Editor’s note: If you don’t want to see a lot of pictures of me, skip to the next blog entry.
Somewhere in my mother’s house, one of two buildings I can call home, there is a 59-year-old edition of a weekly newspaper with my picture in it. It has been decades since I’ve seen it, but it was a column logo for the first column I ever wrote.
I was 11 or 12, and it was a column in local weekly paper about junior high sports in Huber Heights, Ohio.
I had a crew cut and I seem to recall I was wearing one of those shirts like the Beach Boys always seemed to be wearing. Of course it was the year before we heard about the Beach Boys in Ohio, so I can’t claim to be particularly hip.
What was fun about it was that kids I knew read it, and some of them asked me from time to time if I would put their names in the paper.
I enjoyed it a lot, and the irony was that it was 15 years before I even thought about doing it again. I never even considered working on my high school paper and the first two times I went to college I had too much else on my mind to think about it.
I did develop some vague idea of becoming a writer, and I wrote lyrics for five songs — one good, one fair and three execrable — and one childish, amateurish screenplay.
When I was 27 and started having intelligent thoughts about my future, I started thinking about journalism. Sports journalism in particular. My earlier misadventures in higher education pretty well ruled out law, medicine or anything else requiring admission to graduate school.
In December 1980, my colleague Reid Cherner, now retired from a career as an assistant sports editor at USA Today, took a picture of me interviewing tennis great Chris Evert. This was maybe the second-best photo of me in my career, but one that came two years later was even better.
By the end of the summer 1982, I had been working in North Carolina for eight months, covering the Gastonia Cardinals of the South Atlantic League. I won the sportswriter of the year award for the league, but what was even more wonderful was that on the final night of the season, the Cardinals let me manage the team.
We lost.
They always lost that year, going 18-53 in the second half of the season and losing 33 out of 40 at one stretch, but I got what has to be my favorite picture ever taken of me.
Straight hair? And permed in 1980? Huh?
By now I was spoiled. Picture in the newspaper? No big deal at all. When you include column logos, I had probably had my picture in the paper more times than all the residents of Mineral, Va., combined.
Great name, huh? Mineral? I would probably never have heard of it if my friend Bill Madden and I hadn’t taken a wrong turn early in our summer 1974 trip to Isle of Palms, South Carolina..
The only way I could top these pictures was to get my picture in a national magazine, one famous for its outstanding photos. That’s why it seemed only a matter of time until John Kerr, one of my new colleagues at the Greeley (Col.) Tribune would come into the office the week before Super Bowl XXVI and say:
“Mike, your picture is in Sports Illustrated.”
Of course it was. I went to the nearest drugstore, picked up a copy of SI and turned to a page in their preview article.
There I was. Just me on the left, my boy E in the middle, along with a bunch of other guys.
Permed again in 1987.
The strange thing is that it didn’t surprise me. By now seeing my picture in print was something I had almost come to expect.
FYI, I checked the SI photo archives. John Elway has had his picture in the magazine more than 2,300 times.
Once was enough for me.
For a while, at least.
After that it was more than nine years before my picture appeared in print again. I was working in Southern California and my paper was making me a three-times-weekly columnist. So of course they did some promo stuff.
Straight hair again.
I wrote my column for five years, until I got a boss who somehow thought the paper would be better off without a column that won awards every year and that the readers loved.
It was odd timing, too. I lost my column on my best friend’s birthday and I lost it at a time the paper was actually promoting the column by using a picture of me.
This one was different, though. This time my picture was on a billboard, although I had to share it with our second columnist, a guy who looked exactly like the comic strip character “Henry” would have looked like as an adult.
That was pretty much it for me. I’ve probably got more chance getting my picture on a milk carton now than being in a newspaper or on a billboard.
There was one other thing, though. Lots of people get their pictures in the paper, as someone told me. But what really makes someone cool is to be on television.
Yawn.
Been there, done that. Got the videotape.
I’ve been on television five times by my recollection. Twice in 1967 on the D.C. quiz show “It’s Academic.” Won one, lost one. Once just before Christmas 1984. I was covering Missouri basketball, and I was interviewed about the team at halftime of a game at Ohio State.
Then around 1998, when I was a columnist, I did a one-hour bit on a cable access show where viewers could call in and ask questions. Imagine my chagrin at getting no callers in the entire 60 minutes.
Then there was the cherry on the sundae. The PBS station for Riverside/San Bernardino had a weekly magazine show. They didn’t just invite me on the show. They did a six-minute feature about me in 2000.