From a Star-Advertiser story yesterday on the life of Bill Kwon, the great local sports writer who died this week: “It’s not often you can say that the best job in the world was your only job.”

What a wonderful thing to be able to say!

I crossed paths with Kwon at both ends of his long career.

The first time was when I was in high school in the mid-1960s at University High School, now a charter school known as the University Laboratory School.

I played on the basketball team, and I can vividly remember how we looked for Kwon’s column, Prep Parade, with its assessments of the players and the teams we would be facing on the court. To get psyched up, some would tape Kwon’s columns on our next opponent in their lockers as motivation for the game ahead.

The basketball season in my senior year ended with the first “Class B” tournament, where tiny schools with fewer than 425 students competed. UHS was one of those, and we not only made it to the tournament, we ended up winning.

That earned a mention at the end of one of Kwon’s columns. He called the level of tournament play “exciting” and noted that our team “had to go some to beat Molokai and Honokaa, the latter paced by the remarkable Domingo Marcelino whose two-game total of 65 points may be a record that will stand for some time.”

That now-yellowed newspaper clipping turned up in one of my old files several years ago.

At the end of the column, Kwon reported that I had already been accepted at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

I puzzled about that at the time. How in the world did he get that little bit of obscure information?

Years later, I learned the likely source. For several years, my father’s and his girlfriend (for lack of a better word) had an informal partnership. My dad’s small company provided all the kitchen equipment and supplies for the little cafeteria up on the third floor of the old news building, which housed both the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and its rival, the Honolulu Advertiser. His friend, Ann, ran the operation day-to-day. And I’m guessing that was the connection that brought my college plans to Kwon’s attention, although I don’t know for sure if the timing is right, and he could always have heard that from our coach. So I’ll never know the real answer there.

When I joined the staff of the old Star-Bulletin in 1993, nearly 30 years after that mention in Kwon’s column, I had the chance to see him in action as a professional. I didn’t hang around the sports section, so I couldn’t say we became friends, but we were both part of that amazing newsroom.

And I can vividly recall one of the last S-B holiday parties when Kwon, who was half my size, easily drank me under the table as he worked his way through the fine array of single-malt scotches on the wall by the bar at Murphy’s Bar & Grill. Kwon appeared unfazed as he downed those shots, while I had to quickly declare defeat and stagger off into the night.

Then in March 2001, we found ourselves among the small group of soon-to-be-former Star-Bulletin employees who would not be making the move to the “new”, Canadian-owned newspaper’s brand new newsroom several blocks away.

Aloha, Bill Kwon. Thanks for those memories.