Blogatology

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?

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 …

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

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You are now free to step away from the computer and resume your life.