There’s another side to watching sports for money

There was a time in my life when I aspired to follow the footsteps my father had taken down employment’s path. Of course, that was before I knew what he did.

When I saw the daily grind and countless hours he invested into his real estate practice, I quickly decided selling property would never be a gig for me. But I needed those take-your-kid-to-work days to show me that reality.

Now, I’ll do the same for you.

The title of sports editor/writer looks glamorous next to my name. Most days I am thrilled with the good fortune and blessing I’ve drawn. Most days, I can tell people I watch sports for a living and smile. Yeah, an activity I’d be doing anyway – and making money for it. It’s almost like getting paid for actually playing the game (okay, not quite).

Besides watching games, the job also incorporates many moments of shooting the breeze about the games with very cool people. And there are the relationships built with coaches, players and other influential sporting types that make the job seem less like a job. It’s a little like having built-in friends/acquaintances wherever I go. Always seems to be somebody who wouldn’t mind cracking a beer and talking about how good the University of Hawai’i can be this year, or wondering if Waimea will win its 10th consecutive Kaua’i Interscholastic Federation title.

But there is a flipside – a slew of things similar to those that made me realize real estate wasn’t my calling.

The pitfalls are there. Many come from being a one-man show at The Garden Island. We publish seven days a week; deduction should tell you what that means for a one-man department. The hours are long, the ability to take a sick day virtually non-existent. Kind of like zeros on my paycheck – newspapers will never be the gravy train to lucrative retirement.

Here’s a synopsis of my Saturday just passed, a day constructed, I thought, with the intent to cause career-choice reflection.

After finishing work at 11 p.m. Friday night, I was up early Saturday morning and at the paper by 11 a.m. to begin designing the pages for Sunday’s edition. Page design is not an exact science, but it is for me a source of great pride. I try to configure each day’s pages with a little flare and a lot of readability.

Larger papers employ multiple persons to design each section. For instance, at the Honolulu papers, there is likely an employee whose eight-hour shift is devoted to laying out the sports front page. It’s not as easy as it sounds. That one person probably has three or four others breathing endless instruction down his or her neck.

Anyway, I worked on the page from 11 until 1:30 p.m., then headed to Vidinha Stadium to cover Kaua’i High’s football game against Hawai’i Prep. From 2 to 4:30, I sat in the press box logging my own statistics. In other words, there wasn’t much time for watching the game.

At the completion of a play, I begin writing what happened, how many yards were gained or lost, who made the tackle, the yard-marker of the play to come and other notations to assist my memory.

From 4:30 to 5, I interviewed coaches from Kaua’i and Hawai’i Prep.

At 5 I was computing the stats and beginning to write the game story. I finished around 6 and immediately resumed page design. That meant fielding stories from the Associated Press wire and selecting photos from the Internet. I finished nearly all three of my pages by 6:45, and out the door I went headed for Hanapepe. Waimea was scheduled to kick-off against Hilo at 7:30.

I tracked the game and its statistics in the same manner as the game at Vidinha hours earlier, only under the constant pressure of my watch. See, my deadline is 10:30 for sending the three sports pages to the plate room, where they are turned into newspapers. That meant I needed to leave Hanapepe by 9:45 at the latest. I knew that would deliver me to the paper by 10:20, giving me 10 minutes to get the Waimea score on the page, proof-read my section and make last-minute corrections.

Thank the Lord Waimea is a running team. I was in the car at 9:40. A short blurb about the Waimea-Hilo game was on the front page by 10:10. The plate room got my section at 10:25.

At 10:30, I began computing the Waimea-Hilo stats and wrote the game story for Monday’s section. I shut off my computer at 11:45 – the last man standing at The Garden Island.

That’s not my schedule seven days a week. Few humans could sustain. During the high school sports season, however, the hours are fairly typical of a Saturday.

But I don’t suppose it’s too troublesome. I like the adrenaline rush of deadline.

And it beats the heck out of selling real estate – for me, anyway.