I was working at the Valley News Dispatch one night in 1992 when the sports editor, Kevin Smith, walked through shaking his head.
The two big Pittsburgh newspapers had just gone dark. One of them — the Pittsburgh Press — would never return. Their best writers were calling the Valley News in Tarentum for work.
“Who would have thought (name redacted) would be calling me for a job?” Smith said. “What a business.”
What a business, indeed. I’d been covering high school sports for the Post-Gazette “zone additions,” and my editor was Mark Madden. You might know of him. The shutdown prompted me to call Kevin. Next thing I knew, I was recording football scores and deer kills and holes-in-one over the phone and covering more high school sporting events than I care to remember.
I even chronicled the Leechburg softball career of one Jennifer Wolfe, who’s earned-run average one year matched my old high school grade-point average: 0.07. She is now Jennifer Bertetto — president and CEO of Trib Total Media.
What a business.
Finally, in 1995 at age 29, I landed my first full-time job: overnight sports copy editor at the Valley News. The other 9-to-5.
Within a year, I got a call from longtime high school sports editor Rich Emert — formerly of the Pittsburgh Press — to write scholastic sports at the newly formed Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
Are you following this?
I’m not sure I am, and I lived it.
Loved it, too. We were upstarts at the Pittsburgh Trib. We worked our fingers to the bone in the Station Square building that would become Bucca di Beppo, a family-style Italian restaurant where some of my fondest family memories would occur — including our rehearsal dinner and my wife’s surprise 50th birthday party.
Two years later I was promoted to the Penguins beat. Before I knew it, I was criss-crossing North America chasing hockey pucks, and the greatest player in the world (Jaromir Jagr) wasn’t talking to me. I never found out why, though I suspected the competition had poisoned the well (what a business).
Soon after that, and quite improbably, my old boss at the Valley News, Kevin Smith, became my new boss at the Trib.
What a business!
I was a Trib columnist for about 15 years before heading back across the parking lot to work for the competition for a decade. That became rather tumultuous. And now I’m back.
Covering pro sports is not unlike playing pro sports in this respect: You become something of a mercenary, never quite knowing if the next move is the right one. You just hope somebody wants you to keep playing.
Well, I’m still playing. And this feels right. I hope you’ll read my new column, which is actually my old column, called “Stark Raving.” I’m back with Jenn all these years later, back with familiar staff members such as Kevin Gorman and Jonathan Bombulie. Finally united with the workaholic sports maniac, Tim Benz, with whom I’ll be swapping columns.
Perhaps most incredibly, my very first editor from when I was 26 years old is the other columnist around here. Guy named Madden.
What a business.