melissaisaacson.com

I run from the car to my computer like it is heroin and I am a junkie. I need it. I have never needed it more.

I went to dinner with my husband tonight and it should have been a good time. Poor guy. Both kids were with friends. We had no obligations. But we had to go and pick a sports bar.

I wasn’t even thinking about it. But if you live in the suburbs, even the nicest restaurants are sports bars. Maybe I never realized before I stopped being a sportswriter for the Tribune last week, how pervasive sports are in this country, in this city. I know I never realized that this particular restaurant, one of our regulars, had roughly 452 televisions, including one at our table.

I looked up and there was a sports talk show on one. On another, the White Sox game. On another, a Stanley Cup playoff. NBA playoff highlights were assaulting me from still another. Giant screens, side by side, circled the bar.

People were still buzzing about the Bulls triple-overtime victory from the night before. About the Blackhawks’ chances in their second-round series. Always about the Cubs.

There were times this week when I said with conviction that the layoff was OK, that maybe I didn’t even want to be a sportswriter anymore and that this would give me a chance to explore something different.

I convinced myself I was even excited about it.

And OK, so I barely watched the Bulls in their epic playoff series with the Celtics. Or the Hawks, as they won their first playoff round in 13 years. I was busy, after all. Too busy also, I told myself, to check out stories on the Internet. It wasn’t because I couldn’t, or that even the sound of a game tightened my stomach.

Sportswriting is a profession that is really not much different from most. We are, in many ways, like any other business travelers, criss-crossing the country, eating bad hotel food, dealing with airport delays and missing our kids.

Some of us develop ulcers over daily deadlines or drink too much. As a group, we are generally a walking advertisement for “What Not to Wear.” We complain about our bosses and sometimes the hours.

But stay in it long enough and we are each other’s family. We celebrate New Year’s Eves at college bowl games together and Thanksgivings in Detroit. We toast each other’s birthdays at the Cleveland Airport Marriott and console each other’s divorces at an NCAA regional. We share photos of our dogs and our kids. And when one of us gets fired, we all ache a little.

It isn’t like the good old days anymore. Papers aren’t sending writers to every game as they always did. Many major events simply aren’t covered at all. Many papers have cut out their high school coverage entirely.

I have met my best friends covering sporting events, maintained those friendships as we convened at Super Bowls and Olympics and Final Fours. There was always someone to hug, to have dinner with, to talk to in a language only another sportswriter could understand, man or woman.

And when the games were over, there were no good-byes because we always knew we would see each other again. At some game. Sometime.

Good God, what am I even missing? The industry is crumbling and everyone is miserable. But that's not how I think of it in my mind's eye.

The TVs are everywhere and the restaurant patrons see a game being played. I don’t. I see my friends on press row. I picture them up above the fields and down under the courts, in our own private and hidden world where we huddled elbow to elbow over our computers,  where Jerome Holtzman’s and Bob Verdi’s cigars made our eyes water, and where the shared pressure of a nearing deadline always made the room just a little quieter.

I sit in the bar and I try not to watch as I remember all the times I admired someone else’s work but forgot to tell them. We do that, too. We read each other and we are inspired or we are jealous, but we are just a little better because of it.

This week, sportswriters I know and some I don’t have told me that. In eloquent e-mails that bring me to my knees, they tell me to hang in there. I look up at the TVs and I can imagine them hunkered over their laptops, sweating another deadline.

And my husband hands me another napkin because I don’t know when I’ll see them again.