I’ve been all over the place in the best of company
By David Woods
June 8, 2008 9:09 p.m.
Originally, I was going to do something snarky for this column.
I debated writing a biography of another staff member, republishing my first article (about men’s lacrosse), writing about how pretentious the whole idea of these end-of-the-year columns are with their estrogen-laced odes to favorite Daily Bruin memories, ghost-writing another staff member’s column and letting her write mine, or even constructing an entire column inside parentheses. (I still think that would be a good idea, but as you can see, we’re leading into something else.)
But, in the end, I decided that I couldn’t really be that dismissive about something I spent the better part of five years doing. So I’ll try to keep the estrogen out of it, but there’s a good chance this turns into an ode to my favorite Daily Bruin memory.
Before I started at the Daily Bruin, by my calculations I had never been east of Laughlin, Nev., and never north of Medford, Ore. I was a sheltered lad, having never even tasted the glory that is ranch dressing on pizza.
Five years later, I’ve sampled the fair-to-middling pizza of Chicago and taken pictures of myself doing obscene things to a metal moose; drunkenly stumbled from one end of Seattle to the other at 4 in the morning looking for a hotel whose name time forgot; observed the apparent thousands of mutant-looking people in Salt Lake City; and drunkenly (I’m sensing a theme) waded through crowds in Atlanta and San Antonio for two Final Fours. I’ve eaten barbecue in Kansas City, and gone for a romantic walk along a river in Eugene, Ore. with Andrew Hsieh.
I’ve also been to Pullman and Tucson.
I’ve spent hours in an office that, in the best of times, would degenerate into a 10- to 20-person game of “Would You Rather,” in which one option always involved sex with a fat man covered in marmalade. In the worst of times, I would get hit in the forehead with a large coconut and bleed profusely.
I’ve written over 300 stories, most of which were not very good, and one of which had “The night was exemplified, curiously enough, by the grill” as its lede, as I began a story about a baseball game by describing a small fire on a barbecue.
But in the end, this job wasn’t really about writing (thank the G-O-D). I learned, after about three years of writing crappy baseball and water polo stories too late, that this job was really about going places with good people.
And getting drunk.
Woods was the Sports assistant editor 06-07 and Sports senior staff 07-08.
