I’m blaming this on the ESPN bottom line crawl thing. How often have you looked at it and ever seen anything good?

So tonight, I see “David Halberstam, 73…” and I know this will not end well. It’s like seeing a famous person’s picture on TV and hearing a Sarah McLachlan song in the background. Somebody’s not around any more.

In this case, it’s my favorite author. Wait, author’s not the right word. David Halberstam was a writer. A chronicler. He was smart enough to know how to explain things, and talented enough to find a voice to do it that wasn’t above or below his reader.

His credibility was unmatched. He wrote about important things like the Vietnam War, the rise of the media, a defining decade. It was all good, it was all accessible.

He was a sportsman at heart. He wrote two of the best baseball books ever attempted. “Summer of ’49” about a tense Yankees-Red Sox pennant race, and October 1964, which was as much about race in America as it was about the Yankees and Cardinals.

How good was he? I read a book about freakin’ crew (“The Amateurs”) because he wrote it.

He wrote my two favorite basketball books. The infamous “The Breaks of the Game” about the 1979 Portland Trail Blazers sans the immortal Bill Walton, and “Playing for Keeps” about Michael Jordan and the late ’90s Bulls.

I remember when he started writing columns for Page 2 on ESPN.com. They were long, eloquent, well thought out and relevant. You might say they kind of stuck out on that hideous red and yellow layout filled with mindless crap from a flock of no-talent assclowns. The frequency of his writings slowed to a crawl. Probably about the time he paused to see what kind of “writing” was surrounding his work.

He became more prolific as he aged. He balanced his social works with his sports books. In fact, the last book he completed will be released this fall and it’s about the Korean War. The car accident that claimed his life had him en route to interview YA Tittle about the 1958 NFL title game.

He leaves behind an impressive library of works.

He won a Pulitzer Prize at 30. He loved a good joke and didn’t mind if it was dirty. Any subject he dared tackle never had a chance.

Any body who sits at a desk and writes anything aspires to live the life David Halberstam did. Some of us realize immediately we don’t have that talent and start to make clever jokes about how certain centerfielders enjoy molesting canines. And so it goes. He’s gone, and we remain.

Never was a trade so lopsided.

Do me a favor. Wander over to Amazon, or even better, actually go to a bookstore or a library. Find one of his books with a subject that intrigues you and read it.

You’ll thank me later.