Your first trip

They kick you out after Pac-10 football games? I thought the big time sports events let you stay as long as you want.


As for first trip, I'm still waiting for mine.

 

First trip: Richmond for the CAA Tournament. Three days of golf, power lunches and a shit load of work. Great experience though. Five guys crammed into a hotel room, playing asshole, smokin cigs and drinking beers till 3 a.m. every morning.

 

Jefferson, Maryland (SW of Frederick, near Harpers Ferry) for a Babe Ruth baseball regional tournament. Hot as all hell and the field was a disaster - no water hookup for a hose to spray down the infield, no scoreboard, no PA, no lights. But it gave me a chance to both visit Gettysburg and see my 90-year-old grandmother in the Washington area.

 

Adel. So close to hell that you can see Sparks.

 

As a senior in college, I went to the Pac-10 track meet at Stanford. Sports editor of the school paper and a photographer came along. If memory serves, we put my good tires on sports editor's adequate car for the trip. We took $100 in expense money. Arriving in North Beach at night, we tried earnestly to get the rather supersized photographer drunk, a state he insisted he had never experienced. As the night wore on, we got separated. I pissed in the alley near City Lights Book Store, thinking to myself ``Jack Kerouac pissed in this alley.'' The sports editor lost all of our money _ I always suspected he was rolled by a hooker. We ended up selling some film back to a drug store for money for a loaf of bread, cheese and gas for the trip home.
For years, a photo of our extremely hung over selves at the track meet was posted in the school paper's news room.

 

You're not a true SID until you've been left by the team bus. I earned those stripes.

 

WiFi. <Sigh> I'm not going to go into a thing about dictating stories, etc...old TI "computers" (for lack of having to explain them to our youngsters), etc.
But man, life woulda been so much easier on most of us here had WiFi been around on our first road trips.

 

Orem, Utah for the 2A state basketball championships. I was just a part-timer right out of high school and worked really hard at the tournament. I struggled to find a place to file my story, but I finally found one.

Then I came home and found out the geniuses on the desk put the wrong teams in the headline.

 

FWIW, I thought I'd throw up the following on-topic excerpt from "Nuts and Dolts":

The state Legislature had once again failed to pass its budget on time, and someone needed to drive to (town omitted) and cover the debate. I eventually volunteered.

I knew next to nothing about political reporting, so I ended up using several juicy-sounding quotes from the floor debate. They were factual, but they also were party-based slams that should simply have been ignored. After the vote, I talked with the area representative about some of the specifics. Then I found an office in the Capitol building and wrote the article.

After I submitted it, I was told it was 6 inches too short. So I started adding to the middle of the article. Rather than retransmit the entire article on a very slow connection (this was before the Internet), I sent two new segments, thinking they'd be inserted properly back at the newsroom.

They weren't. So the story rolled up on itself rather than flowing smoothly. In addition, in the rush to finish, I'd typed "Medicare" instead of "Medicaid" in one place, which ruined the quote. No one caught the mistake, as they were scrambling to make deadline at the office. The whole turn of events really bothered me; despite my lack of background knowledge, I thought the article would turn out well. In retrospect, few readers would have noticed most of the problems other than the erroneous reference to Medicare.

With that, I reached the Fourth of July weekend.

 

Not that I'm complaining. I had no problem with driving up the freeway a bit to a Starbucks, trust me.

And PE, it's not that I got kicked out, but when you're one of the last three or four folks up there and the janitors are cleaning around your feet, I figured it was time to go.

 

First work trip was to Reno to cover a high school football game.

Oh, overnight? That would be the Texas state basketball tournament. Stayed at a La Quinta and ate at Guero's. At 24 that, ladies and gentlemen, was living like a king.

 

I thought La Quinta was next to Denny's.