Cross country practice, ran 5.8 miles at 7:00 pace on the roads to and from the hospital. Knee a little better. Ben looked good today.
30 years later:
By "Ben looked good", I wasn't referring to his outfit. I was keen on having a strong team, and whenever one of my teammates had a strong practice session, I noted it in my log. I think it was also a way of building my own psychological momentum. I was determined to make 1979 a successful year, and wanted to notch every positive sign.
In my own personal history, this was in important day in another way. It was the first time that I'd been the headline in a sports article in the local paper. The back story: the local sports writer was Jim Schnetz, a well-meaning if not always accurate reporter. He made his rounds of the high school teams, interviewing the coaches and leaders. As I'm sure you can imagine, football always came first, with a series of articles previewing the season and featuring top players. It was a rare opportunity to get a featured article in the paper about cross country. By the way, the paper I'm referring to is the Baraboo News Republic, which in those days was a daily except for Sunday. Not exactly the New York Times, but it was the local rag and had a decent distribution in Sauk County.
When I sat down to the interview, which had been a couple days before, I was eager and excited. I thought we had a good team, and I thought we had as good a chance as any other team if we stayed focused and avoided injuries. I'm sure that I talked too much and way too fast for poor Jim, who probably couldn't really care any less about a bunch of skinny runners. He was jotting down notes on his pad, but what did I know about talking to sports reporters? I'd never done it before.
When the article came out, I was flabbergasted. Absolutely none of the quotes attributed to me were actual things that came out of my mouth. None, not one, zero. It's like he just made them up! The headline of the article, to my mind, was totally misleading. It came across as cocky and selfish, which is not what I'd tried to convey. Frankly, I was annoyed by the whole thing. My first feature article and I'm misquoted and mis-represented throughout!
I learned an important lesson that day. When talking to the press, you should speak very slowly and say very little. If you want something important to come across, you need one or two pithy, short quotes that you repeat at least twice during the interview, pausing to make sure that the reporter writes it down verbatim (better yet, write it down beforehand and give it to him/her). Always praise your coaches, teammates, and competitors, and downplay your own performance or expectations. Just say that you will do your best and let your running speak for itself as the season progresses. Don't be a motor-mouth, yakking excitedly and gesturing madly while the over-worked, under-rested, and barely-interested reporter tries to scrawl a few lines that will a least allow him/her to craft an interesting story.
Now, 30 years later, you be the judge. Does the article below come across as cocksure and boastful? Also, check out that team photograph; we look like a bunch of rejects from nerd camp! Very funny. We were trying to come across as tough and competitive. I think we just look bizarre. That photo always makes me laugh. I posted the article and photo first, then a cleaned-up version of the text below, still not that easy to read, but try clicking on the scans to enlarge (if you don't know the trick, you can also try Ctrl+= a few times to keep zooming in). I will re-scan these soon, at higher resolution, so if you can't read these come back in a few days and try again.
Here are a couple more scans, a bit distorted but you should be able to zoom in on them to make the text more legible, and to see how goofy-looking we were, particularly because we were trying to look tough for the camera:
Post-script: in an editorial pass, I noticed that I jumped the gun on the publication date of this article. The truth is that I was interviewed on this day, but this article did not appear until September 7. I think that some of the quotes from the coaches must have come later on, perhaps in the days just before September 7. Whatever the actual timing, my embarrassment and worry over how this article sounded remained.
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