Sometimes I’m embarrassed to tell people I want to be a sportswriter.
Most people think sports are something to be grown out of, put aside like trick-or-treating. Or if they are an interest to be continued, one should distribute significance appropriately in line with other, real-life priorities. Underlying these principles is the assumption: sports don’t matter, they are games.
And there’s some truth to that. But when I think about my four years at Georgetown (and there’s not much else that seems worth doing these days), I realize they have been marked more by sports than by anything else. I’ve been a sportswriter for THE HOYA since September 2000. So if there’s a way to assess this experience, I can measure mine from the first late summer field hockey game to Midnight Madness to the Big East tournament to the first late winter lacrosse game to the last sweltering tennis match.
I used up a large part of my senior year driving to East Rutherford, N.J., and Storrs, Conn., or flying to South Bend, Ind., and Providence, R.I. to cover the men’s basketball team. From October to March, I spent my Saturday nights joking with my 30- and 40-year-old reporter friends about the bad food at MCI Center. I drove back to campus from Baltimore at midnight on the night Craig Esherick was fired. I skipped class to go to John Thompson III’s press conference.
I missed a lot of parties and a lot of class. But I learned things that, for me, existed more visibly in sports than they did in class. In my life, the significant events are what make sports even more poignant, not less – the two seem to naturally coincide. With graduation approaching, I found myself near tears thinking about how the Red Sox swept the Yankees last weekend.
In Sports Illustrated, Gary Smith described a photo of players in the locker room preparing for a game:
“The older you get, the more you realize that this is what sports are most about: the moments before, the times when a person takes a flashlight to his soul and inspects himself for will and courage and spirit, the stuff that separates men such as Jordan and Ali from the rest more than anything in their forearms or their fingers or their feet. Who am I? And, Is that going to be enough? That’s what you’re peeking at through the door, and believe me, those are two big and scary questions, the two best reasons for all of God’s children to play sports, so they can start chewing on them early.”
In college, we’re lucky enough to have thousands of little contests, before which we can all inspect ourselves. We have breaks and pauses, which were built in perhaps for this specific purpose. We are endowed with a structure of progressively harder challenges, exams and projects and making friends and joining clubs, all of which create points at which we can examine ourselves.
I think that is what I will miss the most about college: all these tiny predetermined opportunities for success or failure. I don’t know what life after college will be like, but I know I’ll never have the ritual of exams and then vacations and then fresh beginnings.
The tests in our new lives will not be listed on the syllabus, because there isn’t one. They will spring up without so much as a study day to warn us, and how we perform will not be analyzed with a neat letter grade or written comment. They’re going to be really hard.
There’s nothing I can do to prepare except to be grateful for the opportunity to watch how so many graceful and talented people have behaved in both defeat and success – from Ashanti Cook, who smiles all the time, to Gerald Riley, who treated me with respect for four years.
I spent two whole seasons watching one of the fiercest competitors I’ve ever seen, former field hockey goalie Jessica Herring, lead her team. I got to see Mike Sweetney go from a bashful, chubby freshman to the NBA player who joined Othella Harrington and Dikembe Mutombo as a teammate.
In the end, THE HOYA gave me a fondness for crude jokes and the music of Afroman, the view of a few magnificent sunrises and most of my very best friends.
But perhaps the greatest thing THE HOYA ever gave me was the sublime sight of men and women sizing themselves up, confronting their own fears, and then barreling head-on toward trial and conflict.
Julie Wood is a senior in the College and a former Senior Sports Editor, Contributing Editor, Sports Columnist and member of THE HOYA’s editorial board.
