Maybe the crowning moment of my journalism “career” — the one great sports photo I ever took. He’s flyin’, man!!
Twenty years ago, give or take a week or so, Fred Obee made the biggest mistake of his life.
I was NOT going to college and refused to leave the man alone, hanging around the Whidbey News-Times’ offices day and night (I worked in the mailroom/pressroom, back when the WNT actually was printed on-site in Oak Harbor, then scrambled for freelance writing work), harassing Obee, the paper’s editor, every time he tried to sneak out for a cigarette or a can of Coke.
Sports Editors were coming and going at the paper at a rapid rate in those days, using the twice-weekly paper as a springboard to bigger opportunities.
So, as we headed into the fall sports season, circa 1992, the paper had a hole to fill and an assistant editor (Keven Graves) anxious to stop covering the sports beat and get back to his real duties.
And sure, the News-Times could hire another fresh-out-of-journalism school slickster — and then fill the spot again in a year — or Obee could shut me up, since sending me to cover stories ranging from a mass of dead star fish at the beach to the Bigfoot “expert” who camped out in the paper’s office and refused to leave until someone talked to him, wasn’t working.
Then, like now, I apparently had an inability to shut up at the opportune time.
So, after staring intently at me for a looooooong time and then suddenly laughing for no reason, an Obee trademark, as he knew it caused most people to freak the heck out, he gave me the keys to the kingdom.
21 years old. Not a day of college.
A complete lack of knowledge when it came to laying out a section (my first month, I took the examples from a journalism book and forced my stories and photos to ruthlessly fit the pre-sized holes).
A shocking willingness to play fast and loose with the AP style book.
And there I was, an “editor,” which meant virtually no one saw the sports section until it hit the street. Cause I was supposedly mature and all or I wouldn’t be in the position, now would I?
Fred Obee was the single greatest editor I could have had at that time and place.
Other people have had a big influence on my writing (Lionel Barona, Jim Waller, Ellen Hiatt, Kasia Pierzga, Keven Graves, the little league parent who threatened to shoot me with a shotgun if I showed up on his property), but Obee (and photographer Geoff Newton, who taught me to fight The Man, but that’s a different story) is the defining figure of my on-again, off-again life as an ink-stained wretch.
He knew when to use the whip and when to let me flounder and when to just freak me the heck out by slowly walking past my desk at deadline time, saying not a word, just smiling devilishly, pausing for a moment, then chuckling and walking outside on the second floor patio to have a smoke.
He let me run wild for two plus years, until I flamed out in what would be the first of many bridge-burning “up yours” offered to the world at large.
I ran (bad) poetry about high school golf, a photo of a baby bouncing a basketball I found in the bottom of the Sports Editors desk, the single largest headline in the paper’s 100-year-plus history (SARPY RULES!! could be seen from space, or at least from the other side of town after Burger King papered their windows with the section), almost got us sued at least once, almost got punched twice, got an alarming number of letters to the editor (pre-internet) referring to me as “an idiot,” and learned several truths about newspaper life.
One, 99% of my day was to be spent shooting rubber bands at the other reporters and 1% jacked out of my mind on caffeine, madly typing on deadline (while ignoring Mary Kay Doody repeatedly beating her telephone against the paper-thin cubicle wall that separated us).
Two, always, and I mean always, run the picture where one kid has his tongue hanging out as he flies through the air and the other kid looks like he just took a shot to the crotch and wants his mommy.
In 20 years, they’ll appreciate it when they get to show it to their kids.
And when a pissed-off five-foot-nothing girl drops a much larger basketball opponent with one punch to the bottom of the jaw, inciting a near-riot (single most exciting moment of my journalism career), DO compare her to Joe Louis. That’s gold, Jerry, gold!!
A lot of high school sports coverage, past and present, is dull, dry and routine. For some, that’s enough. They call those people “well-adjusted adults who like holding on to their benefits and not ticking off the school administration.”
And that’s fine, cause a year down the road, no one is going to remember a single thing they ever wrote.
You gotta burn, baby, burn. Be the urban legend more respectable writers whisper about while clucking their tongues.
My advice for young writers is simple — if you can’t work the words “sweet son of a goat lickin’ whore” into at least one story, you’re not trying hard enough.
And, most importantly, find your Fred Obee (the original one is working in Port Townsend, if you’re looking), and then learn how to stop one step before he has to boot your butt to the curb.
But always go to that last step.
Coupeville Sports 