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Five Media Things: Chasing Tiger and a Bit of Gratitude

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I traveled to St. Louis this week for the final major for the next 241 days and saw it all on Saturday and Sunday at Bellerive. However, the end of the 2018 major championship season always gives way to the beginning of the college football season, and though it seems unfathomable, two weeks from now we will be preparing for the first OSU game of the season. Bart Scott. Can’t wait.

A Media Thing I Think I Believe

I felt old this weekend. I really did. I know that will make some of you laugh because I’m 33 years old, but I walked the PGA on Sunday with a college student intern who was inside the ropes for the first time.

He was wild eyed. I was trying to get the story. We had a blast together.

And it was a callback for me to the beginning of all of this. When being inside the ropes at a major or sitting in front of Mike Gundy as he holds court with the media was as new as it was a revelation and how easily and quickly it is to become jaded.

I never, ever want to be that person. The crusty old writer who always seems like he or she would rather be anywhere than the very place he or she is. I always told myself I would never become him. Turns out, that’s a lot harder to accomplish than it is to initially consider.

Maybe some of you get tired of this stream-of-conscious riff on my path as a writer, thinker and talker about sports. That’s ok. Sometimes I simply write these words on here to remind myself of things or to reorient my mind and my world to the place where it should be.

This weekend, walking next to Tiger, with Rickie Fowler and Brooks Koepka behind us and Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth ahead of us, I was reminded, like Tiger was, that all of this is as cool as a profession gets.

At one point on Sunday, a fan at Bellerive asked us how he could get inside the ropes badges. “Oh just go spend 10 years in journalism school,” replied one of my buddies.

That wasn’t my story, obviously. Sometimes I feel like I weaseled my way into this gig, pretending the entire way that I was somebody I had not yet become. Maybe a lot of you feel like that. Maybe it’s not uncommon. It was, however, as Tiger scurried around searching everywhere for a 15th title, a good reminder for me as I silently vowed to try to complain less and contemplate more.

And that’s not just how I want to view sports. That’s how I want to view the world. The one constant at Bellerive was that every human being on the property had their phone in the air at almost every turn. They wanted to record history, but they failed to internalize it. It felt refreshing to put the phone away a few times. To not fire off takes or capture every moment. To simply drink it all in. It was almost too much to digest, of course, but as the college kid I rolled with said at one point (and I agreed!): “Man,” he said, “this is all I ever want to do for the rest of my career.”

Me too.

In addition to …

I did a lot of non-OSU stuff this week. If you want to read or listen to it, you can do so here.

What I’m Reading

My goal is to finish the Anthony Bourdain book I started on my flight home today. It’s not looking great, friends.

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