Blogatology

I’d been wanting to go to the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City since its current exhibit, on the works of legendary sports photographers Walter Iooss and Neil Leifer, opened late last year. But I might not have gotten around to it, particularly right now, if not for a Facebook posting Wednesday from Jessica Mendoza.

Mendoza, who is unquestionably one of my favorite people, not just favorite athletes, from my 25 years in Ventura County sportswriting, noted she’d be participating in a Thursday night lecture at the Annenberg. I messaged her back to ask when it was (6:30 p.m.) and she graciously offered to add me to her guest list (which was good, since the lecture was fully booked), so I decided it was time to visit the Annenberg.

Not knowing how much I’d be able to see the exhibit in connection with the lecture, I went down in the late afternoon — the Space is open until 6 p.m. — and spent about an hour taking in the exhibit, which includes a short video and projected works by the two sports-photo icons, as well as a number of absolutely spectacular prints.

For a sports fan, this exhibit offers a little bit of the same feeling an art aficionado experiences when walking into the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and seeing Michelangelo’s David for the first time. You’re going to encounter very familiar that which have a whole new power when experienced in person.

The best example of this will most likely come when you encounter the beautiful print of Leifer’s most famous photo, the one of Muhammad Ali glowering over Sonny Liston after knocking Liston down in their 1965 fight in Lewiston, Maine. You know the image, but when you can stand in front of it and appreciate the vivid colors and its remarkable depth, with the people standing and looking on at the other side of the ring, you appreciate it like never before. The power of the young Ali is all the more stunning when compared with a nearby Iooss portrait of the stern, weathered visages of Ali and Joe Frazier taken in 2003.

The perfection of composition of some of these photos is breathtaking. There’s a Leifer portrait of jockey Steve Cauthen on the jockey-room scale at that falls somewhere between a Norman Rockwell illustration and the work of an old master in the way the details surrounding Cauthen only enhance the appreciation of the subject.

The cliché, of course, is that a picture is worth a thousand words. But while 10,000 couldn’t do some of these photos justice, one might: Go. You have until March 14. (For details: http://www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org/)

After visiting the exhibit and walking down the street for dinner, I came back for Thursday’s lecture by Mendoza and photographer Marla Rutherford, one of a series related to the Iooss-Leifer exhibit. (I noted with regret that I missed an earlier lecture by L.A. based photographer Lucy Nicholson of Reuters, who is both a remarkably talented shooter and a very sweet person I was fortunate to get to know during my years as a columnist.)

Ostensibly, Thursday’s subject was last year’s Body Issue of ESPN The Magazine — featuring nude photographs of a wide variety of athletes — when Rutherford did a group shoot with Mendoza (then 8 ½ months pregnant) and Olympic softball teammates Cat Osterman, Natasha Watley and Lauren Lappin.

While that was certainly the starting point, it turned out to be a wide-ranging 90 minutes. The endearingly quirky Rutherford talked, for example, about the challenge of getting people to do things they normally wouldn’t, and of finding the “in-between moments” when people are actually themselves, rather than just responding to instructions. Mendoza — the force of nature who moves from athletics to broadcasting to a variety of causes while retaining energy and enthusiasm for all of them ­— brought along some of her favorite action photos from her career, emphasized her desire to see female athletes photographed in ways that emphasized their athleticism, rather than treating them like runway models.

The term “lecture” implies a formality that clearly was not the case here. This was more like a conversation; not necessarily the most cohesive presentation, in some ways, but no less interesting, enjoyable and informative for that. Rutherford was extremely funny, and Mendoza was as she always has been — perhaps the finest female role model I’ve known in athletics, given her mixture of composure, personality, enthusiasm and commitment.

The lecture has come and gone. The exhibit continues a little longer.

You missed out on one. Don’t miss both.

Not just because of my own situation, I’ve suddenly become aware of just how spurious the idea is that we’ve begun recovering from the recession — at least down here at the bottom of the trickle-down economy.

The studio apartment I’ll be vacating in a few days is in a small (28 unit) building. And the design is such that my front door is on a little balcony shared with three other units.

The neighbors in the three adjacent units (and much of the rest of the building — most of the tenants know each other at least a little bit, which is one reason I’ve liked it here) know I’m moving, either because they’ve seen me starting to carry things out and have asked, or because they’ve heard from others in the building who are aware of it.

They’ve asked why I’m leaving, and I’ve told them. (I’m doing my best to not buy into the idea of feeling ashamed or embarrassed about losing my job; I tend to think those feelings should lie with the people who wielded the ax.) As a result, I’ve learned that two of my immediate neighbors have also lost their jobs in the last couple of weeks.

