Love It Or Leeve It: Retracing the Path to Sportswriting

Last December, I was trying to keep my friend awake at the wheel while we drove home through a blizzard after a hockey road trip. Rewind a bit, and the previous summer I was getting hit on by skeezy sportswriters at the Buffalo Bills’ training camp. Go even further back in time, and I was sitting quite comfortably in the stands at the Murr Center watching our squash teams amid players’ family and friends.

When I look back at the memories of my sportswriting career, I can’t quite connect the dots with perfectly straight lines. Something inexplicable about The Crimson, both the people and the place, sucked me in and never let me leave the building the same person—or even the same day that I entered it.

This perplexing force of the paper goes beyond the late nights and runs deeper than my love for sports. I told myself it was about passion for my writing and pushing myself to succeed. Now, I don’t always know what role I was trying to fill at each point in time. I grew up with sports, and I found in them a precious way to connect to my family and friends. But when I came to Harvard, I didn’t wander into a sports meeting at The Crimson until my sophomore year. I told myself that I needed to balance out my science classes with some unrelated fun, and writing about sports fit nicely into that category.

I wonder now if that’s just the story that I concocted in my head to justify my new form of procrastination. Or if I was merely filling in a hole in my résumé left by my concentration. Truthfully, I found the change of pace refreshing, and the paper was a logical step because my brother had chaired the sports board three years prior. But then I wondered if I was merely playing the role of the little sister, who follows in her brother’s rather large footsteps.

When winter season rolled around, I took up the squash beat. I knew the team, and the sport was small enough to make me feel safe covering it. The strangest thing wasn’t that I devoted my life to squash; it was the fact that the whole time I covered it, I was terrified I would mess up. So why was I a sportswriter if I was scared of exposing some horrible inadequacy of mine?

Like a good Harvard student, I kept at it, pushing myself to embrace the challenge of seeing my name in print. There, was something almost masochistic about it, the sacrifice of free time to watch games among few fans, and the unheralded articles that appeared the next day in the paper.

A great thing happened, though—I had found something that I cared about, and maybe that’s why I was so scared at first. I became an executive, and in turn, I adopted the role of the newsroom bitch. I gave everyone grief, earning quite a few enemies while cementing a rep as the sports girl with an attitude. I could never quite put a finger on why I took on this aggravating role, only knowing that I did love the paper and felt the experience rewarding even if I didn’t always show it. So then I got an internship through a minority sportswriting program, and I lived in Buffalo for a summer working at a professional paper. There, I was on the sidelines among the white male reporters, regulated to both the token Asian and token female roles without any say in the matter. I worked hard, trying to prove myself, perhaps thinking every now and then that I could be a trailblazer for all womankind.

With such grandiose notions, I returned to The Crimson last fall, refreshed and ready to take on bigger sports and harder stories. Such thinking is how I found myself in a car, skidding on ice on the way back from upstate New York after a weekend of hockey. My burning desire to change the industry and make an impact after a summer of professional reporting slowly but surely waned, and during my senior spring, I was happy writing only a biweekly column.

Through the various permutations of articles, editing and late-night insanity, The Crimson became a cornerstone of my college experience. At Harvard, we are driven to pursue nothing less than greatness. Under pressure to succeed, we find ourselves immersed in activities and classes that range from flighty to meaningful, and the degree of satisfaction we derive from our work is almost secondary to beefing up a résumé.

But what it all comes down to, I’ve realized, is loving what you do and who you do it with—there’s more to life than grades, extracurriculars and, yes, sports. I may have been motivated at certain times in my sportswriting career by different forces. I have filled the role of the little sister, the overachiever, the bitch and the token Asian-slash-female. I’ve done all that, and I wouldn’t trade those memories for the world. But after all the cat fights, production problems and mediocre copy that I’ve churned out, I know that those small roles add up to one big payoff: an irreplaceable experience during college, leaving me with ties to people and a place that will never dissolve.

—Staff writer Brenda E. Lee can be reached at belee@post.harvard.edu.