By the time he got around to making that pilgrimage to Ireland he'd always talked about, he already knew he was a dying man. Michael James McAlary was 41 when he died of cancer on Christmas Day. He was eulogised as the New York Daily News's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, but those of us who knew him best remember him for what he really was: a reformed sportswriter.

He was the grandson of a Belfast man who emigrated in the 1920s to live the life of an illegal immigrant in Brooklyn. When the grandfather's wife died and a subsequent fire consumed the family home, life became unbearable for him. He ran off and disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Six children, including Mike's father John McAlary, were left to be scattered in foster homes. There were eventually 30 grandchildren, none of them having so much as a photograph of the family patriarch. It was later learned that he had died working as a hired hand on a Maryland farm.

"The old man died an illegal immigrant," McAlary wrote of the shared tragedy, "never knowing what he'd missed - or how he had been missed."

When I met Mike McAlary, 25 years ago, he was a teenage prodigy, covering the Volvo tennis tournament in New Hampshire as a stringer for the Manchester Union-Leader. He was a hotshot kid, already a terrific writer but eager to learn, and the tournament, an idyllic little affair held annually up in the White Mountains, gave him his first showcase and his first exposure to big-time journalism. By day he would chronicle the exploits of Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl, and by night he would accompany Mike Lupica, Bud Collins, and myself on our tours of the North Conway pubs, sipping a coke in a corner booth while he absorbed it all.

He went on to become sports editor of his college newspaper at Syracuse University, and by the time I arrived at the old Boston Herald American in 1980, Mike was already there, serving his apprenticeship on the sports desk.

He was, in truth, badly misused, little more than a glorified copy boy on a newspaper whose predicted death was almost a daily occurrence. The word was out that if it didn't find a buyer within a year, the Hearst Corporation was going to euthanise the paper, and morale was low. Worse, Mike, when he wasn't transcribing horse racing reports, was given the most trivial sort of writing assignments.

For a young fellow who had covered Jimmy Connors when he was 16, it was a bit of a comedown to be writing stories about high school games that might, if he was lucky, be read by the subjects and their mothers, and it began to show in Mike's work. His increasingly careless stories did not go unnoticed by the newspaper's powers-that-be. One day the editor, Don Forst, summoned me his office and asked me to have a word with McAlary, so a few nights later in the Eliot Lounge, we had our little chat.

"`Look,' I told him, `you may think you have no future on a paper that has no future, and you may be right about that. But you do have a future in this business, and when all those silly stories are printed, they have your name on them. What you have right now is an opportunity to write your own resume'."

A decade later Mike thanked me for what he termed "the best advice I ever got."

Within a year, he was off to the Big Apple. New York was in the throes of an escalating newspaper war. Rupert Murdoch's afternoon Post had decided to take on the tabloid Daily News's stranglehold on the subway crowd by publishing a morning edition of its own, and the News retaliated by creating an afternoon paper. It was this latter for which Mike was hired to work.

The next year the News folded its p.m. edition, and Mike went straight to the Big Leagues. He was hired to cover the Yankees for the Post.

"God, it was breathtaking to be in your twenties and covering New York baseball!" he would later recall.

He and George Steinbrenner, the blustery mogul who owned the baseball team, were soon on a first-name basis. Steinbrenner called Mike "Malarkey," and Mike referred to The Boss as "the anonymous owner of the New York Yankees."

The world of sports would not satisfy his ambition for long. He needed an even bigger stage, and when he was hired by Newsday as a city-side columnist a few years later, he got it. New York newspapers were soon fighting over him. At increasingly obscene salaries, he went from there back to the Post and, eventually, back to the News. When that happened, Murdoch even filed a lawsuit in an attempt to keep him.

The gritty panorama of the New York streets provided him with the fodder for three books. The first of these, Buddy Boys, chronicled the exploits of two corrupt New York cops.

Five years ago he suffered a near-fatal automobile accident. Only the air-bag saved his life, but he was in a coma for five days and received the last rites twice. His family was warned that brain damage was a real possibility.

He survived that experience, only to learn he had cancer.

McAlary was in the midst of a chemotherapy session when he got a call about a horrifying episode of police brutality in a Brooklyn precinct house. Mike tore out of his hospital to another in Coney Island to interview a Haitian security guard named Abner Louima, who had while in custody been sodomised by several white cops using the wooden handle of a toilet plunger. It was an incident so cruel and reprehensible that it had even disgusted fellow cops, some of whom were responsible for tipping off McAlary.

His coverage of those events won him last year's Pulitzer Prize. He accepted America's highest journalism award grimly aware of his own fate.

"It was," he said, "kind of like hitting a home run in my last at-bat."

He made periodic forays back to his roots in the world of sports. The latest came this autumn, when he wrote insightfully about Darryl Strawberry, the Yankees's outfielder who was stricken with the same form of cancer McAlary had on the eve of the World Series.

The year before last he also visited Ireland, with his tour guide and friend John Timony, then the Deputy Police Commissioner of New York and now Philadelphia's Top Cop.

Mike and Alice had four children, the oldest 13. He had caught the worst break imaginable, but he refused to lament his fate.

"If you question why the bad things happen you have to question why the good things happen, too," he pointed out, "and I've been luckier than most. I got a chance to live my dream."