Free at Last

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sort of made this line famous many moons ago. I don't mean to cheapen his words, but it fits how I've felt these last few days.

I've pretty much severed my emotional ties to radio as a profession. I consider myself a play by play guy, and I really and truly love the number crunching that goes with preparing for a game, as well as calling a game for broadcast. The people I've met, places I've been, stories I've told, close scrapes and ass chewings are all part of the mosaic.

But I have come to the realization that I've progressed about as far as I can, given the skills I have. The actual prep and pbp are small percentages of the whole job, which includes a bunch of PR, glad-handing, coaches' shows and what not. And advertising sales. I have a friend in St. Louis who is prob better than me at pbp, who is selling his own games. Loves the games, hates the selling. If I were to move up in the profession, selling is where I'd have to go. I've tried sales before. I hated it, I wasn't very good at it, and I've made sure every job I've had since then has not had a sales component. Life is too short to spend any amount of it doing things we hate.

Plus, in clinging to radio, I'm clinging to thought processes I've had for 30 years. Radio, sports and pbp are all very different monsters from when I first wanted to call ball games. And being in sports and radio often mean sports talk radio, which means conflict at some level (no conflict, no listeners). I never have done conflict well.

So in coming to these conclusions, I feel free and liberated to choose the next direction my life takes, and how the next chapters will be written. And it doesn't have to be something I do for the next 30 years, either. Who knows what I'll think and who/where I'll be 5-10 years from now. The challenge is what direction to go. But somehow, I'm not as frightened as I was before.

And separately, I've printed a running plan for the next four months, in order to get my mileage back up. Looking forward to it.