Sept. 5: "Back in the game?''

I saw a lot more of the Ole Miss campus than I intended on Saturday.
Back in Oxford to report on a football game for the first time in more than 18 years, I found that the campus was just enough of a blend of old and new to leave me thoroughly confused.

I spent about an hour weaving through the narrow, pedestrian-clogged streets that surrounded Vaught-Hemingway Stadium trying to find the Media parking lot, which had been moved to a different location over the ensuing two decades.

When the sports editor at my old newspaper, the Biloxi Sun Herald, asked me to cover the game, I had no trepidation. I don’t know how many football games I’ve covered in almost 30 years in the newspaper business, so I wasn’t sweating this one. After all, it was a 3:45 p.m. game, so the prospect of a tight deadline - a sports writer’s primary stress-producer - wasn’t in play.

But, of course, first I had to actually get into the stadium.

I succeeded, I am happy to report, and I’ll know right where to go next time.

I found the Media entrance to the stadium with no difficulty and stepped into the elevator that would take me to the press box. The young student whose job it was to shuttle folks up and down to the various levels of the stadium, nodded and smiled.

“That’s what I want to do,’’ she said warmly, pointing at press pass attached to my shirt.

“Huh?’ I said.

“Be a sports reporter,’’ she expanded.

“Oh,’’ I said. “Well, good for you. That’s wonderful.’’

The response I really had in mind was, “Don’t you think going from elevator operator to sports reporter is sort of a lateral move?’’ But then I remembered how excited I was at the prospects of being a bona fide, paid-to-do-it sports writer all those years ago. So I suppressed the urge to speak candidly.

“Good luck!’’ I said as the elevator door opened at the press box level and I stepped out.

The game-day staff at Ole Miss, much like you will find throughout the South, is impossibly polite, friendly and accommodating, so the warm reception I received mitigated a slight nervousness that I began to feel as I stepped into the press box.

It was the assignment that made me nervous, obviously. It was just being back in this old familiar setting after so many years away.

I’ve been back in Mississippi for almost nine months now and, during that time, the word has spread among my old sports-writing colleagues of not only my return, but the circumstances that surrounded it. This was the first occasion I’d have to see any of them.

In a word, awkward.

“Hey, Slim! Good to see you,’’ said Parish, who I once interviewed for a reporter job about 20 years ago when I was sports editor in Biloxi. “I heard you were back…’’

There was a moment of nervous silence. He seemed to be struggling for the right words to say. Then, finally: “I’m sorry to hear about your, uh, troubles.’’

“Yeah, I almost never found the media parking lot,’’ I answered with a wink.

Of course, that was not the “troubles’’ my old colleague was trying to find a tactful way to acknowledge. But I was just as eager to leave to subject alone as he was.

Most of the other old acquaintances seemed happy enough to leave the subject –un-broached. But I did notice there was one fella who kept giving me an odd look, both in the press box and later, in the Ole Miss interview room. As I was walking back to the press box after the interviews were over, he finally approached and introduced himself.

Turns out, he’s been around Mississippi for as long as I have, working mainly at small weekly papers. To my knowledge, I had never met him. I certainly didn’t recognize him. But somehow, he knew me.

“Where have you been?’’ he asked.

It was just the sort of question I had been rehearsing my answer for as I drove to Oxford.

“Santa Rosa, San Francisco, Arizona, Prison,’’ I said. “Three of ‘em were job related.’’

He did not seem to know what to make of my answer, really. So he started talking about the facilities at Ole Miss, about how much they had changed since my last visit. I feel sort of bad about the way I responded now. It was sort of a blunt way to put and he had asked the question innocently enough.

Since returning to school, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about what to do next. It’s still an open question, to be honest. I figured the first order of business was to get that degree I didn’t think I’d need 30 years ago when I dropped out of school. But I’ll graduate in eight months. Then what? The idea of law school appeals to me on some level. Getting my Masters and teaching seems like a reasonable idea, if someone is inclined to hire someone with my background (the bad part, I mean).

Then again, I could always do this – sports writing. I figure I could get a low-paying job at a small paper and start over. There is certainly some comfort level in this profession: I know I can do a credible job.

But do I want to?

A few years before I went to prison, I left sports journalism to write news columns, mainly because I began to realize that the people in the grandstands were a lot more interesting to me than the people on the playing field.

So do I really want to go back to that? I don’t know. It’s fun, to a certain degree. But still…

As we were waiting for some of the Ole Miss players to arrive in the interview room after the game, I ran into another old colleague. I want divulge his name, but he is a few years older than me and has been covering sports in the South for more than 30 years. He’s widely regarded for his writing ability, too, and is treated with deference by even the most elite of coaches.

We stood there, not speaking, just waiting for the player we wanted to talk to, when he said in a weary tone of voice, “I’m so tired of this s—t.’’

He didn’t have to elaborate. I knew precisely what he meant.

A lot of people would be inclined to think that being a sports writer is a dream job.

But you do it long enough and the new wears off and the endless demands of driving all over creation to get to games, the sometimes crazy deadlines, the long hours of weekend duty, the surprisingly fragile egos of the athletes and coaches you deal with on a regular basis, the complete lack of perspective and proportion of fans and the low pay begins to grind you down and you get cynical, bitter even. Mostly, though, you just get “tired of this s--t.’’

So that’s the dilemma: Do I start at the bottom doing something I do well with the distinct possibility that I might get soon completely sick of it? Or do I step away from what I do best to pursue some vague possibility that might end up just as empty?

I just don’t know.

In the meantime, going to games is fun and it puts a few bucks in my pocket.

For now, that’s all I really know.