Blogatology

The Top Ten things we learned from the World Cup:

10. Vuvuzelas are the perfect gift for the children of people you don’t really like.

9. “Jabulani” is a word in a Zulu dialect meaning “ball hated by everyone except athletes paid by the company that makes it.”

8. You absolutely cannot use your hands unless you’re a goalie — or you really, really need to prevent a goal that would eliminate your team from a tournament.

7. The growth of soccer can only be helped by the fact telecasts don’t involve Brent Musburger or Joe Buck.

6. If you really want to make sure your flight gets you to a semifinal match in time, you should be royalty, a head of state, a celebrity or arrange traveling with someone from those three groups.

5. Uruguay and Paraguay are not, in fact, the same country.

4. To reach its estimate that 96 percent of the officiating decisions at the World Cup were correct, FIFA must be giving credit for things like showing up at the proper stadium and remembering to wear pants.

3. Also, those four percent of incorrect decisions apparently included 97 percent of the scoring.

2. FIFA, incidentally, stands for Fools In Fear of Accuracy.

1. The sporting world is a better place when there are psychic octopi involved.

So, 25 years ago today I started work at the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle.

For some reason, I don’t feel a whole lot like celebrating the milestone.

In the 24 years, 10 months and 21 days that followed, I went through one reapply-for-your-job merger, one pay cut and at least two pay freezes. I worked out of four offices, for a half-dozen sports editors, and went through uncounted crises — either for the company or journalism as a whole — until the one that claimed my job on Feb. 16.

On the bright side, along the way, I also covered:

— The 1996 Little League World Series, which I remember most for the improbable way Moorpark earned its berth — winning three games in a single day at the San Bernardino regional — and the resulting logistics of getting to Williamsport on one day’s notice. (I ended up having to fly to Baltimore and drive from there to Williamsport. Google Maps tells me that’s a 176-mile trip. It seemed longer, but then, I was operating on about four hours’ sleep and distinctly recall wandering out of my lane as I fought to stay awake over the last part of the drive.)

— The 2002 World Series, one of the great unexpected success stories in my experience, as the Angels just kept winning. As much as I enjoyed covering the success of Mike Scioscia and a very likeable roster, the championship was a bittersweet moment. My dad, a big Angels fan and one-time season-ticket holder, had died the previous summer.

— The Ducks’ Stanley Cup Finals appearances in 2003 and 2007. As a hockey fan, seeing the Cup presented in Anaheim should have been one of the great moments ever, but I was so incredibly sick that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have. Still, the memory of walking out on to the ice to do interviews after the Cup presentation — with the crowd still in the building, cheering — still gives me chills.

— Three BCS championship games. The best one, clearly, was the USC-Texas game at the 2006 Rose Bowl, the second consecutive year Vince Young was just dazzling in Pasadena. The other really memorable one was the Orange Bowl the year before — memorable mostly the cross-country trip for about a 36-hour stay in Florida to cover USC’s 55-19 thumping of Oklahoma was such a complete anticlimax to the because Texas-Michigan Rose Bowl I covered before flying out.

— Six NBA Championships. I have so many memories from these that they deserve their own blog entry or entries, which I’ll save for a future date. I’ll note here that the 2004 Finals, the one that saw the Lakers lose to Detroit, marked the high point of the paper’s commitment (and financial wherewithal) to sports. That was the year I covered every playoff game, home and road, learning just how grueling the beat-writer life could be in the process. Between the Lakers coverage, the Olympics, a few other assignments and vacations, I was away from home over 100 nights that year. I like traveling, but even I found that a bit excessive.

— And, of course, the five Olympics: Sydney, Salt Lake, Athens, Turin and Beijing. As I’ve written before, I have great memories from each one, and few of those memories revolve around the actual sporting events.

And, as I’ve told a few people over the years, I sometimes think it was a misperception that made it all possible. It was mostly because of Marion Jones that I joined the Scripps-Howard Olympics team in Sydney; she was clearly going to be a big local story for The Star, and there was some thought that, because I’d covered her in high school, it might help us get a little more access to her.

Which, of course, it didn’t — access to Marion was tightly controlled (understandably, when you remember she was arguably the biggest story in Sydney, and there were something like 10,000 journalists covering those games). And, though I never went out of my way to point it out, I had never covered Marion as a track athlete, even in high school. Former Star staffer David Kirvin did the track stories, as well the best single feature about Marion during her high school career. I covered her during basketball season — and still think she was the best girls’ basketball player I’ve seen.

Still, it went well enough that I was part of the Scripps team from then on, until there wasn’t a Scripps team to be part of — the news service passed on Vancouver in a cost-cutting move.

I know about those all too well.

Still, to the extent I’m thinking about that 25th anniversary today — and once I’m done writing this, I probably won’t dwell on it much — I’m grateful for the things I was able to do, and the people I met along the way.

And the support I’ve had over the last month has made it clear it was the people, not the places, that made those 25 years really meaningful.

Teemu Selanne scored his 600th NHL goal tonight for Anaheim. If the accomplishment were tied to the quality of the individual, rather than just his skill, he’d be at about 1,000.

There’s just not a better guy in professional sports, at least from the writer’s perspective. As good, maybe, but not better.

He’s always understood his need to help promote the game, and so he’s always made himself available. (At the 2006 Olympics, he lost three teeth in Finland’s quarterfinal victory over the United States, and still talked to reporters afterward.) What’s more, he always makes you feel he’s actually enjoying the interaction.

I think the degree to which Selanne’s teammates tried to set him up for the milestone goal over the last two games speaks to the kind of individual he is, and how everyone wanted to a.) see him score No. 600 in Anaheim, and b.) be a part of the moment.

Scott Niedermayer, who assisted on the goal 34 seconds into the second period of the Ducks’ 5-2 win over Colorado, noted, “There was a little underlying feeling when you’re on the ice with him. You want to at least give him the opportunity. It shows what kind of teammate and person he is. He is a great guy and we were definitely pulling for him.”

I covered the Ducks’ game with the Islanders Friday for the AP, Selanne’s second game stuck at 599, and had mixed emotions about the milestone.

On the one hand, having enjoyed him as a player and a person over the years, it would have been nice to be there. On the other, If he’d scored that night, it would have meant banging out a quick separate story to move on the wire, and I had visions of it happening in the final minute of the game, when it would maximize the already difficult balancing job that is filing one story to move at the buzzer (or as close as is practical) and then running to the locker room to get quotes for the “optional,” the second, more fully developed game story.

As it happened, that game was a tough enough write from the AP standpoint, with the Ducks tying the game with 32 seconds left, and winning 14 seconds into overtime, which meant I probably had no more than two or three minutes to go from writing an “Islanders win” story to a “Ducks win” version. I can’t imagine what that would have been like if Selanne had scored either of those goals at the end.

I was just watching on TV tonight, which was much more relaxing. And it freed me to react a little more when the moment came.

It’s a tremendous accomplishment for a great player, and a better guy.

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.

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.

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.