Sports Nirvana

Chicago and Miami come to DC. Thank god I'm nowhere near the press box.

I’m Darren Samuelsohn, and this is what Sundays look like at love, journalism — a dispatch from the notebook, unfiltered, from whatever year I happened to be living in.

This one is about why it’s better to cheer for your team than cover them, especially when they roll in your adopted hometown.

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Two outs, top of the ninth at Nationals Park. We were losing 7-0, their starting pitcher and reliever combining on a one hitter and ready to end it.

“Let’s...go...Cubbies,” I belted to a beltway crowd that didn’t seem that interested in their incoming win, or even standing up to root for the home team.

It’s one of the joys of not being a sportswriter anymore. Up in that great big press box in the stadium sky, reporters get fed statistics and soft serve. But they cannot cheer.

As a kid, sports was the place I wanted to be most. I wore a pinstriped home uniform to my first Wrigley Field game and sat next to my first drunk person when the Miami Dolphins beat the Chicago Bears at the Orange Bowl during a 1985 Monday Night Football game. I collected autographs at PGA events and baseball card shows.

Journalism brought sports to life, and those press boxes became my first writing studios for school papers and a couple of city ones, too. The laptops we used in those days are legends, just like hometown heroes Edwin Pope and Dave Hyde.

At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, credentialed as a “technician” for The New York Times, I penned a brief about staying in a capsule hotel and then bunked in the media village with George Vecsey and Jeré Longman. Dave Barry told me jokes while Mitch Albom introduced me to someone you’ll meet later who’s become a lifelong friend.

To the chagrin of teenage Darren and a few family members, I puttered out on sports journalism. I’d taken a big swing in college on a story about my school’s star cornerback with a history of domestic violence that got recognized far and wide but propelled me away from the beat’s routine of previews, features and gamers.

I said then I wanted to write about things more serious, and so freelanced from Tokyo for a Grateful Dead fan magazine and landed in the Pacific Northwest with assignments covering national parks, salmon fishing and Bigfoot.

It also meant I could go back to just being a sports fan. I timed a cross country move for a pitstop in Indianapolis to sneak into a Dolphins game with the halftime smokers. Bless one of my Politico editors during the 2016 election who was a Yankees fan and so understood the need to drop everything for a 30-hour road trip to Cleveland to punch my standing room only ticket for World Series Game 7.

And it paved the way for this past week’s latest detour. No longer a sports writer. On the sidelines from daily journalism, and with free time to catch all three Cubs games in Washington, followed by Miami opening its NFL preseason with Friday night lights.

I am among the miserable fans who love my hometown team so much that I’ll take public transit two hours round trip to a suburban stadium to watch guys I’ve never heard of compete for a spot on a roster that prognosticators say is probably going to suck. Their efforts meant nothing for the record books, but I still stood up during the final minutes cheering for one final touchdown even though the coaches cared more about no one getting hurt, rather than trying to win the game.