HAVE PEN, WILL TRAVEL: PART ONE

Memoirs of a Freelance Journalist

Is it a business, or are you just unemployed?

"What do you know about the Mexican re-insurance market?"

It was the middle of September, 1993, and I heard that question as soon as I picked up my ringing office telephone even before I could announce, “Hello.” I recognized the voice of Mike Berman, an editor in New York with the daily business newspaper The Journal of Commerce. I laughed.

“How much and when is my deadline?” I answered his question with two questions of my own.

“Next Friday, 750 words and $300,” said Mike, an editor of few words borne from years of dealing with me. Despite our comfortable relationship, I had never met him in person, and I never would.

“So, what do I know about Mexico’s reinsurance market?” I continued. “Well, by Wednesday I will be expert enough to deliver your story a day before my deadline on Thursday.”

“I’ll put your contract in the mail,” said Mike. Then he hung up.

I found a blank page in a yellow legal pad and scribbled the subject at the top: “Mexican Reinsurance Market.” Below that line, I started listing potential general sources like “insurance associations” and “large corporate insurance companies.” Then I found another blank page and started writing questions. My first question: “What is reinsurance?” Then, “What is the size of the Mexican market today?” Then, “Why is the Mexican market of interest to anyone outside Mexico?” And on and on, I listed questions that I would need to ask of sources whenever I might find them.

Then, I used a paper clip to fasten those two legal pad pages together and placed them atop a stack of similarly fastened pages, each one representing a different pending story assignment from several different magazines or newspapers. I needed to maintain a list of written questions on each assignment because I never knew when a source I had contacted might return my call. I easily could be confused about the reason I had called in the first place when receiving a call the day after placing it. But I could always pull my question list from the stack, and it would appear this story was the only one in my life.

I knew I would find sources to talk, and I knew I would answer the questions. I knew I would write 750 words on this subject—even though the first question on my list betrayed my current level of ignorance on this subject: “What is reinsurance?” Both I and Mike Berman knew my ignorance of any peculiar subject would make no difference to the ultimate result.

Mike received my story on time. I received a $300 check from the JOC before the end of September. And, on October 21, 1993, my masterpiece appeared at the top of a section

page in that day’s JOC beneath the headline “US Firms Poised to Lead Rush Into Mexico Insurance Market” with my byline identifying the article as “Special to The Journal of Commerce.”

That article should be totally forgettable on its own. For me, however, I’ve often cited the episode as a good example of my life and career as a freelance journalist between 1980 and 1997—before the Internet changed everything about the business of freelance writing.

The $300 fee was part of $11,989 I collected in 1993 from the JOC, which contributed 20 percent of my total income for that year: $60,603 before expenses (worth about $116,000 in 2021). The JOC finished second to The National Law Journal, which topped my list at $15,443 for 26 percent. Third place went to Money magazine, adding $9,860 for 16 percent. Fourth was $5,172 or 9 percent from The Explorer, a monthly newspaper for the international oil industry published by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG). The rest of my 1993 income was divided among payments from thirteen different sources for smaller amounts.

My records show 1993 as the highest earning single year for my freelance career, which generated a total of $672,618 in payments between 1980 and 1995. But 1994 came close behind with $59,577. Of course, after deducting business expenses, my total net for those years figured out to just $377,661. Nevertheless, those amounts proved sufficient for me to support myself and my two young daughters while working from home.

Not that many people believed me. Introducing myself as a freelance writer in bars during that period usually triggered a snicker and a knowing glance. Reading minds, I knew they were thinking: “Drug dealer. How else can he make a living?”

Or, try explaining your freelance journalist job to a seven-year-old daughter when she asks, “What do you do?” Because she often watched TV detective shows with me, I tried to compare myself to Jim Rockford of The Rockford Files because Jim worked from home for a variety of clients performing unexplainable tasks. But that left her disappointed.

“Rockford? Why can’t you be Magnum? He has a better car.” Now that she’s in her forties, she probably still has no clear idea about what I did all those years or how I created a freelance journalism business I was able to sell in 1996 when I decided to return to a regular corporate job with health insurance benefits and more reasonable hours.

Over the years, I’ve also fielded numerous requests from other journalists for an explanation of the so-called business model that allowed me to live the glamorous life of a freelancer in the 1980s and 1990s while they slaved away in their cubicles taking abuse from their editors in the corporate environment. They also have enjoyed some of the side stories about my freelancing life, like the time I sued a Houston magazine editor in small claims court for overdue fees and had him served at his home during his Christmas party.

They also laugh when I compare myself with a prostitute, noting that a freelancer should never take himself more seriously than that. Think of Mike Berman with the Mexican reinsurance assignment. He didn’t want foreplay or chitchat. I provided a service worth $300, and the only reason he would ever call back would be to complain. If the phone rings after submitting a story, it’s almost a certainty the editor is not calling to congratulate you on sharing another masterpiece.

