(Ed. note: This is a rerun of a column written 10 years ago, updated a bit for reasons that will become apparent).
Statistics, I was told. Norm Jollow loved statistics in sports stories.
OK, I thought. Then numbers it is.
It was Jan. 30, 1984. I was 23 and about to embark on my first assignment as a sportswriter for the Finger Lakes Times. It was a job I’d aspired to since I was in seventh grade, and my English teacher, Mr. McKee, wrote on a paper I’d turned in: “You ought to think about becoming a sportswriter.”
In all honesty, I hadn’t thought about it — I mean who does in seventh-grade? From that point on, though, I sure did, interning for the hometown weekly, majoring in journalism at St. John Fisher, working as a reporter for the Democrat & Chronicle, and then — finally! — landing a prized job as a sportswriter for the Times.
Tommy Leo was leaving for a similar job at the Syracuse newspapers, and I was interviewed for his spot by Managing Editor D.C. Hadley and Sports Editor Jollow on a Friday. They told me they would think things over during the weekend and let me know their decision on Monday, but by the time I got home to Lyons, where I was living at the time, there was a message on my answering machine from Hadley. “You know what,” he said. “Why wait ’til Monday to call? We want to offer you the job. Can you start on Monday?”
They offered a princely salary of $216 per week — which really didn’t matter because I would have taken that job for a dish of macaroni a week.
So, there I was that evening, getting ready to cover my first game for the Times. Norm assigned a men’s basketball game between Community College of the Finger Lakes (dating myself: yes, that would be CCFL long before the letters were juggled into FLCC) and Onondaga CC in Hopewell.
Having been clued in to Norm’s affinity for stats by Tommy, I planned on getting there plenty early so I could chart every rebound ... every turnover ... every point ... and use them in my story.
I hopped in my ’74 Maverick (yes, you read that right too) and started making my way from Lyons to CCFL. There was one problem: It was January ... with slick roads. Actually, make that two problems: That ’74 Maverick was not so much a “set of wheels” as a “sled on wheels.”
If you are guessing that my car maybe, just maybe, slid off a big curve on ice-covered Leach Road outside of Lyons and into a deep ditch, you might be correct.
A buddy of mine has said for years, usually with a shake of his head: “You know, I have always considered you a very bright guy ... but how you could be so dumb as to drive that Maverick, I’ll never understand.”
Anyway, there I was, uninjured but knee deep in snow with no way to get that car out of the ditch. With the clock ticking, I hustled down the road to a farmhouse with the lights on and explained my plight. The sympathetic owner of the farm so graciously excused himself from the family dinner table, put on his winter gear, fired up a tractor in the barn, drove down to my car and used the tractor to yank the Maverick out of that ditch. To try to make me feel better, I suppose, he said it wasn’t the first time he’d pulled off such a rescue.
I could not believe my good fortune and thanked him profusely (later, after receiving my first $216 paycheck, I delivered a tray of pastries to his house).
So, I eventually made it to the CCFL gym, but the game already had begun — and only about four minutes remained in the first half. Yikes!
Now, if you are guessing that I had no first-half statistics to put into my story, you may just be correct again.
I didn’t tell Norm what happened, but as I wrote a story the next day about CCFL’s exciting 86-82 win, I realized it was tragically devoid of first-half facts and figures. I pulled the story out of the typewriter — yes, kids, a typewriter in those days — and flopped it into the basket on Norm’s desk. Then I waited uneasily for him to read it, certain that my career was over before it even had a chance to begin.
But something miraculous happened. Norm read the story without asking me a single question. He then sent it to the composing room to be typeset, signaling that it would appear in that day’s paper.
With or without stats, my first story written as a professional sportswriter appeared in the Jan. 31, 1984, Finger Lakes Times under the headline “Points stolen off transition win for Lakers.”
Whew.
There aren’t too many tales that you can tell at two different retirement parties, but I told this one both when Norm retired and when FLCC basketball coach Putt Moore called it quits. Norm jokingly told me he realized there were no first-half stats in the story, but he hadn’t wanted to point it out and hurt my feelings. Putt told me if it was his car that slid off the road, he wouldn’t have tried to make it to the game; he would have gone to have a beer.
So, all of that was to say this: Where in the world have those 40 years gone?
Had someone told me on that night in 1984 that four decades later I would be reminiscing about it as the publisher of the same Finger Lakes Times, I would have asked what they were smoking.
I do know that in 10 days, on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024, I am going to pause to reflect. I won’t be thinking so much about what happened to me way back then but rather about all the wonderful people I have been blessed to work with over the years here at the Paragraph Factory, as Hadley used to call it. Many of them are no longer with us, including D.C. himself, Norm, and even Tommy Leo, who died in 2013 at the way-too-young age of 55. I’ll be remembering owner/publisher Sam Williams, beloved reporters Stella Cecere, Jean Jones and Maurice Dumas, Circulation Director Keith Fegley, Chief Photographer Dale Duchesne, Advertising Director Ken Bauer, and mailroom superstar Mike Roberti among so many others.
It’s been an enjoyable ride. Except for one snowy night in a ditch.
Mike Cutillo is the publisher and executive editor of the Times. Contact him at mcutillo@fltimes.com or 315-789-3333, ext. 264.
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