I have to say, working for the Daily Bruin Sports section taught me a lot about myself and what I want to do with my life. The most important thing I learned was this: Never will I ever, under any circumstances, be a journalist.
Before joining, I thought journalism would be the way to go for me; I did it in high school, I like to write, and I love sports. It seemed like a perfect fit, but, boy, was I in for a surprise. While writing was always enjoyable and I really liked interacting with athletes, one thing turned me off from journalism forever: my fellow writers. This is in no way a knock on the Daily Bruin staff ““ they are all good people (and in the case of Dave Woods, very hairy people).
It was when I started covering the football team that I realized that professional sports writers are miserable folk. When I first started on the beat, I was brimming with enthusiasm. My work with the smaller sports had paid off. I was moving on up, rubbing elbows with writers from big-time newspapers.
It looked like everything was coming up roses, but little did I know that those roses contained bees (and by bees, I mean professional sports writers) which would continuously sting me throughout the season. Many big-time writers I interacted with were just itching to find something wrong with the team, the players, the coaches, etc.
I had no idea journalism was like this. Don’t get me wrong, I know bad stuff must be reported and it makes for a juicier read, but I didn’t know how far people would dig to find it. But “you gotta do what you gotta do,” I thought to myself, and I went with it.
But then there was one incident that really made me see why I wasn’t a journalist. At an early-season practice, I reported on a player ineligible for a game because of an “incomplete” he had received a quarter earlier.
The player I talked to gave me the name of his professor. Just before I left, I was stopped by one of the sports reporters who said, “You’re not going to print the name of the professor, are you?”
“No way, why would I do that?” I replied.
“Oh good! You are already better than the rest of those people.”
I was taken aback by that comment, and I thought to myself, “I really don’t want to turn into one of those despicable professional writers; I don’t have the stomach for it. Besides, they don’t make any money anyway.”
So after spending a season sharing the press box at the Rose Bowl with some of the most sniveling, whiney adults I have ever met, I realized I didn’t want to be a sports writer, and I am thankful for this discovery. Without the Daily Bruin, I might have wandered into a career in sports journalism only to find that I wasn’t despicable enough to fit in.
So I guess the moral of the story is that you can get something out of what you hate in realizing what you don’t want to do for the rest of your life. So my advice to all my adoring readers is to sample various different career opportunities because you never know which job you will love and which will leave you swollen and puffy from repeated bee stings.
Garcia was a writer on the 2006-2007 Sports staff.