Goin' Bohlen: It Can't Be Just a Job

Sure it looks like fun and games-free passes into the hottest sporting events, hobnobbing with famous players and dedicating your life to something most pencil-pushers can only dream about. And it is fun to watch the games, meet your heroes and enjoy what you are doing, but being a sportswriter is not all it's cracked up to be.

I joined the sports staff at The Crimson because I am a sports fan and I like to write. Sounds like the perfect combination, right? Well, in a way, yes, for all those reasons mentioned above. But in another way, no. I've been to countless Harvard athletic events, but I haven't always been able to enjoy them. While friends sat in the stands eating popcorn and laughing, I was courtside furiously taking notes, forced to watch every play, even when the game was no longer interesting. After a defeat, I had to deal with the mad coaches and disheartened players, trying to get something out of them beyond the vacuous cliches like "We gave it 110 percent" or "It was a tough loss." Isn't 110 percent impossible? Aren't all losses tough?

The problem is that I am a sports fan first, and everything else second. The sports fan in me has been on temporary hiatus for these four years as, through Zen techniques and constant meditation, I have succeeded in not breaking into "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard" while sitting in press row at Harvard basketball games.

Only I really want to.

I love being a fan. I love losing myself in a crowd, shouting myself hoarse and feeling exhilarated with a win and blue with a loss. I love saying "my team" when I've never met the players. In high school, when they announced the year-end awards for social life, I rightly took home "Most School Spirit." I had been the basketball fan with the basketball for a hat and the painted face who led the basketball crowd in "the wave." I was a bona fide fan.

Of course, part of being a fan stems from playing sports. When I was a boy-back when Bob Saget was a clean-cut dad instead of a foul-mouthed and bitter man-there was one thing I wanted to be when I grew up: a baseball player. But by the time the wheat was beginning to separate from the Little League chaff, I was firmly established as chaff. I had trouble hitting to the outfield, and my fastball topped out in the low sixties with a penchant for hitting the backstop.

I was a tall one, so I turned to basketball. But I was also a skinny one. I hit the ceiling-both literally and figuratively-in my sophomore year of high school. On the high school basketball team, I had become next in a long line of blond, gangly white centers. Only weight training wasn't helping me much. The other guys, mostly from the School of Hard Knocks, got bigger. Much bigger.

A pro hoops career wasn't in the cards, so I left to join my other dorky friends on the tennis team, where I wouldn't have to worry about opponents' elbows bruising my sternum. Eight years later, I'm still waiting for my 6'5 frame to fill out.

All along the way, there was one constant: I loved sports. I read the sports page first thing in the morning, often over a bowl of Wheaties-the breakfast of champions, and skinny white dorks-and in front of "SportsCenter." In fact, it quickly became clear that I enjoyed sports media and sports culture as much as I cherished playing sports. I wanted to be Kilborn and Olbermann up there spewing catch phrases by the dozen, being worshipped by kids just like me in every corner of the country.

So I came to Harvard with the dream of turning my experience into a prime role on "SportsCenter" or at the very least, Fox Sports Net. Or, because I favored the printed word, maybe I would become a Mitch Albom or Tony Kornheiser or Dan Shaughnessy.

When I joined The Crimson in my freshman year, and it was the right move for me. I found a community of sports junkies who were as absorbed in statistics and box scores as I was. Becoming a sportswriter forced me to put down the books and get out to the games. Readers of The Crimson would know about a game only through what I told them; it was an instantly gratifying feeling of power, an opiate for my journalistic ego.

Over the next few years, I rose through the ranks each year to become co-editor of this section. I had found my niche on this campus.

But that niche also took me away from what I had set out to do. Career ambition became an obstacle to fun. I had to spend more time inside 14 Plympton laying out pages, managing staff and sitting in long bureaucratic committees listening to uncompromising board heads quibble over miniscule changes to the paper's bylaws. I had lost the thing I sought the most-going to sporting events. And even when I was going to games as a writer, not cheering was the hardest part.

And that is when I started to wonder if this was the path I wanted to be on. Did I want to follow two of my immediate predecessors into working for Sports Illustrated, the Bible of my youth? Did I want to trail overpaid athletes with a tape recorder, hoping I had gotten the crumb of a quote to separate my story from a rival's? Did I want to sit in an office, orchestrating a section from my desk, waiting for my minions to bring their "big scoops" about the contract negotiations for a new shortstop?

In what was roughly a job interview, I had a conversation last summer with John Cherwa, sports editor of The Chicago Tribune. I was waffling between doing news or sports as my first career move out of college. I told him how much I loved sports and how I had long thought I wanted to be a sportswriter and how my recent experience had me wondering.

What he said made my heart sink.

"I don't go to games anymore," he said. And for his stable of writers, he said, they had also lost their childhood love for the games they covered. The magic of sports was no longer there for them. Sports was a cycle they had to follow; they could never take a break from the games or the athletes or the endless stories they had to crank out in order to keep bread on the table and their sportscars paid for.

Sportswriting had become just a job.

Just a job.

I hold out hope that I could be a sportswriter while preserving my youthful enthusiasm for the games I love.

I may still write sports for a living sometime. But I will switch to something new before it becomes just a job.