the Cubs, where he sold peanuts/red hots/etc. and occasionally helped the ground crew pull the tarp. Not even Gould could help the Cubs win anything, but the tips were better.
Moving into the newspaper business after college (Wisconsin and Northwestern), he joined the Chicago Daily News, which closed within a year. Being versatile and low-paid, he was picked up by its sister paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, which also retained the services of several other members of Mike Royko’s softball team. (Purely a coincidence.) While he was on that team, it reached the finals of the prestigious Tournament of Champions in Chicago’s Grant Park, but succumbed in the finals to the CTA team and nightly carousing. Ironically, the transit workers were very fast—on the base paths. Predictably, the Sun-Timesmen tended to linger in the tavern.
After working as a news editor, cityside reporter and feature writer, Gould moved to sports in the mid-80s, in time to cover the Cubs’ playoff meltdown of 1984 and the Bears’ Super Bowl triumph of 1985. Since then, he has chronicled the ups and downs of Notre Dame, the Chicago Blackhawks and the University of Illinois, and has been the Sun-Times’ senior college writer for nearly two decades.
He also has written about golf extensively, from major championships to touring in Ireland, and skiing.
He is the author of Victory March, a recap of Notre Dame’s 1988 national championship, and a variety of unpublished tomes, including a history of the radio and press coverage of D-Day, and several novels and meandering works of fiction/nonfiction.
