"Santa Clara State" and other Cal Poly adventures

Time to get this blog back to its stated reminiscing purpose. I was thinking the other day about my first real job out of college: sports information director at my alma mater, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

The first year I was out of school I became the women's sports information director at Cal Poly. I did a really good job, considering it was 1979-80, women's sports were relatively new and I was the first person to ever hold the job. Cal Poly women's sports got a lot of media attention in the area that year and that was mostly because of me (and also because Poly had some pretty good teams). But at the end of the year, the women's athletic director decided to get rid of me, and this was mostly because I was male and she had already decided which female she wanted to replace me with.

So I became ... the men's sports information director. Not sure why, if I wasn't good enough to be the part-time women's SID I was good enough to be the full-time men's SID, but that's what happened.

They didn't make the decision to hire me until about a week before the first football game and I was never able to get up to speed. I was still trying to put together the football program for the second week of the season when I was with the team in Greeley, Colo., for the season opener against Northern Colorado. And of course, in 1980, this was anything but a computerized operation. I lugged my portable typewriter along with my suitcase while the entire team sprinted through the old Denver airport O.J. Simpson style because we had gone to the wrong gate while trying to get home.

My biggest adventures that fall had to do with getting the football programs printed. I had already sold all the ads during the summer while waiting to see if they would hire me full time. Most of the pages in the program stayed the same from week to week; others changed with rosters and stories for that week's game.

The biggest complication was that the printer was located in Santa Maria, 30 miles south. He was a booster and one of the few printers who could handle it. But this meant early deadlines and having to describe layouts over the phone to him (again, no computers, no e-mail. It's hard to imagine now how anything got done at all).

I had to drive down to Santa Maria to pick up the programs, about 1,000 of them, each week. I had commissioned an artist to draw portraits of the five players I wrote features on during the season. The covers looked great -- except the week I arrived and the printer told me he realized too late he had put the wrong name on that week's cover. Right picture, wrong name.

But he had a solution: He had made 1,000 stickers to put over the names. All I had to do -- for some reason, it was me who had to do this, not him -- was put the stickers over the name on each cover.

So that night, I licked stickers (yes, they were the lickable kind). And my parents licked stickers. And my grandmother licked stickers. And my next-door neighbor licked stickers. We got them all done and no one complained -- except the people who had done the licking.

Another week the printer said he was going to be a little later than normal with the programs and could I please come to his house that evening to get them. Well, that seemed OK since he lived in Nipomo, a little town about five miles closer.

Nipomo's a pretty rural place, or at least was then. I followed his directions and drove into this driveway to this somewhat rundown house. The only doorbell I saw was next to a sliding glass door. There was a long pause before the outside light was turned on and a woman opened the door. I asked her if this was the Smith residence (not their real name; I'm not trying to protect them; I just don't remember it!) and before she could answer, a man slowly emerged at the door from my right. He had a double-barrel shotgun.

He asked what I wanted. Surprisingly, I was able to tell him. I told him I was looking for the Smith residence, that he was a printer and had some football programs for me. He said he thought they lived across the road. I quickly, and as calmly as possible, said thanks and got in my car. All the time as I was backing out of the narrow driveway, I was saying quietly and rapidly to myself, "He's got a gun! He's got a gun! He's got a gun!"

The Smiths were very surprised to find out their neighbors across the road had a shotgun.

Cal Poly made it into the NCAA Division II playoffs that year and its first home playoff game was against Santa Clara. I suddenly realized I was going to have to come up with as many as two more programs. I called a few advertisers to see if they would continue for a smaller publication and I figured out what I was going to put on the cover for the game against Santa Clara. I sent the photo down to the printer and told him over the phone what the text on the cover was going to say.

That week I had 1,000 beautiful glossy programs. They looked great. But they said "CAL POLY vs. SANTA CLARA STATE." Santa Clara State?! Santa Clara is a Jesuit school near San Jose. My life flashed before my eyes.

I told the athletic director, who was a very kind, quiet man. He was the kind of man who, when he got angry, seldom showed it. He was angry. You could tell by his eyes. And maybe the wisps of smoke coming out of his ears. But he apologized to the Jesuits on behalf of his idiot 24-year-old sports information director.

There wasn't a single day the whole school year when I was SID that I didn't do something for that job. Saturdays, Sundays, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, every day. It was very difficult to get a handle on a job I had been given only a week before the first football game. And when Cal Poly got into the Division II football championship game, it was even tougher. The title game was in Albuquerque, N.M., where I had relatives, but I don't think they even knew I was in town. I barely knew I was in town.

Cal Poly beat Eastern Illinois for the national championship on a game televised by ABC and I remember I got to join the team for a big dinner afterward, followed by the New Mexico-Arizona State basketball game at the Pit.

San Luis Obispo went bonkers about the Mustangs finally winning the title after having come close in the playoffs several times before. On top of that, SLO High won the CIF football championship that same weekend at Mustang Stadium. When our buses arrived on campus, there were a lot of people there that night to welcome us back.

Or I should say welcome them. All I did was get off the bus, go to my office and desperately try to put together a season preview for the basketball team.

The basketball coach and his team hated me. Mostly because they never saw me. I had been so busy with football I never had much of a chance to do much for basketball.

The basketball team was almost just as successful as the football team, advancing to the 1981 Division II Final Four in Springfield, Mass. It was televised by this fledgling new TV network, ESPN. The four sports information directors gathered at a Springfield to meet with Sam Rosen, the play-by-play announcer, and his analyst who had just joined ESPN, Dick Vitale.

Yes, Dick Vitale has always been that way: Loud, enthusiastic, over the top. I came to the Final Four with a "Postseason Media Guide," but it was really just a 10-page mimeographed news release. Looked more like a term paper than a media guide.

Cal Poly's president was Warren Baker, just hired then and soon to retire now. Vitale knew him from the University of Detroit where Baker had been president and Vitale had been basketball coach.

"You tell Warren Baker he needs to spend some dough to put out a media guide!" Vitale said. He was trying to rib his former boss, but Baker had nothing to do with it. It was my fault we didn't have a media guide.

Cal Poly wound up finishing third in the Final Four (they actually had third-place games in those days). After that game, we drove to New York City where our flight home was originating. We spent one night in the Big Apple, but I was sick as a dog. All I remember is driving in Manhattan in order to return the rental car and walking back to the hotel in less time than it took me to drive. I stayed in the hotel that night while everyone else was out on the town. I remember seeing Patton on TV that night. First time I'd ever seen it. Still one of my favorite movies, even though it brings back bad memories of my only time in New York.

They consolidated the two SID positions at the end of the school year and told me I'd have to reapply. I interviewed, but it was clear they didn't want me. I wound up leaving and getting my first newspaper job at The Daily Press in Paso Robles, where I was the sports editor and also the sports staff.

But that's a story for another time.