Longtime sportswriter Arnie Leshin arrived in Santa Fe at 10 a.m. June 3, 2001, after driving three days and nights from Florida — and he never looked back.

Oh, wait; actually he did, in a recently published book, The Best Damn Sports Stories!, recalling his 40-plus years in journalism.

Beginning in 1960, after studying music and running track on a scholarship at Syracuse University, the Brooklyn-born Leshin pursued sports with a vengeance. He covered professional and college sports in the New York area for 12 years before heading south to Miami to do the same for the city's daily newspapers and weeklies in the area.

Friends had told him about Santa Fe — how beautiful it was, how friendly the people were. Longtime friend Don Piccolo, brother of the late Chicago Bears star Brian Piccolo, encouraged Leshin to take a look at the City Different. So, sight unseen, Leshin hopped in his car with his green-cheeked conure, Pretty Bird, and headed west.

"Why?" he asks in the book. "Because this is America. It's a free country. You can pack up and leave, and I wanted to pack up and leave. I needed a change from the heat, the humidity ... the traffic, the people. I needed (and) wanted to see parts of America that I'd never seen before.

"Here, I've settled into a different groove, a different lifestyle. I've become very part-time," Leshin adds.

While he has covered sports sporadically for Northern New Mexico newspapers since his arrival more than six years ago, Santa Feans can find him most afternoons covering the parking lot at Chalk Farms Gallery on upper Canyon Road, across from El Farol's restaurant.

Leshin works for Jim Trujillo's Art VanGo shuttle service and has been assigned to the Upper Canyon Road lot since July. Before that, he was at First National Bank of Santa Fe's downtown office.

And before that, he was the building administrator for a medical/dental center. In fact, he credits that employer, Ernie Romero, president of the real-estate firm Phase One, with giving him the time and resources to finish the book.

"Would I trade in the 'parking gig' for a journalism job or something else that better suits my education and background? No doubt I would, but they are just not out there. And, of course, my age doesn't help," Leshin noted, adding that he will be 70 next month.

"Right now, I hang in there, but I'm always looking around for something more suitable for me," Leshin said with a smile as he autographed a book for a visitor.

The glory days of sports writing fill the pages of The Best Damn Sports Stories!.

"I'd go wherever I was sent," Leshin said. That meant covering baseball, basketball, football, track and field — his favorite sport, both personally and professionally — boxing, golf, jai alai, soccer, tennis, horse and greyhound racing and rowing. He even covered a Beatles concert in Atlantic City in 1965. (That is not such a stretch. Leshin is a music buff and, for fun, he entertains at local nursing and retirement homes with a standup routine and singing. In fact, as a teenager, he and two friends had an East-coast doo-wop hit single, "Blanche.")

Sports highlights, he said, included covering the Penn Relays for 30 years. "It's the oldest track and field event in this country; in fact, there's nothing like it in the world," The event goes on for four days every April at Franklin Field next to the University of Pennsylvania campus.

Leshin can't pin down the "best" or "most exciting" event he's covered. "There were so many highlights for me ... sitting on the bus with (Mohammed) Ali, being with Nancy Lopez on the golf course, joking with Pélé (the soccer great), watching Lew Alcindor's (née Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) Power Memorial High School team's 61-game win streak snapped, meeting Roger Staubach in his Heisman Trophy season."

He can cite the most memorable moment, however: "Meeting Jim Brown back in 1990 and getting into a conversation with him about Syracuse (Brown was a fellow graduate of Syracuse), about football and about life.

"When we concluded our one-on-one, he smiled, looked at me and said, 'you know something? I do remember you. You were at Ernie's (Syracuse and Cleveland Browns great, the late Ernie Davis) funeral in Elmira (N.Y.), and you haven't changed one bit."

Davis died of leukemia shortly after joining the Browns in the mid-'60s; the team retired his number.

"Then, he gave me this big handshake — he has huge hands — a hug and left. ... That (experience) was huge for me, because (Brown) was just the greatest lacrosse and football player we've ever had," Leshin reminisced.

You know something else? Leshin still hasn't changed: he loves life, people, Santa Fe and sports — not necessarily in that order. His signature song with personal lyrics sums up his outlook: "My Way."