That’s not to say I failed to develop lasting relationships with many of my editors or their publications. The National Law Journal and Money, for example, brought me to New York on several occasions for their respective holiday parties in December because they considered me “family.” Fundamentally, however, I’ve advised freelancer wannabes to quickly accept their role as a journalism prostitute and lower expectations about congratulatory slaps on the back.

Since my financial numbers should clearly qualify me as one of the most successful freelance journalists of that pre-Internet period, I wanted to record my adventures as one in a post on this blog. Maybe it will interest no one besides other journalists. And, I’m sure my daughter will continue to wish I’d been closer to Magnum than Rockford. But at least this five-part post will provide an entertaining review of a vanishing breed while perhaps providing some fundamental truths about self-employment applicable to any kind of business—such as: Make each client feel like he is the only one you have.

Before I became one in August of 1980, I never considered freelance writing as a realistic goal. In fact, while working as a newspaper reporter from 1969 until August of 1980, I often joked that the title “freelance writer” was just a synonym for “unemployed.” People who introduced themselves as such were often just working up the courage to ask me for help in getting a real job. Even with the perspective of time, I don’t believe now that many people can survive as freelancers for a variety of reasons beyond their ability to research and write. Had Mike Berman visited me back in 1980 to predict I would still be supporting my family as a freelancer more than 15 years into the future, I would have dismissed him as a fantastical dream produced more likely by having eaten too much pizza than a time machine.

My introduction to freelancing came so haphazardly that I often mused to myself, “I can’t imagine I’ll still be surviving like this a year from now.” Thus, I lived for the next 16 years in abject terror of awakening one morning with no assignment from anyone and no money left in the bank. But that day never occurred.

That terror began in the midst of a family crisis so serious that overnight I became a single parent with custody of my two daughters, aged 5 and 2. I’ve described these events in my 2009 memoir, Luggage by Kroger, so I won’t repeat them here. They are a better story for another day.

For purposes of this post, however, I mention them only in marking the first turning point in my journalism career, which divides equally into three phases: newspaper reporter from 1969-1980, freelancer from 1980-1997 and trade press reporter from 1997-2012.

Suddenly facing the prospect of single parenthood in 1980, I realized I also needed to make some lifestyle changes I thought would benefit my daughters. Their mother was locked in a mental hospital following an emotional breakdown, and they had no one but me. I immediately quit my job as a newspaper reporter for The Houston Post without any idea how I would make a living in the future. But I realized I needed to focus on my daughters and recognized my unstable work schedule as too much of a distraction for rearranging my life.

Besides, I did have some money in a savings account left from sale of my house earlier that year following my divorce. And I really needed time off to take emotional stock of everything that had happened. In hindsight, I’ve often thought I could have made it work, juggling my newspaper job with single parenthood. If I had tried, money never would have been an issue. But my life would have been so different. In retrospect, I’m glad the way things unfolded in the years ahead.

So, there I sat terrified in my rented two-bedroom apartment near Houston’s Astrodome complex, worrying about my daughters and wondering how long my savings account could last. I realized I needed to project an aura of absolute confidence for their sake. I packed my fear away in the back of my head and got busy creating a new life based on the strengths I discovered buried in my resume. 

My oldest, Erin, was just starting a public school kindergarten program for advanced children, traveling by bus each day across town. But my youngest, Shannon, was still in

a Montessori pre-school costing me about $240 per month. The good news: She no longer needed diapers. Despite the cost of Shannon's school, I was determined to keep things as stable for them as possible. And I definitely needed my daytime clear to look for some sort of paying job.

To help generate income while searching for a new line of employment, I managed to land a part-time job as a lunch waiter at a Houston seafood restaurant. I could spend my mornings with the classified ads, work a shift for anywhere from $50 to $100 in tips, and return home in time to greet Erin’s bus after retrieving Shannon from Montessori. For a couple of weeks, I even found the waiter job somewhat therapeutic while I pondered a new career path for my particular set of skills, as the actor Liam Neeson might say.

Located near the headquarters for the Houston Oilers professional football team, the restaurant often attracted celebrity clientele. I served lunch to future Hall of Famer Earl Campbell one day—he left no tip. Most interesting, however, were visits from the team’s cheerleading squad, the Derrick Dolls, who always tipped well. Those “lunch breaks” provided me with pocket change and time to examine my possibilities.

I quickly realized those possibilities might actually lead back to some kind of writing. I could be a walking cliché—the unemployed writer who earns a living as a waiter. But I discovered options while reviewing the newspaper’s classified ads under “Help Wanted” and recoiled in shock to see a section under “writers.” I thought, “The paper actually has enough advertisers looking for writers that it can provide a separate section for them?” Drafting an inventory of my professional experience, that section seemed right up my alley.

