Published October 20, 2024

People sometimes ask me if I miss covering major college football. LSU. The Southeastern Conference. Bowl games. National championship games.

No. I don’t.

That answer is usually met with surprise.

There are the negatives that would take too long to explain, and who cares? And yes, even the deadline adrenaline rush has its appeal, but too much of the whole package left me wanting after enough years.

It can be thrilling, energizing, to be inside a venue with 90,000-plus people screaming and stomping their feet, such as in and around Ben Hill Griffin Stadium (above) on the campus of the University of Florida. You can be seduced into thinking you are in a place where something popular is happening. How important it is, I can’t say.

Even so, without it, I wouldn’t have the job I have now, editing stories about it for a New York Times-owned company. So there’s that.

But I can’t say I miss the game nights. It’s someone else’s turn. It has been for many years.

What I do miss

There’s more that I think back fondly on, maybe even miss, but what keeps coming to mind are the moments long after the cheering, hours after everyone but the cleaning crew has gone.

I’m going to let William Ackerman get me started here. Here’s some of what he wrote about the song “The Last Day at the Beach” for his 1986 album “Conferring with the Moon.”

Having to do with people and places and circumstances which change and won’t be back again. The feelings that result actually leave a sound in the air in places where people flock seasonally and leave suddenly this resonance remains, a vestige at some minor big bang in the red-shift of people’s passing lives.

That second sentence might need punctuation, but the more I stare at it, the less likely I am to touch it. With this, it’s my job to listen, not edit.

I thought about something I heard or read a long time ago, about the sounds trapped in a movie theater after the movie has finished and people left. The seats were all empty, the screen was dark and silent, but in some sense, the sounds lingered. Regardless of venue, there are versions of that sentiment out there.

What I think about is lugging my laptop bag from the stadium to the car, either mine or a rental. Crossing the parking lot, the silence suddenly noticeable after the three-plus hours of crowd noise and the noise inside my head as I wrote on deadline.

Maybe walking with the satisfaction of knowing I wrote a good story. Maybe carrying the weight of knowing I failed to compress the night’s experience and dynamism in a way that would be worth reading.

The feeling of having written. It’s so different compared to the feeling of writing. Or racing the clock and fighting all kinds of demons.

Do I miss it? No

I’ll stop right about here. As on those nights, I am in danger of writing too much. Maybe not enough for some readers, but too much for the copy desk.

And now I get to be on the other side of that.

I live next door to a cinema. The young people there know me from my walks to get movie popcorn and a soda to bring home for an evening snack. Maybe someday I will ask them if I can sit inside one of the empty theaters and just listen. I am already on the weird scale, so I have no reputation as normal to protect.

It’s more practical than traveling across the country to lumber across an empty parking lot after midnight on a fall Saturday night that has become a quiet Sunday morning.

This didn’t turn out nearly as readable as I’d hoped. It puzzled together nicely 24 hours earlier, but not when I sat down to write. That’s okay. You have probably had experiences that allow you to fill in the missing pieces. That’s why you’re here. Thank you for being here. I hope you find something to take with you when you visit.

Sending love.

Tiger Stadium photo by CRobertson via iStock.
Ben Hill Griffin Stadium photo by Arkorn via Shutterstock.
Photo of Long Beach, Washington, by me.