This year has been an eventful one for Oregon athletics, and an equally eventful one for myself as a beat writer for Oregon football and basketball.
For me, the school year started with the beginning of fall football camp. My year is a little longer than most students, but this is the life I have chosen and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Being a sports journalist is much less fun than most people realize. To cover sports day in and day out you really have to love the job itself, not just sports.
Yes, the year had high points for me: doing ESPN twice, knocking back a beer with Pat Forde in a Little Rock, Ark., bar, and just getting to be right on top of everything that happened this year in Oregon sports. But it’s not all glamour, glory, and free buffet food. A young journalist, particularly the beat writer for the student paper, is expected to tread lightly through the world of “big boy” Division I athletics.
I’m just not that kind of guy, and that landed me in a few sticky situations this year. Here are a couple of things I’ve learned during my first full year as the beat writer for football and basketball.
?If you ask Nick Aliotti about his “bend but don’t break defense” he gets pissed. Though Mike Bellotti uses the phrase constantly, to hear it from the mouth of a young reporter like myself obviously gets under his skin. I have long since erased the profanity-riddled tirade from my tape recorder, but it gave us all quite a few laughs at the Emerald sports desk.
?Never quote something Ernie Kent said to you when you didn’t have a tape recorder in his face. This got sticky for me when I paraphrased a conversation he and I had outside of the normal coach-media relations in a column of mine. It pissed him off big-time, but we ended up working it out, man to man. It’s easy for a coach or athlete to shun the student paper’s beat writer with no repercussions, so thanks for talking it out with me, Coach, rather than just shutting me out.
?When it comes to sports fans, and Duck fans specifically, you will NEVER please everyone. If you criticize, some call you a hater. If you applaud, the rest call you a homer. This realization didn’t change my writing though, since I have never cared what people think of me anyway. I have continued to write what I feel, and have a good chuckle over the comments on the Web site and the e-mails in my inbox. I can’t reply to Web comments due to Emerald policy, but I’ve answered every e-mail I’ve received this year, good or bad. Accountability is key to being a journalist. I stand behind everything I write but I can be, and have been, persuaded that I’m wrong by a solid argument.
Finally, if you don’t like my ideas, writing style, or stupid hats – too bad. I’ll be back next year in the same role.
You see, I could have graduated this spring, but once it was announced that baseball would be back in the spring of 2009 I started sandbagging credits so that I would be here to cover it. One more year of 12-credit terms seems to me a small price to pay for the chance to cover such a huge moment in Oregon sports history.
So with one year more experience under my belt, a few more wrinkles and gray hairs, and the healthy sense of skepticism that got me here, I will once again offer you, my readers, everything I’ve got next year in terms of information, humor, and insight into Oregon sports.
[email protected]