Round Two: Notes on notes

One constant of my 40 years in journalism is that each day has been a new adventure. Or, many times, a misadventure. Things I didn’t expect to happen, things I never dreamed could happen, things I’ll never forget whether I want to or not.

Here are a few:

The race is never over

It was May 1994, and I was covering the Division III district track meet at Kent Roosevelt High School. It was my first spring covering track, and I’m pretty sure it was my first postseason track meet. As I mentioned in an earlier column, trying to keep up with everything going on at these big meets was tough, trying to get results from the press box as the meet was in progress was even tougher, and trying to find athletes for interviews was toughest of all because they were always on the move.

So on this beautiful spring day in Kent, I decided to park myself at the fence near the finish line. This way, when a race finished, the winner would pretty much have to walk right past me on the way to whatever it was they were doing next.

My strategy worked as planned. If a local athlete won a race and I needed a quick interview, I was able to get their attention and ask a few questions. It was beautiful.

And then it got comical. After one race, I went up to a senior sprinter from Mogadore and asked if he had a minute or two for a few questions. He was happy to oblige— until a group of female athletes from another school started making their way past us. He cast a few glances in their direction as he answered my questions, growing increasingly distracted. Finally, he stopped in the middle of a sentence, looked at me and said, “Hey, can I borrow your pen and notebook real quick?”

His request caught me off guard, but I said, “Sure, here you go,” and handed my ink pen and notebook to him. “Thanks!” he said, and hurried over to the group of girls.

A few minutes later, he returned. Before handing my notebook back to me, he tore out a few pages that I could see contained several names and phone numbers.

“Sorry,” he said, “I had to hurry and catch those girls. They were about to leave.”

And with that, he continued with the interview.

Like I said, each day was a new adventure.

Speaking of notebooks

In the fall of 1999, the Kent Roosevelt boys soccer team was in the middle of a postseason tournament run that eventually carried the Rough Riders all the way to the Division I state semifinals.

The Rough Riders gained momentum as the postseason wore on, culminating with a pair of victories in the regional tournament. After one of those wins, I headed down to the field from the press box for interviews as usual, located one of the Rough Riders’ standout players and began to ask questions.

I’ll stop here and say that I was never a fan of recording interviews. I preferred to go old school and write down what players and coaches said, especially after games. That way, if exuberant fans were yelling and screaming or a marching band was playing in the background while someone was answering my questions, their voice wouldn’t be completely drowned out— leaving me with no player or coach comments for my story.

But writing down responses on paper came with its own problems, mainly due to basic human physiology: Most people can talk faster than they can write. To clear this natural hurdle, I developed my own special brand of shorthand composed of a wide variety of abbreviations — sometimes containing no more than a single letter — skipped obvious words in a sentence like “a” and “the” to save hand-movement time, and even combined two words into one.

I also learned to write fast— which made my handwriting, generally awful on a good day, only slightly easier to decipher than the Rosetta Stone.

But I could read my own writing just fine. To me, it was — usually, anyway — crystal clear.

For just about everyone else on the planet, my dizzying combination of scribbles and proprietary shorthand looked like it originated off planet. You know … Contact.

So it was, then, that I was interviewing our intrepid Kent Roosevelt soccer player, only minutes removed from a momentous victory in the regional tournament. He spoke, I wrote, everything was going well until he happened to glance at my notebook as I was busily writing down his last statement.

He shifted his angle to get a more right-side up look at the notebook, stared down at it for a few seconds, then asked incredulously, “Can you actually read that s–t?”

I assured him that I could.

Usually, anyway.

And more notebooks

During my brief stint covering high school sports for The Post Newspapers of Medina County in the fall of 2017, my travels took me to the Rootstown vs. Creston Norwayne football game in the second round of the Division VI state playoffs at Green High School.

Actually, my good friend and former co-worker Jonah Rosenblum of the Record-Courier took me there. You see, Jonah was covering the game because Rootstown was in it, and I was covering the game because Norwayne was in it— which felt strange because I had spent the better part of the past two decades covering athletic events from the Rootstown point of view. But Norwayne was in The Post’s coverage area, so I was on the scene for The Post.

It was like old home week. Jonah, who lives a town or two over from me, picked me up at my house and we went to the game together. And another old friend was in the press box: Rootstown Athletic Director Keith Waesch, my boss at the Record-Courier when he was sports editor from 1997 to 2002.

And the hits just kept on coming: I ran into R-C photographer Amanda Woolf, who was setting up to shoot the game, as well as R-C bowling and golf writer Susan Jenior, who was there to cheer on her Rovers.

It was a boost to my psyche at that time to see so many of my former co-workers, and covering a high school football playoff game while sitting in the press box with Keith and Jonah remains one of the highlights of my career.

And, Rootstown defeated Norwayne 35-6 to stay alive in the postseason.

But that’s where the fun and games ended— for me, anyway.

Afterward, as Jonah headed off to do his Rootstown interviews, I walked over to the visitors’ side of the field and waited for Norwayne’s head coach to finish addressing his team one final time for the 2017 season.

I had never met him, and his team had just lost decisively in the state playoffs, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from him.

It didn’t take long to find out.

When the Bobcats’ team huddle broke up, I went over to the coach, introduced myself and asked if he had a few minutes for an interview. “OK,” he said in monotone— and I swear he rolled his eyes.

I got about two questions in, scribbling his answers in my notebook as usual, when out of nowhere he said, in a cocky tone just dripping with derision: “Nice notebook. Looks like it’s from 1975.”

Of course, that was his snide way of calling me a dinosaur for writing his answers to my questions in a notebook instead of using a recording device. Why he cared what I used considering his team had just lost by four touchdowns in the state playoffs is anyone’s guess.

All I knew was that he meant it, and the words rattled around in my head for a few seconds: “Nice notebook. Looks like it’s from 1975.”

I wanted to say: “So does your offense.”

I wanted to, but I didn’t. Coaches taking out frustrations for their failures on the media is as old as sports themselves, and fortunately I haven’t been a coach’s verbal piñata after a game very often.

Instead, I cut the interview short and tracked down Norwayne’s senior tailback, who handled the defeat with a whole lot more maturity than his coach.

After talking with the running back for a few minutes, I concluded the interview by thanking him for his time and adding: “It was nice to meet you. Sorry it was under these circumstances.”

“Hey, no problem, that’s the way it goes,” he replied. “It was a football game. The sun will come up tomorrow.”

We shook hands, he headed off toward the locker room and I started back up to the press box to write my game story.

The night was back on track thanks to a high school kid with more wisdom than the grown man charged with leading him.

Like I said, each day was a new adventure.