It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
August 28, 1997
Hello, we’re your men’s and women’s sports editors. We have been attached at the hip for the past nine days, and now can’t even write a column individually. We even wore a two-person raincoat. We hope you liked it or at least laughed.
It’s been a humbling week for us. Number of deadlines missed: two; number of laughs between us: 3,042; number of laughs at us: 4,765; number of weird looks received on campus: 43; number of songs sang out of tune: 26; number of compliments: four; number of times misspelling names: four (one being Nunex, which sounds like a verb rather than a name); number of requests to play on a pro wiffle ball team: one; number of pages that were deleted by a high-ranking editor: five; number of hours spent in the office: too many; number of mistakes that were actually our fault: zero. (Thanks to English 305 for this idea.)
Happily, though, we’ve made it through our first week. For those of you keeping score with us at home, since we can get no closer than we have been (we’ve shared a raincoat for Pete’s sake), we want to describe our first week as Daily editors so we can be closer to you. And if you are scoring at home, congratulations and we wish we could have joined in the fun.
There was no warm-up, no pregame music, nothing. We were just thrown in the heat of the battle and told to publish ten pages for the sports section, not once, not twice but three times.
It was Hell Week II: The Daily Publishes Three Fifty-Page Issues. It was a comedy (mostly of errors). We title it as though were a sequel because the last week of classes at the end of the semester already has dibs on the name “Hell Week.”
The theme song would be appropriately titled “Centerfield” by John Fogerty or “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits because they are great for sports bloopers, and that is what we were and are.
Throughout the last two weeks, we have experienced temporary lapses in sanity having gone 12 hours without leaving one room, have missed countless meals and missed out on countless calls from members of the opposite sex telling us how loved we are, just to make your sports section possible.
When we finished, our eyes were more bloodshot than those we saw leaving the Phish concert last year. And we had just as much fun, and we probably remember more of it.
But in the section we call ours, we forgot to tell you a few things. For example, we told baby that Simeon is the Wright one, but we forgot to tell you where to keep reading about his running career. (By the way, for you kids who were late to practice, his Wednesday feature continued on page two.)
And we forgot to tell you about Drew’s obsession with the foreign exchange student from France when he was a 13-year-old hormone. Well, we didn’t forget; we simply lacked an appropriate place to put it.
We wanted something else to get us through this journalists’ kind of life. Maybe our chief editor’s decision to hold Thursday night meetings at Welch Ave. will do the trick.
And why did we do this? Who knows? It’s hard to say what it is we saw in you, wondered if we’d always be with you. Words can say, we can do, enough to prove, it was all for you.
We’re damned glad about it, too. We’re good; just ask us, we’ll be the first to tell you. It’s the weekend, and it’s time to make like a baby and head out.
Amanda Fier and Drew Harris are journalism and mass commincation majors from Davenport and Peosta.