[7/1/04]The first sports section of this newspaper that I produced solely came in the fall of 1996.

Then-sports editor Dennis Seid had resigned, and he left me with one key piece of information as to the running of the sports department.

“Forget the World Series,” he said. “You can forget the Super Bowl, the Egg Bowl and the college basketball national championship. But under no circumstances can you forget Fred’s column.”

Fred Messina was the guy I met in the old Post building on my first day working here. I made the mistake of asking him where was a good place to eat. I had never been to Vicksburg and figured he might know some place to get a bite.

For the next hour under the watchful eyes of managing editor Charlie Mitchell Fred went restaurant by restaurant.

“This one has a great baked potato. That one has good steak, but the potatoes aren’t that good. This one down here has good seafood, but the salad bar is small,” he said over and over.

Heck, all I wanted to know was where a struggling reporter could sit down for six bucks and get a burger. But with Fred, nothing can be answered in just one sentence.

So it came to be, my first Friday at the Post. I had Dennis’ instructions, but was so nervous about my first section, well …

When Monday morning came around, ole Fred came rumbling through the newsroom, beelining for my desk.

“Smurph, what the heck happened?” he asked.

“What do you mean,” I said.

“I got a hundred phone calls from people wanting to know if I was on vacation, if something went wrong or if there was a problem with Tony,” he said as I flipped through Friday’s edition only to notice I had left out Fred’s column.

From that day to now, that mistake has never been made again.

I figured if he had such a loyal readership, my arrival would come when he highlighted me in his column. Loyal readers are very familiar with Bump Callaway and Tony the main characters in Fred’s weekly ramblings on the outdoors.

The last two weeks, he has put this sports editor on the same pedestal as those. It’s taken several failed hunting attempts and a fishing trip where it rained so much, I ended up fishing for cold beer in my ever-leaking tent.

He had given me pointers, rods and reels and enough tackle to catch an ocean’s worth of fish.

None of it ever got used.

Instead, the tent roof leaked and the batteries in my headphones died the first day there. The staple camping foods of potato chips and hot dog buns it was too rainy to cook out were as soaked as I was.

It was the Fred Messina jinx. I knew not to listen to his tips. I knew that he would be bad luck. I listened anyway.

Which reminds me of a story told years ago about Fred’s hunting prowess.

Supposedly, Fred had two big bucks in sight. His gun was aimed directly at them as the bucks fed on grass. He waited for the perfect shot when all the sudden, the two deer popped their heads up, looked right at him, and went back to their business.

“It’s only Fred,” one buck said to the other. “We have nothing to worry about.”