Of course, I believed I eventually could seek employment in public relations for any of Houston’s collection of large companies. I had colleagues who had left the newspaper world for higher pay in that field. Since I had little interest in writing spin for the corporate world, however, I decided instead to explore this new underground world I had discovered near the end of the alphabetical listings in the classifieds.

Immediately, I mailed resumes to three of those ads. And just as quickly, I received invitations to interview. Always intriguing, want-ads for writers offered spotty details. All three of these sought a writer for certain large but unspecified projects. And all of them led to a paycheck.

My first stop came at a small office in an old house in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood where I found the headquarters of a small graphics business named Ampersand Inc. Operated by a pair of women, Ampersand had succeeded as a small art shop for outsourcing pamphlet production for some of Houston’s larger corporations. The female entrepreneurs had invested in an early computerized printing system for producing everything from annual reports to marketing brochures for corporations eager to cut costs by outsourcing those tasks. Until then, the ladies had done none of the writing. Corporate information officers would write their own copy and deliver the manuscripts to Ampersand for layout and publication, adding photos and drawings as needed. Ampersand made a lot of money. But these ladies harbored larger ambitions, as they explained in my first interview. They wanted to publish journalistic magazines.

“When we received your resume, we became ecstatic,” said Joyce, who supervised the business side of Ampersand’s operations. Before Ampersand, Joyce had worked as a reporter for The Houston Chronicle.

This comment during my first freelance interview would always stick in my mind in the years to come as proof I had underestimated both my background and my value in the freelance marketplace—which I also had underestimated as a legitimate field of work. After all, I had researched and written thousands of articles in the past twelve years, someone had paid me to do it and obviously, according to Joyce, I had few competitors now offering that service for hire. Have Pen, Will Travel? I mused, recalling one of my favorite old television shows from the 1950s about a gunslinger with business cards that read “Have Gun, Will Travel.” Suddenly, this freelancing racket seemed cooler than I had imagined, and the primitive elements of a business model began to take shape in the back of my mind.

But the interview got even better. Once I explained that I had left The Houston Post to provide more time for my daughters, Joyce spotted the seeds of a successful symbiotic business relationship destined to last at least for another eighteen months. She needed an editor who could launch two magazines into production. She offered me $1,500 per month (equivalent to about $4,500 per month in 2021) and office space upstairs at Ampersand without any required hours. As long as I completed the deadlines on their dream magazine projects, she said, I could come and go as I pleased. And she promised to help facilitate my blossoming freelance career by allowing me to use Ampersand phones and equipment for other projects unrelated to its magazines.

And the magazines? I suppressed a chuckle when Joyce shared their ideas. But I still knew I could produce and edit copy for them. At this stage, they had successfully published each title on an experimental basis as small monthly tabloid newspapers, buying some articles wherever possible with Joyce multi-tasking as an editor. Southwest Racquetball had been launched as a paper to promote the Houston racquetball clubs just taking hold in the city. And the Ampersand brain trust envisioned Houston HomeTrade Journal as a publication that would attract readers in the fast-growing gentrification remodeling marketplace reclaiming the city’s older residential communities. At first glance, these both seemed to hold potential. As tabloid newspapers, they cost little to produce, and I could envision many advertisers eager to reach the marketplace of possible readers in the nation’s fourth largest urban area.

But the ladies unexpectedly stunned me with a more elaborate plan for my services. They had decided to invest thousands of dollars transforming these cost-effective little tabloids into full color, glossy magazines. Moreover, they planned to expand distribution of the racquetball publication across the southwestern states using the mail to send boxes of the magazines to racquetball and health clubs from Houston to Phoenix for members to grab from the front desks after play. 

Joyce envisioned a “Sports Illustrated for racquetball” with coverage of major tournaments and profiles of top southwestern players, plus articles about health and exercise. I even suggested a column called “Ask the Podiatrist” since foot injuries often sidelined players. I later recruited a doctor to answer questions from readers, like a “Dear Abby” for racquetballers.

Although they decided to limit distribution of the home improvement journal to the Houston area, a glossy version of that one posed hurdles, too. For starters, Houston already had one glossy home and garden magazine of long-standing, so Ampersand’s rival version faced serious competition. Also, the costs of color photography loomed as a barrier to entry in this market. I knew that readers of a home improvement glossy would want to be dazzled by the photos, and those would not come cheap.

Initially, a couple of cliches popped into my brain. Are they biting off more than they can chew? Are they trying to run before they walk? I even voiced my concerns loudly enough that they wanted assurances I would work hard on the editorial front to make these magazines succeed. Another cliché took center stage in my brain. Unwilling to look a gift horse in the mouth, I agreed to collect my $1,500 per month and work my ass off to provide high quality editorial content. At the same time, I planned to work my ass off developing additional freelance writing contacts to provide alternate tracks when this Ampersand gravy train looked headed for a crash with the economic realities of the magazine marketplace, as I was certain it would someday in the future.

