PARTING SHOT: Sports Writer Learns Lessons on Writing, History, Friendship

It’s hard for me to pinpoint the exact moment when writing sports for The Crimson no longer had anything to do with sports. Maybe it never did.

I, quite literally, stumbled across the Sports Board after a tremendous exercise in freshman stupidity turned me into one of those statistics that DAPA stamps on the Nalgene bottles they love to give out, and my mother bluntly declared, “You need a hobby.”

With this sage advice in mind, I trekked over to 14 Plympton Street and listened to members of various boards give their spiels before deciding on Sports, mostly because the chairs at the time seemed like—as the expression goes—“pretty chill dudes.”

Four years later, many of my best memories of Harvard stem from my involvement in Crimson Sports, rivaled only by recollections of my time in Kirkland House—the other cult I’m in.

But the moments that I remember with the most clarity and fondness are moments in which sport served as a conduit, rather than an end in itself, for uniting individuals who would permanently alter each other’s lives in ways they never could have imagined.

***

I remember taking the T to Boston College for the women’s hockey team’s Beanpot matchup with the Eagles during freshman year. I went with Jonathan Lehman ’08, who was the sports chair at the time.

The game was a triple-overtime thriller, one of the longest contests in college history, and a devastating 4-3 Harvard loss, but what stands out most from that night is the cab ride back.

Eager freshman that I was, I furiously typed out the first few paragraphs of my recap and showed them to my fellow traveler. Lehman looked over my (in retrospect) serviceable but average copy, gave it a nod of approval, and made a few suggestions.

It was a pretty unremarkable moment, but it marked the first advice I’d receive from a person who taught me more about writing—not sportswriting, but writing—than any professor I’ve come across at Harvard.

***

I remember sitting across from Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh in his office at the athletic complex in early March. We had just wrapped up a 45-minute interview for a feature I was writing about him for The Crimson’s annual baseball/softball supplement.

Walsh, who former Crimson writer Martin Bell correctly called a “walking embodiment of the mystical fabric that connects the games of baseball and life,” has a uniquely thoughtful, eloquent, and folksy way of talking that makes him a dream quote for any reporter.

On that March afternoon, he was his usual self, filling my voice recorder with a gripping narrative that brought his long career in baseball to life better than I ever could.

But it’s the conversation we had after the official, sports-related interview—the one that exists in no record outside of my own memory—that remains most salient in my consciousness.

As I gathered my things to leave Walsh’s office, I mentioned that I was reading a book for my thesis on the turbulent, racially-charged period of school desegregation in Boston during the 1970s. I asked Walsh, who grew up in Dorchester and long ago determined the letter “R” to be an unnecessary impediment to good conversation, about his experiences living in the city during that time.

After the 20-minute, anecdote-laden discourse that followed, I realized that I was talking to a personification of what the author of that book was trying to explain.

Walsh spoke candidly about the racial tension that left its mark on every corner of Boston, about his family’s connections to the local political machine, and how they knew the judge who ordered the city’s schools desegregated. But he also personalized the era in fantastic detail, musing about how he and his friends would sneak into the Boston Garden to see concerts; how Keith Richards and a Mick Jagger-less Rolling Stones barged into a hotel-room party he was at looking for booze; how black and white teens would play basketball against each other and how that diffused, but sometimes intensified, racial hostility.

It was a history lesson that, as they say, you can’t find in a book, and it happened because I was writing a sports story for The Crimson.

***

I remember the Crimson Sports staff joking about how my co-chair Dixon McPhillips and I didn’t even like sports. This may have been an exaggeration, but it’s true that we approached our jobs intent on delivering content that transcended athletics.

Dixon and I were a match made in...well, it depends whom you ask.

At our most benign, we urged our staff to write features that focused on the more human elements of sports, and Dixon made pushing Crimson Sports and The Crimson in general into the 21st century a personal crusade, trudging across the river every weekend—film equipment in tow—to spearhead our paper’s video efforts.

At our craziest (although we’d argue most genius), we terrorized Crimson designers with what some called our “cracked-out” ideas, like “Let’s turn the baseball/softball supplement into a graphic novel,” and “Can the spread for the Commencement issue be an art gallery, and can we be in it?”

(Luckily for us, the designers’ talent was even greater than their skepticism, and they brought out the best aspects of our concepts while reining in the more far-fetched.)

The creative bromance cultivated by a year as comp directors and another as sports chairs resulted in one more cracked-out idea—a musical that was performed in Kirkland this spring—that really did have nothing to do with sports.

But, as with my writing tutorial under Jonathan Lehman and my history lesson with Joe Walsh, sports were the common thread, the conduit through which it all happened.

So when I try to locate the exact moment when writing sports for The Crimson no longer had anything to do with sports, maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe it never happened at all.

—Staff writer Loren Amor can be reached at lamor@post.harvard.edu.