The world was only a few months into a new decade, and I was less than a year out of high school when my life changed for the better, all by chance. It was early and with our country on the edge of Operation Desert Shield, I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue taking college classes or if it was my patriotic duty to join the military. My mother was having none of it.
Knowing how much I loved sports and that I was majoring in communications to pursue a career in the media, she took it upon herself to call Roy Exum, who was sports editor of the Chattanooga News-Free Press at the time, and plead for him to give me a talking-to. Instead, Roy, ever on the lookout for strays he could take in, gave me something even better - a job. So at 18, and having absolutely no business working in a daily newspaper's sports department, I was hired on a part-time basis.
On my first day I arrived 30 minutes early and wore a tie. I'm pretty sure it's the last time I've ever worn a tie to work.
Later that spring I covered my first game, and by that fall I had been promoted to a full-time employee and was hooked on the adrenaline rush that I was actually getting paid to write about sports. The job became a doorway to cover everything from Southeastern Conference football and the NFL to NASCAR, the Atlanta Braves and the Masters, but I always gravitated toward writing about high school sports because I recognized early on that's where the real drama and best storylines were, and it's where I've focused much of my career.
Surrounded by games that are dominated by numbers, I always preferred to write more about people - what makes them tick and pushes them to excel in sports - than simply game results. This past week marked my year anniversary of covering sports for Chattanooga's newspaper. Since that first year - when we watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, the debut of "The Simpsons" on TV and Milli Vanilli being stripped of a Grammy for admitting they didn't actually sing on their "Girl You Know It's True" album - I've been able to follow through on the words of a college adviser who told me, "Find something you enjoy doing, someone who'll pay you to do it and you'll never work a day in your life.
