More Where Are They Now? Pete McEntegart: Secrets of the WATN? issue Arthur Agree/William Gates (Hoop Dreams) Dick Butkus (Football) Steve Cauthen (Horse Racing) Lenny Dykstra (Baseball) Marvin Hagler (Boxing) Tony Mandarich (Football) Scott Norwood (Football) Robert Parish (Basketball) Carl Yastrzemski (Baseball) More content from this week's issue of SI

This week Sports Illustrated published its fifth annual Where Are They Now? issue, checking in with former athletes to see what they've made of themselves since the cheering stopped. Based on the letters we receive, the issue never fails to bring back memories for our readers -- or for those of us who put it together.

I served as SI's primary reporter for the issue for each of its first four years (2000-03) before moving to SI.com earlier this year. Working on WATN (as we insiders call it) proved to be both fulfilling and frustrating.

The biggest challenge of putting together such an issue is that the ideal subject comes from a fairly limited universe. We're seeking former athletes who were prominent enough to still have name recognition, but not so big that most everybody already knows what he or she is up to now. It's no coup to track down Michael Jordan, Phil Simms or Wayne Gretzky -- or others who have never really left the public eye.

We also want to find former athletes who are doing something interesting. But thanks to the explosion of salaries over the past few decades, many retired pros are doing little besides working on their golf games. That's good for them, but not so fascinating for our purposes.

Often the reason we haven't heard much about the current doings of a particular former athlete is because he or she isn't particularly eager to be found. So even if we work like the dickens to a player down, we still face the challenge of getting them to agree to talk to us.

It isn't all that surprising some subjects play hard to get. Just because we wanted to talk to Bill Buckner about his famous error in the '86 World Series, for instance, didn't mean he was particularly eager to discuss the worst moment in his professional life.

In 2000, we tried to track down Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, the Yankees pitchers who had swapped wives (and families, including pets) in 1972. We did get their digits, but they preferred to leave the past in the past. Though the last we heard, Peterson is still happily married to the former Susanne Kekich.

It took much cajoling to convince our eventual 2000 cover subject, William (Refrigerator) Perry, to reenter the public eye. We put a full-court press on nearly every Perry in Aiken, S.C., most of who turned out to be kin of the Fridge. When we got to Perry himself, his biggest concern seemed to be, well, how big he had gotten. He didn't want to look like a chump in front of a national audience.

The Fridge did eventually agree to participate, and Austin Murphy's  story on him was terrific. As it turned out, Perry liked being in the spotlight again so much it was hard to get him out of it. Before long, he was sparring with Manute Bol (a WATN subject in '01) on Celebrity Boxing and downing a woeful four franks -- or roughly one per hundred pounds -- in last year's Nathan's Famous  Hot Dog Eating Contest.

Even some subjects we thought would be eager to chat had become publicity-shy. In 2000 we wanted to look up Jeffrey Maier, who as a 12-year-old in 1996 had reached over the right-field wall in Yankee Stadium and turned what might have been a flyout into a postseason home run.

We learned that Maier had become an excellent high school baseball player. The story practically wrote itself. The only problem was Maier wanted no part of it. (This was a kid so bashful he had appeared on Letterman as a pre-teen.)

We worked on Maier for two more years, until finally we just took a picture of him at a high school baseball game in 2002 and, as we say in the biz, "wrote around" his lack of cooperation. You can run from WATN, but you can't hide. Not forever, anyway.

That first year also began WATN's most epic quest: Morganna. Every year, SI staffers and readers demanded to know what the Kissing Bandit was up to. Each year, Morganna, through her husband/manager, turned us down. At one point her people floated the possibility that we could have her cooperation for the right price, but SI doesn't play that way.

Finally, in 2003, we took the Maier approach. We hired a photographer to essentially stake out Morganna's home and take a paparazzi-style shot. SI's Steve Rushin contributed a glowing essay, and we had finally "gotten" Morganna.

I have been personally rebuffed or otherwise unsuccessful in tracking down Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd, Spud Webb, former Georgetown basketball player Michael Graham (the guy with the shaved head who played for the '84 champs) and former Vezina-winning goalie Jim Carey, among others.

With Oil Can, I did get finally get a number for the Boyd household, either his own or one belonging to his family. The woman who answered said firmly that Dennis didn't come around much, and hung up quickly. Nobody ever picked up again.

