A Hard(court) Lesson

I’ve always been a sucker for college hoops. 

There’s something about the buzzer-beating energy and boyish finesse of amateur athletes that, for me, always keeps the game fresh. 

But watching any college basketball game — especially during the conference championships, and particularly the ACC — invokes bleak, embarrassing memories of my own amateur days. 

A hapless scrub who rode the bench in my church league, I was cursed with a weak-wristed jumper and an inability to either block out or rebound. 

And yet basketball did teach me something.

It was a bitter lesson meted out not on the hardwood itself but at court side — during my one flailing, desperate effort to cover the sport as a fledging journalist. 

On a nightmarish weekend in April 1981, I came to grasp the importance of reining in naked ambition, stifling unhealthy competitiveness and, most importantly, never over-selling my meager talents at doing anything.

The recollection still stings. 

Bill Kovach, the gentlemanly, tough-as-nails Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, had summoned me into his corner office.

“You ever cover basketball before?”

I stood there as fidgety as a bad foul-shooter at the charity stripe.

Fresh out of college, I was working as an underpaid news clerk in the age of the manual typewriter. 

My job was simple.

Answer phones. And respond to reporters who yelled “Copy!” on deadline, who handed me three-sheet duplicates to ferry to the news desk.

There were a few of us, ambitious young turks, some of whom would one day make it big in the business.

We wrote minor stories, never with bylines, always with the anonymous “Special to the New York Times.”

The only section that credited non-staffers and people like us was Sports.

I knew that. Kovach knew it, too.

And this knowledge freighted our conversation.

I stammered.

“Yeah, sure, I wrote about basketball in college.”

I lied.

After all, this was a chance for my very first professional byline, in the venerated New York Times, no less. I was not going to give up this opportunity, let somebody else make off with my good fortune.

I had never covered basketball — neither pro, college or church league — nor any other sport for that matter.

But how hard could it be?

“Good,” Kovach continued. “The New York sports desk is looking for someone to cover the ACC basketball tournament this weekend at the Capitol Center. Call Fred on the desk. He’ll tell you what to do.”

And that was it. He went back to reading something important.

My heart pounded as I called Fred later that day.

“OK, kid,” he said. “Here’s how it works.”

He then went on to explain what sounded like a grueling weekend of Camp Lejeune basic training drills -- reveille, pushups, ten-mile runs and all.

Friday night would feature a doubleheader. Virginia against Maryland in the opener, North Carolina meeting Wake Forest in the nightcap. 

Show up at place early, Fred said. Meet the coaches. File your first story right after the first game, and an update at half-time of the second game. Then file a recap of both games after the second contest ends. 

Get to the auditorium early on Saturday and find a feature to write. Then write the championship game story.

Got it?

“Yep,” I said with a tone of false confidence. 

Except that I didn’t.

I didn’t get it at all.

I arrived at the Cap Center early that Friday night. I didn’t carry a typewriter because I’d planned wrote my story longhand in the my notebook.

There were no cell phones in these days. Reporter dictated their stories from a bank of pay phones, like overseas Marines lined up for calls home.

In those days, the press table was right alongside the court. You couldn’t ask for a more intimate way to watch a basketball game. These seats were celebrity close.

I walked down the line, looking for my place.

Then I saw it.

“New York Times,” the placard said.

It was about the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

Then I saw something else. A pair of eyes staring at me, sizing me up.

It was a reporter sitting two spots away from me, at the Baltimore Sun spot.

He wasn’t much older than me, but I understood the look.

Who the hell was I and what was I doing in that chair?

He’d never seen me, didn’t know me.

Our eyes met. His were cold.

I was either an imposter or a rising new talent.

A threat.

I ignored him.

I had work to do.

Eventually, the game started. And my sports writer’s life boat quickly sprung a leak.

Within minutes, I was drowning.

In statistics, that is.

The stat sheets arrived by the truckload, dropped by league aides. I was being sucked under by a pace of action I could not follow, by a technique and nomenclature I could not begin to comprehend.

Later, looking back at my notes, I recalled writing in my scribbly shorthand, “So-and-so passes the ball to what’s-his-name.”

What a joke.

If you’re a newbie/klutz like me, how do you know that a basket scored with nine minutes remaining in the first half is the beginning of one team’s 10-0 run?

Well, the answer is, you don’t.

Basketball is gorgeous to watch. It’s like looking up at the stars at night. Or hearing a beautiful piece of music. But any study of the cosmos is based on physics. And music theory is the language of math.

For me, basketball was like a beautiful car, a ’57 Chevy I loved to ogle, but I didn’t even know how to change the old, let alone swap out the tranny.

These were tough hardcourt lessons, and I felt like a fraud.

I began to sweat, then stopped taking notes altogether.

It was like covering a speech in Swahili.

When the game (mercifully) ended I pieced together some unformed thoughts and badly-written sentences and called New York.

I stood at a bank of a dozen phones, each attached to a reporter filing his game story.

A news clerk took my call and I dictated my mess of a game story, slowly, painfully.

As I talked I heard a voice at the next phone.

I looked over.

It was the Baltimore Sun guy, whose sentences flowed easily, like he’d done this before.

I paused. I leaned in. 

And, I admit it, I eavesdropped.

It was not my proudest moment, but I was desperate. I could hear the death rattle of my fledging newspaper career.

Suddenly, he turned and looked at me. There was disgust in his eyes.

Then he turned his back and continued filing, now in a whisper.

I have never felt like a bigger loser.

Well, actually, I would, and it would come later that same night.

I slunk back to my court side spot and couldn’t even look at that New York Times placard, which now seemed to taunt me. 

Nor did I make eye-contacted with the Baltimore Sun guy.

I couldn’t.

I had another game to cover after all, but my heart was no longer in it.

At halftime, when I went to file, the clerk told me that Fred wanted to talk to me.

I knew what was coming.

The arrogance police, the journalism cops, the hubris investigators, were all going to make a major task-force arrest. I’d be handcuffed, forced to do the frog walk in front of everyone I’d ever known.

It seemed like forever before Fred came on the line.

Finally, he was there.

My execution was brief, over in a nanosecond.

“You’ve never done this before, have ya kid?” he said.

“No,” I answered. 

It was the first true thing I’d said throughout this whole hoops fiasco and it felt good getting it off my chest, like I was inside a church confessional.

“Don’t worry about it," Fred said. "Go watch the second half. We’ll use the wires.”

They would run a wire-service story, no doubt written by a seasoned professional who was in this very same arena, who wasn’t trying to fit into bigger britches than he was capable of wearing, who actually knew what he was doing.

I didn’t watch the second half, nor did I return the following night for a free ringside seat to the championship fight.

I couldn’t.

North Carolina won the tournament, with San Perkins named MVP.

He went on to play power forward in the NBA, for teams like the Dallas Mavericks and LA Lakers, before retiring in 2001.

Sam was the big winner that weekend. He probably doesn’t even remember much about that long-ago college tournament.

But I do.

And what stick with me most is this: something that only Fred the New York Times sports editor, the news clerk, the guy from the Baltimore Sun, and myself, could know.

That I was that I was the big loser that night.