Jonnie On The Spot: No Need To Beckon Any More

It is almost midnight on Oct. 15, 1999.

A 17-year-old kid is sitting beneath the goalposts at Ed Harvey Field in Essexville, Mich. A town of 4,000 is on his left. Cornfields are on his right. He is thinking.

Hours before, he had played the game of his life. Of the 25 passes he threw, 20 were caught. Two were dropped. Two-hundred fifty-six yards. One touchdown. No interceptions. Everything he hoped for in his last home game.

Except that his team, the Garber High School Dukes, lost. They always lost. They stunk.

Afterward, the kid showers, leaves the locker room last, limps to his parents’ car, and drives home. Three whole blocks.

He eats warmed-over pizza and watches the 11 o’clock news with his dad. “BIRCH RUN 40, GARBER 37” flashes on the screen. The kid frowns. “I’ll be back later,” he mumbles to his dad.

He drives three blocks again. He squeezes back through the gate, onto the field where he grew up. He sits under the goalposts. And thinks.

He wonders about football, about college, about his girlfriend, about his future—stuff 17-year-old boys think about on rare occasions they allow themselves to.

His applications are out. Mom wants him to go to Michigan, maybe Northwestern, because they’re close. Dad thinks he should give Division III football a shot. His guidance counselor says he has a chance to get into an Ivy League school.

He doesn’t really know what he wants. He’s 17.

Then he closes his eyes. At last, clarity. “I’m going to keep playing football,” he tells himself. “I have to. I love it too much. Wherever I go, I’m going to play.”

So that was it. He was going to play four years of football. That was The Plan.

Well, a couple months later, a big package arrives from Cambridge, Mass. Today, four years later, he graduates.

Somewhere in between, the kid realized he was 5’8 and slow. He never did play college football. So much for The Plan.

The press box beckoned.

***

It is almost midnight on March 20, 2004.

The kid is 21 now. He is at Pepsi Arena in Albany, N.Y. He is wearing a suit and carrying a pen, notebook and digital voice recorder, a neat piece of technology that actually works. Sometimes.

It’s after a hockey game. He is standing on the ice. He is not supposed to be there. He’s not on the team, like he always was at Garber High School.

He’s a print journalist now, and only photographers and TV reporters are allowed on the ice. Those are the rules.

But ever since he turned in his shoulder pads and flak jacket for a life of laptops and phone lines, the kid had learned something: Sometimes, you have to go where you’re not supposed to in order to do your job.

So, he had ducked into the penalty box, sneaked onto the ice and walked toward a bunch of guys his age that were hugging each other and screaming. They were the 2003-2004 Harvard men’s ice hockey team, and they had just won the league championship.

The kid smiles. Yes, there was a press badge around his neck. But reporters have feelings, too, and these were people the kid felt happy for.

There’s Kenny Smith, the captain. He had taken heat when the team struggled. He had some rough games along the way. He was benched twice. But he kept the dressing room together and was always honest with that writer. So, press badge be damned, the kid smiled when Smith scored the game-winning goal.

A couple times that night, the writer wondered what it might’ve felt like to win a league championship with his best friends back in Essexville. They never had that chance, of course. They stunk too bad.

But he could see what that title meant to his classmates, guys from places like Lacombe, Alberta, and Stoneham, Mass., and Macon, Ga. He didn’t know them as well as he knew the Kyle O’Neills and Jeff Quasts and Mark Stefaniaks, his teammates and best buddies back in Essexville, but he knew them well enough to smile.

Still, this championship wasn’t his to enjoy. He had a story to write. Putting words on a computer screen was his thing now.

He couldn’t linger on the ice like he did on the field four years before. He wasn’t on the team anymore. He had a deadline to meet. So, he got his one-on-one interview with Smith and left.

The press box beckoned.

***

It is almost midnight on April 16, 2004.

The kid is almost 22. He is at Fenway Park. He is wearing a suit and carrying a pen, notebook and digital voice recorder, a neat piece of technology that actually works. Sometimes.

This is the biggest night of his professional life. The Boston Red Sox are playing the New York Yankees in what many agree is the most widely anticipated regular-season baseball game in years.

And, thanks to some good fortune, the kid has a press badge from the Washington Post around his neck.

Boston won that night, 6-2, in a game of little baseball drama and zero lead changes.

The writer had just finished pounding out a running story, completed on his laptop during the game and sent to a newsroom hundreds of miles away, via e-mail, as soon as the last out was recorded. The technology of it all still fascinates him.

He is in a crowd of reporters, mostly 40- and 50-year-old guys that look like his dad, scurrying around the narrow corridors toward the clubhouses. Everyone is rushing. Everyone is checking their watches. Everyone is muttering about deadlines.

This is very different from Friday nights in Essexville.

He goes into the Red Sox clubhouse, grabs some quotes from the pitching coach and catcher, then ducks out and hustles to the other side of the park.

He squeezes into a crowd around New York’s star shortstop and picks up a couple sound bytes. He leaves again.

He’s about to go upstairs, back to the press box and that laptop, when he spots a famous team executive—who, like himself, was once a sports reporter at an Ivy League newspaper.

He asks the man a few questions. The kid’s happy because, like that interview he did with Smith on the ice, there isn’t anyone else around. Finally, he has something no one else does.

Just as he turns to go upstairs, this tall guy comes sweeping by. It’s him, the guy who made everyone talk about baseball from November to February and beyond.

Some called him the Yankees’ biggest acquisition since the greatest of them all. And he was so close to playing for Boston that he had been booed that night and for the entire weekend. Weird.

“Hey, how you doing, bro?” the tall guy asks the executive.

“Good, man, how are you?” he responds.

The reporter looks around. No one else in sight. He had seen something worth writing about for the next edition’s story.

The press box beckoned.

***

It is midnight for the kid now. He is graduating from college.

Never again will he cover a game for his student paper. He surely won’t play another game of football. He’s put on a couple...dozen...pounds since he last did that.

He’s not on the team anymore. He’s not the one throwing passes, scoring goals, or taking that outside deuce to right.

No, he wears a suit now. This is a job, one he loves. He hopes to make it a career.

But covering the Red Sox or Yankees wouldn’t be the same as covering Harvard hockey, in the same way that covering Harvard hockey wasn’t the same as playing Garber football. It’s all one more step away from Essexville.

There are fewer common bonds with people he meets now. He had known his high school teammates since elementary school.

He knew some of the guys he covered in college for years, too, between classes and the rink and the odd night at Brother Jimmy’s. But how much in common would a sportswriter, making $550 a week, have in common with a $252-million man? Not much. And that’s OK.

He will not smile as much during celebrations now, not like he did in Albany, and certainly not like he would have if that 0-9 senior football season had been 9-0 instead. But that’s OK, too.

Because to enjoy the present, you have to understand where it was you came from, who was once important to you and who still is. And enjoying the present is a lot easier when you’re doing something you love—like writing about sports.

No need to beckon anymore. He’s going to the press box on his own.

—Staff writer Jon Paul Morosi can be reached at morosi@post.harvard.edu.