Joyce even helped get me started with that, referring me to one of her clients who managed creation of an in-house magazine for the employees of Houston’s largest bank. This client needed a freelance writer who could provide ideas for general interest stories to include in the monthly publication alongside news of promotions, birthday parties, updates on the dress codes and such. Beyond the $300 per article that this connection would provide, it also stimulated creation of a habit crucial to the next sixteen years as a freelancer: Maintenance of my Article Ideas Inventory.

The art of pitching article ideas to editors would prove as crucial to freelancing success before the Internet age as convincing editors to hire you for ideas they had developed on their own. The editor of this banking publication, for example, needed ideas as much as she needed a freelancer to produce a finished article. So, I continued with a process I had employed sporadically as a newspaper reporter. Every day I made a habit of writing down five new ideas for articles.

I had first heard about this process a few years before when reading a biography of the famous cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who never went to bed without first noting ideas for at least five new cartoons. At the end of each week, he reviewed his list. He said 60 percent of his ideas usually went into the trash. But usually he would find multiple ideas worth development in the week ahead.

For my idea inventory file, I relied on stimulation by everything from newspaper articles to television shows. Sometimes I would just ask myself an interesting question—like “What is life like for college football referees?”—and then jot that in my note pad. I also had kept an ideas journal as a newspaper reporter for those slow news days when stories had failed to fall into my lap.

In my first foray pitching at the bank publication, I pulled a couple of those unfinished newspaper ideas from an old notepad. For one, I suggested an article on collectors—Houstonians who maintain interesting and unusual collections as a hobby. A few years before, I had written a Houston Post article about a Houstonian who enjoyed a hobby of collecting historic political campaign buttons. So, I offered to build a larger story about collectors around him. Among the other unusual collections, I found an optometrist with a complete collection of glass eyeballs. (In 2019 I posted a copy of that article to this blog.)

I also pitched the idea of an article profiling a psychology professor at the University of Houston who had been an indispensable source for multiple articles at The Post. I had used Professor Richard Evans frequently as what I called a “Dr. Know-It-All” to explain

and analyze the motivations of people involved in certain news stories. We had even joked about his ability to sound authoritative and academic without having any direct research into the facts at hand. But Evans could usually provide comments citing arcane research reports or university experiments to bolster his observations.

My new editor at the banking publication flashed a green light on both ideas and they became the first real freelance articles in my career. Joyce even earned a fee for taking color photos of Dr. Know-It-All. I began to feel like a real entrepreneur—pitching ideas and getting paid.

But the bonanza from Ampersand proved just the first positive result from the three classified ads I had found at the start. I learned quickly that Houston held a bumper crop of publishing wannabes in need of my skills.

Second stop was the office of a wealthy real estate developer with an unusual assignment. He had made a bet with a rival developer that he could create a successful publishing company out of nothing. He had developed a list of topics for development into 15-page pamphlets he called “Best Bulletins” after the name of his newly incorporated enterprise, Best Publishing. He planned to advertise these bulletins for $3 apiece by mail order using classified ads in publications like The National Enquirer. Examples of his topics ran the gamut from “How to Get a Government Job” to “Sex, Single Parents and Happiness.”

Since I had experience with divorces as a two-time loser and no experience yet with sex as a single parent, I picked the topic titled “Divorce—How To Handle It” and began interviewing lawyers and psychiatrists to complete that pamphlet, which he published in 1981 after paying me a $300 fee when I met his deadline before the end of 1980. But he would never call with another assignment, so I concluded he failed to sell these bulletins. I didn’t pester him, however, because by then I had more work than I could handle.

My third stop resulted in a deal to write a book about an iconic Houstonian named Marvin Zindler. My interview from this ad for a writer led me to a photocopying shop in a Houston strip center where I met an older couple who further convinced me I possessed a more salable skill than I had realized. Before even interviewing me for their opportunity, they thanked me for answering their ad and said they didn’t know what they would do without me, based on my background and my previous experiences as a reporter already acquainted with Zindler. This couple had somehow convinced Zindler to join them in a book venture about his life story, which included his famous adventure seven years earlier in closing down what had become known as the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas—the historic Chicken Ranch brothel in La Grange, Texas.

Their deal with Zindler had occurred while Hollywood was preparing to release a movie version of a Broadway play based on Zindler’s 1973 crusade against the brothel as a flamboyant television reporter for Houston’s ABC-affiliate. They believed a book about Zindler could benefit from promotions on the movie, which became a big hit starring Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton. Although they never would be unable to publish the book, I would eventually publish it in 2012 on my own, and have included an explanation of the publishing venture in that book, I, the People: How Marvin Zindler Busted the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas for anyone who wants more details. For the purpose of this blog post, however, suffice it to say they paid me an advance of $1,000 to begin my research and writing on that book project in 1980.

