A Fence Too Far

Even Sports Illustrated (SI) carried an obituary for Kurt Vonnegut, who died last month. The April 23 issue reported:

DIED At age 84, novelist Kurt Vonnegut. In 1954, Vonnegut—a talented young writer who confessed to knowing next to nothing about sports—was hired to write for SI, which had yet to begin publishing. One of his first assignments was to write a caption about a racehorse who had jumped the rail at Aqueduct and galloped across the infield. Vonnegut pondered the task, typed one sentence and then walked out of his office, never to return. His caption: The horse jumped over the f—ing fence. SI's loss was literature's gain. Cat's Cradle came out in 1963, and in '69 he published his most famous work, the semiautobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five.