Favorite assignment

My memory sucks.
I've been in this biz for nearly 20 years and not one assignment jumps out at me.

A few were not assignments, but I was there because of work:
- Meeting the 1991 college hockey champs at their 10-year reunion. They were gods to me as a 8th grader.
- Watching a high school intern go from being a back-up right fielder for an American Legion team to seeing him ump 2nd base last week at Miller Park as a major league ump, the dream he told me he wanted 14 years ago as a senior in high school.
- Seeing a co-worker naked...and now she is sort of famous.
- Meeting bands and artists I respect, and just having chill time with them. Not just interviews, but having a conversation and exchanging ideas.
- Brett Favre asking if I wanted to sit down and have breakfast with him before a playoff game (and I HATE Favre, but he was nice enough)

 

Of all the cool things I've covered, photographing fires and wrecks for the weekly newspaper I started at many years ago ranks among my favorite times. I knew the cops and fire department guys in the small town and had pretty liberal access.

 

Taking this thread title literally, I was assigned to made a radio show appearance on behalf of The Big National Paper at the U.S. Olympic Festival in the Twin Cities in 1990.

The host was Ray Scott.

The show was fun, but sitting with a colleague and drinking while Ray spun out some of his favorite tales for a couple hours after was a highlight.

 

Was it Jay DeDea who was the QB for Bloomsburg? He was my seventh grade english teacher.

 

My favorite interview was with former AP boxing and horse racing writer Ed Schuyler Jr. a couple years ago. Ed's been a friend of mine for the better part of 10 years, and he's got some great stories to tell about covering the golden age of each sport. I write columns every year on the Triple Crown races for amateur handicappers and when I'll Have Another was going for the Triple Crown I called Ed and asked if he wanted to sit and talk about Secretariat and Affirmed and why it was so hard to win the Triple Crown.

I pulled up to his house about 10 minutes after it was announced I'll Have Another wasn't going to run the Belmont. I got out of the car and Ed says, "Well, your story just went to shit" with that cackling laugh of his. He told me about when Secretariat was running the Belmont how even the guys on press row were standing and cheering and he said "I was still in my seat. I was waiting for that big red son of a bitch to fall over." It's just classic Ed, a guy who isn't one to bite his tongue about anything. He's a brash man, but a great man who was a great story-teller and a great writer who definitely came from the old school. We must have talked for 2 hours that day. I must have said 5 times I think we're good and he'd come up with another story to tell that was gold.

 

Another fun one I had was when a bunch of old athletes from the segregation-era black high school got together to buy some championship rings they never received 40 years earlier. The school was an absolute powerhouse in basketball and football in the 1960s. Several football coaches went on to have long and successful careers in the SWAC.
One of the former players was the football coach at the current high school in town, so he put the word out that we were doing a story and got a bunch of people to come to the fieldhouse for a group interview. Over the course of 90 minutes, probably a dozen guys wandered in and out, telling stories and reminiscing. I might have asked five questions the whole time. The rest of the time, I was taking notes and listening. Those are always the best interviews, the ones that steer themselves.

Some of the stuff they talked about was fascinating, too. The black high school's teams were so good at the time, and the white schools kind of mediocre, so the black school was THE game to watch every week. Black people would be in the stands and white people had to stand outside the stadium, watching through the fence.
They also talked about the black and white high school players getting together for pick-up games on Sundays, and how it helped make the town better than most in the state in terms of race relations. By all accounts, we never had the sort of tension and violence here that you had in other areas.
Most interesting, though, was how some of them were actually upset when integration came in the early 70s. The black high school had excelled in almost everything. Its sports teams were great, one of its graduates went to Harvard, and it had a reputation for strong academics and for putting out good people. There was a lot of pride in what they'd built. When integration came, and the black school closed, they felt like they lost something special.

 

You betcha.

 

I just remembered another fun one...a feature on a local boxer, which ended with me and our photographer getting into the ring for a round of sparring.

 

The Fifth Down game!

Drunk before, during and after. No Missourian for me that day.

 

Favorite was in 2006. Covered the Greater Greensboro Open, but not in the traditional sense. My boss sent me down for the Monday and Wednesday pro-ams to do a story on caddies. The catch was that I was actually caddying the pro-ams. The Monday was the lower-money day, and I got paired with a younger guy and grinder Neal Lancaster, who gave me some interesting anecdotes of caddies past.

On Wednesday, I got an older gentleman who was a little more demanding, but still nice enough. I helped him get a couple of birdies with great green reads, which makes sense, since putting is one of the few things I can really do well on the golf course. The big thrill was our pro: Bernhard Langer. I spent 10 minutes with him after the round gabbing about caddy stories, and he told me one about how he fired one of his caddies in the 80s and the guy responded by coming at him with a knife. Also talked to a couple of the caddies who lurk around the clubhouse during the early part of the week, looking for work. Turned out to be a great Sunday package. Plus, hell, I got to walk 18 with a freaking Masters champ, so there was that.

 

Went to Kuwait before the 2003 invasion. Spent a week with the troops out in the desert. Guy in the next tent asks how my nephew was. His wife and my youngest sister were best friends in high school. Aside from that, an incredible week of work and experiences, from the prolonged trip out there to being out there on the frontier just a few miles from the Iraqi border. Later, I was there to greet some of those guys as they came home. So many of them thanked me for telling their stories.
Everything else has paled by comparison.

 

I'll bet. Were you an embedded reporter?