This means three out of four the four units who share this landing have been struck by unemployment in a matter of weeks. I know there’s a healthy degree of coincidence involved there, but it’s also a pretty sobering reflection of the current state of the economy.

I didn’t get a chance to reflect on my career in the pages of The Star. If I had, it probably would have been something like this:

They took the job. They can’t take the memories.

I worked for the Star and one of its predecessors, the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle, for half my life — until that jarring day last week when I was told my services were no longer required.

Needless to say, in the ensuing week, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect — and keep coming across various objects that spur that reflection that much more.

As I sorted through old notebooks, one fell open to a list of names. At the top was Shani Davis, the U.S. Olympic speedskater.  As it happened, on my TV screen at that very moment was … Shani Davis, skating in Vancouver.

The notebook was from the Olympic Media Summit for the 2006 Olympics, held in November 2005 in Colorado Springs. It was the kind of event that made for 10 very eventful between April of 2000, when I became the Star’s sports columnist, and last week.

In those 10 years, I went places I never imagined going — to five Olympics (Sydney, Salt Lake City, Athens, Turin and Beijing) on four continents. I became an international traveler for the first time in my life, and discovered what a thrilling, broadening experience that can be.

I walked on the Great Wall of China. I stood before the tomb of Michelangelo in Florence, saw a soccer game in Rome, climbed the hill to the Acropolis. I took one of the world’s great train rides, the Indian Pacific, from Sydney to Perth after the Sydney games.

Everyplace and anyplace, I met people I never would have met, had conversations I never could of imagined.

A lot of times, the conversations were political. On a tram in Athens, I had a lengthy conversation with a volunteer from the host country, who gave a sometimes withering but exceptionally well informed critique of U.S. politics. (“Roosevelt was your greatest president,” he asserted). On a mostly empty media bus in Beijing, two British journalists looked across at myself and another American writer (thanks to our credentials, it was easy to tell where we were from), and without preamble, asked, “How could you elect him twice?” (“Him,” of course, was George W. Bush.) The resulting discussion made for one of the fastest half-hour bus rides of my life.

But sometimes, they were simply people connecting with people.

At the Turin Games, in a break from curling coverage in the small town of Pinorolo, a USA Today reporter and I wandered into a small, family-run restaurant, had one of the great Italian meals of all time, and — as the lunch rush abated — ended up with family members sitting at the table, telling us why they felt the Olympics were important for their city and the region in general.

And Sydney, the night before the Olympics, my colleague David Nielsen and I went out to explore the city a bit, and ended up at a barbeque restaurant in the most Australian of locations — at the harbor end of the Sydney Opera House. Overhearing our American accents, a table of Aussies invited us to join them, then started calling friends to come join the party. We talked for hours about our respective countries, our hopes for the Games, and anything else that came to mind. It was my first night on the Olympic beat, and might still be the most memorable, because the people were so gracious, and so engaging.

All these memories, I know, and not a one has mentioned a score or an athlete. I have those, too, but it’s the things beyond the arena that have been the most enriching.
Of course, plenty of the games have been pretty good, too.

I probably had the most exposure for my Lakers coverage, mostly because I stepped into the columnist beat at the precise moment the Lakers became really, really good. My first Lakers game as a reporter came during the 2000 playoffs; I think the second was the famous Game 7 of the Western Conference finals, when the Lakers used a 15-0 run to rally and beat Portland, advancing to the NBA Finals, where they beat Indiana to begin their run of three straight championships. (My most vivid memory of that Portland game is that I was up in the hockey press box, next to three “reporters” from some Portland magazine who were whooping and cheering as the Trail Blazers built their big lead. They got very quiet, very fast.)

So it’s not surprising that most of my most memorable games come from the Lakers beat.

I was the only columnist at Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game against Toronto in January of 2006. I was standing in the tunnel near the press room — having moved there to avoid getting caught in crowds coming from the other end of Staples Center — when Robert Horry hit the famous 3-pointer against Sacramento in the 2002 Western Conference finals. It gave me a perfect line from his position to the basket, so the moment it went up, I could see it was going in.

And I was in San Antonio when Derek Fisher hit the famous “0.4” game-winner against the Spurs in the second round of the 2004 playoffs. Because of the interest around that year’s team, with Karl Malone and Gary Payton on board, that was the lone year the paper had committed to having me cover every Lakers playoff game, home and road, for as long as the team lasted. When Fisher’s shot went down, I — and everyone else on the Lakers beat — knew for a certainty the team was going to reach the Finals. (And I still believe they would have won the title, had not Malone suffered his knee injury.)

