Confessions of an overworked sportswriter

Why must I insist on opening every single blog post with an explanation of why I don't write more blog posts? It's stupid and repetitive and boring. I really need to stop doing it.

Ehh, never mind. I can't think of anything better to start off with... maybe I'll just settle for being boring.

My excuse this time is that I have a ton of writing these days with actual deadlines attached to it, and that takes precedence for obvious reasons. It's been a rough month. Since the beginning of February, I've had to write four articles for my journalism class (another one's due Monday), three for the Observer (another one's due Monday), and six for the Daily (my next three are due Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday). It's been hellish, but it's been interesting. Some highlights include:

-An Observer piece on February 6. We decided to do a pro/con spread on Kobe Bryant -- I begged to do the con. It wasn't my best work, and in fact it was probably far from it. But I didn't know just how bad it was until... well, about four seconds after it went online. Some random guy at Berkeley read my article, and instantly posted a reader comment tearing it to shreds, saying that Kobe carries the Lakers, and he deserves to be respected for it. Now, his points made sense to me, and I was impressed with his argument, but I have to ask... how the hell did he find this random article in the Tufts Observer, of all places?

I started out with three guesses. First, he could have a Google alert set to send him articles about Kobe. Second, he could be a regular reader because he has a friend on the Observer. Or third, I could have a stalker situation on my hands.

As for the first idea, I think I can rule it out. Google gives you 7.14 million results for a "Kobe Bryant" search. Even if you search only news articles, you get almost ten thousand matches. There's no reason he'd read a random newsmagazine like the Observer. Then, about the second guess... I looked him up on Facebook. Not only do the two of us have no mutual friends, but he doesn't even know anyone at Tufts. So, it appears that I've arrived at the third option. He's chosen me, at random, to be the victim of a lifetime of stalking. That's kinda sketchy. Mr. Roland Peer, if you're reading this, which I assume you are because any good stalker would be, I just want to say: you're creeping me out.

-A Daily article on February 10. I got to meet Tony Masssarotti, one of the best sportswriters in the Boston area, and a Tufts alum (class of 1989). It was a really short article -- it was pretty much just a blurb we added to fill a bit of space on the back page -- but that didn't matter to me. He gave a great speech about the past, present and future of the Red Sox, and I got to talk to him afterward. Plus he signed my copy of his book, which is pretty cool.

-My Daily coverage of the NESCAC (that's the New England Small College Athletic Conference for those of you not in the know) basketball tournament. It's not exactly the ACC tourney, but it's a lot of fun, in different ways.

The article that I wrote was an overall wrap-up of the conference Final Four. That was kind of a royal pain, because it meant I had to cram the two biggest games of the year into one 750-word piece. But it turned out okay.

All three games took place in Amherst, which is a couple hours away. I didn't get to go to the Saturday games, in which Tufts beat Trinity and Amherst beat Bates, but thanks to the services of JumboCast and a few postgame phone calls to players and coaches after the game, I was caught up in a hurry. Then, the next morning, the stage was set for a rematch with the hated Amherst Lord Jeffs, in a battle for the NESCAC title. I was lucky enough to catch a ride there with the JumboCast crew, so I saw the final game live. After getting up at seven, hopping in the car at eight, and spending an hour or so helping the TV crew set up, I was in my seat in time for a noon tip-off.

Now, if you've never been to a D3 basketball game before, it's an experience that I'd definitely recommend. There's really nothing like it. How so, you ask? Let me put it this way. I met our starting center's mother. She spent 15 minutes or so before the game handing out homemade oatmeal cookies to everyone on the Tufts side of the bleachers, introducing herself to everyone in sight, and even offering to show them her good luck charm (a small stuffed elephant -- "it's actually Danny's," she explains in a thick, but charming, Boston accent). I met our point guard's little brother too; he was the kid sitting in front of me complaining about every single call the officials made throughout the game. And then there was our small forward's mom. She approached me after the game to say she read an article I had written weeks earlier, and she loved the picture we had taken of her son. She wanted me to order her prints of it.

Wow. Only in Division III.

Anyway, we lost the game, but it was still an incredible experience. We even ended up eating dinner after the game at the same Wendy's as the Tufts team. (A couple of them applauded when they saw us walk in the door... that was touching.)

