The Basketball Diaries Part II-The Sports Editor

I started this series like two months ago and never moved forward with it even though it is probably going to lead to the greatest blog ever. Also known as the one story I have never told.  In order to have the complete back-story to the greatest blog post ever known I need to complete the back-story. So I decided to write it up. (In like 5,000 installments that are horribly boring until the last 100 or something like that.)

After being cut from the high school basketball team my junior year I pretty much let the fact go that I wasn’t going to play high school basketball. It wasn’t a disappointment because I made the baseball team but still whenever I saw the coach in the hallways it was still always uncomfortable because I know he lied right to my face. Kind of like when you see an ex out in the bar that you found out a bunch of negative shit about after you broke up. You don’t want to call them on it because everything is over and done with but you have a massive dislike of them.

My junior year finished without anything exciting. The summer went along. My friends and I got jobs, played summer league baseball, and… I honestly don’t remember anything from that summer. (It was horribly boring compared the summer after I graduated.)

Strip aerobics don't count as an extra curricular program?

When the fall rolled around and I started to apply to colleges I had the whole crisis of “I don’t have enough extra curricular activities”. Which looking back is the biggest bullshit thing ever but I bought into it and applied to be a sports writer for the school paper. (Along with joining the Spanish club even though I pretty much failed Spanish the year before.) I figured I would drop a column a month, write about the baseball team, and it would make it look like I had diversified interests. I knew the risks of doing this after the way we had previously treated the last baseball player that wrote for the school paper. It was a calculated risk that I was hoping would be an easy resume builder. The advisor for the paper happened to be my English teacher and he felt it would be better if I became the sports editor. Recognizing the fact I couldn’t piss my English teacher off, I took the position and appointed a friend as co-editor so it would cut the work I had to do in half. Which in retrospect saved me from failing AP English when I decided that I didn’t want to do anymore work because I had already been accepted to college.

(Note: The extra curricular activity thing is the biggest myth ever, well right next to the whole permanent record myth. Neither of these matter ever-in life. Even when people make you think it matters it is a lie because money, influence, and whom you know can make both of those things not matter. Same with a good blowjob or so I have been told. )

My plan of doing as little work as possible had backfired and now I got pulled into doing more work with people that I didn’t know, didn’t like, and were frankly in total different social circles. You see the newspaper people were basically the same as yearbook people, kids that hung out in editing rooms and had no social skills what so ever. The last place I wanted to spend four hours a week was in this room debating the merits of one novel versus another and talking about all the cool pictures that were taken of people that weren’t my friends. I mean it wasn’t going to get me laid right? (Actually if I was smart I should have spent a lot of time in there nailing the entire yearbook/school paper staff.)

"Bang me on a stack of yearbooks"

Right off the bat I decided that I wanted to treat this like a “real” paper and not just write fluff pieces about the school’s teams. I wrote a pro-sports column as well as offering up predictions for the high school teams. In previewing the girl’s volleyball team I said if they didn’t make states the season would be considered “a disappointment”. I quoted a player on the team anonymously verifying that sentiment and the coach flipped out feeling that I was setting the bar too high. She just happened to be the wife of the basketball coach, who was also the athletic director.

(Note: The previous two seasons they made states, the team was loaded and was returning every single one of their players. It was a totally fair assessment.)

The coach grilled her players trying to find out who gave me the anonymous quote (it was the green booger girl) and ordered them never to talk to me about volleyball. Then had her husband question me to see if I was personally out to get them because of what I wrote. (He tried to tie it back to basketball.)

While I thought I was in a shit storm it was only the beginning.

Next: Part III- The big scoop.

Have you ever been accused of being out to get someone?

Yeah this one was kind of boring but it is setting the table for much larger stories.