So, thanks to the classified ads, my budding freelance business suddenly had multiple clients who could keep me busy on a full-time basis. That’s when I became even busier, adding another client destined to provide me with paying assignments for years to come and enhanced credibility in the freelance marketplace.

This new client would prove to be probably the most prominent of all, with my opportunity arising from a chance meeting with an old friend on a street in downtown Houston. We had worked together for many years at The Houston Post, but he was moving out of town. After a bit of chitchat, he asked me if I would consider succeeding him as a local stringer for Time magazine, where he had been moonlighting for a while. Time, of course, was the flagship of the Time-Life publishing empire, and I had been a regular reader since high school.

Although Time employed a full-time correspondent in Houston, the region generated too many potential news stories for one reporter to handle alone. Like his counterparts in other cities across the globe, the Houston correspondent supervised a small network of local reporters—called stringers—to provide the extra coverage on events as required from week to week. So, I dropped off a resume and received a call right away from Bob. Not only would I collect regular assignments and paychecks from Time for the next 15 years, but that connection also would prompt additional freelance work, including my appointment in 1983 as the first contract freelance correspondent for Time’s sister publication Money magazine.

Stringing for a colossus like Time involved a different writing process that requires an explanation. But my background offered the Time-Life empire a perfect servant for its needs in Houston. Instead of generating ideas for magazine feature stories, all I had to do for Time was answer the bell for gathering information. The only “writers” for Time-Life magazines worked at headquarters in New York City. Editors dispatched assignments to bureaus around the world directing them to reply under deadline with written files of information, rough drafts answering the questions listed in these queries. Correspondents and stringers would respond from their respective locations with files for the actual article writers to read.

Primarily, these writers wanted quotes from experts and witnesses to insert in their news stories. They placed no limit on the length of a file because they paid stringers an hourly rate of $12 back then—worth about $40 in 2021. I would maintain a written time log on my work interviewing sources as well as writing the file. Then I would submit the log each month for payment.

I realized quickly that Time in the 1980s did not care how many hours a stringer spent collecting information and compiling a file. Later I would often hear the running joke in the system that if Time HQ wanted details for a story on homelessness, for example, the editors hoped stringers would somehow succeed in interviewing every homeless person in America. I could submit a 10,000-word, 20-page file and earn hearty congratulations if one sentence from that file appeared in a completed Time magazine article.

But I had been doing this kind of work for more than a decade. I knew how to gather information and write first drafts understandable enough for a re-write reporter to use in a polished story. For many years as a courthouse reporter for newspapers, I had done exactly that verbally by telephone explaining events to a re-write desk collecting information from other reporters to combine in a single story. Moreover, I offered Time the luxury of availability. I wasn’t moonlighting while working at a newspaper. I was eager for daytime assignments and never had to refuse a query.

In addition, on the in-house political front, I posed no threat to the bureau chief as someone shooting for their job. I eventually would work for several chiefs during the next 15 years, and their personal ambitions in the Time-Life empire would prove helpful to me. A few years later, one in particular snapped immediately to my value in his bid to rise in the corporation. Because I could handle any kind of story, he started assigning me almost all the queries coming to Houston. This strategy gave him the time to work exclusively on the so-called big stories that would enhance his reputation within the empire while taking weeks to report—like the cover piece he compiled on the vaunted Texas Medical Center. At one point during this chief’s tenure, the Time-Life bureau secretary confided to me that New York had complained about me doing all the work for the bureau and wondered why they were paying him a big salary. But my checks always arrived on time and never bounced, so I was pleased to become as much of a fixture in the next 15 years for every arriving bureau chief as the office space, the desk and the secretary.

I don’t recall any specific Time assignments from those salad days of 1980 and 1981, but one example from 1985 may help illustrate the process. Stringers rarely received bylines, but occasionally the magazine would list their names as contributors on large stories. I received one of these tag lines for my contribution to a story on immigration reform under the headline “Finding Niches in a New Land.” The initial query from New York had requested a file from Houston with comments from immigration experts about the immigration law reform debate and examples of immigrants who had started new lives there. Identical queries had gone to bureaus in other big cities as well. Time’s finished article included a brief profile of a Vietnamese fisherman I interviewed in Houston as well as comments from a veteran immigration lawyer about the difficulties of passing immigration reform legislation. In those days before e-mail, I wrote my 20-page file on an electric typewriter and sent it to New York by hand-delivery to the Western Union office in downtown Houston, probably arriving there in the middle of the night with my two daughters asleep in the back seat of my 1980 Ford Bronco.

