Ambivalent About sports

 I have aways loved sports but did not value writing about it. How meaningful is it to watch two guys play catch while another tries to hit the ball with a fat stick?

But how can you avoid some sports when starting at The Associated Press? When I was working the night desk in Portland, Ore., the coaches on two Northwest League professional baseball teams couldn’t agree on who was in first place. But I had to write the standings for the newspapers in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. So it was Yakima over Lewiston. Sorry, Lewiston!

I did write a story on how all of the region’s football teams were playing terribly one fall. All but one of the newspapers refused to print it!

One thing that pushed me out of that job in Portland was a new requirement to satisfy the editor of the Coos Bay newspaper. Each day we had to write a recap of how each native Oregon player did in the NBA or —get this—the American Basketball Association.

So if was off to Last Vegas, where, of course, sports is a big thing! I covered multiple boxing matches, including one of George Foreman’s first and Sonny Liston’s last, both on the same night. I was thrilled to see the famous Howard Cosell with a ringside seat opposite mine. I was convinced Liston was dead when he had trouble getting up after a knockout, but he eventually shook it off.

Later, in the San Francisco bureau, I loved covering the world arm-wrestling championship in Petaluma, which I described as “the egg capital of the world.”

Occasionally I helped the sports reporter cover Oakland Raiders’ games from the press box. I was sent to the visiting teams’ locker room afterward to get comment. Since they usually lost, it was scary. How do you ask a 300-pound tackle why his team got trounced? “Because they got more points than we did” was a typical answer, accepted without argument.

We didn’t have much sports in U.S. News & World Report, but I really enjoyed going to auto racing and football training sites for an article “Dream Schools.” In Salisbury, Md., I followed around one young guy hoping to make it big in the new U.S. Football League, picking one of the most unlikely candidates. The rest of the class resented him for getting more press coverage than they did.  What happened to him? I don’t know, but the league folded the next year.

Wish I had been able to fly to L.A. to include women’s modeling schools, but I had to do interviews by phone because of budget constraints. Too bad!