Working in sports was one delight

On staying small-c catholic in career plans

Mine has been a varied career professionally but a consistent one visually. If some unseen camera’s been trained on me all this time, the viewers must find me monotonous. From literally the first day at my first job I’ve sat behind keyboards and typed words for public consumption.

Up until last spring I always did so on behalf of employers. At first glance those employers appear to have been a random lot, but in real time the job moves made perfect sense. I needed to be employed in the same city as my wife, whether it be as an employee of a university, ad agency, architecture firm, or consulting behemoth. Eventually technology and kind bosses meant I could remain employed by ESPN even though the Gasaways continued to roam.

Naturally consistency can coincide with real or even abrupt change. At ESPN I was still writing words for public consumption but there were novel qualities to this particular gig.

In every previous job I was intrinsically a peripheral figure, “the writer” who listened attentively to decision makers deliberating core matters. Conversely ESPN.com was in the business of sending out unique and timely thoughts on sports. My role felt aligned to the organization’s central purpose in a way that was new to me.

I was also pleased by the journalistic flavor of the job. The Friday night in 2018 when Virginia lost by 20 to UMBC and became the first No. 1 seed ever to fall in the round of 64 was extraordinary. What ensued was like something out of an old black-and-white movie centered on a newspaper city room. I was working alongside my editor and fellow writers in the ESPN “war room” in Bristol. Bedlam erupted, of course, with phones vibrating and people suddenly rushing about. I pitched my piece about what the game meant to my harassed and overburdened editor simply by writing it in its entirety and then putting my laptop physically in front of him in the war room at 1:00 in the morning. Scenes like that were an exhilarating part of the work.

Still another change became apparent when the words I typed started being about sports. This came to be the first work where others asked me how they could come to do the same thing. I had true tales to tell such questioners about how much I really did enjoy the work. I would then add that when the stars had aligned I had enjoyed other work outside sports just as much. What I was sharing with regard to sports, I’d suggest to them, should be thought of as tasting notes for one wine. Other wines are excellent in their own right.

One of my favorite pre-sports gigs was as a writer and creative type for a sustainable design architecture firm. My wife and I were newly arrived in our latest city, I applied, and one of the partners was brought in for my second round of interviews. On sight he was a potentially intimidating sort 30 years my senior. I referenced my earlier interview and said something like, “I understand you have 60-odd people working here.” He paused with impeccable comic timing: “I would say we have 60 odd people working here.”

I knew zero about architecture and had never worked in a pursuit-and-selection setting for a professional services firm. I didn’t know what “RFP” stood for. Then again it was immediately clear that these were uncommonly good people doing interesting work. I raced myself down those learning curves.

Soon the firm was pursuing a special opportunity. An internationally acclaimed architect was designing a high-visibility project in our city. As part of the project his New York-based staff required a local firm to turn the vision into reality. The architect in question was a so-called starchitect. He wrote books blending design maxims with citations of the great philosophers. I digested everything written by this person I had never heard of previously.

The potentially intimidating partner 30 years my senior of course turned out to be a kind soul. We met to talk about the pursuit and, very much in self-deprecating character, he said the starchitect was “on a different level intellectually.” I said I don’t think he is. In his books he makes a perfect hash out of Husserl and phenomenology. He’s either a distracted reader or he’s just dropping names.

My work with the firm was a sweet gig for some of the same fundamental reasons that my time at ESPN would later prove to be. I enjoyed and was interested in the day-to-day work. My peers were engaging, smart, and fun. The people above me on the org chart valued my role and acknowledged my efforts. For me these qualities proved to be as weighty as being inside or outside of sports.

True, one very real advantage to the ESPN work is its sheer shelf life as a vocational endeavor. Sports analysis and/or punditry is kind of its own end. Customarily when I ask colleagues what they want to do when they “grow up” they say they’re doing it. They’re good.

Still, it’s nice when I go back to our previous city and see the brick-and-mortar result of my old employer’s collaboration with a philosophically vague New York starchitect. We got the job. That was of course due entirely to the excellent professional reputations built by my employers over the years and even decades prior to my arrival. Even so, I did write a mean proposal.