As a budding entrepreneur, I appeared off to a good start in the last half of 1980. I had contracts for regular work on several jobs. I even had a new business card identifying me as the Managing Editor of Southwest Racquetball. I felt so comfortable with my new business that I ordered another set of cards identifying me as a Freelance Journalist available for “Reporting-Editing-Writing-Consulting-Research.”

But my personal life remained in a bit of turmoil. My daughters contracted chicken pox in November, forcing us to quarantine for a couple of weeks. Their mother earned discharge from the hospital, however, and returned to her job, leaving her available to share our parental responsibilities and keep our daughters about half the time.

Meanwhile, my mother in St. Louis was dying of brain cancer—destined to die by March in 1981. I had secured a court order naming me the custodial parent for my two daughters and their mother had not contested it—yet. Despite her issues, she seemed capable of caring for our daughters and accepted my role as the parent in charge. I wanted visitation and other decisions to be as amicable as possible, hoping to avoid any confrontation that might trigger court action.

I enjoyed creating a frugal but cozy life for us in the two-bedroom apartment I had rented. Erin was doing well in Vanguard kindergarten, already learning multiplication tables. Many nights included helping with her homework. The pressures of single fatherhood most vividly emerged in my efforts to buy school clothes for her. She accepted the clothes I picked, then confided later that other children had ridiculed her. Although devastated, I learned I needed to take more care about the girlie things that seemed unimportant to me. More importantly, however, I noticed that she realized she had to become more assertive for herself. She never let me pick her clothes again, and throughout her life she’s always been one of the best dressed young ladies in her group. And, we had started working together to make a better life for the three of us, forming a partnership that would withstand the challenges of the years ahead. I was learning a lot about so much more than my writing.

Not yet three years old, Shannon appeared unfazed by the turmoil in her young life. But she did teach me some things. When we first set up the new apartment, for example, I turned on the TV and asked her to pick something. But Shannon lost me when she started screaming “Spider-man.” I couldn’t find Spider-man anywhere in the newspaper guide. Erin started laughing and said, “It’s a character on The Electric Company.” Oh, that show. I found it just as Spidie popped onto the screen. Shannon sat on the floor and focused on the show. I clearly had a lot to learn.

Besides juggling my business launch with the challenges of single parenthood and the threat of a legal custody quagmire, I also was trying to navigate the opportunities emerging in adult relationships. I had a serious girlfriend earlier in the year who now wanted to help. And, two weeks after I had resigned from the newspaper, I received a phone call from a woman who worked as a teller where I banked. I vaguely remembered her as an attractive blonde I barely knew. She noted that she hadn’t seen me depositing my Post paycheck in a while and admitted researching my change of address. She wondered if I was having “problems.” Rather than express irritation at being stalked by my bank teller, I gave her an update. She offered to provide “comfort” if I needed it. Thus began an on-and-off relationship destined to continue for three or four years.

Another opportunity arose when I left my brief employment as a lunch waiter at the seafood restaurant. While there I had become friends with the lunchtime bar maid, a twenty-something college student curious about journalism. With my ex-wife scheduled to keep our daughters one night, I invited the bar maid to dinner at a pub. Rather than leading to a serious relationship, however, our date would prove to be a milestone turning point in my outlook toward multi-tasking parenthood with freelance writing. Back at her apartment after dinner, I awoke about three in the morning to the sound of her washing machine in operation. She said she couldn’t sleep, so decided to do some laundry before morning. Spooked about the image of an unfamiliar female wandering around while I slept, I excused myself and left.

But I found a more disturbing development upon the return to my apartment. My ex-wife called to tell me that Erin had been harassed by a strange man while walking the two blocks from her bus stop to the church near my apartment providing after school daycare. Sensing an edge in our custody debate, she had called the police and filed a report. Then she scolded me for being “out of touch,” demanding I consider other educational options. But I devised my own solution. I approached the single woman who lived in the apartment above us and offered to pay her nine-year-old son five dollars per week to walk Erin from the bus stop to the daycare. He enjoyed the money and seemed to revel in his new role as a security detail for my daughter.

At the same time, I realized I needed to become less cavalier about my bachelorhood. I could only juggle so many balls at once, and girlfriends seemed to be the most expendable. So, when my most serious former girlfriend called me one night from a bar asking again to help with my children, I told her I just needed to concentrate on fatherhood and freelancing for a while. She said she understood.   

Realizing the girls had to be uncertain and frightened about their lives, I vowed to provide as much stability as possible while fumbling around with the launch of a freelance business. One question kept running through my mind: Can I really make this work?

I would finish 1980 with freelance earnings of only $3,700 (worth $12,000 in 2021) while developing that initial client base in the last four months of the year. My tax records show I had made $18,825 from The Houston Post before leaving in August. Thus, I would have made $32,271 had I stayed there for the year versus $22,525 for The Post plus freelance in 1980. Freelancing for the whole year in 1981, I would generate $19,687 in fees and increase that income the next year to $31,102.

