A look back at a wonderful trip to some great places

People who know me know that I worked 17 years as a sportswriter, from 1979-96. If the paper I worked for hadn't gone all bizarro about what they were covering, I might have kept on doing it longer. But I had been hired to cover pro sports, and by 1996 they were asking me to cover local high schools and small colleges.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Of course, in the end I let them fool me badly four times and I still wouldn't have left if they hadn't fired me.

But I digress.

As usual.

For some reason, though, I've been thinking about the truly memorable places I covered sporting events, whether in baseball, basketball, football or hockey. I'm not going to count places I saw games as a spectator, so that leaves out places like Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park.

But just for the heck of it, let's do a top 10, and after I'm finished I'll throw in some other memorable ones as honorable mention:

Duke

10. CAMERON INDOOR STADIUM, Durham, N.C. -- One of four basketball arenas on this list, I covered a couple of games at Duke early in the Blue Devils' years as a powerhouse, and yes, the Cameron Crazies live up to their reputation.

Duke edges out UNC's old Carmichael Coliseum, where I saw a truly amazing game in 1983. No. 1 Virginia led No. 2 Carolina 62-47 with about nine minutes to play. Carolina won, 63-62, with the final points on a Michael Jordan breakaway dunk.

9. LOS ANGELES MEMORIAL COLISEUM -- Not great games, per se. I didn't cover USC. I covered the Raiders their last two years in Los Angeles. Still, there aren't many places in the world that have hosted the Olympics (twice), a Super Bowl and a World Series.

Kansas

8. CANDLESTICK PARK, San Francisco -- This one might seem controversial, but I saw some great 49er games in the Joe Montana years and also the 1989 NLCS where the Giants beat the Cubs. It's a better stadium for football than for baseball.

7. ALLEN FIELD HOUSE, Lawrence, Kan. -- One of the real cathedrals of college basketball, I saw Larry Brown's Kansas Jayhawks beat Norm Stewart's Missouri Tigers, one of the great rivalries in the college game. This may not have been where basketball was invented, but they sure do play it well.

6. ROSE BOWL, Pasadena, Cal. -- I covered two Rose Bowl games in the '90s and quite a few UCLA home football games. It's a great stadium, but it really only comes into its own on television on New Year's Day when the rest of the country is freezing.

5. RUPP ARENA, Lexington, Ky. -- Adolph Rupp never coached in this building, but Kentucky is another of the great powers in college basketball, and the weekend I saw three games there was the 1985 Final Four. I got to see what some people call the greatest game ever, Villanova's 66-64 shocker over heavily favored Georgetown.

4. PAULEY PAVILION, Westwood, Cal. -- College basketball's Valhalla. No one was ever as good or will ever be as good as the UCLA Bruins under John Wooden -- 10 national titles in 12 years. I wasn't there for those years, but I covered some decent Bruins teams in the early '90s, and Coach Wooden was in the stands. No place better for basketball.

3. RFK STADIUM, Washington, D.C. -- The stadium itself was kind of a dump, but when the Redskins were playing, the atmosphere was almost as good as it gets. I covered Joe Gibbs' first season, the year they went 0-5 and finished 8-8. The next two years they went to the Super Bowl.

2. DODGER STADIUM, Los Angeles, Cal. -- I never covered games at Wrigley or Fenway, but I'm not sure there is a more heavenly place in the world than a summer night game with the Dodgers going good. I covered two full seasons -- 1990 and 1991 -- and I was never happier as a sportswriter. Tommy Lasorda calls it Blue Heaven. I'm not going to disagree with that.

1. MILE HIGH STADIUM, Denver, Col. --  This may sound goofy, but autumn evenings covering the Broncos at Mile High were almost like a religious experience. Games started at 2 p.m. MST, and by the end of the game in late fall, the sun was down. Sportswriters were allowed on the sideline for the last two minutes, and looking up and seeing a sea of orange and looking down the field and seeing John Elway lead another comeback, well, I never had it better. If I wanted to have my ashes spread in places I had worked, half of them would go here and the other half to Dodger Stadium.

***

Those honorable mentions?

For baseball, Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

For football, Sanford Stadium in Athens, Ga., Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, S.C., and possibly North Carolina and Oklahoma.

For basketball, Carmichael and the Dean Smith Center at UNC and the Fabulous Forum in Los Angeles.

For hockey, just the Forum.

Hey, I really had a blast.