Bill Cardoso, a writer who coined the term “gonzo” to describe the frenetic participatory journalism practiced by contemporary Hunter S. Thompson, has died. He was 68.
Cardoso died Feb. 26 of cardiac arrest at his home in Kelseyville, Calif., about 80 miles northeast of San Francisco, according to his longtime companion, Mary Miles Ryan.
Cardoso began his journalism career as a sports writer for the Medford Mercury in the 1950s while a student at Boston University. He went on to write for the Boston Globe, covering the 1968 presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Richard Nixon.
It was on Nixon’s press bus that Cardoso met Thompson. They became friends and admired each other’s work. When Thompson wrote his colorful, drug-riddled story “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” for Scanlan’s Monthly magazine, Cardoso wrote a letter calling the piece “pure gonzo.”
The term stuck. Thompson embraced it and so did Webster’s, including it in the New World Dictionary in 1979 as meaning “bizarre, unrestrained, extravagant, specifically designating a style of personal journalism so characterized.”
At times, Cardoso, whose work appeared in Rolling Stone, Ramparts and Esquire, invoked the “gonzo” style.
When he covered the “Rumble in the Jungle,” the 1974 boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, the bulk of his story focused on happenings outside the ring.
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