I did get a line on Spud's cell phone, but he never answered or returned any of my pleading messages. With Graham and Carey, the closest I got was an address. I FedExed them the previous year's WATN issue and a nice note and hope for the best. If they ever got the packages, they didn't respond. (Graham's package, in fact, was eventually returned to sender, unopened.)

Even when we did convince someone to talk, though, we weren't home free. My strangest experience with the WATN issue -- and perhaps of my career -- came in 2001. We got a tip that former Cowboys wide receiver Golden Richards was driving a bus for the city of Houston. He agreed to meet me at the bus depot, saying he was a big SI fan.

After a surreal two-hour interview -- during which "Golden" even gave me a signed picture of his TD catch in Super Bowl XII -- I began to doubt whether this man was really who he said he was. On the flight home, I began checking his story point-by-point against what else I knew about Golden Richards. I concluded that the man was an imposter.

The next night I tracked down the real John "Golden" Richards, who was living in Salt Lake City and understandably shocked that a bus driver in Houston was pretending to be him. My digging around ended up causing the bus company to look into its Golden Boy a little more, and it turned out there were outstanding warrants for his arrest.

So in one week, Gordon Richards Jr. (the imposter's real name) went from Houston bus driver to potential SI subject to jailbird. The lesson here is that if you're a wanted man, it pays to be publicity-shy.

While the fake Golden didn't show up for his SI photo shoot -- he had apparently gotten wind that I was starting to check into his background -- part of the appeal of the WATN issue is that we typically run a current photo next to one from the athlete's playing days. In most cases, if we can't get a new picture, we won't run the item.

Fennis Dembo wasn't ready for his second SI close-up. Joe McNally/SI

That has proved to be a holdup for several subjects. I spent a pleasant half-hour on the phone one evening with Fennis Dembo, a former hoops star at the University of Wyoming who was the cover boy of SI's College Basketball Preview in 1987. Dembo had become a police officer in Georgia, another story tailor-made for WATN.

I told Dembo several times that he would be hearing from an SI photographer because we needed to take his picture. He said he was fine with that. But he never again answered or returned our calls.

My theory is that Dembo shared a concern with some other reluctant WATN subjects: they now looked more like Fat Bastard than fit athletes. Some former pros would prefer that fans remember them in their physical prime rather than see what they look like now.

Sometimes, though, we were the ones to get cold feet rather than the subjects. For instance, one year we got a tip that former A's pitcher John "Blue Moon" Odom was a house painter. We instantly envisioned a great photo opportunity, with Blue Moon standing on a ladder, slapping some blue paint on the exterior of a three-bedroom Colonial.

I tracked Blue Moon down and made our pitch. He seemed excited, but said that he had actually sold the painting business a year before and had retired for good. These days, he told me, he mostly played golf. (Surprise!)

I knew that we had no interest in running an item on Blue Moon Odom, golfer, so I instantly started backtracking. I asked him a few questions just to be polite, then gave him a noncommittal, "don't-call-us, maybe-we'll-call-you" sendoff. It was like ending a bad blind date.

Still, once we were able to track down the subjects, catching up with them was typically terrific. I spent time with Herschel Walker, Joe Charboneau, Ickey Woods and Cecil (and Prince) Fielder, among others. All were living busy and/or fulfilling post-sports lives.

After several years of pitching the story to my editors, last year I wrote a feature on Steve Dalkowski, a legendary Orioles farmhand in the '50s and '60s who is considered by those who should know to be the hardest thrower ever. Dalkowski was exceptionally wild both on and off the field, however, which (along with an arm injury) kept him from ever reaching the majors.

In the Dalkowski article, I related a story that the late Cal Ripken Sr. had told in his book. When Ripken was catching Dalkowski in the minors, he called for a curveball. Dalkowski, who had terrible vision but resisted wearing glasses for a time, thought Ripken called for a fastball. The ball took off, and Ripken had no chance to catch it. Ripken said it broke the umpire's mask in three places and sent him to the hospital with a concussion.

Frankly, the story struck me as one that might have been embellished over time. But after the article came out, I got a note from a man who identified himself as the umpire in question. He said it was entirely true.

I also received e-mail and letters from several of Dalkowski's former teammates, who shared some great stories I'd never heard before. They were delighted to hear about Dalkowski's current doings as well as to get a chance to reminisce about the good old days.

And that, of course, is what the Where Are They Now? issue is all about. As always, we hope you enjoy it.