Other favorite memories, away from the court?

Well, there was Angels’ run to the 2002 World Series title — a delightful but somewhat bittersweet ride, since my dad, who had died a year earlier, was a huge Angels fan who didn’t get to see their ultimate triumph. My most vivid memory is of the clubhouse celebration, when Mike Scioscia dumped most of a bottle of champagne over my head, drowning my tape recorder in the process. (The column from that night is, as a result, a little lighter on quotes than might normally be the case.)

There are a couple of Dodgers games in there, too — the Sept. 18, 2006 game with San Diego when the team hit four consecutive homers in the bottom of the ninth to tie, then won 11-10 in the 10th on a Nomar Garciaparra homer, and last October’s improbable playoff game with St. Louis, when Matt Holliday dropped a two-out, ninth-inning fly ball and the Dodgers rallied for two runs, a 3-2 win, and an unexpected victory in the series.

It’s a long list, I know. And it could be longer, if I gave it more thought.

But for all that — for all the things I saw, all the people I most enjoyed meeting (and that’s another entry, for another time) — I have no problem in selecting the single greatest play I ever saw in a game. And it wasn’t in any of the events I’ve mentioned, or from any of the biggest stars I saw play.

No, that greatest single moment has to be Keith Smith’s weaving 98-yard touchdown run against Hawthorne in the 1993 CIF-Southern Section Division III championship football game at Moorpark College. Had it come a little later, in the YouTube era, that play would be an online classic.

Instead, it inspired what might be my single favorite opening of a game story in my career — “In the long run, you just can’t beat Keith Smith” — and lives on in my memory as the reason I loved the job so much.

At its best, it was about great people doing great things.

And how can you not love a job like that?

Just a quick note for anyone who might be dropping by to check in. Between preparations for moving (given the circumstances, I’m going in with a friend for a while), various obligations resulting from my new status (I’m getting to know the EDD website) and other complications, it’s been difficult to find time to write here. I still have an idea for the farewell column I would have written at the paper, given the opportunity, and I want to do that very, very soon. Now that I’ve got a laptop to replace the one from work, that should be a little easier.

So please, keep checking back. I’ll have more soon. Thanks.

At 12:50 p.m., I was a veteran sportswriter.
Shortly after 1 p.m., I was an unemployment statistic.
And so, as I drove off from the paper that had been my professional home for half my life, I was feeling physically ill and emotionally stunned.
Before I was a block away from the office, I had my brother on the phone. Told him the news. He couldn’t quite believe it, either, even though we’d certainly discussed the looming threat over anyone at a newspaper. We didn’t talk long — it’s amazing how little there is to say at a moment like this — which was probably good; I needed to force myself to pay attention to driving, while my mind was going a thousand miles an hour.
I didn’t drive straight home. I had, occasionally, thought there was one place I might approach if this ever happened, to see if they might be able to create a position for me. The person I needed to see wasn’t there, but I reached him on his cell, and talked very briefly about my idea. (Sorry to be nebulous about this, but really, I don’t think it would be fair, or in anyone’s best interest, to be specific.) My friend was receptive, but wasn’t sure the idea would work. He said he’d float it to his superiors the next day.
From there, I did go home. Reached one friend on the phone as I was driving, and cried for a little bit — for the first time, but not the last.
Tried to reach a handful of other close friends; we’ve shared our joys and sorrows for most of our adult lives, and this definitely fell in the latter category.
In keeping with the day, I got nothing but voice mail.
I e-mailed the Lakers to cancel my seat request for Thursday’s game with Boston, one of four assignments that had already been on my schedule. The other three were high school playoff games — exactly the kind of thing that are supposed to be crucial to the “hyperlocal” strategy that is the buzzword of most newspapers, but that would no doubt go uncovered now, because there was one less person to cover them.
And then I went on Facebook. The reactions had started rolling in — some of them shocked, some of them angry, all of them supportive.
The Facebook post would prove to be the saving grace of the day. People said amazingly complimentary things, and they came from everywhere: People at the Olympics, at newspaper jobs all over the country, at web sites, in the media relations offices of sports teams.  There were Facebook posts, private messages, IMs, e-mails, phone calls, and they just kept coming, all day long.
I was, to be honest, stunned. And moved.
Newspaper layoffs aren’t really that big a deal any more, in the grand scheme of things. There’s not anyone in the business who hasn’t seen a friend downsized, or a face-of-the-paper veteran summarily dismissed, even though those are the kind of people that give papers their distinguishing features, make them unique in a corporatizing climate of sameness.
I made that post mostly because I knew the paper wasn’t going to publicize what it had done, and I knew there were a lot of people I was used to seeing — and enjoyed seeing — that suddenly weren’t going to be seeing me at the Lakers, or the Dodgers, or the Angels, or the Kings. I wanted them to know why.
Reactions? I suppose I expected a few, but layoffs are so closed to home for all of us that I thought it was more likely people wouldn’t want to dwell on the subject.
Instead the messages kept coming, and they’ve kept coming well into the next day, as someone sees the post for the first time, or learns about it from a friend, or sees yesterday’s blog post, which has been linked by a few friends. (Thanks for that, guys. And welcome, those of you coming here from one of those links.)
It hasn’t just been sympathy. It’s been pep talks, phone calls, and real, solid, meaningful advice — freelancing leads, tips on dealing with unemployment, people I should call.
I received a call from someone on a break from covering an Olympic event; she’d just heard the news from another writer. She offered condolences, and the possibility of some work. I heard from the Lakers’ beat writer, Mike Bresnahan, as he drove home from Tuesday night’s game. At midnight, after going through the deadline wringer. I don’t even know how he got my phone number.
It’s been incredibly uplifting. If my employer didn’t appreciate me, my professional peers did. That may not mean anything financially, but boy, is it fulfilling. I’ve always gotten along with all these people, but I never really knew they, well, cared.
It was a long, hard, awful day. When I left the paper after getting the goodbye envelope, I felt incredibly alone.
By the end of the day, I knew that wasn’t the case. And there is no way to explain how much that means.

