In college, I took an upper-level English course on Shakespeare for the sole purpose of improving my performance on “Jeopardy!” I was one of the Mizzou basketball beat writers for the Columbia Missourian at the time, and when I told my English professor I would need to miss a few classes to cover the Big Eight Tournament, he replied, “Oh, yes, you’re the one who follows the tall guys who bounce the ball.” If this conversation were to happen now, it would be more like, “You’re the one who follows the tall guys who pick up their dribble immediately after crossing midcourt,” but the Tigers were better at basketball-related tasks in the early ’90s.
Anyway, I thought this professor was a little too dismissive of a profession I had taken out student loans to pursue. But, in retrospect, he was just the right amount of dismissive. I have spent 30 years documenting sporting events on a full- or part-time basis, mostly for the benefit of people who already watched the events in question, and it doesn’t get much less impactful than that.
It finally makes sense why the pay was so terrible.
To put the best spin on it, I have tried to entertain you. An exotic dancer could say the same, and you don’t see Diamond giving a sappy speech during her last slide down the pole at Club Vogue, so who am I to pontificate?
I would like to imbue this farewell column with the lack of gravitas befitting the end of a five-year run writing weekly and then monthly “What Just Happened?” columns for a sports website that covers a university that hasn’t won a football conference title since 1969. That followed 25 years in the newspaper business, mostly covering the same teams not winning titles, so my sweet spot was exploring the nuances of the not-so-great to not-half-bad range.
Normally in these situations, a writer thanks all sorts of people. But nobody cares about that crap. I will limit my kudos and just thank Gabe DeArmond for giving me this forum to write Mizzou athletics-adjacent content with no editorial oversight. He probably should have provided some editorial oversight during a stretch when the content veered into Yelp reviews of Kansas City strip clubs and ideas for promoting St. Louis’ No. 1 national ranking in STDs per capita, but I appreciated his disinterest.
One thing I want to make clear is I am not giving up this gig to focus on my health, nor to spend more time with family, nor to devote more energy to charitable pursuits. I will spend my extra time watching cooking shows and falling asleep on the couch at 9:30.
Over the course of 30 years, I have seen some stuff. I once covered local Elvis impersonator/magician Mario Manzini escaping from 10 pairs of assorted police handcuffs while underwater in the pool of a Super 8. So that was probably the biggest deal. That, or the Armageddon at Arrowhead football game against Kansas in 2007. I guess those are 1A and 1B.
While I’ve seen plenty, I haven’t learned much that I could pass on to a young sportswriter other than these three things:
*Spell names right as much as possible.
*Don’t begin a question with “Talk about …”
*Consider law school before it’s too late.
Actually, the best journalism advice I ever received was from my former newspaper boss Kent Heitholt. A reader had called to complain about an error in the paper, and after Kent hung up, he yelled, “What do they expect for 50 cents?” It wasn’t technically advice — more of a rhetorical question — but what I heard was that the work we did wasn’t so important that we should take ourselves too seriously or beat ourselves up over every mistake. I tried to apply that in my newspaper days but probably spent too much time worrying about what was going wrong or what might. I overcorrected as a PowerMizzou columnist and dismissed all concerns about quality control. I think my body of work reflects the liberation — or incoherence, depending on how strictly you define the phrase “run-on sentence” — of someone unafraid to crack a few beers during the creative process.
I’m sure the question that the dozens of you still reading this column are asking is: Why quit now? The short answer is I was going to quit after next month’s column, but that would have required watching at least four more Mizzou basketball games, and I just couldn’t muster the willpower. No better time than the present to stop working.
It’s true that the relentless mediocrity of Missouri athletics over the last eight years has sapped my enthusiasm for typing sentences about Missouri athletics. The football program is 41-44 since winning its second straight SEC East title in 2014, and that’s a dynastic run compared to the men’s basketball program’s futility over the same span. The losing wouldn’t be so bad if there were a little more of the bizarre behavior that was a key part of the Mizzou basketball experience in the old days. If you’re going to finish 11-21, at least give us a sociopathic point guard, a coach fired by a radio analyst or a player arrested for multiple assaults on a teammate in the same day.
But only a poor craftsman blames his tools. If a Mizzou assistant coach’s stripper girlfriend’s pet monkey had bitten a child at a Halloween party, the November column would have written itself, but there still would have been the matter of December, January, etc. It was easier to write these columns at first when I knew most of the people involved in Mizzou athletics and still had some inside knowledge, but it got progressively harder as almost everyone left or got fired and I stopped covering sports daily. The last few years, I’ve basically just been writing long, correctly spelled message board posts loosely connected to Mizzou athletics. It’s time to sign off and leave the writing to people with some actual insight, or at least to the people who show up to all the press conferences.
So let’s get to the final question that at least three of you diehards are thinking right now: What are my regrets from a 30-year career as a sportswriter?
There’s really just one. I never got to write the oral history of Waltz. I desperately wanted to break the story of who suggested Mizzou should adopt the ill-fated inflatable mascot, what was going on inside the costume when our bouncy boy flailed around Faurot Field in 2017 and who issued the final deflation order.
The DMs are still open, Waltz insiders. I would come out of retirement to write that one.
Sign up today and get all the news with a premium subscription.
Talk about this story and more in The Tigers' Lair
Make sure you're caught up on all the Tiger news and headlines
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for video and live streaming coverage
