Newsrooms seem to attract needlers and agitators. Sarcasm passes for everyday discourse.

Maybe it comes from the cynicism that overtakes even the most idealistic of just-starting-out journalists. You may still have moments when you feel as if, “Hey, what I just wrote/edited is important.” But on the whole you spend your day sorting out lies, parsing bombast and deflecting self-promotion, and after a while you just aren’t all sweetness and light when you sit down in front of the computer. Rather, you tend to be curt and blunt and just this side of frustrated by hypocrites and probably more than eager to pass on an off-color joke or five, just to lighten the mood.

Which brings us to Dan Evans. Maybe the single biggest needler/agitator/”that’s what she said” pronouncer in 30 years of Sun sports history.

Dan grew up in/near Cincinnati, and is old enough to remember when the Cincinnati Reds were the Big Red Machine, and maybe that sparked his interest in sports journalism. Not that covering sports is an unusual career fantasy for kids, not far behind pro athlete/fighter pilot.

He went to college at the University of Iowa, and I’m sure I asked him “why Iowa?” but I honestly have no clear memory of a reasonable answer, so he just may have wanted out of the house.

We hired him along about 1987 or 1988, to be our L.A. Raiders beat writer. This was back when Gannett networking was still in place, and Jackson, Tenn., was a Gannett paper, as was San Bernardino. We flew him out (imagine that, these days, at a suburban; flying in a job candidate), had him do a tryout — a college football game between Tennessee and UCLA, as I recall … and we hired him. He was a solid journo, with some all-around experience at a smaller paper, and those are the kinds of guys we wanted, back then.

Dan caught the back end of the zenith of The Sun as a more-than-local sports section. We still were covering all the downtown teams, back then, and I’m certain he did the Raiders home-and-road for at least a season, and maybe 2-3? The Raiders were heading into their particularly freakish phase, by then, and goofy stuff was sure to go down around the Silver and Black on any given day. It’s not as if I debriefed Dan at the end of each season (he would make a joke here about me “debriefing” him, btw), but I assume he enjoyed most of this. Despite the monster commutes to El Segundo from Berdoo.

Dan didn’t do a whole lot of desk work, during this period. So he wasn’t in the office all that much, and we probably didn’t have a clear idea of what he was about. That’s how it works; reporters on beats don’t interact much with the production-side people. “Outside” vs. “Inside” and all.

Around 1989-90, things began to get a little weird, in the newsroom. Corporate Gannett mandated that every newspaper do a sort of intense navel-gazing and identify the 10 or so issues it really cared about, thought readers cared about … coverage of which might drive readership, circulation, advertising.

One of the topics that came up — and stuck on the agenda, much to my chagrin — was “recreational sports.” I was (and remain) convinced our readership wanted event-oriented sports, whether is was preps or pros, but it was decreed that we would begin doing reams of stuff on local-local participant-sports goofiness. Rock-climbing stories, wake-boarding stories, ballooning stories, dog-sledding stories. And I was ordered to assign a staffer full-time to this.

I settled on Dan Evans. Mostly because he was the newest “writer” on the staff and, perhaps, would be least distraught at giving up the downtown beat for something local-local. I still remember driving out to his apartment in Redlands one morning … his wife was there … and sitting down and telling him “sad to say, this is what we’re going to do.”

He wasn’t happy. But he did a solid job on the “rec” beat, and actually turned out some stuff that qualified highly on the “general-interest” scale. He wrote about several sports that later were to become real and significant, the X Games kind of stuff. But I had no illusions it was what he had signed up for, back when he came to the paper, or saw himself doing forever.

Then Nick Leyva left, and the prep beat came open. I don’t remember if Dan offered to go over to that, or if I asked him, but he went. It was far more work than rec, but it also was a much-higher profile beat. The guys who covered the Dodgers/Angels/Lakers felt higher on the staff pecking order, but the reality always was that the prep guy was more widely read — and far better known among readers.

It also brought Dan Evans into the office, fully, for the first time. And then we really got to know him.

Most of it was fun. At least, as far as I was concerned. But I concede I have a pretty high tolerance for teasing/ribbing/ragging. And a very high tolerance for off-color remarks.