Annual income from freelancing would never fall below $33,000 during the next 15 years of my freelancing career, as I refined my business model based on the opportunities I had seen emerge in the beginning. I find it instructive to note that $33,000 in 1985 would be worth about $84,000 in 2021.

Next in Part Two: From Unemployment to Credible Magazine Writing

The Art of Winning

(This post was inspired by a recent question from my oldest daughter. She asked a simple question. But, of course, I delivered a more complicated answer.)

 Have You Ever Won Anything?

I’ve never been one to brag. And I consider boastfulness a vice in other people. When someone launches into a recitation uninvited about their accomplishments, I immediately conclude they must be insecure. I think, “This guy wants to impress me so he must feel unimpressed with himself.” Of course, if someone asks about a contest or competition, I have nothing to hide.

 Now you say you want to know if I have ever won anything. Should I be offended that you haven’t been keeping score on your own? How did you miss all these things I have won? Oh, yeah, I’ve been winning things for 73 years and you’ve only been around for half of that, so I have to excuse you. Moreover, I hope you’ve been concentrating for all those years more on winning some things for yourself instead of a thinking about me. So, since you asked, let me catch you up. My turn to brag?

 But first, let’s really examine the question of winning. Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell examined that question in 1967 by writing what ranks among my ten most favorite songs: Both Sides Now. Folk rocker Judy Collins covered the song two years later and made it a national hit. I remember analyzing it as a soundtrack inside my head while it played constantly on the radio when I was about to graduate from the University of Missouri in 1969. In Both Sides Now, Mitchell reviews her intellectual development from childhood to young adult as a series of revelations. In the first part, she remembers clouds that resembled “row and flows of angle hair, ice cream castles in the air” and recalls how she first “looked at clouds that way.” But later, she writes, “they only blocked the sun, they rained and poured on everyone, so many things I might have done but clouds got in the way.” As a result, she concludes she had looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow “it’s clouds’ illusions I recall, I really don’t know clouds at all.”

 Next she tackles love, I suppose as a teenager recalling that “dizzy, dancing way you feel as every fairy tale comes real” then contrasting that with the other side that’s made love just “another show, to leave them laughing when you go”—undoubtedly recalling her first heartbreak. She learned to appreciate love from both sides now, she concludes, “from give and take and still somehow, it’s love’s illusions I recall, I really don’t know love at all.”

 Love, of course, is just a part of life, so Mitchell’s third verse addresses the two sides to that bigger picture of life. She concludes: “Well, something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day. I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose and still somehow, it’s life’s illusions I recall, I really don’t know life at all.”

 Thus, like everyone, I’ve had a life of both winning and losing. Reviewing the big picture, I won by fulfilling my potential with a career that both contributed to society and generated economic security. I won by raising two incredible daughters to independent adulthood. I won by helping other people who might not have made it without me. But along the way, I experienced plenty of losing, too. I suffered times when winning in that particular moment seemed more of an illusion for others to enjoy. When I review my life in my memories now, I can’t really find the recollection of a pleasing event that doesn’t also include a twinge of regret, an aspect of failure. But the overall result should still register as a win—and I am recording it as such.

Beyond these intellectual gymnastics about the big picture, however, I do find it appealing to recall more singular contests and competitions where I have won. On several occasions, I won first place when I didn’t even understand I had entered a contest. On other occasions I won by finishing higher than I might have normally expected, going “deep” as they say in a poker tournament for example. Those are wins for me, too. And every time I have been in a competition, win or lose, I’ve endeavored to learn something about myself from each experience. If you can do that, I believe, you’re a winner even when you lose.

But your question obviously focuses more on singular victories, rather than big picture philosophical achievements. Yeah, you know I won the walk of life, but what about that darts tournament in 1983? So, let’s ramble back across the years, have some fun and revisit those golden moments when I did manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and savor the adulation of the multitudes while avoiding social scorn. I’ll organize these events in three categories: childhood, professional and individual athletics. Yes, you’ll be sick of all this winning by the time you read to the end.

KID STUFF

Although I don’t recall the sensation, I’m sure competition began for me officially on October 17, 1949—the day my sister was born to start stealing the spotlight in which I had basked as an only child for the previous two and one-half years. So, I’m sure I generated lots of wins in the next few years any time I attracted hugs and kisses away from her. I probably became more aware of my competitive drive about the time I lost interest in winning hugs and kisses, and I recall the thrill of winning a spot as the starting shortstop on a little league team by the age of ten. I also recall the heartbreak of leaving that team before the playoffs due to a severe allergy attack that generated small blisters inside my eyelids that refused to go away. About that same time during elementary school, I collected more wins from my ability as an author of several original plays produced in a primitive way during the fourth and fifth grade. In addition, I also won a fistfight with a bully named Lloyd Weeda during recess, and that made me feel tough. In the summer between my fifth and sixth grade school years, my family moved to a new school district and I found myself winning in the new neighborhood where several little girls confessed to their parents they had crushes on me and were vying for my attention. One of the dads shared this information with my father and started referring to me as “the Sheik of Warson Meadows.” One of those girls lived next door, and she taught me to play chess. So, I also added some wins to my record on the chess board that year.

