The Twilight Zone
THE LATE INNINGS
When I graduated from Hamilton College in 1972, I went looking for a newspaper job in my powder-blue 1969 Chevy Malibu. I drove from town to town, searching for the offices of daily papers, dropping off my cover letter, a skimpy resume and some writing samples. Just when it looked as though I would be sorting hangers in my father’s clothing store in Troy, N.Y. for the foreseeable future, I stopped by the Evening Sun in Norwich, N.Y., smack dab in the middle of the state.
The cinderblock building at the south end of Main Street matched the color of my car exactly. I handed my stuff to a receptionist and drove home to Troy, N.Y. A few days later, I got a call from Tom McMahon, the owner and publisher of the Evening Sun. He wanted to see me, so I got back into the Malibu. There I was, sitting in the office of a man who looked a little like Clark Kent’s father. He told me, “I need a sportswriter. I can pay you $90 a week, which I’ll raise to $105 in a couple of months. You’ll be here for a year or so, then you’ll go to Florida because that’s where the newspaper jobs are, and in five years someone in New York will see how good you are.”
Downtown Norwich, NY in the 1970s
Sounded good to me. And so I began a career that’s nearing 50 years long. From Norwich, I went to the Fort Lauderdale News, then to New York to work as a reporter for Sports Illustrated, where I wrote and edited for 17 years, then on to Time magazine for three glorious years. In 1997 my old SI friend and colleague John Papanek invited me to help him launch ESPN The Magazine, which lasted 20 years and enabled me to keep writing and editing and raising an amazing family of four with my late and dear wife Bambi, whom I met at SI.
Here I am, in the evening sun of a career that began on a manual typewriter. I am eternally grateful to all the people who helped me along the way. My immediate boss at the Evening Sun was Barry Abisch, who gave me my most valuable lesson. On my first morning at work, I arrived early to write up a story on a girl marksman. My habit in college was to write my first draft long-hand, which was what I was doing.
“What are you doing?” Barry asked when he came into the office right after me. Before I could finish an explanation, he rolled me in my office chair over to a Royal typewriter and said, “From now on, this is where you will write.”
From now on, this blog is where I will write. Lord knows, I’ve typed enough already—stories I’ve forgotten, stories I wish I could forget, stories that make me say, “Hey, I wrote that.” But I’m still as crazy about sports as I was when I was 21, and I’m still itching to write, especially when something happens that brings to mind something that happened along the way. It seems as though I’m still being pushed toward the keyboard. To quote Sean Connery in Finding Forrester, “Punch the keys, for God’s sake.”
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