A career full of choices, the second half of the story

My life got really weird in the fall of 1985.

My boss at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat ran out of money and stopped paying us. Oh, we kept getting paychecks but they bounced and bounced and bounced. There wasn't a bank in St. Louis that would accept our checks for anything other than collection.

Anyone who threatened not coming to work unless he was paid was told that missing work meant he would go to the bottom of the list when money came in for payroll. We learned that entrepreneur could be a truly obscene word.

Our owner, Jeffrey Gluck, filed for bankruptcy and locked the doors in early December. He owed me five weeks in back pay and seven weeks in vacation and comp time. I got 48 cents on the dollar for the pay five years later and never saw dime one on the other seven weeks.

We were out of work for nearly eight weeks until a new owner decided to try again. Taking a "won't get fooled again" attitude, I started job hunting. I flew to Los Angeles and interviewed for a non-existent opening at the Herald-Examiner in May, and tried for a great job covering the Seattle Seahawks for the Tacoma News-Tribune in June. It was the closest I ever came to the brass ring. I was told there had been 99 applicants and that I was the second choice. The guy who got the job moved to ESPN a few years later as a pro football reporter. His name is John Clayton.

Woulda, coulda?

In October I applied for two jobs and got both of them.

Just in time, because the last week in October, the Globe went down again.

1987 in New Orleans without me.

I had applied for jobs in Greeley, Colorado, and Syracuse, New York. Greeley was a much smaller paper -- smaller than all but one of my previous employers -- but the job was sports editor and I fell in love with Colorado as soon as I stepped off the plane in Denver.

The Syracuse job was what I had been doing in St. Louis -- college basketball -- and meant covering the Orangemen. They went all the way to the NCAA championship game in 1987, but I was watching the game on television from my home in Greeley.

That was one choice I never second guessed. I loved my two years in Colorado, and while I certainly can't regret the way my life turned out, the perfect life would have been having my family and my Colorado life.

I made more bad decisions in 1988 than I had for a long time, mostly based on the promise I had made to a wife I no longer even knew. I had told her we would live in California someday, and I wanted to prove I could do it.

In January I came in second for another great job, covering the San Francisco Giants for the Marin Independent Journal. In the late summer, I applied for job that didn't even sound real -- sports columnist for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Yes, that Honolulu, and the editor told me I was the one he wanted for the job.

So how come I never went there? How come I didn't live happily ever after in the land of surf, sun and luaus?

Well ...

The first problem was that he didn't have the budget to hire in 1988. He said he was pretty sure he would have the money to hire me in 12 months, but he couldn't promise me anything. I told him if I was still available in 1989, I'd be interested.

My interview in Marin had brought me to the attention of Gannett Newspapers, and I got an offer that summer to cover high schools for the Reno Gazette-Journal. I said I wasn't interested, but if something better came along, they could call me.

They called again in late September to see if I would be interested in covering University of Nevada-Reno basketball.

That was when things got weird. I flew out for an interview, and when I saw the paper and the fact that I would be getting a $5,000 raise, I was interested. They didn't exactly offer me the job right away, so I went back to Colorado and waited to hear from them.

One day the next week, the Reno sports editor called and offered me the job. I accepted, and about two hours later the Marin sports editor called me. He said he heard I had accepted a job in Reno.

I told him he had and he said that was a shame. They had another vacancy -- this one covering the San Francisco 49ers -- and he would have offered me the job except that I had accepted the offer from Reno.

I was horrified. I said I would much rather work for him and I would call and turn down the other job. Sadly, he said, I couldn't do it. Since they were part of the same chain, he couldn't offer me the job anymore. And that was pretty much the last chance I ever had to move to San Francisco.

I worked in Reno for 18 months and covered two seasons of UNR basketball. Then I finally got my shot at California, although it wasn't the part of the state I wanted. I took a $100 a week pay cut to work in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles, the part they call the Inland Empire. The paper was no bigger than Reno, but I was going to spend all my time covering college and professional sports in L.A.

My plan was to get into the market, get noticed by the big boys and wind up at either the Times or the Orange County Register.

It didn't work. Almost from the time I got to Southern California, the job market for sportswriters went into the tank and never came out.

Even worse, after I had been working at the Daily Bulletin only two years, budget cuts eliminated most of the downtown coverage I was doing. In the spring of 1992, I started applying for jobs back East to be closer to friends and family.

Before anything happened on the job front, though, I met my second wife and fell in love almost overnight. All of a sudden, I had nowhere to go. I worked at the Daily Bulletin until 2008, and had some of the highest highs and the lowest lows of my career.

But no more choices.