BOB GARFIELD: For 25 years, Mike Penner was a sportswriter at the Los Angeles Times, covering the wide world of athletics as a reporter, columnist and essayist. Press boxes, locker rooms, all-in-all, a macho environment if ever there was one. And so, it was perhaps especially shocking to readers when, in 2007, Penner wrote that he would return after a vacation with a new byline, Christine Daniels. In what was to be Penner’s last column as a man, he wrote:

CHRISTINE DANIELS: I am a transsexual sportswriter. It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type these words.

BOB GARFIELD: Penner, by then, Daniels, had become, most likely, the world’s first transsexual sportswriter. That audio is from a 2007 interview with the erstwhile NPR program Day to Day, in which Daniels described the experience of changing gender in a very public way.

CHRISTINE DANIELS: At 1:46 the first email from a reader came, and it was slugged – the subject - the subject line was “You Go, Girl.” By about 6 or 7 L.A. time, I was getting one email a minute. By 5 or 6 o'clock that evening I had 538 emails, and two were negative. And I thought this could have been the worst day of my life, the worst day of my career. I didn't even know if I was going to get through it. And, as it turned out, it was one of the best days I've ever had.

BOB GARFIELD: The introduction of his female-self column won the sportswriter widespread plaudits for courage and honesty. And for the next year, Christine Daniels took over Mike Penner’s beats. But then about a year ago Mike Penner returned, and last week Mike Penner died, an apparent suicide, at age 52. Mike James was Penner’s colleague for more than 20 years, and he joins us now. Mike, welcome to the show.

MIKE JAMES: Thank you, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Tell me about Mike Penner, the sportswriter, before the transformation.

MIKE JAMES: Well, Mike was an immensely talented writer. He was very skilled at dissecting a good deal of information and putting it in a way that would be entertaining. He would skewer people, when necessary, or deal with sensitive pieces with a very considerate touch. He loved the absurd elements in sports, and there are a lot of them, and Mike liked getting into that. He covered everything from baseball to the Olympics to football, as a columnist. He covered the L.A. Rams, the Anaheim Angels for a long time, and did it with great skill. He was an extraordinary talent.

BOB GARFIELD: When Mike Penner became Christine Daniels, she did not spend a whole lot of time in, in locker rooms or press boxes or bars with the sportswriters she had known when she was - Mike Penner.

MIKE JAMES: Mike had, for an extended period of time, before the transformation, become an essayist and wasn't out in the field as much. He was taking information either from inside the office or working from home, as, as many of our writers do. Mike hadn't actually covered a team beat for quite a while before the transformation, and that continued.

BOB GARFIELD: So, if there were to be backlash to this very public voyage, he was – or she - was at least spared it in the most public places.

MIKE JAMES: Yes, I'd say that would be true. There was a lot of support here for Mike and for Christine, because he developed so many relationships with so many people, and virtually all of those were – I wouldn't say unaffected, but all of those people retained the same fondness for the person.

BOB GARFIELD: When Mike Penner introduced himself as Christine, he did so in the most public way, in what was to have been his final column as Mike Penner. When he reemerged as Mike Penner, after a year as Christine, no such column. Do you know why?

MIKE JAMES: That was his choice, and because it was such an intensely personal matter, the entire process, that was his request. And we honored that because we felt it was important to grant him that. So we went along with it.

BOB GARFIELD: Now Mike, this story, obviously, has an appeal to morbid curiosity, but is there something larger that we have learned?

MIKE JAMES: I think that I'm not sure, Bob, that I'm really capable of answering that one. I haven't gotten much beyond just thinking about Mike and looking back on his life and the experiences that I had with him over 25 or so years to look much beyond that, but I'm sort of choosing right now to think about his overall life as a journalist and the incredible body of work that he produced. I mean, I've printed out stories just to look at them, and it’s kind of an, an awe-inspiring collection of work. He was prolific and, and incredibly talented.

BOB GARFIELD: How would you like Mike Penner to be remembered?

MIKE JAMES: That’s actually easy. I'd like Mike Penner to be remembered as a gentle, kind, thoughtful, incredibly imaginative person who was capable of taking any situation in the sports world – and I'll, I’ll just say the sports world because that was the venue in which he worked, but I think he could have done it in any field – and put on paper an incredibly readable, fast-paced account of what had just happened and always teach you something about what had just happened. Even if you had just seen it, you would learn something by reading what Mike wrote about it.

BOB GARFIELD: Do you fear that Mike will be remembered for his work of body, as opposed to his body of work?

MIKE JAMES: Of course you've got to fear that, but I think that if you step back and look at what’s there for the duration that the body of work is really what defines him.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Mike, thank you very much.

MIKE JAMES: Okay.

BOB GARFIELD: Mike James is a sports editor for the Los Angeles Times. This is Christine Daniels again, in 2007.

CHRISTINE DANIELS: I feel like I, I stepped up, and I’ve liken it to having an economy ticket and suddenly trading in all my frequent flyer miles, and now I'm in first class. [LAUGHTER] I’ve got - I've got more room to stretch. [LAUGHS]