They repeated the same drill every day when I was a boy.
First my father would walk into the house. He’d rest his briefcase by the door, sigh, kick off his shoes, and sit down by me wearing a smile of content exhaustion. A few minutes later, my mother would arrive. She’d follow the same protocol: the briefcase, the sigh, the shoes and finally the smile of content exhaustion. It was the smile I always thought of when people asked me what my parents did for a living.
They were teachers –
him in
I’ve spent the last three years as a sports writer for Newsday. Without bragging, I’m quite good at my job, which most of my friends have offered to trade limbs to do—even for a day. But it never offers me content exhaustion. I enjoy my job. It’s often tiring. But I never feel entirely drained and entirely satisfied. I know this because my job is frivolous. It’s an embarrassing thing to admit. Though I have a talent for sports writing, nobody, not the paper’s 1.2 million readers, and certainly not myself, wakes up in the morning with a better life because of the job I do.
Even though I’m an award-winning writer who has excelled in the most competitive journalistic marketplace on the planet. Even though I’ve broken stories that have brought changes in public policy. Even though I’ve gone toe-to-toe with some of the largest egos in sports while interviewing some of the biggest stars of the NFL, NHL, NBA and Major League Baseball. Even though I’ve told the stories of a football player who lost his sight to parasitic amoebas. Or a wrestler who found comfort in the sport after losing his mother, father and two siblings to complications with AIDS. Or an athlete who died in his mother’s arms after a failed attempt at CPR.
I never came home like my parents did … at least, not until a few months ago. A young reporter, who’d been with the paper barely six weeks, had written three stories in a row that required retractions. That’s pretty ugly stuff for a reporter to deal with, because it’s bad enough the first time your editor points out a mistake. Three straight days of that feels like eternal damnation. So the reporter sulked around, tentative to go after anything for fear of another error. I noticed, and pulled the reporter aside.
“Chris,” I said, because that’s his name, “the difference between a failure and winning a Pulitzer is one thing.”
He stared at me like I had all the answers in the world. It was a truly awesome feeling.
“Effort,” I informed him.
He stared back quizzically. He seemed to want to say, “I try my best with every phone call, every interview, every paragraph.”
I cut his thought off before it could become speech. “Show the editors what you can do by doing it. Writers write. Failures dwell on their mistakes. And you’re not a failure unless you want to be.”
His next article, a simple game story about a couple of local college basketball teams, drew praise from even the big bosses. He transferred each pat on the back they gave him onto me. Then he said, “Thanks for teaching me the right way.”
The word hung in my ear for a day-and-a-half: “Teaching.” I understand from talking to most of my former teachers that teaching does not always provide this immediate gratification. But it exists. Unlike writing stories for a million faceless fans, most of who I’ll never meet, there is a real proximity between the effort and the product for teachers. You can see your work take hold on another’s face. Chris had a similar crisis of confidence a week or so later. I set his mind at ease by recounting some of my inglorious moments from my first days as a reporter. It took five hours to convince him he belonged in the profession, but eventually, he gave the awesome look again.
After work that night, I walked into my apartment, set down my brief case, sighed, and sat down wearing a smile of content exhaustion.