I'm not sure how many third graders let a single paragraph influence the next 18 years of their life, but there's at least one. After reading the paragraph above, written by Steve Rushin in Sports Illustrated1 after the Twins won the 1991 World Series, I knew I was going to be a sports writer when I grew up. That paragraph still gives me the same goosebumps I got when I was 10 years old. It brings me back to that magical summer and fall, when the Twins taught me that no dream was too big, no accomplishment too implausible. Whether the dreamers are a close-knit team of 25 men, a state of 5 million hanging on their every move, or a single third grader from Rogers Elementary School, anything they imagined could come true.
It would be easy to appraise my life since that series from a distant horizon of historical perspective and see that I didn't reach my dreams. After all, I'm a technical editor at an engineering firm; I've never interviewed an active professional athlete, never been published in a magazine with more than 1,000 readers. Yet I consider myself resoundly successful.
For two years, I got to have the exact job I always dreamed about. I was a professional sports writer, working for first both daily and weekly papers, and loving almost every minute of it. That I didn't turn out to be very good at what I did doesn't tarnish the accomplishment to me. Sure, I'm not doing what I thought I'd be doing with my life, but I had my chance.
I have nothing to complain about with my life. I have a wonderful, fantastic wife who is supportive of everything I do; I live in a great house in the same neighborhood that spawned both Rushin and Kent Hrbek; I've spent the last year dodging the daily war between my cat and my dog; and I have a baby boy coming in November, an event that makes me both incredibly excited and surprisingly nervous. I really do live a happy life.
When I left the newspaper business, I thought I would miss sports writing. That supposition turned out to be half true: I miss the writing aspect of newspapers, but not really anything else. I don't miss editors, or having to write about stuff that will be of interest to the readers rather than stuff that's interesting to me, or having to come up with story ideas, or having to talk to people. I just miss writing.
Enter this blog.
I figure this would give me a good outlet to write about sports as often as I want, without having to meet a certain quota. The subject matter is completely up to me, as are the length and frequency of the posts. Aside from the fact that I don't have hundreds of thousands of readers (yet....), it's what I've always wanted to do.
I don't expect to be remembered for my words long after I'm gone. I don't expect to be influential. But if I can write something that makes one person feel the way Rushin's piece makes me feel, if I can inspire one person to become a writer, then maybe I will have a legacy to be proud of.
Though this is the first official post for this blog, you will eventually notice some entries listed before this one. I plan on going back and finding some things I've written in the past that I liked, whether I was paid to do them or not. That way, interested parties can see how I've evolved as both a writer and a sports fan.
1 The full text of Rushin's story can be found here: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/mlb/features/1997/wsarchive/1991.html
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