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I'm approaching my 72nd birthday, and I've been thinking lately about the thousands of athletes, hundreds of coaches and countless games that have filled nearly 55 years of my life as a sportswriter. Some of those athletes became Olympians and professional stars. Others never played another competitive game after high school. I've witnessed remarkable championships, heartbreaking defeats and individual performances that still seem almost impossible to believe. I've also met some of the most interesting people imaginable, many of whom probably never realized how much their stories meant to me.
And after all these years, I can make a statement that might sound ridiculous to anyone who has spent a lifetime working for a living: I've never worked a day in my life.
Not really. Not when you love what you do as much as I've loved being a sportswriter. I realize how fortunate I've been to spend most of my life doing something I would have happily done for nothing. Sportswriting has never felt like a job to me. It has been a passion, a privilege and, in many ways, an education in human nature that no classroom could possibly provide.
My newspaper career began in 1971, when I was a sophomore at Cloquet High School. My English teacher, Gus Gilespe, encouraged me to approach Harry Lawrence, managing editor of our hometown Pine Knot weekly newspaper, about writing sports. Harry was a big sports fan, and I'd seen him at plenty of games around town. He knew I loved athletics, but there was one rather unusual complication with hiring me as a sportswriter.
I played on many of the teams I would be covering. Harry recognized the potential conflict immediately. "How would this work?" he asked.
I assured him that I would never write about myself, even if I scored the game-winning hockey goal against our biggest rival, Duluth East, or went 4-for-4 in a spring baseball game to help us defeat an opponent. I'd figure out a workaround. I wasn't about to give up playing sports, and I certainly wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to write for the Pine Knot. Somehow, the two would have to coexist. And they did. I never published my own individual achievements or statistics, regardless of how deserving I might have thought they were.
My teammates and I had a lot of fun with the arrangement. They'd frequently ask what it would take to get a favorable mention in my Thursday column.
"When you start earnin' the ink!" I'd tell them.
And I meant it, although we certainly enjoyed teasing one another about it. When I showered a teammate or two with praise in the next edition, I could become the man of the hour in the locker room or on a road trip. Everybody enjoyed seeing their name in print, and I enjoyed being the guy who could make that happen. But I wasn't always complimentary. There were weeks when I wrote that our teams stunk, because sometimes we did. I remember one coach giving me a wink before a Thursday afternoon practice after I'd written a particularly critical assessment. It was his way of saying, "Atta boy." Apparently, he agreed with me.
Those early experiences taught me lessons about journalism that have stayed with me for the rest of my career. You can love a team, respect its coaches, enjoy friendships with its players and still be honest about its performance. A sportswriter's responsibility is to tell readers what happened, not what somebody wishes had happened. Readers deserve the truth, not a press release disguised as a newspaper column.
I'll also confess something about those early days that probably won't surprise anyone who has ever been a teenager with his photograph in the newspaper. I loved seeing my byline.
In fact, it stroked my youthful narcissism. There was my name in the Pine Knot, with my picture at the top of the column. For a high school kid who loved sports and writing, that was pretty exciting stuff. I didn't need anybody to tell me I was important. I could open the newspaper and see the evidence for myself.
But eventually I grew up, at least a little, and began to understand something much more important. Having a newspaper column wasn't really about me. It was an opportunity to tell other people's stories. My photograph might have been at the top of the column, but the athletes and coaches I wrote about were the people who deserved the attention. And above all, the readers came first. They were trusting me to give them an honest account of what was happening in their community.
That realization changed the way I thought about my work, and it helped me discover the kind of sportswriting I would enjoy most for the next five decades.
I've always loved the stories behind the scores.
Of course, the games matter. Championships matter. Records and statistics matter. But I've always been more interested in the people wearing the uniforms than the numbers beside their names in a box score. What makes a great hockey player so good? Why does one basketball player seem to perform better when everything is on the line? What separates a gifted athlete from the rest of the competition? And, just as importantly, who are these young people away from the rink, court or field?
I wanted to know how they were doing in school, what they enjoyed outside athletics and what they hoped to accomplish with their lives. Did they dream of playing college sports? Did they imagine someday becoming professionals? What were their families like? What had they sacrificed to become successful? What did their coaches and teammates see in them that an ordinary spectator might never notice?
