Commentary: Small blessings in an awful year
There’s a week left in the never-ending hellscape we will forever know as 2020. I’m not naive enough to think everything is going to suddenly be better on January 1, but at least it will be a bit of a mental cleansing when we flip the calendar. It really will be a new year even if college football has predetermined that Clemson and Alabama will play for the national title again.
Like everyone, I look back on this as the year of, to steal a phrase from Joe Walljasper, What Just Happened? Unlike most, I will also look back at it as the year that reinvigorated my professional life and got me excited about my job again.
Maybe you don’t want to read about 2020 actually being a positive for someone. I’d get that. It’s been awful for most of us and far worse for nearly everyone than it has for me. So if you don’t want somebody pointing out silver linings, maybe reading this isn’t the way you want to spend Christmas morning. On the flip side, maybe all of us could use a reminder now and then that even when a lot of things suck, not everything sucks. Another warning, this column is going to read more like a personal blog or an emotional word vomit than the stuff you’re used to reading on this site. But it’s Christmas Day and barring some kid thinking this is a good day to announce his commitment (which is possible), we don’t really anticipate any Mizzou news, so I figured it would be a good day to run something a little different.
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention.
I think all of us will be able to look back on 2020 and find our light bulb moment. You know, the time when we went from “Hey, I’ve seen a few stories on this corona business, I wonder what’s going on there” to “Oh, man, life’s about to change, huh?”
Some time in February, my wife had mentioned the virus and said maybe we should stock up on a few things at the store just in case it actually did head our way. So I went to Sam’s Club and bought some extra meat to throw in the deep freeze, some toilet paper, coffee, you know, the stuff you need if you can’t leave the house for a few days. I texted her, “Just spent $450 at Sam’s and COVID can go f— itself.”
I didn’t really think there was much need to actually buy that stuff, but I figured what the hell, can’t hurt. It wasn’t long after that I had my light bulb moment. For those who are avid sports fans, your moment is probably the same as mine. I was watching something or other on ESPN when it was announced that Rudy Gobert had tested positive for the virus. Within an hour or two, the NBA season was off. And that’s when we knew nothing was going to be the same.
The next morning I was at the gym when Mitchell Forde texted me that they’d called off the SEC Tournament and he’d be heading back from Nashville, having driven six-plus hours to talk to Cuonzo Martin. It’s one of the last in-person interviews anyone on our staff has conducted.
The next few months weren’t good. For us or for anybody. We run a business dedicated to covering sports, and there were no sports. Missouri held out on spring football for a couple of practices so we had that. April and May are generally slower times anyway where we take some time off and get by on recruiting news. Then we hit the summer, when we should have been gearing up for football season.
I knew SEC Media Days weren’t going to happen, and then we started to wonder if the season was going to happen. The first couple months had been okay. Like I said, there wasn’t that much to cover anyway and it’s the time of year we’re writing different off-season kind of stories. I’ve been doing this for 17 years now and my dad had covered Mizzou for 13 years before that and I’d grown up watching Mizzou sports so I had some historical knowledge I could fall back on for things like stretching out 64-person brackets voting on the best football and basketball players in school history for nearly three months.
But we’d run through all of that and I was out of ideas. And there were still no sports. I didn’t really fear too much for my business because I thought we’d built up enough equity that people were going to stick with us if they possibly could. And, like most of you, I still mostly believed there was no way we weren’t going to figure out how to get past this and get back to something approaching normal life in a reasonable amount of time. I took long walks and listened to podcasts and audiobooks, I played more golf than normal and I drank more beer than normal.
I also started to face the thought of a fall without college football.
That was the low point. I’d say it was probably late July. I was scared and, if I’m honest, depressed. I did two things I’d never done in my life. First, I saw a therapist a couple of times (side note: There is zero shame in this. It helps. It’s probably not for everybody, but you don’t know it’s not for you until you try it). Second, I applied for a different job. Even had an interview.
We were four or five months into this thing and there really wasn’t an end in sight. The Internet was a cesspool of hot takes on the virus and political bullshit (on both sides). It was usually about 8:30 a.m. when I would text someone and say, “That’s it. Can’t read the message board or Twitter anymore today.” So I had a good 12 hours to fill with something other than my job and scrolling on my phone. That’s a tough thing to do every day.
So for the first time since I started here in August of 2003, I seriously considered doing something else. It doesn’t really matter what it was; it just needed to be something that got me off the Internet every day. For most of the last 17 years, my job had been something that most people I knew couldn’t believe I got paid for, and if we’re being honest, it still surprised me sometimes. But it wasn’t fun anymore. The parts that were good—the games and the relationships you built in covering people and the nights on the road with your friends and colleagues and the things you got paid to do that most people paid to see—those didn’t exist anymore. And even though I knew they would again, I’d started to question whether they were worth all the rest of the stuff that was impacting my happiness and my outlook on life.
In the end, I went through one round of interviews for the other job and got a callback for round two. But the money wasn’t going to work. My youngest son is starting college next fall (proud dad parenthetical coming up: he was accepted to the University of Chicago this week and, knock on wood, he'll be able to start classes and swim season there next September) and we need to pay for that. I just couldn’t justify taking the pay cut I’d have to take. So I said thanks but no thanks and went back to figuring out how I was going to get myself back in the frame of mind to do a job that was draining every ounce of energy I had by the end of breakfast every day.
