It was a spasm of good fortune. For the newspaper, the section and for Mike Terry.

It was the spring/summer of 1987. Bob Ritter was editor of The Sun. He called me into his office one afternoon and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Would I like to add Mike Terry to the sports staff?

It felt like a trick question.

“And give up … what?”

Nothing. Ritter would just move him into sports. “He’s having a tough time covering news … and do you want him?”

Well, heck yeah. When you have a staff of maybe nine full-timers, you take an extra staffer without question.

But this was better, much better, than just another body. I already knew Mike as an out-of-position guy working in the paper’s Victorville news bureau. He was a sports guy, something he reinforced by agitating for more Victorville-area prep coverage and often offering to do it himself. On his own time.

You bet, hand the sports section a full-timer? Mike T., come on down (from the High Desert)!

And then things just fell into place. A few weeks later, Gannett moved forward with an initiative for expanded state-wide coverage. And that included traveling with the Dodgers and Angels — a huge step for the paper. And it opened up a beat, the Angels, because Steve Dilbeck would be going over to the Dodgers full-time.

And Mike Terry … a guy who wanted nothing more in his career than to cover a baseball team full-time, went from “shaky” status as a news guy in one of The Sun’s bureaus to covering the Angels full-time, beginning in midseason 1987. From almost-fired to traveling ball writer in a matter of a month.

It worked out well for everyone.

Mike Terry instantly became one of Those Guys on the beat. The ones who show up early, stay late, hang around the clubhouse, soak up all the rumors and gossip. He attacked that beat with enthusiasm. He knew it was his break, and he ran with it.

He was competitive with the big kids. He didn’t break a lot of news, but he rarely was late, either. He also developed sources all over the league. As a sports editor, I felt as if the guy covering the Angels knew that team — management and players alike.

Mike T. became something of a legend in a couple of ways.

First, on the inside of the paper. Mike was known by the copy editors as a guy with great imagination when it came to spelling, especially of people’s names. I’m not sure he knows to this day if the former Angels manager is named Jim Fregosi or Jim Fergosi. Whether it’s Tommy Lasorda or Tommy LaSorda. Mike’s copy was lively and fun, but it wasn’t clean (and this was before laptop spell-check, I’m pretty sure), so the desk had to be on its toes.

Second, in the public. Mike became well-known within the baseball world because he was so gregarious, so upbeat and also one of the handful of African-Americans covering baseball home-and-road. I believe he was proud of all that.

Mike was a guy the Angels knew was around. He wasn’t the quiet guy in the back. He would pipe up during interview sessions, asking probing or tongue-in-cheek questions.

He had a preoccupation with deadline, and that reminds me of two Mike Terry anecdotes that might still be making the rounds, some 20 years later.

The Angels were playing in Chicago and Carlton Fisk was catching for the Sox. Fisk was known for making games abnormally l-o-n-g with his behind-the-plate fussing and frequent trips to the mound.

One particular game, Fisk was outdoing himself, and the game was crawling. Ball writers know what we mean here; it’s as if you can feel yourself getting old because they just won’t put the ball in play.

Mike Terry apparently had visions of a four-hour game, thanks to “Pudge” — as Fisk was known.

Finally, Mike could take it no longer, and he rose to his feet in the Comiskey press box and bellowed, “Hey, Pudge! How about picking up the pace!?!?”

Apparently, Mike’s voice (a very nice baritone, by the way) was heard all over the stadium, which was nearly empty. A couple of his Angels beat colleagues, mortified that everyone in the stadium was looking to see who was shouting, pulled the seething Mike T. to his seat. His outburst was borne of frustration. But it’s not something you hear/see very often.

The second incident: The Angels were playing at home, and the crusty Gene Mauch was the manager. In what I’m sure was only a half-serious aside, Mike said to Mauch, “Hey, see if you can play a fast one, help us out with deadline.”

Mauch didn’t take it well, this suggestion that he would try to speed up a game for someone as unimportant as a baseball writer. He responded with malice in his voice.

“There are two things in this world I don’t give a shit about,” Mauch said. “Tits on a man and your fucking deadline.”

Well, then.

Mike saw practically every Angels game for four-plus Angels seasons. His enthusiasm never seemed to flag. He enjoyed traveling the country. He loved the game, he loved the stadiums, he loved the players. He was as complete a baseball guy as I ever worked with.

If he had a fault as a journalist, it was this: He didn’t always take advantage of his access. Which is another way of saying … he was too nice a guy.

As mentioned earlier, everyone knew Mike T. Players as well as journalists. He seemed to have personal access to a bunch of stars. The sort of access he could have turned to journalistic advantage, had he chosen to, had he been a little more aggressive. Cut-throat. And, yes, he probably should have been.

But he always had trouble with that. He didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. He didn’t want to potentially betray a trust. He could have been beating the Times and the Register on the Angels beat, but he rarely did.

And, yes, he was too nice. Ball writers help each other out, but only to a certain point. They will catch each other up on an inning or two the competitor missed. But they won’t share inside info, and I believe Mike tended to do that. “Oh, you missed it when Mauch said he was benching Doug DeCinces? I have some quotes here on that.”

Just because he was a good guy.

Another example of his concern for others:

Mike Terry was the only guy who ever put tips for hotel workers on his expense account. Usually $10 a day for the domestics, on the road. He knew they didn’t make much money. And he was ahead of the curve on the practice of tipping them.

I approved the expense and sent it through … and it never got kicked back.

Sometime around 1992, Gannett decided to stop subsidizing our Angels and Dodgers travel. We couldn’t pay for it out of our own funds (something like $20,000 per team per year), meaning we would cover only home games.

Mike took it hard. To be sure, players and management treat the traveling baseball writer with far more respect than the guy who shows up only for home games. So his perfect job … was no longer perfect.

But, also, Mike got a great job offer: Covering the Washington Bullets (as they were still known) of the NBA for the Washington Post.

Gulp. Yeah.

Nobody from The Sun ever had made that kind of jump. Not a writer, anyway. Mike didn’t seem keen to leave The Sun, where he knew he had established himself and had job security. And he wasn’t really that interested in the NBA, and hadn’t covered much of it.

But it was the Washington Post. He had to go. And he did.

He had a semi-rocky season, at least from the Post’s perspective, and by the end of that first season he was being eased out of the beat. During the offseason, it was clear he was losing the beat.

I don’t recall if the Post fired him. They might have. At the least, he knew his future there was bleak. And when the Los Angeles Times offered him a job in its Orange County bureau, he jumped at it. It got him back to the West Coast … and it also put him back in the same house with his wife, who at the time wrote editorials for LAT.

In his 12, 13, 14 years with LAT, Mike covered lots of preps, the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks, did some backup baseball work.

He was the same guy we knew in San Bernardino. Happy to see people he knew, a man with a strong (almost crushing) handshake who looked you in the eye and meant it when he asked how you and your family were doing.

Mike recently was nudged out of the newsroom by the L.A. Times. I’m not sure what his plans are for the future. He is out there with a lot of us veteran journalists, now unemployed, in a market where newspaper jobs are drying up and pay structures are sliding down.

But, like most of us who worked in San Bernardino in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mike has his memories. He was with us at a time when the Sun’s sports section was ambitious and striving. We expected to get better year after year, and we generally did.

And for four-plus seasons he was Mike Terry — Traveling Baseball Writer. It was his life’s ambition, and he lived it. It makes me smile to think of it. And the two things Gene Mauch didn’t give a shit about.