Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 124 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.
The passage is a bit of advice on how to become a SportsCenter anchor...or to get a career in sports media. In the book, the way to tell which anchor wrote what was by different fonts. So, the Olbermann part below is in courier; the Patrick part is in arial.
You cannot start too early. I wanted to do this from the fifth grade on. So I took lot of writing classes in high school, then majored in communications at Cornell, but that was unnecessary; I could've majored in turf grass management and it wouldn't have made any difference as long as I spent seventy-five hours a week at our college radio station. That led me into an internship at a TV station in New York between my junior and senior years, and connections there got me a chance to have a tape listened to at that radio network. They liked it, they hired me, and then the job advancement happened pretty rapidly to a second network, a TV job at CNN, then spots in Boston and L.A. and then here to ESPN.Put today's excerpt into an baseball context.
I think I knew by the time I was twelve that this was the way it was going to wind up. I was going to do what my father had always wanted to do. Be a sportscaster. So I did anything I could to stay in broadcasting even though I didn't become a full-time sportscaster until I was twenty-seven years old. Ours is an overnight success story -- if you consider 1967 to 1997 overnight. The gist of it is to get the experience before you get paid, whether at a school station or an internship or both.
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