Some of us fell into print journalism. Some of us discovered it fairly late.

Some of us knew we were destined for newspapers. Early and with absolute certainty.

That was/is Vic West.

I never pinned him down on this, but I bet he knew — KNEW — he was going to be a sports journalist at an early age. And he never wavered from his plan to become one. It was as if his early life prepared him for it, and he held it in his mind ever after.

It was 1980. I had just been named sports editor, and we had three job vacancies.

One was a part-time position, and I got Jim Long for that.

Another was a desk job, a copy-editor who would be my first full-timer hire.

That turned out to be Vic West.

We put the word out we were looking for a desk guy. This is back when eight, nine, 10 newspapers covered the major beats and just by having your own staffers mention an opening in a press box, word got around fast. You didn’t need journalismjobs.com back then, is what I’m saying.

Within a few days, no more than a week, I got a call from Tracy Ringolsby, then the Angels beat writer for the Long Beach Press Telegram. I knew “Trace” a little from covering some Angels games. He wasn’t yet the baseball legend he was going to become, but he was a serious journalist … and he was confident, insistent, even, that this kid back in the Press Telegram office would be perfect as an entry-level sports copy editor.

I interviewed Vic, and he was from my neck of the woods, a Lakewood guy (to my Long Beach guy), and he worked for the Press-Telegram, which I had read growing up, and respected …

And he just so obviously was meant to work at a newspaper. It’s just that Long Beach wasn’t going to make him a full-timer any time soon, and he was just getting out of Cal State Fullerton. At Long Beach, he was pigeonholed as an “urch” — the kids who did the bottom-feeder jobs of taking phone calls, making food runs, filling glue pots, ripping copy off the chattering wire machines …

Vic didn’t want to leave Long Beach. But he had been convinced that he needed to go somewhere else before he could go back there, and San Bernardino was his somewhere else.

I had no doubt in hiring him. He was of that breed of sports guys who grew up collecting baseball cards, going to as many sports events as possible, playing the games himself (he played on the St. John Bosco basketball team) … and he had seen a good suburban sports section produced. The business was in his blood.

Vic was a major contributor on the production side almost immediately. But he had the bug to get out and do some reporting, so we put him on the Dodgers beat in (I’m gonna say) 1982. He covered the team for a couple of seasons, at least two, before health issues involved in the long commute from San Bernardino to Dodger Stadium (140 miles, roundtrip) prompted him to (reluctantly) give up the beat.

He moved on to the preps beat, replacing Claude Anderson, who had suffered a stroke.

Following in Andy’s footsteps was no small challenge; the man was a legend. But Vic made the best of it thanks to his organizational skills, his energy and his knowledge of All Things Sports. Plus, he was a far better writer than was Claude Anderson. We missed Andy’s institutional knowledge and presence, but Vic West ultimately was an improvement on a critical beat.

While serving as our prep guy, Vic made two major contributions to the section.

1. He studied this new product named USA Today and was impressed by its “around the nation” feature, in which at least one news item from all 50 states appeared in the news section.

He suggested we do the same in sports, applying it to every high school in San Bernardino County. I liked the idea, and we got the editor to agree to dedicate the space for it (the thing was always more than 100 inches long) … and Around the County appeared every Tuesday morning in The Sun sports section for the next 20 school years. Vic made it go, the first few years, by personally calling up 20, 30, 40 coaches and ADs every Monday and getting a bit of news we hadn’t already printed in the newspaper. It was a massive effort, but it advanced our prep coverage and gave body-type treatment to “minor” sports we previously had relegated to agate only. Oh, and the page was built around our athlete of the week, another Vic suggestion.

2. He suggested and put down the rules for the Sun Baseball League, founded in 1982, which predates “Rotisserie” baseball. The SBL shares several basic concepts with roto ball, but I firmly believe it is a superior product because it allows for six weekly “games” against individual opponents. The league has never faltered, and Vic remains (albeit via e-mailed draft list) one of the four surviving charter members. The others being Mike Davis, Gregg Patton and me.

The amount of energy and passion consumed by the Sun Baseball League is far out of proportion to its intrinsic value to … oh, anything meaningful. But a 6-0 week in the SBL can make any of us look at a new week with added enthusiasm.

Vic was so conscientious as our prep guy that he began to work himself into exhaustion. Preps can do that, because there isn’t a bottom to it. By the mid-1980s, everybody had a panoply of girls sports, meaning schools fielded 15, 17, 19 varsity teams. And if the number of high schools we covered back then was “only” 30 … that’s at least 450 varsity teams, and Vic felt as if he needed to keep track of ALL of them. His own insistence on being complete and thorough was wiping him out, and eventually he recognized it.

When we had a desk opening, he moved back over to the production side. This was about 1987.

From then on he was our ace copy reader, No. 2 layout man and No. 1 sports trivia guy. Remember, this is a room filled with sports wonks, but if one of those wonks wasn’t sure who won the 1967 American League batting title, Vic almost certainly WOULD know.

(This is how into sports he was: For quite some time he insisted the word “titlist” — as in champion — was spelled “titleist”. Because, by God, the golf balls he hit spelled it that way.)

Vic carved out a life for himself in the IE. He met his future wife. (I was best man at his wedding, in 1984.) He bought a house in Redlands. “The West Adobe,” I called it, for no particular reason other than it made it sound like a historically important site. His children were born in Redlands, and one died there.

It was 1989, I believe, that he left us for a sports desk job at the Orange County Register. He was there for several years before getting a similar job at the Dallas Morning News, long considered one of the top sports sections in American journalism. He remains in Dallas to this day, surviving all buyouts and layoffs to date. Because he’s good. The kind of guy sports sections are built on.

We don’t hear from him much anymore. Heck, it’s been 20 years, almost, since he left. But the team he drafts (and leaves on auto-pilot) in our fantasy league is almost always competitive. So his name is invoked at least once a week, when standings are posted. He must be a mysterious figure to all the other guys in the league — who have no idea who he is, other than The Godfather of the game, as we tell them.

Vic represents an archetype: The sports-suffused guy with editorial skills. In our generation, there was a perfect place for people like him — daily newspapers.

I wonder where the current generation of Vic Wests go. Do they end up in some dreary job and indulge their sports passion at home or at the neighborhood bar? I know many of those opportunities to turn an avocation into a vocation … are gone.

Maybe I’ll ask Vic, sometime. “If you hadn’t gone into sports journalism … do you have any idea what you would have done for a career?” It’s just so hard to think of him doing anything else.