Writer Bill Cardoso, who coined the term ”gonzo” to describe the frenetic participatory journalism practised by contemporary Hunter S Thompson, has died. He was 68.
Cardoso died on February 26 of cardiac arrest at his home in Kelseyville, about 130km north-east of San Francisco, according to his long-time companion Mary Miles Ryan.
Born in Boston, 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 M Nixon.
It was on Nixon’s press bus that Cardoso met Thompson. The two became friends and admirers of each other’s work.
When Thompson wrote his colourful, 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 characterised”.
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 in Zaire between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, the bulk of his story for New Times magazine focused on happenings outside the ring, including an encounter with Zairian paratroopers and a man selling python skin.
Cardoso worked as a reporter for United Press International in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. In 1984, Atheneum published a collection of his stories called The Maltese Sangweech & Other Heroes.
A lifelong smoker, Cardoso was diagnosed with throat cancer in the late 1990s.
In addition to Ryan, Cardoso is survived by a daughter, Linda, and a brother, Gilbert. — Sapa-AP