Now retired and 72 years old, I am reflecting on how I became a sportswriter.
I loved sports as a kid, especially baseball. Growing up in Hackensack, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City, I played organized baseball from age eight through high school.
I never thought about writing sports, nor did I write for my high school newspaper. But something happened in my junior year that would prove significant for my future in journalism.
I played clarinet in our high school orchestra. The director of our orchestra had played clarinet in the New York Philharmonic. So our orchestra was very important to him. I faithfully attended class and did my duty in the marching band for football games. However, in the spring of my junior year, I encountered a conflict. I had baseball practice every day after school. On the day the orchestra was holding its spring concert, I also had a tremendous amount of homework to complete. I took my studies seriously, as I graduated number one in my senior class of 550 students. I approached the band director and informed him that I would be unable to play in the concert. He was very annoyed. The following week, when I went for my weekly clarinet lesson with his assistant, the director saw me and angrily told the assistant, “Don’t give him his lesson!” Whoa! That completely turned me off from continuing to play in the orchestra in the fall. So instead, I took typing.
1968 Olivetti-Underwood typewriter (photo courtesy Willowcreek Typewriters)
I was the only guy in the typing class. I took to it well and was soon typing 60-65 words per minute. I did not intentionally take it to help me in college. I just thought it would be good to know how to type. However, when I started college at Cornell, I had numerous papers to write. I was also able to type on my trusty Olivetti-Underwood manual typewriter. This saved me a lot of money; I would have had to pay a student to type my papers. And I wouldn’t have trusted anyone else to do it anyway, as they might have made typos, and I am a perfectionist when it comes to my writing.
While at Cornell, I regularly read the Cornell Daily Sun newspaper. As I read the sports page, I said to myself, I can write better than that. That may sound boastful, but it was my honest evaluation of their writing. So I applied to write for the Sun. My test assignment was to watch a baseball game on TV and write the game story. So I watched a Mets game on the TV in our dormitory lounge, wrote the story on my Olivetti-Underwood, and was accepted onto the Sun staff.
I covered basketball and baseball for the Sun and also had the chance to write my first feature article, a profile of one of the varsity basketball players. I enjoyed doing my first interview for that profile.
In the two summers I remained in Ithaca, New York (where Cornell is located), I wrote sports feature stories for the weekly Ithaca New Times, including an interview with Joe DiMaggio.
During my senior year at Cornell, I had no idea what I wanted to do after graduation. I was a psychology major, but soured on that because Cornell focused on experimental (lab rats) rather than clinical psychology. But I had enjoyed sportswriting, so I applied to a few schools and received a full fellowship for the master’s program in magazine journalism at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.
I learned a great deal about feature writing and editing at Syracuse, and I wrote on a variety of topics for the school newspaper. When I graduated in December 1976, I had no job prospects until, at the last minute, I was contacted by the Cortland Standard in Cortland, New York. A sportswriter had just retired, and they needed a new one. Someone at the Syracuse Post-Standard had forwarded my application to the Cortland newspaper.
I jumped at the chance and began covering high school sports of every kind for the Standard. Unfortunately, some poor life decisions took me away from Cortland, and my time at the Standard came to an end. But out of the dark place to which those decisions led me, I came to believe in Jesus in August 1978. You can read that story here. I am Jewish, and with a new appreciation of my Jewishness (Jesus was, after all, a Jew), I came to San Francisco to work with the Jews for Jesus organization.
Although I tried, I was unable to return to the sports writing business. My experience at the Cortland paper was too brief, so San Francisco Bay Area newspapers either turned me down or didn’t have openings. I left Jews for Jesus in 1982 and worked in the transportation industry for the next 23 years. But all that time, I was writing freelance magazine feature stories about Christian athletes, including Hall of Famer Gary Carter, Brent Jones of the San Francisco 49ers, and Steve Alford, a former Indiana University basketball player.
Matt Sieger
So I still had the writing bug. At the age of 55, I retired from my transportation job and returned to Jews for Jesus, where I worked as a writer and editor, a role I held for the next eleven years. When that job ended, I was almost 66 years old, but I still needed to work to support my wife’s health insurance until she turned 65 in three years, at which point she could qualify for Medicare. To my amazement, a sports reporter job opened up at The Reporter, the Vacaville, California, daily newspaper. I returned to writing about high school sports, as I had done at Cortland years ago, and I loved it. It made for the perfect bookend to my career in sportswriting.
Since retiring from The Reporter, I wrote a book, The God Squad: The Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978. And now I write for The Sports Column.
Once a sportswriter, always a sportswriter!