(Which reminds me. When the staff was even younger, in the early 1980s, when we were pushing deadline it could get pretty salty in the room. A lot of F-bombs. Exclamations of frustration, yeah. Where the &*@#%$ is that story? Can you believe that bleepity bleep that dumb bleep just filed?” Like that. And we often forgot we were just part of the newsroom, not a section sealed inside some sound-proof room. And, eventually, the regular columnist for the features section, which was next door, actually did an entire column on how “blue” the air was over the sports section. From all our bad language, see? Well, harrumph! He trashed fellow employees in print without ever having broached the topic to any one of us individually. Talk about a scold. I don’t know if the guy was still around, when Dan Evans was working days, but he couldn’t have been happy. But I digress.)

Dan was a very solid prep guy. Organized. Connected. Well-known in the community. He had the sort of wide-ranging sports knowledge you have to have in the prep guy. From football to badminton. He kept up the record-keeping Nick Leyva had inaugurated and perhaps expanded it.

But he also fairly terrorized other staffers with his tart (verging on acidic) remarks. One I remember fairly clearly, and I’m almost sure this was Dan. One of our stringers, name of Danny Summers, a former prep athlete who was getting a little thick, came into the office on a hot summer day wearing “coaches shorts.” Coaches don’t really wear coaches shorts of that sort anymore, but they were fairly tight, probably double-knit polyester … and Danny Summers, a fairly pale guy, was wearing a pair of tight, blinding-white coaches shorts. And Dan said to Danny, whose nickname was Jack (I’ll explain, eventually), “Jack, I don’t know where those pants end and you begin.”

It was nasty. But it also was funny as hell. And fell safely within the sort of frat-house ragging that was acceptable (at the time, anyway) in the department.

Dan was a pretty good athlete himself. He had run track, and he was a more than recreational sports guy. Someone once asked him if he “jogged” and he promptly corrected them by announcing that, no, he ran. And, indeed, he has had the lean look of a middle-distance runner ever since I’ve known him.

About 1997, thereabouts, Dan decided he wanted to work fewer nights. He had kids now, and the prep job entails covering an event every Friday night during the school year, and on a lot of Tuesday/Wednesday nights during basketball season. He was looking more for a 9-to-5 sort of gig that jibed with a Family Guy existence. And he transferred over to business, right next door. It didn’t keep him from jabbing the needle into sports guys, just out of habit. Though not all of them enjoyed it. At least one guy considered punching him in the face, and told me so. I advised against it.

Did I mention Dan always brought his own lunch to the office? And it always contained a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich? Just trying to paint a picture here …

After a few years in business, he took a job as the press information officer for the Colton Joint Unified School District. I’m sure it was more money and certainly it meant for better benefits. But in journalism, when someone leaves for public relations, it’s always seen as a move toward the “dark side.” Getting paid to minimize or even hide events newspaper people consider news. Though Dan was not one of the clumsy, confrontational flacks. He was able to give us what we needed without ticking off his employers or his newspaper clients, and that is the secret to skilled flackery.

He was good enough at what he did that within a few years he got a bigger/better job, as the press guy for San Bernardino County schools. And that is where he is now.

We remain in touch with him through the Sun Baseball League, the fantasy league Vic West created in, what, 1983? Dan is one of the chief agitators at the annual draft. (And every draft needs one.) The guy who tries to instill doubt in every decision everyone else makes. (“Hope that sore elbow doesn’t turn serious!” … “Hey, I heard he’s gonna platoon this year!”) And he also will find a scatological subtext in nearly every declarative sentence. Basically, yes, a “that’s what she said” guy of heroic proportions.

At home, or working for the county schools, I imagine Dan Evans isn’t the edgy guy we knew. Or know, when he shows up at the baseball draft and verbally flays everyone there. Maybe we serve as a sort of outlet for him. Sports journalism is an environment where talking smack not only isn’t discouraged, but may earn you points for quick-wittedness.

So, anyway, looking back … Dan Evans could have gone another route. Though he’s a very family-oriented guy. Had he come to The Sun a few years earlier, he would have had more years on the downtown beat, and maybe he could have parlayed that into a job at a bigger paper covering the Reds, or whatever. And gone that way.

Thing is, the money for travel was drying up, even then, and we were able to give him only a taste of it before exigencies took him into the local-local arena. Was he more valuable to us as the prep guy than the Raiders guy? Absolutely. And as the Raiders guy he wouldn’t have made the contacts that got him into the PR career that seems to have worked out for him quite nicely.

Dan probably is remembered by a batch of high school sports people … but he certainly is remembered by co-workers. Some of them perhaps not fondly, because he skewered all of us, eventually. To me, though, that sort of verbal fencing was part of what working in sports journalism was about, and having Dan Evans in the department made it more authentic.