A sportswriter once told me our profession was only a matter of sheer dumb luck.
It was only chance that we found this blip in history where people could get paid for written accounts of the days’ sports news.
Fortunately, it takes some talent to do that because there is really nothing worse than bad sportswriting.
Believe me, I just dug up the first thing I ever wrote that appeared in the Daily Bruin.
Let this stand as my apology to the one person who stopped Sudoku-ing long enough back in the fall of 2007 to skim a mid-week soccer notebook.
Sorry dude, I’m sure even your oceanography lecture was more scintillating.
At least, after four years of applying myself in this trade, I can now use the word “scintillating.”
Sportswriting is that rare profession that you go into despite the fact that it does not qualify for the three reasons people usually do things: for the money, to help the less fortunate or to impress chicks.
If you’ve never had the chance to spend time with sportswriters, they are a strange bunch.
They have the self-deprecating tendencies of someone charged with constantly evaluating the much more physically gifted, plus the unwarranted narcissism of their very minor print celebrity, and over/under 80 percent of them are addicted to gambling. (I’ll take the over.)
As a sportswriter, the most strenuous part of your job involves agonizing over finding the right words to fill a single sentence, the lede, the first line of your story. Then, by rule of Murphy’s Law, the moment you’ve written it, the home team will stage a comeback and you will have to start from scratch.
The crowd’s roar drowns out the curses you aim into your third cup of coffee.
Then, the next morning, most of the people who see your story will read only the headline, which, of course, you had no part in writing.
There is, no doubt, something magical about it though, this hole in the luck-time continuum into which I somehow slipped.
Despite the myriad athletes pestered with interviews, despite the masses of cyber fans patiently standing in line to post their discontent, despite all the late-night disturbances from the Copy desk phone line, sportswriting is ““ at its very heart ““ a solitary pursuit.
It is a feeling that comes long after the final buzzer. You sit alone, tapping away on your laptop, while the faces of 13,000 empty seats stare down, entreating you to properly adorn the memories of what they each witnessed that night.
Thanks to the glory of searchable Internet archives, these are not memories I will soon forget.
I recorded slaughters in Seattle and thrillers in Tampa. I penned both heartwarmers and heartbreakers from the Texas plains. All in all, I strung words from the World’s Most Famous Arena in New York to the basketball hoop outside my dorm room window.
So, even when I soon sell out to the more profitable, commendable and sexually appealing sectors of this bleak employment landscape, you can be sure I’ll keep my sportswriter’s credentials in a back pocket.
For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against my name, he will mark not whether the team won or lost but how I wrote the game.
Smukler was a Sports senior staff writer from 2009-2011 , an assistant Sports editor for 2008-2009 and a Sports contributor for 2007-2008.