My time in college—which I lurched through, transferring from one school to another, leaking credits, managing to take an interest in a course here and there—hardly signaled an auspicious future. Nor did my newspaper career begin with great promise. I nearly blew it when it was barely underway. On a Saturday night in September 1972, the six p.m. first-edition deadline approached. Tom Valledolmo, the Sunday sports editor, told me to stay put in the narrow wire room to wait for the pending result on the Olympic gold-medal basketball game between the United States and the Soviet Union, in Munich, Germany. Any grudge match between the world’s superpowers in the midst of a cold war was a major story. Waiting anxiously for the Associated Press report, I experienced that dreaded deadline pressure—the enemy against which I was destined to wage a career-long war—for the first time. Finally, the result hit the wire: USA 50, USSR 49, the piece’s lede telling of two free throws by Doug Collins clinching the victory with three seconds remaining. I grabbed the hard copy, spooled the tape, attached it with a paper clip, and rushed from the room.
“We won . . . we won!” I announced, holding up the goods, forgoing journalistic neutrality I didn’t yet comprehend.
“Get it out right away,” Valledolmo said, pointing toward the composing room.
With that story set, the early edition was done. I returned to my desk, the deadline adrenaline rush subsiding, proud of my effort, ready for a break between editions. I don’t know what compelled me to go back into that wire room about twenty minutes later. At that hour on any Saturday in September, the sports wire clattered away nonstop, full of baseball and college football results. Left unattended for even a short while, the paper would back up, bunched to the floor. More out of curiosity than presumed need, I perused the stories, one after another, until I reached the one that nearly stopped my heart. It was a resend of the basketball result.
ALERT: USSR 51, USA 50.
The new lede told the tale of the disputed replay of the final three seconds that became an excruciating part of American sports lore. I burst out of the wire room with the tape and paper, yelling, “They replayed it . . . they replayed it!” Valledolmo had no clue what I was talking about. When I explained what had happened, he turned pale, bolted from his seat, grabbed the tape from me, and raced out to the composing room. The first-edition run, already begun, ground to a halt.
Lord knows whatever happened to the handful of Sunday Advances that had the Americans winning the gold. All I know is that Valledolmo, bless him, didn’t blame or fire me. In fact, shortly after my graduation from a division of New York’s City University system in 1975, he gave me my first full-time job as the newly minted sports editor. As a full-time staffer, I covered high school and local college games, manned the phones, and learned old-school page layout and photo cropping. At a local paper that required everyone to chip in as needed, I covered school board meetings and wrote obituaries for the news desk. I worked closely with Valledolmo, who later became a night sports editor at the Post, and with Jay Price, a superb columnist who would have been a star at any of the city’s major dailies had he chosen that route. The Advance was my Columbia School of Journalism.
A perk I earned by the midseventies was covering Saturday night Knicks games at the Garden, filing deadline stories and squeezing into the locker-room scrum of famous New York scribes for interviews with the remaining legends of the championship teams, Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe. Each week, as I watched the players warm up from my seat at the very end of the press table, as much a fan as I was a reporter, the same Knicks PR employee would wander my way and ask, “And you are . . . ?”
“Staten Island,” I would say.
The Advance was an excellent local newspaper, covering the city’s most rural borough across the Narrows, though rare was the New Yorker from the four other boroughs who knew it existed. Didn’t matter to me. I was a full-time working sports journalist. I suddenly had direction and a career in the making, and I grew more determined, every time I ventured to the Garden, to make that Knicks employee remember my name. That opportunity would come sooner than I could have hoped for.
• • • • •
The Post had long been my sports section of choice, a collection of creative writers whose prose was enhanced by the generous overnight deadlines of journalism’s endangered species, the afternoon newspaper. Larry Merchant. Paul Zimmerman. Vic Ziegel. Henry Hecht. Maury Allen. The young Mike Lupica and Larry Brooks. I read them faithfully throughout my Advance years, and tried on occasion a little too transparently to imitate them.
Much to the chagrin of a parochial readership expecting a straightforward names-and-numbers account of a high school game, I was intent on churning out innovative gems, a few of which went woefully wrong—like my infamous “I Am a PSAL Baseball” story, in which I assumed the identity of a ball being “spanked” into submission by a hot-hitting high school team. Letters and calls flooded the sports department from coaches and parents. Beyond bewilderment, some readers went so far as to ask: Was your reporter drunk, or high?
I loved my years at the Advance, where our staff basketball team played school faculties all over the island, entertaining gyms full of students while trying not to make fools of ourselves. But the Post remained my dream job, and the call that came on a spring day in 1977 left me joyous, if a bit dazed. It was Phil Mushnick, a
