The glamorous life of a sportswriter, Part a trillion

This happened on a trip with my girlfriend once. Covering a college game down south and they had your choice of Mexican, Cajun or hot dogs. I looked at all three and decided not to eat. Too risky. My girlfriend rolled the dice. About 3 a.m., I hear these awful noises coming from my hotel bathroom, sounds like a sea mammal of some sort is giving birth. It's my girlfriend. For the next four hours she's going back and forth to the bathroom. Thank God I didn't eat that food. I'm always careful about what I choose to eat in pressboxes. Now she is too.

 

Actually, she was in the business then (photographer) but not full-time any more. She does some contract work now. That's how we met. Still, she understands the business as good as anyone could hope and I think that's helped a lot. She loves traveling places with me, so I take her as much as I can even now with travel being scaled back.

 

From the SID side...we back in 2011, we had a 12-day road trip that included Texas, California and Vegas.

After losing to Baylor, we head to San Francisco to play St. Mary's and Stanford. I had an entire Sunday off in San Fran.

"Why didn't you go to the Raiders game?" was the question I got from home.

"Because I'm at Fisherman's Wharf eating seafood with an incredible view of the bay after riding cable cars all day."

"Oh."

After that day, I vowed never to bitch about travel again. Even if the team sucks.

Yeah, Orangeburg, S.C. and Normal, Ill. aren't great spots, but no big deal. We played UT-Martin one year. Middle of nowhere in Tennessee. And just when I was about to break my vow, I go to practice and realize we're playing at Pat Summitt's alma mater. It was really cool.

 

My only issue with my travel is that I have to pay for everything outside of airfare out of my own pocket and get reimbursed later. That could be anywhere from $400-800 I'm waiting on. Just ridiculous. Fortunately, I only travel a handful of times a year to worthwhile events.

One time I traveled a few weeks before the holiday season, and because the editor who has to approve the reimbursement and the accountant who processes the payment were both on vacation, the reimbursement wasn't processed until after the new year. Not a great time of year to be waiting on money your cheap-ass company owes you.

 

My last newspaper gig, I had a company card to start. Then BH bought us out, and apparently Buffett doesn't believe in cards. So we went through this ridiculous process where we estimated the cost of a trip so we could get a cash advance. Of course, we then had to turn around and write a check back to the company if we didn't use all of the funds. It was such a pain in the ass.

Thankfully we all have company credit cards at the current gig. Just makes life easier.

 

This was actually how it worked at my old newspaper job, when we did have company cards. Never understood it. Why add the extra step? Here, we get detailed receipts, code them to a certain department, and accounting pays off the bill every month.

 

My first job was less than 90 minutes from the state's two powerhouse schools. The editor, former sports editor didn't believe in traveling for those games because he argued it's a high investment for a low payout, and the folks on those beats whose stories we get usually do it better. We were better off killing it on HS football (the area had low internet penetration) and getting many Fall Saturdays off. The sports editor would tell stories of his last shop, where he drove a few hours to cover ACC or SEC powerhouses during the week and on Saturday and then belched out a pile of stories (his job asked for some overproduction).

I never really wanted to have those long Saturdays dropping in on unfamiliar beats, and that opinion was sealed when I got hired in a reserve role covering one of those teams. The SE said, "You can help cover other State U." I told him that sounded good. Then after leaving my house at 7 for a 2.5 hour drive to get to a Tuesday presser, I decided, "Nah, that's not a thing I'm seeking out."

 

That's the other half of the equation. I'm obviously familiar with what's going on at the state schools, I'll ask my share of questions while I'm there, and some of the people know me since I've been in this job for a long time, but it's not like I'm breaking open a recruiting scandal in my six hours on campus. I'm a glorified stringer at that point, not working the beat. And if that's the case, we can either get it from AP or patch it together on the desk in a lot of cases and I can stay home and get a good morning's sleep on Saturday.

 

This is all ancient history now, but I never had serious issues with work travel.
At a previous job, the ASE made all the travel arrangements. One college football season, the school I covered had four road games. So I had eight flights. The arrangements made by the ASE had me on five different airlines. Yes, one road game I departed on one airline and came back on a different one.
We had company issued AmEx. It was our responsibility to pay it so we had to submit the expense report and hope the money came back in time to pay the bill. It usually did. That company had a policy of only $5 maximum without a machine-generated receipt (most papers were $25 max without a receipt). I had a lot of $4.99 Carl's Jr. expenses when there were free press box meals. And my wife was able to make some official-looking receipts with a set of rubber stamps.
One of our baseball writers had this plan for his receipts. On the last day of the road trip, he would walk down the press box and get different people to fill out the blank receipts using different color pens so the handwriting was different.
Finally, I was laid off from that job while I was on vacation in Maui. It took them about three days to cancel that credit card. I found out when when my card was refused at a lunch spot in Lahaina.