Tomorrow I’ll be driving the six hours to Birmingham for the SEC Football Media Days, but it gave me a break when I realized that I’ve been covering media days for more than 40 years.
It started on the Southwest Conference press tour in 1980.
About 40 media types from newspapers, radio, and television met in Dallas, got on a bus, and then toured the state of Texas for press conferences with all of the SWC schools in that state, ending with a flight to Fayetteville.
Please see Sunday’s column for more information.
There are a million stories about this press tour, some fitting for a family newspaper.
One that I will never forget. We had an 8am departure from Houston to Austin and everyone was on time except for the bus that had parked in our hotel parking lot the night before.
The police were called and a replacement bus showed up four hours later, and when we turned the corner to get onto the freeway, someone saw a bus in sight in the middle of a field. It was maybe four blocks from our hotel.
Someone said they should have just brought us the bus and saved three hours.
As it turned out, that was our bus.
One of the braver TV guys had “borrowed” the bus for a social engagement with an employee of our hotel.
Four blocks was all he could do with it before jumping over the curb into an empty field.
They went back to the hotel and he decided not to tell anyone.
Every year at the end of the tour there was an award for “Horse’s Behind”. The TV reporter won that year. It was given in a good mood, or at least I was told so in the year I won it.
[ad_1]
