I guess that was my biggest media claim to fame — playing the Jacksons in basketball in a charity game at Santa Barbara High School. I blocked a shot at the buzzer that would have tied or won the game. My coach, Jack Trigueiro, the coach of Santa Barbara High’s boys team, told me I should have let them make the basket. Oh well, my destiny wasn’t fulfilled.
This was during the Jacksons’ heyday in 1977. No, Michael Jackson wasn’t there. I remember we, the faceless opposition made up of local members of the media, sat leaning against the gym walls during the halftime spectacular before a packed house that had come to see the Jacksons sing and put on a dance show before enormous throbbing speakers.
During a George Plimpton (look it up) phase of participatory journalism as a 23-year-old and thereabouts, alternately:
–I played ice hockey against a boys youth team on skates. At the conclusion of the game, we piled the kids in the goal as a humorous coda to the event. They all loved it.
–I jogged with a female UC Santa Barbara long-distance runner while interviewing her, then wrote up the whole piece afterward for the Goleta Today, a weekday-morning daily I served as a one-man sports staff.
–I got smoked by Los Angeles Rams player Otis Grant (like me, 6 feet 5 inches tall) as he went around me easily to score in a benefit basketball game at Rio Mesa High School in Oxnard, near my hometown.
I spent one week as an assistant basketball coach for Bruce Lofthus at Dos Pueblos High in Goleta/Santa Barbara until I explained a pivot to a varsity player that didn’t comport with Bruce’s understanding of the move and we called the whole experiment off. I continued my sports writing, he continued his teaching and coaching at the school. That was my one foray into coaching, and I have remained a sports reporter/photographer on the sidelines in stretches ever since.
Along the way, I experienced the mundane — covering local high school basketball games for the Chico Enterprise-Record as a college student intern — and the more elevated — sitting in the top deck of Estadio Azteca in Mexico City sharing sandwiches and snacks with other fans during a pro soccer semifinal.
When I entered journalism as a junior high writer with a column, “Eddie the Editor,” then proceeded to high school to author my next sports column, “Physical Ed,” I never once thought of newspapers as something that would go out of style. My cousin, a managing editor of an outlet in Nebraska, recently told me he knew from his college days that the days of newspapers were numbered.
However, I did realize that some of my own days writing for a paper would be limited when after 14 months at the Goleta newspaper, my health went bad and I had to seek the support and solace of my parents’ home in Ventura County to figure out my medical issues and complete my recovery.
