Decisions can have long-term effects in more ways than one

Everyone makes decisions at one point or another in their lives that affects what happens next.

Key Bridge to Georgetown

To marry or not to marry, to relocate or stay in the same place. Sometimes even to choose between one career and another. When I was 29 years old and living in McLean, Va., my life fell apart.

My first wife decided that she didn't want to be married any longer, so whatever vague plans we had been making sort of went out the window.

That was the spring of 1979, and between then and the spring of 1990, when I moved to Southern California for my last job, I worked and lived in six different states -- Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada.

That sounds goofy enough, but when I think of jobs I was offered and choices I made, I could also have worked in Washington, D.C., another part of Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, upstate New York, back in Missouri, Hawaii and two different places in California.

Except for a fairly desperate period when my employer in St. Louis was bankrupt, I never had trouble getting jobs. In fact, there were at least five or six times when I had the opportunity to choose between two offers.

As for the St. Louis thing, it always seems so fitting that when you need a job the most, you have the toughest time getting one.

The first time I had a choice, it was between a paper that no longer exists and The Washington Post.

Guess which one I chose.




Wrong.

The offer from the Post was a part-time job with no guarantee of how many hours a week I would get. The offer from the Alexandria Gazette was for a full-time position as a sports reporter, one of three sports people on the paper. I was assured by the person doing the hiring at the Post that part-time positions of the type I was being offered never led to full-time positions, at least not directly.

So I worked at the Gazette for about 20 months. I might have stayed longer, except that the owner started bouncing paychecks. I was looking to move up and out. I subscribed to Editor & Publisher and started scouring the classifieds. Within a month or two I had been offered jobs in Gastonia, N.C., and Anniston, Ala.

There wasn't much doubt which one I would take. Gastonia was about 300 miles from home, and Anniston was 700 and in a part of the country I didn't know at all. Still, I nearly didn't go. About two weeks before I was supposed to leave, I got a call from the sports editor of the Charlottesville Daily Progress.

There really were few places I would rather have gone, but I had already accepted the job in Gastonia. Call it honor, call it responsibility, call it whatever you want. I went to Gastonia to work for Gary Schwab and as it turned out, I never made a better decision.

Gary taught me to write. He's the one who showed me we weren't writing about games and scores but about people and their hopes and dreams. In my second summer at the Gastonia Gazette, Gary left to work in Charlotte. I had received a couple of job offers, one I had pursued, but I didn't take either one. I could have gone to Lompoc, Cal., but I would have been a one-man sports staff and that didn't appeal to me.

I got an offer out of the blue to work in McComb, Miss., a city halfway between Jackson and New Orleans that I never knew existed. Years before there was a Redneck Riviera and a couple of decades before I started reading Greg Iles' amazing books about Natchez, I couldn't fathom living in Mississippi.

I had been trying very hard to get a job with the Daily Oklahoman, a big-time metro newspaper where my friend Tom Kensler was working. I had several friends with influence call on my behalf, but the paper had a hiring freeze for the whole time I was trying.

I left Gastonia because a promotion I deserved had been promised to someone else before I ever came to the paper. I had no trouble finding a job and I moved a hundred miles farther south along I-85 and went to work for the Anderson Independent-Mail in South Carolina.

I worked there only nine months, and there are times I wish I had stayed longer. It was my first paper that seemed to want to do things right. I had a travel beat -- South Carolina football -- and I did my first work that required extensive work. I did a seven-part series on drugs in sports and a takeout piece on the Virginia team that won the 1976 ACC basketball tournament.

If I had stayed a second year, I would have had the top beat, covering Clemson home and away for football and basketball. I got an offer that sounded great, yet turned out to be the biggest mixed blessing of my life since Leslie Golman.

St. Louis, three summers without air conditioning.

It was a chance to make the toughest jump of all, from small-city paper to big-city metro. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat had shut down the year before, and a new owner was trying to crank it up again. Sadly, it was the Reagan years, and a glib entrepreneur with more chutzpah than money was the owner.

My first day on the job should have made me run away. When we discussed pay, they told me their pay scale was based on years of experience, from none to five or more. I told them I had more than four years experience on daily papers. They said experience on smaller papers wasn't considered equivalent. I said that made sense, figuring they would start me at the two-year level.

No such luck. They gave me credit for one year of experience, and then had a pay freeze the entire time I worked there. I worked for a major metro for 28 months and never made more than $19,000 a year. My crosstown competition was making nearly twice that much.

I had a lot of fun covering college basketball, traveling all over the country and covering the Final Four in both 1985 and 1986. Legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins says everyone should have at least one really major event in their life, and covering the classic NCAA final between Villanova and Georgetown in 1985 at Kentucky's Rupp Arena.

Later that year, our out-of-money boss started bouncing paychecks.

That's when I started looking, the only time in my life I had trouble finding a job.

Tomorrow, the rest of the story.in more ways than one