Now you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough, rich enough to forget my name
— Bruce Springsteen, “Youngstown.”

The newspaper business is changing, and not for the better, spinning into an abyss in which the only answer to its problems is less of everything — less people, less space, less commitment to doing anything other than hobbling along until the next round of reductions.

Yesterday — Tuesday, Feb. 16 — I was a victim of that change.

I was supposed to be off, but received an e-mail on Monday asking me to come in for a 1 p.m. staff meeting.

When I walked in the office, no one else in the sports department knew of any meeting. I guess that should have been the first sign, but I just put it down to the usual flaws in communication.
But a few minutes before 1 o’clock, when the top guy on the editorial side tapped me on the shoulder and said he needed to meet with me in HR, I knew. I pretty much slid into shock, but I knew.

At this point, layoffs in the newspaper are never a surprise. I’ve certainly talked about the possibility with friends, and I’ve seen plenty of other friends fall victim to the relentless cutting. The paper laid off 20 percent of its staff in November 2008, rolled back our salaries, and instituted a pay freeze. And I’ve watched the carnage around me at every other L.A. area paper.

But last week, the company announced a stunning new plan to take its three West Coast properties and eliminate all the copy desk and page design people — the staff members who take the stories from people like me, decide where to put them on the page, write the headlines and edit for errors.

Instead, a “universal copy desk” will be created in South Texas to handle those chores. Those people won’t have any local knowledge of the places they’re reading about, or for whom they’re writing headlines. And they won’t know their “coworkers” on the west coast, because they’re 1,500 miles away and have never met them. (There may be one or two people who accept the offer to re-apply for their jobs and relocate to Texas, but clearly, there won’t be many.)

This decision will wipe out 15 jobs at our paper, three in sports. (I say will because the jobs won’t be eliminated until May or June when they get this system set up.) I’ve worked with all three of them for years, one of them since 1985 when I was hired.
I felt awful for all of them, sickened by what it meant for the paper, and — like almost everyone else in the newsroom — saw it as the beginning of the end for the paper.
But I also figured that had to be it for the grinding, morale-killing changes. Whacking that many jobs in one spot had to be enough for a while, didn’t it?

I could not have been more wrong. Which is why I was stunned as I made that walk to HR.

“This can’t be good,” I finally said to the editor.

“I’m sorry, it’s not,” he said as we went into the little room.

The HR director was waiting, along with chairs for the editor and me, and a manila envelope.

The meeting was brief, mostly because I was stunned. I was told the envelope contained the “involuntary separation plan,” information on filing for unemployment, and my final paycheck — two weeks’ pay en lieu of two weeks’ notice, plus settlement of outstanding vacation time. And details of the severance package — which could be worse, but could obviously be a whole lot better for someone cast out into a state with 10 percent unemployment, and a resume of work in a dying industry that dates to age 14.