Some people might argue that a lengthy newspaper column about a high school athlete is interesting only to that athlete, a few relatives and close friends. I've never believed that for a minute. People are curious about other people, particularly those accomplishing remarkable things in their own communities. They want to know what makes them tick. A good sports story can satisfy that curiosity in ways a box score never will.
And sometimes, if you're fortunate enough to be paying attention, you get to recognize a special athlete long before the rest of the world discovers that talent.
One of my earliest and favorite examples was a little hockey player from Cloquet named Corey Millen.
Corey was playing squirts for Athletic Park, as I recall, when somebody decided he was simply too good for the competition. Only a couple of weeks into the season, he was moved up to one of Cloquet's top pee wee teams, playing with and against boys two and three years older. It didn't seem to matter. He was small, but he was also one of the finest young skaters I'd ever seen, with extraordinary balance, speed, puckhandling ability and a knack for scoring almost at will. He could make older, bigger players look helpless. I wrote about him in the Pine Knot because I believed I was watching a young player with an exceptional future, and I continued following and writing about his career for years.
But there's one particular Corey Millen performance that remains the finest individual sports sequence I've ever witnessed, at any level. That includes professional sports, college, high school, youth athletics and everything I've watched on television.
It happened during the championship game of the prestigious Spirit of Duluth hockey tournament, when Millen was playing Bantam A hockey. His team was trailing late in regulation, and the championship appeared to be slipping away. Then Corey scored three unanswered goals in the final three minutes to force overtime. Three goals in three minutes, with a tournament championship hanging in the balance. What happened next was even more remarkable.
Millen took the puck and began an end-to-end rush, maneuvering through opposing players who desperately tried to stop him. Defenders chopped at him with their sticks, but he kept his balance, maintained control of the puck and continued attacking. Finally, he reached the goaltender, made a beautiful deke and scored the overtime winner. Four consecutive goals, including the championship-clincher, in a performance so spectacular that I can still picture it all these years later.
I've seen some wonderful athletes do some incredible things, but I've never witnessed anything quite like that.
Of course, I wrote about it. And afterward, I interviewed Corey, in what may well have been his first newspaper interview. I can still remember how excited he was, both about winning the championship and about being interviewed by his hometown sports columnist. Here was a young boy who had just accomplished something extraordinary, and he seemed almost as excited to talk about it as he had been to do it.
Millen eventually became a star for the Cloquet Lumberjacks, then one of the University of Minnesota's most accomplished offensive players, scoring 119 goals and collecting 241 points in 149 college games. He represented the United States in the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo and the 1988 Games in Calgary. He later played 335 NHL regular-season games, scoring 90 goals and recording 209 points with the New York Rangers, Los Angeles Kings, New Jersey Devils, Dallas Stars and Calgary Flames. He also enjoyed a lengthy professional career in Europe.
Those are impressive accomplishments for a kid who began playing hockey in Cloquet. But when I think about Corey Millen, I don't immediately think about the Olympics or the NHL. I think about that little boy skating circles around older kids, the extraordinary Spirit of Duluth championship game and the excitement in his voice when I interviewed him afterward.
And maybe that's the most important part of this entire story.
Over the next five decades, I would repeat that experience hundreds of times. I'd interview a young hockey player after an unforgettable game, a basketball player who had just scored a career-high number of points or a football player whose late touchdown had delivered a championship. Some were naturally outgoing and loved every minute of the attention. Others were so nervous they could barely answer a question. I always tried to make them comfortable, to give them an opportunity to tell their stories and to enjoy a little well-deserved recognition.
I understood their excitement because I remembered exactly how I felt when I saw my own name in the Pine Knot for the first time.
One of the most rewarding things about growing older as a sportswriter is hearing from former athletes who remember those interviews, even when I've long since forgotten the details of a particular game. Sometimes they'll approach me at a sporting event or somewhere around town and remind me of a story I wrote about them many years ago. They'll tell me how nervous they were when I interviewed them, how excited they were when the column appeared and how much it meant to have somebody take an interest in their accomplishments.
And they thank me.
Not necessarily for making them sound like superstars, but for being kind, for making them feel comfortable and for giving them a moment of recognition they still remember.
I've come to treasure those conversations. They remind me that a newspaper story can mean far more to the person being interviewed than the writer might ever imagine. What seems like another routine assignment to a busy sports columnist might become a treasured childhood memory for someone else. A column that takes an hour or two to write can stay with a young athlete for the rest of their life.
