I was
simply in the right place at the right time.
Planted in front of a computer at a temp job in March,
a quick break from the boredom of data entry to check
my e-mail revealed a note from an editor at SLAM.
I'd pitched a few story ideas to the basketball magazine
the previous day and had just landed a last-minute feature
on the Blazers that another writer had bailed on. That
story, in turn, ignited a string of articles for WW.
So I quit that temp job with a proud smile on my face.
After months of prep work on my freelance writing career,
I'd finally secured some steady writing gigs, covering
a team I'd been following since fourth grade. And though
I'd been writing about sports off and on since college,
chronicling the Blazers' playoff run revealed a couple
of important things about covering the pros.
First, it's got to be one of the sweetest gigs in journalism.
Great location, great competition and the plushest seat
in the profession. Where else in the field of journalism
do the people you write about provide a great spread
of food followed by a full menu of statistics and clips,
all handed to you on a silver platter?
"Small wonder guys still do this," says Oregonian
columnist Steve Duin, who covered the Blazers on the
sports pages in the '80s before bolting for the Metro
section in the '90s. "It's a pretty easy paycheck. You
get paid to watch sports."
At the same time, though, it's still a job. If it weren't,
reporters wouldn't disregard the final minutes of nearly
every game to rush to the locker room just to ensure
a crack at the obligatory post-game quote. We wouldn't
scribble meaningless notes about which hand Rasheed
Wallace dunked with in the second quarter or how many
defenders Damon Stoudamire split in the third. And we
certainly wouldn't miss out on the plays straining to
study reactions from a bench-warming Rider.
That shift in focus has its consequences. A friend
recently admitted that it's no longer fun to watch games
with me. She says I've lost my perspective--the perspective
I had in fourth grade when I stood against a wall in
Memorial Coliseum in awe of Kenny Carr and Jim Paxson
and quizzed my pops about just what the hell illegal
defense was. The one I had when I jammed myself into
Pioneer Courthouse Square in 1990 as Clyde, Terry, Jerome
and crew greeted an overflow crowd before the NBA finals.
Gone. Lost in the shuffle of the players' pregame surliness
and post-game absence, the fan inside of me was snuffed
out down the stretch.
It's a common occurrence among sports journalists.
"I'm still a sports fan," says Duin, "but this game
lost me a long time ago."
That's the nature of the game. My hometown loyalty
was strangled by the etiquette of the job. The stickers
posted on press row say it all: "No cheering in the
press box, please." But after a while, cheering isn't
even an option.
The mystique is lost when you cross the locker-room
line and you start watching games with an agenda rather
than desire. It's lost when your interview hopes are
dashed by grumpy millionaires. It's lost when you realize
the media coverage of the team often reflects the politics
of who is friendly and who is not.
Indeed, watching Blazers games with me was no fun anymore
because it had become my work.
So I'm glad I didn't have to watch the waning moments
of the Blazers' playoff run from the press section of
the Rose Garden. While the Blazers saw their season
swept away with a pair of embarrassing home losses,
I was on another assignment, paddling a canoe in Canada
and touring three of the Okanagan wine country's finest
vineyards, spared the agony of the blowups and blowouts
of the season's final days. I washed away a trying day
of canoeing by sipping wine and retiring to a charming
lakeside bed and breakfast.
What can I say? I was in the right place at the right
time.
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Willamette Week | originally
published June 16, 1999
