I was interviewed by a college journalism student for a class assignment this past week. It was right after I covered the selection show where Villanova Women's basketball team found out they earned an at-large selection to the NCAA Tournament (that's them, in the photo above, waiting to hear where they'll be playing in their 14th tournament appearance in the past 20 years. Below are the Villanova women, finding out where they play. They've been to a few Women's NIT tournaments in the past few years, but this is thier first trip to the NCAA's since 2013. Harry Perretta - sitting down - has been their coach for 40 seasons).
I mentioned to the student I also covered the men's basketball team the night before, when they learned which #16 seed they would face in the first round to the NCAA Tournament.
He asked if I was covering the tournament. I said no. He looked disappointed, then he asked if I covered the Super Bowl.
I said no, then somehow felt compelled to say, without hesitation, "But I WAS on the sidelines at at Super Bowl XV when the Eagles lost to Oakland in New Orleans" (that would have been in 1981).
"So, you don't cover sports?" was his followup question. Again, I felt I had to defend myself. "I covered the Phillies when they played Baltimore in the 1983 World Series!" I could tell where this interview was going, so quickly added, "I covered Super Bowls, heavyweight championship fights, grand slam major golf tournaments, Final Fours and World Series in my twenties, when I worked for United Press International before the Inquirer hired me."
(I didn't tell him there was one summer when I worked for UPI in Kansas City that in covering almost every one of 81 home games, I never sent a single photo out on the wire of a second-base slide - a very easy, so therefore cliched photo, to make in baseball).
Then, like I was almost apologizing, to him I said, "there were just so many opportunities at the newspaper when I got here, I just wanted to cover other things; travel to other parts of the world doing photojournalism."
Instead of covering only sports, I got to go to Grenada after the invasion, the Philippines as the "People Power" revolution was unfolding and to The Soviet Union on the cusp of glasnost and perestroika (also covered the first-ever Miss Moscow parent and the first Western fast foot franchise - Pizza Hut - to open in their communist economy. I also spent time with minor league ballplayers (before the movie Bull Durham even came out), and homeless people living in Center City Philadelphia.
In the years since, I never really went back to being a "sports shooter."