The knock on the door got here at an obscenely early hour — for a school junior, anyway. It was most likely the crack of midday. I stumbled out of the loft inside Room 472 at Devereux Corridor, St. Bonaventure College, opened it. The pale hallway mild was blinding. It had been a protracted night time.
Earlier than me, a thin child was extending his hand.
“Hello! I’m Adrian Wojnarowski!” he mentioned, with precisely the quantity of enthusiasm you’d anticipate from somebody who was precisely two hours into his freshman 12 months. “I need to write for you.”
I used to be the editor of the college paper. Adrian defined by means of the fog that he had simply moved in a number of doorways down and he wished to jot down sports activities for The Bona Enterprise. I growled one thing about coming to a gathering Tuesday night time.
I requested him his title once more.
“My associates name me Woj,” he mentioned.
Thirty-seven years later — virtually to the day, now that I give it some thought — I went outdoors to stroll my canine for a couple of minutes. And once I returned, I used to be shocked to find near 175 textual content messages. That’s normally a horrible omen.
On this case, it was a beautiful one.
A number of months in the past, Woj had referred to as me and requested, “What would you say if I instructed you …”
And now, he had truly accomplished it. He had greeted the day with a pair of Woj Bombs: he was retiring from ESPN, the place for the final seven years he set a hard-to-fathom commonplace for proudly owning a beat, in his case the NBA. However he was additionally asserting that he was returning to our shared alma mater to change into the GM of the Bonnies males’s basketball staff.
Now the world knew that, too.
And it felt like half that world was sharing the information — actually, its fascination with the information — on my iPhone. What was I feeling? What was I pondering?
Effectively, it wasn’t lengthy after that preliminary assembly that Woj and I found that we had been, in nearly each method, of similar makeups. We had been each the merchandise of working-class households who’d instilled in us insatiable work ethics. We each had been fascinated by the craft of sportswriting; he, in actual fact, had already gotten a head begin as an intern writing highschool sports activities on the Hartford Courant.
And we each had desires.
Jesus, did now we have desires.
And for the subsequent few years, over a numerous provide of beers at The Burton — our favourite off-campus watering gap — and limitless late-night tuna soften sandwiches at a close-by Perkins, we talked about these desires.
Later, as my skilled pathway took me to Olean, N.Y., and Fayetteville, Ark., and Middletown, N.Y., and Kansas Metropolis — and his took him to Waterbury, Conn., after which Fresno, Calif. — we might discuss it out some extra over the telephone, 2 a.m. calls during which he’d learn me his newest column and I’d learn him mine. I’m nonetheless paying off the long-distance payments.
Then, within the days whenever you needed to truly pay for each minute of dial-up web, we’d do the identical on-line, typically joined by a gallery of like-minded associates like Les Carpenter (now of the Washington Publish), all of us fueled by ambition and the sort of wistful hope that sometime these aspirations would discover prepared suitors at a big-city paper.
Miraculously, it did. Miraculously, for 3 giddy years, Woj was the columnist on the Bergen File and I had the identical job on the Newark Star-Ledger, and now we had been battling over the identical turf, the identical tales, daily. It was an excellent time. Then I obtained the decision I’d waited my complete life for, at The Publish.
And Woj?
Effectively, he went one other method. Again within the day, Woj had gained some sort of scholarship and as a substitute of making use of that windfall because it was meant — both towards his tuition or towards our bar invoice at The Burton — he went straight to the Radio Shack and purchased himself his very personal TRS-80 (with the flip display screen). For a time, for inspiration, he taped an image of Peter Vecsey on the facet of the laptop computer.
Vecsey had primarily invented fashionable basketball reporting within the ‘70s right here at The Publish. And beginning in 2006, when Woj left the File for Yahoo!, he went in regards to the enterprise of doing the identical factor, for an entire new technology. Later, when he moved to ESPN, he grew to become proprietor of the Woj Bomb.
(I’ve lengthy loved relating the story of being his wing man on the primary Woj Bomb ever. Up in school, we’d discovered the basketball coach was getting fired. We had the story chilly. But it surely was Wednesday, and The BV didn’t publish until Friday. So Woj had an concept: let’s name the three Buffalo TV stations. The one which agrees to credit score the paper for the story will get the information. And so it was.)
As his pal, as godfather to his son, Ben, I by no means thought I’d be prouder than seeing him scale these skilled heights. I used to be fallacious. Wednesday, he walked away on prime. In his personal method, in his personal world, he was Jim Brown, leaving on the prime of his sport, leaving them wanting extra. Brown determined he wished to strive performing. Woj goes to do his greatest to maintain our Bonnies aggressive in a school basketball panorama that modifications by the second.
It’s all come remarkably full circle, and in additional methods than you’d imagine. He despatched me an image the opposite day of his new crash pad close to the Bonaventure campus. It’s a really good condo.
Upstairs from the Burton, after all.