That's a pretty remarkable return on a few hours spent at a hockey rink.
I've also thought a great deal about the coaches I've encountered along the way. Some were brilliant tacticians. Others were exceptional motivators who could convince an ordinary group of players to accomplish extraordinary things. There were demanding disciplinarians, colorful characters, quiet teachers and intensely competitive personalities who seemed to take every defeat personally. Some could make me laugh during an interview even after their teams had played terribly. Others weren't particularly interested in talking to a sportswriter after a difficult loss.
But the coaches I've respected most were the ones who understood that they were doing something far more important than trying to win games. They were helping young people grow up, teaching responsibility, discipline, teamwork and how to handle success and disappointment. Those lessons mattered long after the uniforms had been put away.
I have enormous respect for the high school coaches who spend countless evenings and weekends working with young athletes, often with little public recognition and compensation that hardly reflects the hours they invest. Their influence can last a lifetime. Many of the athletes I covered years ago probably remember their coaches' words far more vividly than they remember the final scores of their games.
And while I've always preferred writing about the positives, sportswriting hasn't been an uninterrupted parade of wonderful memories. I've watched talented teams suffer crushing defeats, seen athletes struggle with disappointment and witnessed coaches endure public criticism after giving everything they had to their programs. I've learned that the aftermath of a heartbreaking loss can sometimes tell you more about a person's character than the celebration following a championship.
There were also times when I had to write things that coaches, athletes or readers didn't particularly want to hear. I never believed that loving local sports required pretending every team was wonderful or every decision was correct. You can be supportive of young people and still be an honest journalist. In fact, I've always believed that the two responsibilities belong together.
I've covered thousands of games, and I couldn't begin to tell you how many columns I've written. Many of those stories disappeared into old newspaper files, dusty scrapbooks or the memories of people who were there. Some of the athletes I once wrote about are now grandparents. Some of the coaches who seemed larger than life when I was a teenager are gone. Entire generations of players have come and gone, replaced by new generations with the same dreams, the same excitement and the same desire to make their hometowns proud.
And I'm still here, watching and writing.
That's the part of this story that amazes me most.
Nearly 55 years after Gus Gilespe encouraged me to visit Harry Lawrence at the Pine Knot, I still enjoy walking into a hockey arena, football stadium or basketball gymnasium with the possibility of seeing something special. I still enjoy talking with coaches about their teams and getting to know young athletes who are just beginning to discover what they're capable of accomplishing.
I still love finding that one player whose story deserves more attention, the unheralded kid whose contributions don't always show up in the statistics or the young star who might someday become another Corey Millen.
And I still get a kick out of writing the story.
I know newspaper journalism has changed enormously since 1971. We've moved from typewriters, printing presses and weekly deadlines to computers, websites and stories that can reach thousands of readers almost instantly. The business has become more challenging in many ways, and the relationship between newspapers and their communities isn't quite what it used to be.
But the fundamental reason I became a sportswriter hasn't changed at all.
There are still great stories waiting to be told. There are still wonderful young people competing for their schools and communities. There are still coaches giving their time and energy to help those athletes succeed. And there are still parents, grandparents, teammates, neighbors and ordinary sports fans who enjoy reading about them.
I sometimes wonder how different my life might have been if Gus Gilespe hadn't encouraged me to talk with Harry Lawrence all those years ago, or if Harry had decided that hiring a high school athlete to write about his own teams was simply too complicated.
I'm grateful they gave me the opportunity. Because that opportunity became a career, and that career became one of the great joys of my life.
I don't know how many more years I'll continue writing sports. At nearly 72, I'm old enough to understand that nothing lasts forever. But I haven't lost the enthusiasm I had when I was a teenager eagerly looking for my name in Thursday's Pine Knot.
The difference is that these days, I'm far more interested in seeing somebody else's name in print.
And when a young athlete finishes a remarkable game and I have an opportunity to ask a few questions, I still think about that little kid named Corey Millen, his unforgettable championship performance and how excited he was to talk with his hometown sports columnist.
I suspect I'll always remember that conversation. And perhaps somewhere out there, another young athlete will remember one of ours. That's more than enough reason to keep writing. After nearly 55 years, I still haven't worked a day in my life. And I wouldn't change a thing.
