Coupeville Sports

The voice of a generation (of journalists).

I blame Fred Obee.

If it wasn’t for him, you probably wouldn’t be reading these words now. And a lot of newspaper editors would have spent less time waking up with night sweats, screaming, for the past 24 years.

Journalism wasn’t my first choice. Cooking was.

But, a sudden move from Tumwater to Whidbey Island in the middle of my senior year of high school, liberally seasoned with the fact I’m not really all that special a cook, threw things all asunder.

And then, a fateful phone call from a tired Whidbey News-Times Sports Editor seeking a high school kid to cover one basketball game launched me into another world, and here we are, billions of words (some better than others) later.

There are many people who have been big influences on me during my torrid, on-again, off-again, screaming and kicking, bridge-burning odyssey through the world of journalism. None stands taller than the one-time editor of the WNT.

We danced the dance for three years — me a painfully green, no-college-ever-cause-it’s-for-sellouts “freelance reporter” (which means I camped out in his office and annoyed him until he gave me a story), he a well-respected newsman with a rapidly expanding migraine no Coca-Cola would solve.

Until that fateful day, when, after scintillating stories on dead starfish and Bigfoot hunters, hours of hand copying marriages and divorces at the court house and one ammunition-and-toxic-paint-fueled fire from Hell that landed me on the front page, he named me Sports Editor.

It was then that the fun really began.

Fred was quick. He was nimble. He was the best boss a 21-year-old idiot could have.

Somehow, he never fired me over the course of the next two years, through too-big headlines, poetry on the sports page and several thousand pieces of carefully crayon-scrawled hate mail from a couple of morons who couldn’t understand why I gave girls sports equal coverage with boys sports.

I won him some awards, gave him some angina and had a mid-life crisis at 23 (the first of many) and went to work on a mussel processing boat in Penn Cove.

Cause I’m a freakin’ moron.

But I never stopped writing, never stopped seeing how much I could chafe the folks in charge by loudly declaring, “Touch a word of my prose?!?! How dare you … from God’s lips to my fingertips!!!!!”

That always went over well.

And now, I answer to no one but my readers, a free man here at Coupeville Sports for the last two years.

All because one guy, who celebrates his birthday today, saw enough in me to keep me around even during the angina.

If I am a writer, it is largely thanks to his guidance, to his unwavering support, to the moments when he took me aside and gave me tips and the times when he just rolled his eyes, laughed and let me go on my merry way, knowing I would need to crash and burn sometimes to get the lesson.

Fred Obee is a towering figure in my development as a writer.

Maybe some day he’ll forgive me for all the angina.