Mike Lopresti is one of my favorite sports journalists, as well as one of the best sports journalists in the United States over the past 30-some years.

We go way back. I met him no later than 1980, and I tried to hire him a few years later — just before he and I and a bunch of other Gannett employees went off to Washington ahead of the start-up of USA Today — which I was not around for, but he was.

In 1984, he and I were among the group of seven USA Today/Gannett News Service reporters who covered the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. It was our first overseas assignment, and an exotic one, and I remember it clearly. Including the charter flight out of New York to Zagreb, and the long wait on a frozen platform for the train that dragged us, stopping and starting, to Sarajevo in the middle of a Balkan winter night.

Mike was always a fine writer, a history buff and someone who also kept abreast of pop culture.

He had a gift for tracking down sources who were not easy to find. (Perhaps that is more about tenacity, than gifts.) While in Sarajevo he found the Yugoslav ski-jumper whose spectacular crash had symbolized the agony of defeat on the opening credits for the U.S. weekly sports show named ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

Word today that he has taken a buyout from USA Today prompted me to recall some of the many qualities of Mike Lopresti.

Among the many things he did very well:

–He prepared better than any journalist I have known. A lot of us tend to show up at a sports event and count on the game and our background knowledge to carry us through. Mike did research, and when he got on site at a major event he would do penetrating pieces on the history of the place, and the strange characters there, on days when the hour-to-hour happenings were not particularly compelling. And he was very good with sources; they always talked to him. Always.

–He was one of the great deadline event-story writers of the second half of the 20th century. Anyone who has covered sports events on deadline know this matters. A lot.

No matter the event — the World Series, the Super Bowl, the NCAA basketball final — Mike would file a minute before it ended, and his editor in Washington would take a quick pass through it (like all really good writers, Mike’s copy was always clean), and it would be on the Gannett News Service wire even before the Associated Press had posted their writethru. And it would be better than AP. Always. More than 20 inches, bang, into the paper and great stuff. He was a huge asset for his employers.

–Another way he prepared. At the bang-bang deadline events described above, Mike would arrive having plotted what he would write for two or three or four potential outcomes. Worked it out in his head. (Probably had notes for it, too.) What he would write if Team A won. Would he would write if Team B won. Would he would write if either of them won easily. Et cetera. He didn’t make it up as he sat there on press row, and it showed with the quality material he filed.

–He had his own voice, and it was a plain, honest one. He could bring tears to your eyes, but he also could make you laugh. He did not indulge in verbal gymnastics; he did not challenge a reader to fight through strings of multi-syllabic words and endless clauses. He drew you in, led you effortlessly through a story, and brought you out smiling at the end.

He was/is a very good guy. A proud Hoosier, a fan of Indiana University basketball — though he was sorely conflicted by the Bobby Knight regime. He probably can quote the movie Hoosiers from start to finish. He was a self-effacing, aw-shucks kind of guy, and most of that was real, but it sometimes it left city slickers thinking he was a sort of journalistic hayseed — until he turned in his next excellent, on-deadline piece.

He and I did 14 Olympics together, and we were part of the same team for about nine of them. (He and another colleague, Steve Dilbeck, must have done a dozen World Series together, and another colleague, Mike Davis, teamed with Lopo for a bunch of NCAA title games.)

Mike and Gregg Patton and I shared a rental home for the Barcelona Olympics, and the day after closing ceremonies — and the end of two-plus weeks of stress and strain — I had a ridiculous amount of sangria at a tapas place, and fell off a curb into the La Rambla gutter, and I assured Lopo (who rarely drank) that if I just stayed up all night I could avoid a hangover — then suffered greatly on the flight from Barcelona to Paris, a few hours later. Lopo gently mocked me all the way.

A good guy, a great comrade and an even better journalist. He covered everything there was to cover in American sports, and more than a little outside the country, too. And with none of the drama often associated with elite writers.

He was having issues with his vision, the last time I saw him, which might have been the 2008 Rose Bowl. I have not had much contact with him since the move to Abu Dhabi.

I don’t know if this is the end of his journalism career. I hope it is not. I venture that no living writer has seen as many big American sports events as he has, and he never had a bad day.

If that is -30- on his career … take a breather, Lopo. You deserve it. You were as good as anyone from our generation.