No. 656 – Tea in the Sahara

Performer: The Police

Songwriter: Sting

Original Release: Synchronicity

Year: 1983

Definitive Version: Live!, 1995

I associate The Police with being at Northwestern. As I mentioned, a bootleg of The Police’s Synchronicity MTV concert was the first tape I played upon arrival. In the spring of 1987, when I should have been taking the magazine-publishing class but instead was taking sports reporting, this song was on a tape I listened to a lot in the wake of my breakup with Beth.

Although I was pretty miserable overall, school was going great, and, as I mentioned, a lot of that had to do with covering New Trier baseball for most of the spring.

When I drove to the school—it’s long since moved to a massive campus west of the old location—to introduce myself to the coach, I told him that I would cover the team’s practices as well as games, and he gave me free rein.

I don’t recall meeting any players that first day (I do remember that it was pouring, so there was no practice, just sprints and pick-up basketball in New Trier’s dungeonous gym), but it wasn’t long after that that they began to take notice of the creepy older guy who hung out behind the batting cage.

Now, in the bigs, the players are used to having creepy older guys hanging out behind the batting cage, but this was a new experience for high-school kids. For the most part, high-school kids LOVE the idea of talking to the press, but I had to prove myself first.

When we covered a team for class, we had three weekly assignments—a game story, a news story and a feature. My first New Trier feature would be about David Norman. Norman was all about baseball. He had played since being a little kid but unlike, say, me, he played round the calendar and took it very seriously, even going so far as to play indoors in the winter at a nearby batting cage to work on his swing. In his junior year, he started to fill out and had a huge year at the plate. Now a senior, even more was expected of him.

I introduced myself to him and told him I was going to be talking to other people about him for a feature story. When I was done chatting with the others, I would interview him. He seemed a bit apprehensive but agreed. The story turned out great; I got an A on it, which seemed like the first time I had seen that letter on anything since Wabash.

But the kicker was what happened next. Other students and instructors at Northwestern had mentioned that area newspapers presented a free-lancing opportunity, so when you wrote something that went beyond a basic story, you should submit it and see what happens.

At the time, there were two neighborhood weeklies in the North Suburbs—the Pioneer Press and the News-Voice. I submitted my Norman story to both. I never heard from the Press, but the News-Voice bit. They said they would pay me $50, which is a pittance for a 1,500-word story, but I was overjoyed. It was the first time I had been paid to write anything by an independent source. My career as a sportswriter was off and running!

When the players saw the article and thought they, too, might be the subject of future features, well, let’s just say, I was no longer the creepy older guy who hung behind the batting cage. Now I was the creepy older guy who hung out behind the batting cage who could make them some publicity. That’s all the difference in the world.