They offered the usual words of regret. Probably they even meant them.

The only question I asked was about the possibility of applying for one of those jobs in South Texas. They indicated that would be a possibility — but that signing the severance documents might complicate it, so I should hold off on doing so.

I doubt the meeting lasted five minutes. I walked back into the sports department, announced that I had just been laid off, and walked back to my desk — or the desk that had been mine until a few moments before. A couple of the guys indicated how sorry they were, but knowing how impossible it is to say anything truly meaningful at that point, they didn’t say much.

Initially, I planned to clean my desk out then and there, but I realized pretty quickly that I just needed to go. I’ll go back for my things later.

I closed the e-mail I’d been reading, posted the news on Facebook that I’d just been eliminated, and gathered up my 2008 U.S. Olympic Media Summit backpack, a memento of the last gasp of good times.

I said a couple of goodbyes, and received long, sorrowful hugs from Jean and Marjorie — and from Joseph, a photographer. That caught me by surprise, but I appreciated it. Jean walked me to my car. We talked for a few minutes, and then I got into the car and drove away.

I was one month and three days from the 25th anniversary of my hiring, wondering what comes next for a 50-year-old sportswriter.

More to come …

For anyone finding their way over from my Ventura County Star blog, welcome. I was laid off today — in some ways not that surprised, and in some ways shocked. Shocked mostly that it was today.

I’ll have a bit more to say about this as soon as I sort out my feelings, so please check back. One of the many bad things about today was that I didn’t get to write any kind of a proper farewell column. I’m sure I’ll be doing something along those lines shortly.

Thanks for checking in.

To be serious for a moment:

In a number of online forums, I’ve seen a constant theme of skepticism about giving to the Haitian earthquake relief efforts — skepticism that the money will actually reach its intended goal, that there is any reason to believe these efforts to help in Haiti will be any more effective than a number of other charitable interventions in the past, or that the money given to Haiti should be kept at home to address American poverty.
I choose to give. And I choose to give not because I am naive enough to believe there won’t be problems in translating those gifts into help, or that we can solve Haiti’s issues with one sudden infusion of cash. I choose to give because I have no doubt the need is immediate and pressing. I choose to give because while giving may be not be an ideal way to help, it is the best I can offer. And I choose to give because while giving may not address all Haiti’s problems, not giving assures none of them are addressed.
I hope others will join me in choosing giving over skepticism or inaction.

www.hopeforhaitinow.org

Now that Hollywood has managed to shed itself of the last vestige of respect for its source material — with an action-hero Sherlock Holmes whose name is about the only link to the classic literary character — the movie people are free to get really creative in maximizing the box-office potential of existing works — because Lord knows it’s a lot easier to take an existing idea and screw it up than it is to come up with something original.
And so here at the Top Ten movies just begging to be re-made if “Sherlock Holmes” is the expected hit:
10. “The Princess Bride,” directed by Roland Emmerich.
9. “Annie Hall,” starring Bruce Willis and Jessica Simpson.
8. Quentin Tarentino’s “Toy Story.”
7. Vin Diesel in “It’s A Wonderful Life.” (Advertising tagline: “Mr. Potter is about to be hit by a Diesel.”)
6. Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler are “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
5. “Sleepless in Seattle,” starring Nicolas Cage and Jennifer Lopez.
4. Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu in “Sense and Sensibility.”
3. Keanu Reeves in “On The Waterfront.”
2. Nicolas Cage in “Patton.”
1. Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Bambi.”

OK, so you’re not feeling well. But how can you really tell if it’s some run of the mill illness, or the panic-inducing pandemic for our times, swine flu? Here are the Top Ten indicators you might be feeling a bit piggish:

10. You wonder if rolling around in mud is an effective way to treat a fever.
9. Extreme anxiety when Vin Scully reads a spot for Farmer John sausage.
8. You can smell a truffle a mile away.
7. You wonder why more supermodels don’t wear their hair in pigtails.
6. You have a strong desire to rent the movie “Babe” (but still don’t want anything to do with the sequel).
5. You Google “Arnold Ziffel” and are outraged he didn’t win an Emmy for his work on “Green Acres.”
4. Suddenly, Miss Piggy looks kind of hot.
3. You look at that package of bacon in the refrigerator and feel guilty.
2. It seems worth it to drive 1,200 miles to shop at a Piggly Wiggly.
1. Have taken to ending all conversations by saying “T-t-t-hat’s all, folks!”