As I write these words, Tufts is just now celebrating a win in the first round of the NCAA tournament (yes, D3 has one), and they're on the road against SUNY-Cortland at 8pm Saturday, fighting for a spot in the Sweet Sixteen. In all likelihood, that would put us right back in Amherst next weekend. I can see it now: three games against Amherst this year, with one loss knocking us out out of the regular-season title race, one ousting us from the NESCAC, and one sending us home in the NCAAs. Sorry to be pessimistic, but I can just feel it coming.

Okay... enough about all this writing stuff. Moving on...

Oscar night is this weekend! I'm becoming a big movie buff these days, so I'm finding myself a lot more psyched about the Oscars this year than in years past.

Now after the baseball and football playoffs I've seen in the past few months, you'd think I'd have learned my lesson about making predictions on this blog. I swear, I used to be good at predicting things. Somehow, having a blog jinxed everything, and now that my every word is put in writing, I come out looking like an idiot. Oh well. I haven't learned my lesson yet (especially because I was 6 for 6 on the major ones last year... I have way too much ego to give up on making my picks now). Here goes:

Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon
Best Supporting Actor: Paul Giamatti
Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz

Those four seem to be pretty standard among a lot of movie critics, and there's not a whole lot of debate. Supporting actor may be a tricky one, since Matt Dillon was amazing in Crash, plus George Clooney and Jake Gyllenhaal have gotten great reviews. (William Hurt doesn't have much going for him besides his exceptional Tufts education... he's probably running in a distant fifth.) But the Academy's probably going for Giamatti, especially since he deserves an apology for last year -- he should have won Best Actor for Sideways, and he somehow wasn't even nominated.

The two tricky ones are Best Picture and Best Director. As you may have noticed, the five directors are the same five directors who made the five films. The interesting question is whether the voters put all their eggs in one basket, or split their votes between two movies. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they take the latter route. How does this look?

Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain
Best Director: Paul Haggis

Brokeback and Crash are probably the top two movies on the ballots. Capote is up there too, but since Hoffman's likely to win Best Actor, the other two movies are probably going to be represented elsewhere in the Big Six. Brokeback is probably still the favorite to win the big one, although rumor has it Crash is gaining. I'm gonna say that Haggis, who's getting a lot of respect these days after winning an Oscar last year for Million Dollar Baby, gets the consolation prize.

In other news...

-I always knew Boston was a baseball town, but this is incredible. Since this is my first February in Boston since... what, 1989?... I had never learned before of the miracle that is Truck Day. Multiple friends of mine who are fellow Red Sox fans stopped me on the street on my way to class on February 13 to wish me a "Happy Truck Day." I was amazed. I mean, I've always considered myself somewhat of a hardcore fan, but that is something else. I'm supposed to celebrate the departure of a truck full of baseball equipment? Wow.

-My classes are beginning to get hard. My astronomy teacher is mindless and incompetent, so she spends hours on end teaching us to convert meters to lightyears (among other tasks that everyone in the class can accomplish in their sleep), but then she has her TAs write impossibly hard tests. I fear that I bombed the first one. Econ has a similar problem. Our professor can't add, and he constantly mixes up basic terms like "producer" and "consumer," but for some reason his tests are impossible. As for Western Political Thought, we haven't had any graded assignments yet, and that makes it really hard to know where I stand. I could be grasping the material just fine, or I could be completely and utterly lost. I hate being confused like this.

The only class that I'm really happy with is my journalism class. It's a great environment -- I'm surrounded by great writers, and we can all bounce ideas off of each other. I've been pretty happy with all the stuff I've written so far, and I've learned a lot in the process. It's possible that when the time comes to pick a major, I'll end up going with English. (I'd like to double-major in econ too, but let's first make sure I can pass the pre-req course.)

-The university-wide housing lottery is this coming week. We pick our rooms in order by a randomly-selected lottery number, and it turns out that the computer at the ResLife office loves me. Rising sophomores are given numbers between 1500 and 3000, and I got 2995. This meant that I toyed with the idea of applying for a nice apartment with a few friends, but in the end I don't think that's going to work out. After all, housing options for sophomores are only so plentiful. At the moment, I'm torn between taking a single room in one of the downhill apartment buildings, or living up the hill on the academic quad in either a quad suite or a double with one roommate. Thanks to that good old random number generator, seemingly everyone and their brother wants to room with me.

That's all I have the strength to write about for now. After the housing situation is cleared up, the statuettes are awarded, and perhaps a bit of spring baseball gets played, I'll have plenty more to sound off about. Until then... sayonara.