There are a lot of reasons that eventually happened. First of all, sports came back. There were plenty of arguments whether they should or not, who wanted them to and who didn’t and on and on. But they did. And even though the first half of the season was disjointed and weird and didn’t feel like a real season, we had something on which to focus, something to distract us after six months of nothing. Second, I deleted Facebook and my personal Twitter account. I’ve found my life isn’t worse by not knowing how many miles people I haven’t talked to since high school ran or how much people I don’t know hate the stories I write, which they don’t actually read because they refuse to pay 33 cents a day for them.
Next, and maybe mostly, Eli Drinkwitz was (is) good. And now, Cuonzo Martin's team is good too. That’s helpful. I’ve told you guys a hundred times, I don’t root for Missouri like you do. But I want them to be good. I don’t like covering bad teams. They don’t like us when they’re bad, you don’t like to read about it when they’re bad and it’s just no fun. I’ve covered my share of bad teams in the last few years. Covering good teams—or at least teams that are better than we thought they were going to be—is fun. So that was a part of it too.
But the biggest reason is that I finally let go of what I had been taught for decades this job was supposed to be. People in Journalism (I didn’t use the capital J by accident) often are accused of being pompous and self-important. The accusation is usually fair. None of them are more pompous and self-important than those of us who graduated from Journalism school at Mizzou. If you want to know how good the J-school is at Missouri, just ask someone who went there. I promise, we’ll tell you.
For 25 years (and really more than that for me because I grew up with a father who was in this business), I’d been trained to believe that being there was important. How can you say you cover a team if you aren’t at the games? For 17 years, if Missouri had a thing people could attend, we attended it. Not just the games, but the practices and the booster club events and the recruiting camps and the protests and everything else. If Missouri athletics was involved in a function, we were there. And don’t get me wrong. I do think that was important.
But covering a team in 2020 isn’t what it was in 1990 or 2000 or 2010. It isn’t even what it was in 2019. There are some things you can pick up by being there—even 100 yards removed from the action—that you can’t on TV. You can watch pregame warmups and such. And there’s a non-zero value in that. But when every interview is done on Zoom and you never actually talk to anyone (I think I’ve met Drinkwitz face to face three or four times in his first year on the job and his new assistants no more than once), is being there really of any value? It isn’t to you guys. And if it isn’t to you guys, it isn’t to me.
So I took my coverage in a completely different direction this year. My friends and colleagues Neal McCready and Jay G. Tate (we do a podcast together; it’s called GPITS; you should subscribe to it and download it because it’s great) have been doing live streaming coverage remotely on game day for a couple years and have been trying to convince me I should do it too. I resisted for a while. I didn’t really want to do it. I did it this year largely because I was forced to. I haven’t been to Faurot Field since Drinkwitz’s introductory press conference. Of the 26-36 basketball games Missouri plays, I will be at three and the last one was on Tuesday night. I’m live streaming on game days for both sports. For football, we’re doing a 90-minute pre-game show, a virtual game watchalong and a post-game show that goes until people are tired of it. For hoops, we’ll do an hour-long pre-game and a similar post-game format for Braggin’ Rights, TCU and every SEC game, plus any meaningful postseason games Mizzou plays.
It was a big step for me. I really didn’t want to do it. I had to admit what I do is just (at best) journalism and not Journalism. But I’ve discovered something in the first couple months of doing it: I kind of like it. It’s actually fun. And in a lot of ways, it might be better for you guys too.
When I cover a game in person, I’m going to write three or four stories, I might post a video or two, it’s going to be an eight to ten hour day. But in all that time, I don’t really get any feel for what you guys are seeing or wondering about. I write what I think is important, I jump on the message board to answer some questions (often relating to why I didn’t ask what you wanted me to ask) and that’s that. Doing this, I’m talking with you guys all day. I’m responding to what you want answered. I’m seeing the games from your point of view and you’re seeing them from mine. They might not be the same and we might never completely agree, but we can each probably understand the other point of view a little better. In the end, if the job is to be a go-between from the team to the fans, doesn’t it make sense to have an idea what the fans want?
The pandemic changed every part of all of our lives. It forced me to take a look at what we were doing and to change it. While necessity was the mother of this invention, I don’t think it’s going to be a one-year thing. When you run a business, your number one priority is to adapt to stay relevant. Writing stories about what happened and separating yourself from the fans isn’t what this business is anymore. I honestly don’t know the next time I’ll go to a Missouri game in person. And I’m okay with that.
Six months ago, I didn’t know if I wanted to keep doing this. Today, I’m coming up with new ideas on a regular basis and am excited to see where it goes. Ultimately, it’s you guys who will determine whether this is a worthwhile idea or a waste of everyone’s time. A business is only as good as the people willing to pay for it. But for the first time in a long time, I’m excited to see what happens.
So, I guess, thanks 2020. You forced me to adapt. You gave me back some of my passion. At least you didn’t completely wreck everything.