San Francisco

He said he wanted his ashes shot out of a cannon. "A great funeral" was what he wanted, he told his son. Then he walked into the kitchen and shot himself dead in the head. That was the end of my old friend Hunter S. Thompson. But the end is only the beginning of his story.

His last column was a sports column, for ESPN's Page 2. He began his writing career as a sportswriter, and he came full circle to end it that way. Hunter viewed corporate journalism through the same prism of suspicion he used to pull the butterfly wings off professional politicians. He was fond of saying the sports box scores were the only part of a newspaper you could trust because "there were too many witnesses to the final score for anyone to lie."

Hunter Thompson's demise at 67 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his compound in Woody Creek, Colorado, has rattled his friends and admirers in this hang-loose city that's still struggling to ascertain if it was Kool-Aid or Flavor Aid that the Rev. Jim Jones of San Francisco served to his followers in Guyana, and why.

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