My Brief Stint as a Sports Reporter
By James Donahue
Throughout my younger years I never developed an interest in sports events. Many of the fellows I ran around with and their fathers were ardent football, baseball and basketball fans and I sometimes found myself forced to watch “games” while at their homes. And athletic events were the center for most of the social activities we enjoyed during high school. Yet I attended the football and basketball games, mostly because I was in the band and it was a place to meet girls.
I was even persuaded to try out for football one fall. Since I was heavy enough, I was placed in the line as a tackle, which meant I was supposed to butt heads with players in the opposite line and then try to catch and knock down anybody from the other team who was running with the football. After a few weeks of getting beaten up during practice sessions, and limping home with black eyes and bloody noses, I realized that football was not a fun sport. In fact, it seemed such a stupid thing for young men to be wasting their time doing, I quit the team and went back to the things that I enjoyed doing.
Later I made the mistake of trying out for basketball. I found that to be another grueling sport, but in a different way. We literally spent all of our energy and every second of our time on the court running at full speed behind a basketball, dashing from one side of the court to the other, depending on which team had possession of the ball. I was supposed to be a guard, but I was constantly being yelled at by the coach for failing to guard anything. I never got the hang of that sport. And I never liked wearing a jock strap or showering in smelly shower rooms after the games. Those cold concrete floors were filthy and I was always fighting athlete’s foot. Needless to say, I soon abandoned that sport as well.
Baseball was a sport I managed to avoid altogether.
With this background, imagine my dismay at being assigned a job as sports reporter after I joined the staff at the Times Herald. I applied for work there after college because I grew up reading the Times Herald, and always thought I wanted a work for that newspaper. The day I drove to Port Huron to apply for a job, we had a big rain-storm and I drove into a small town along the Lake Huron shoreline where water was running in the streets. I had a camera in the car and shot some pictures. I got hired that day and the paper published one of my pictures which made me feel pretty good.
The Managing Editor, Bernie Lyons, explained that the only opening they had was on the sports desk. I took the job, thinking that I would be in a position to move into something more interesting when someone moved on. To my shock, when I arrived on the job, I met a staff of seasoned older reporters who had been there for years. The only young reporter was Jerry Brown, who was hired just before I arrived. Jerry was on the police beat. It was obvious that there were not going to be any openings for other reporting jobs for the next few years.
I did the best I could with that job. But I was not happy. I worked for a sports editor whose name I do not recall, but whose face still stands out in my mind like a bad dream. He was a driver who demanded that everything be done well, with great haste, and in the way that he wanted it done. I called on fishing reports for a weekly column that he wrote. I traveled from high school to high school in our reading area, taking pictures of all of the members of every football team and interviewing coaches for stories on how well they thought their teams would fare that fall. Once the games began, I found myself attending and trying to write intelligently about them. That meant working every Friday night, every Saturday afternoon and often covering some kind of athletic event on Sunday afternoons. All of my stories had to be written and on the editor’s desk on Monday morning. Then I had a full work schedule all week. It was rare to get a day off.
It was during that time that we learned that Doris was pregnant again, so we had to prepare for another major change in our lives.
Our time in Port Huron was not a happy one. The nation was going through the Cuban Missile Crisis that fall and we were spending every spare minute of our time glued to either the car radio or the television set. People were building bomb shelters all over the country for fear of a looming nuclear holocaust.
One day I made the decision to change our situation in life and do it before the next baby arrived. I acquired a copy of Editor and Publisher magazine, got the names of several Michigan newspapers that were advertising for reporters, and started calling them. I remember that I had job interviews lined up with several papers. One was in Greenville and the last was in Benton Harbor. I gave the Times Herald two weeks’ notice and quit that job. The sports editor tried to beg me to stay. He reminded me that we had a child on the way, and I did not have another job promised. He could not stop me. I remember how elated I felt the night I left that office and drove home for the last time.
By James Donahue
Throughout my younger years I never developed an interest in sports events. Many of the fellows I ran around with and their fathers were ardent football, baseball and basketball fans and I sometimes found myself forced to watch “games” while at their homes. And athletic events were the center for most of the social activities we enjoyed during high school. Yet I attended the football and basketball games, mostly because I was in the band and it was a place to meet girls.
I was even persuaded to try out for football one fall. Since I was heavy enough, I was placed in the line as a tackle, which meant I was supposed to butt heads with players in the opposite line and then try to catch and knock down anybody from the other team who was running with the football. After a few weeks of getting beaten up during practice sessions, and limping home with black eyes and bloody noses, I realized that football was not a fun sport. In fact, it seemed such a stupid thing for young men to be wasting their time doing, I quit the team and went back to the things that I enjoyed doing.
Later I made the mistake of trying out for basketball. I found that to be another grueling sport, but in a different way. We literally spent all of our energy and every second of our time on the court running at full speed behind a basketball, dashing from one side of the court to the other, depending on which team had possession of the ball. I was supposed to be a guard, but I was constantly being yelled at by the coach for failing to guard anything. I never got the hang of that sport. And I never liked wearing a jock strap or showering in smelly shower rooms after the games. Those cold concrete floors were filthy and I was always fighting athlete’s foot. Needless to say, I soon abandoned that sport as well.
Baseball was a sport I managed to avoid altogether.
With this background, imagine my dismay at being assigned a job as sports reporter after I joined the staff at the Times Herald. I applied for work there after college because I grew up reading the Times Herald, and always thought I wanted a work for that newspaper. The day I drove to Port Huron to apply for a job, we had a big rain-storm and I drove into a small town along the Lake Huron shoreline where water was running in the streets. I had a camera in the car and shot some pictures. I got hired that day and the paper published one of my pictures which made me feel pretty good.
The Managing Editor, Bernie Lyons, explained that the only opening they had was on the sports desk. I took the job, thinking that I would be in a position to move into something more interesting when someone moved on. To my shock, when I arrived on the job, I met a staff of seasoned older reporters who had been there for years. The only young reporter was Jerry Brown, who was hired just before I arrived. Jerry was on the police beat. It was obvious that there were not going to be any openings for other reporting jobs for the next few years.
I did the best I could with that job. But I was not happy. I worked for a sports editor whose name I do not recall, but whose face still stands out in my mind like a bad dream. He was a driver who demanded that everything be done well, with great haste, and in the way that he wanted it done. I called on fishing reports for a weekly column that he wrote. I traveled from high school to high school in our reading area, taking pictures of all of the members of every football team and interviewing coaches for stories on how well they thought their teams would fare that fall. Once the games began, I found myself attending and trying to write intelligently about them. That meant working every Friday night, every Saturday afternoon and often covering some kind of athletic event on Sunday afternoons. All of my stories had to be written and on the editor’s desk on Monday morning. Then I had a full work schedule all week. It was rare to get a day off.
It was during that time that we learned that Doris was pregnant again, so we had to prepare for another major change in our lives.
Our time in Port Huron was not a happy one. The nation was going through the Cuban Missile Crisis that fall and we were spending every spare minute of our time glued to either the car radio or the television set. People were building bomb shelters all over the country for fear of a looming nuclear holocaust.
One day I made the decision to change our situation in life and do it before the next baby arrived. I acquired a copy of Editor and Publisher magazine, got the names of several Michigan newspapers that were advertising for reporters, and started calling them. I remember that I had job interviews lined up with several papers. One was in Greenville and the last was in Benton Harbor. I gave the Times Herald two weeks’ notice and quit that job. The sports editor tried to beg me to stay. He reminded me that we had a child on the way, and I did not have another job promised. He could not stop me. I remember how elated I felt the night I left that office and drove home for the last time.