The farewell column.
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?