Tales From the Newsroom: Ironic Interviewing Intrigue

As 1996 rolled in, I was 26, newly married and feeling like life in Peoria had run its course. We decided to move to Seattle at the end of the year. 
 
On a scouting visit in April, I managed to solicit some interviews. One was with Greg Johns, the sports editor at The Bellevue Journal-American, who potentially had a job or two coming open. We had a great conversation, which concluded with him saying, “By the way, tomorrow is my last day here, but I’ll be sure to pass along your file to whoever takes over the hiring.” 

What the what? Well, that’s an odd twist of fate, I thought. I just spent an hour trying to impress a guy who very likely would have nothing to do with filling these positions ... one of which apparently was his.

A few weeks went by, and I never heard anything from The Journal-American. I called a few times to find out where I stood, never getting a firm answer but always being led to believe that I should keep in touch.
 
With our move to Seattle approaching, I was getting a little stressed about not having a job waiting for me, and I fired off a pretty incendiary letter to one of the paper’s senior editors, a guy named Tom Wolfe (who didn't wear a white suit, unfortunately). I railed against the injustice of being interviewed by a lame-duck editor and then being strung along for weeks. 
 
Another week or two went by before I got a response from Tom Wolfe, who fired back, rightly, that the interview had been initiated by my visit and that I was lucky to have been accommodated at all. He called me petulant and brash and suggested that I be a little more respectful. But then, in the last paragraph, he said that, nevertheless, my letter was so well written and my argument so clearly articulated that they wanted me to come back to Seattle and interview for their open sports column position.
 
Well, that’s another odd twist, I thought. Petulance pays.
 
So back I went in September for another round of interviews at not only The Journal-American but also its sister paper, The Valley Daily News in Kent. I had a great conversation with Wolfe, and we kind of laughed about the chain of events, and I met the publisher, Peter Horvitz, and everything seemed to be going along fine. Then I was ushered into the office of another senior editor named Barbara Morgan, who was so fixated on my petulant, brash letter to Tom Wolfe that I started to get the feeling that she had approved the interview just so she could confront me about it. She made it clear that she was uncomfortable with my temperament. It was really uncomfortable, and it was obvious that the decision to let me audition for the column came against her wishes. 
 
Well, that was really odd, I thought, as I drove from Bellevue down to Kent for more interviews, including one with the sports editor, Kevin Patterson. Here, things took an upswing. Patterson was a really cool guy and was really high on my clips, but he told me that I was one of two finalists for the columnist job and that the next day, I was going to have to go to the LPGA’s Safeco Classic and write an audition column.

Women’s golf? I couldn't write 18 words about women's golf, much less 18 column inches. But this was September 1996, remember, and Tiger Woods had just made his pro debut a week or two before, and I figured that I couldn’t go wrong hanging my hat on some kind of Tiger angle, whatever that could be. Then something in the press notes caught my eye: Juli Inkster. A California native, just like Tiger. Attended Stanford, just like Tiger. Won three consecutive U.S. Amateur titles before turning pro … just like Tiger.  Yahtzee! Had my column. God bless Juli Inkster.
 
I found her on the practice green the next morning and secured 15 minutes with her along the ropes. True professional that she is,  she gave me great material about playing practice rounds with Tiger at Stanford, about what he could expect, about the pressures of turning pro so highly regarded. I turned it around into a decent column on deadline, letting Inkster’s narrative cover up my absolute lack of knowledge about women’s golf. And I felt really good about my chances.
 
Didn’t get the job.
 
I found out later that the guy who beat me out for the column was Greg Johns, the same guy who interviewed me in April on his second-to-last day on the job. Apparently his other job was not working out, and his former colleagues in Bellevue were happy to take him back.
 
Well, that’s a little ironic, I thought. If the guy had never left in the first place, he might have hired me and I might have had a job covering the Sonics. And if he had stayed gone, I might have had a job writing a column. 
 
The good news was that the paper hired me anyway as a news reporter, and I started there in February 1997. A few weeks later, however, ESPN.com called me — it was based in Bellevue at the time, and I had interviewed there, as well — and said they now had an opening for an online producer. I jumped at the chance to get online and left the Valley Daily News for ESPN.com, where I found out that the person I was replacing was none other than Greg Johns, the same lame-duck sports editor who interviewed me in April and then bird-dogged the columnist job from me in September.

Oh, the irony of it all.

Footnotes: 
 
Greg Johns, by the way, is a great columnist and a great guy — the paper made the right decision — and he now covers the Mariners for MLB.com.

Tom Wolfe, Barbara Morgan and Kevin Patterson bailed water as long as they could, but the industry eventually caught up with The Journal-American and The Valley Daily News. After a series of name changes and consolidations and reductions and other assorted alchemy, the papers shuttered in 2006 or 2007. I don't know where any of them are today.

The SuperSonics left Seattle for Oklahoma City, but not before I got to ask Detlef Schrempf why he always acted like he's never committed   a foul in his life.

Juli Inkster's career, which had kind of tailed off when I first met her in the mid-'90s, came back in a big way at the end of the decade. She won a couple of majors and had a dominant run in 2003, which allowed me to revive my never-published audition column with an updated piece for SI.com. 

I have no idea what became of Tiger Woods.