Thompson put his
spin on marathon

Friends in Hawaii remember
the writer as hard-living but
upbeat about his life

Just more than a month ago, former NFL player John Wilbur was making bets on football games with "gonzo journalist" Hunter S. Thompson.

"He suckered me," said Wilbur with a laugh. "He was one of the best bettors." Wilbur, who lives in Kahala, had not been able to call Thompson since.

He was shocked last night to hear of the world-renowned writer's death.

"It's a very sad and surprising development," said Wilbur, who first met Thompson in 1969. "He was maybe one of the most honorable, polite people you'd meet in life. He was always an upbeat person. And, you know, he had a temper."

Thompson last visited the islands in December 2003 to cover the Honolulu Marathon, which he wrote about in his 1983 book, "The Curse of Lono."

Two days before the race, Thompson fell on a hard floor in his Kahala Mandarin Oriental Hotel suite, fracturing two bones in his left leg.

"I'm in pain, and I want to distribute maximum pain to all those around me. I don't want to keep it all for myself," Thompson told the Star-Bulletin in an interview at the Kahala hotel after his fall. "I am in the darkest of funks."

He was unable to take a commercial flight home, so his good friend, actor Sean Penn, arranged an air ambulance to pick him up and take him to a Colorado hospital.

Thompson had come to cover the marathon for a weekly column on ESPN's Web site.

He also covered the race -- which he once called "a freak-out that usually involves speed, danger and thousands of naked people looking for action" -- in 2000 and 2001 for the sports television network.

Dr. Jim Barahal, president of the Honolulu Marathon since 1987, brought the author to the islands for each of those three years, hoping to get a unique spin on the race.

And that, Barahal said, is just what he got.

"They were classic Hunter Thompson," he said. "Very gonzo, very different."

Barahal said he was able to spend quite a lot of time with Thompson while he was in the islands, and got to know the author well.

"On the one side was the famous Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalist, the hard-living guy," Barahal said. "On the other side, though, if you were his friend, once he connected with you, then he was extremely loyal and quite interesting."

Barahal said Thompson struck him as a survivor, not as someone who would take his own life. "He really ... had a fierce desire to live," Barahal said. "When he broke his leg here, he was very upbeat about getting better."

The author first came to Honolulu for the marathon in 1980 for Running magazine.

His article, which would later be lengthened into "The Curse," first appeared as "The Charge of the Weird Brigade."

Fabled ‘gonzo’ journalist
kills himself at 67

DENVER » Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," fatally shot himself last night at his Aspen, Colo.-area home, his son said. He was 67.

"Hunter prized his privacy, and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News.

Pitkin County Sheriff officials confirmed that Thompson had died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Thompson's wife, Anita, was not home at the time.

Besides the 1972 drug-hazed classic about Thompson's visit to Las Vegas, he also wrote "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." The central character in those wild, sprawling satires was "Dr. Thompson," a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant.

Thompson is credited with pioneering New Journalism -- or, as he dubbed it, "gonzo journalism" -- in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story. Much of his earliest work appeared in Rolling Stone magazine.

"Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist," Thompson told AP in 2003. "You have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it."

An acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life, Thompson also wrote such collections as "Generation of Swine" and "Songs of the Doomed." His first-ever novel, "The Rum Diary," written in 1959, was first published in 1998.

Thompson was a counterculture icon at the height of the Watergate era and once said Richard Nixon represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character."

Thompson also was the model for Garry Trudeau's balding "Uncle Duke" in the comic strip "Doonesbury" and was portrayed on screen by Johnny Depp in a film adaptation of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

"He may have died relatively young, but he made up for it in quality if not quantity of years," Paul Krassner, the veteran radical journalist and one of Thompson's former editors, said by phone from his Southern California home.

The writer's compound in Woody Creek, not far from Aspen, was almost as legendary as Thompson. He prized peacocks and weapons; in 2000 he accidentally shot and slightly wounded his assistant, Deborah Fuller, trying to chase a bear off his property.

Born July 18, 1937, in Kentucky, Hunter Stocton Thompson served two years in the Air Force, where he was a newspaper sports editor. He later became a proud member of the National Rifle Association and almost was elected sheriff in Aspen in 1970 under the Freak Power Party banner.

Thompson's heyday came in the 1970s, when his larger-than-life persona was gobbled up by magazines.

It was the content that raised eyebrows and tempers. His book on the 1972 presidential campaign involving, among others, Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey and Nixon was famous for its scathing opinion.

Working for Muskie, Thompson wrote, "was something like being locked in a rolling box car with a vicious 200-pound water rat."