Chip Shots: How Did I Get Here?

It's November, and three weeks from today will mark the sixth anniversary, to the day, of this column.

How I got here was an unexpected journey, but it wasn't my first unexpected landing in sportswriting with the Warsaw Times Union.

I didn't reach out with a portfolio of written work, nor did I respond to a classified ad. My journey to this newspaper started with a conversation at a sectional softball tournament hosted by the Warsaw Lady Tigers in May 2019.

The sports editor at the time was Mark Howe, who was covering the sectional while I was serving as the public address announcer. Between at-bats, we discussed a variety of topics, when Mark asked whether I had any writing experience and an interest in sportswriting.

I've had many people ask whether I write the same way I talk, usually either before or after they've read something I've written.

My conversation with Mark led to Warsaw Tiger football coverage during the 2019 season, with not the slightest notion that an opinion column was in my future, let alone one that would begin a little more than a year later.

Mark took a calculated risk to find out whether I could write about sports as well as I talked about them.

We worked together on refining mechanics and trimming word count. At the time, the Times Union had at least two or three other football writers, so space was limited. I also ordered an AP Stylebook, which was packed with useful writing guidance that extended well beyond sports.

Mark, whose work still occasionally appears in this newspaper, eventually moved on to other business ventures. In late 2020, Drew Fritz replaced him.

When Drew sat down with me over a Mexican dinner one Monday evening in November 2020, he explained that he wanted to add a weekly sports opinion column to the newspaper: a pleasant surprise.

Both Drew and Mark have a lot of "Big J" journalism in their backgrounds, and when Drew brought up the idea, A response such as, "Well, it's about time," would have been very inappropriate.

I didn't feel as though I had been held back from something like this because, frankly, my finished product sent to print for the sports section still needed work.

I believed Drew saw a need he wanted to fill with a local personality rather than a new editor arriving from somewhere else.

Much like Mark, I think Drew recognized that I approached sports differently. In conversations at the newspaper office, where I occasionally wrote postgame stories, he noticed many of the same things Mark had noticed.

I'm willing to pursue opinions beyond the obvious, and my writing tends to have a conversational personality.

The column's name? Chip Shots.

Drew already had that tucked away in his back pocket and essentially handed me the title. For what it's worth, when it comes to golf, I stink on ice. In fact, I sold my clubs 12½ years before I wrote my first Chip Shots column.

Whether a column receives praise or criticism, a passing thought often grows into a much larger investigation. I've also enjoyed looking at topics from unconventional angles in hopes of giving readers something they may not have considered before.

There have been plenty of columns where I started down one path and ended up somewhere entirely different. I've been told that in conversation I'm surprisingly good at returning to the exact sentence I was on before going off on a tangent, or to the exact point where an observer might have assumed I had permanently derailed the discussion.

More recently, I've made a conscious effort to keep these columns between 600 and 800 words, even when I change subjects along the way. If you run into me on the street, however, there are no guarantees I'll be nearly that brief.

Maybe that's how I got here.

I might not know exactly where a column is going when I begin writing it, but the uncertainty is part of what keeps me coming back every week.

I still don't know whether I was destined to write a sports column. I do know a conversation between at-bats eventually became a weekly commitment to put my thoughts on paper. My second editor gave it a name. My current editor, Connor McCann, admitted that a recent column titled "No Pellets" choked him up a little.

You, the readers, gave it an audience. The fact you're still reading Chip Shots six years later remains the most surprising part of the story.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to say each week.

And after six years, I'm not entirely sure I've figured out how I got here.