But my most impressive childhood win by far occurred when I started my new school, Mount Pleasant Elementary, as a sixth grader that fall. This experience would mark the first time I would win first place without even knowing I had entered a contest. As the new kid in a school with two sixth grade classes, I had to make new friends and learn to get along in a new social structure. Despite my reputation as the “Sheik,” I felt the fear and pressure. I maintained a nervous silence while sizing up my new classmates. One big guy tried to bully me until I told a joke that made him laugh. We would go on to become friends for life, so I guess I scored another little win with that confrontation because he certainly would have kicked my ass. But my big win occurred about a month into the year on that day when I had felt so depressed about my new school that I had begged my mother to let me stay home. I told her I wasn’t making any friends, everyone disliked me and I was scared to go.

She sent me anyway, and once I had arrived, I learned we were having an important election for officers of the Schoolboy Patrol. I did not even know about the patrol or what it was supposed to do. When the teacher wrote my name on the board as one of the class nominees, I had to leave the room while she counted votes. When I returned, I learned I had won election as the new Captain of the schoolboy patrol! Several others had been elected lieutenants, but I was chosen to be their boss. I learned my duties would be to organize assignments for guarding the crosswalk between the school and a store across the street during the hours before school and after. I also would be part of the three-person honor guard raising and lowering the American flag on the lawn every day. My bully friend was the elected lieutenant who blew the bugle for the ceremony every morning. When I came home, my mom asked about my day.

“I don’t believe this,” I told her. “They elected me captain of the patrol.”

She smiled and said, “See. Sometimes you really don’t know what people are thinking at all.”

Throughout junior high and high school I had other wins in sports like basketball and football. Of course, I missed a lot of shots, too. I scored a win in the ninth grade when I was selected as editor of the junior high school newspaper. That same year, I also had another win for a contest I did not know I had entered. This occurred during a ninth-grade dance when I finally had the courage to ask a blonde crush named Sharon to slow dance. I know, I was the “Sheik” after all, but I was still pretty shy. Sharon gave me a funny look, but agreed. I noticed during the dance that other couples were leaving the floor until only we remained—but I didn’t understand. We danced to the rock classic In the Still of the Night. And, when it ended with the requisite dip, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder and heard a teacher-chaperone congratulating me on our win.

Sharon started giggling and said, “You didn’t know this was a contest, did you?”

I confessed, “If I did, I probably would not have asked you to dance.”

In high school, I played on a basketball team that lost 20 games. Even as a member of that team, however, I now feel I won by learning about perseverance. Try to imagine the difficulty of continuing to practice and attend games knowing your team is the worst in a league. The award-winning American writer Pat Conroy actually wrote a best-selling book about his experience as a point guard for a college basketball team that also lost 20 games, acknowledging that every day presents a challenge that you can win just by showing up. In My Losing Season, Conroy recalls finding solace in appreciating the small triumphs that happen every day even when a season is lost.

Despite my experiences in organized sports, my most memorable athletic win of high school occurred in an oddball event that likely would be banned if attempted now. It occurred on a rainy day when my sophomore physical education class was forced inside, stuck in the high school gym with many students eating lunch in the bleachers. Struggling to find a suitable activity that might allow him to leave the gym and go to his office for a smoke, our football coach-teacher initiated a game of dodgeball with no rules. He simply threw four volleyballs into the crowd of about fifty boys and said, “You get hit with a ball, you go sit out.”

Of course, word spread and a crowd started to gather in the bleachers hoping for a bloodbath. Kids were cheering like the audience at a gladiator contest in ancient Rome. No rules? So, I grabbed a volleyball in each hand and ran among my classmates tagging them with the balls. I controlled half of the balls and pretty quickly had dispatched a large number to the bleachers. At one point I had three of the four balls, and gave one of them to a girl in the bleachers with instructions to hold it for me. Suddenly I realized only I remained against Charlie Tracer, a senior and the best basketball player on a good varsity team. Charlie had the peripheral vision of an eagle and the body control of a chimpanzee. He once had dribbled a ball between my legs on his way to a layup when I tried to guard him in a playground game, leaving me to look the perfect fool. Now, I stood at one end of the gym holding two volleyballs while Charlie stood at the other with two of his own.

The crowd went wild. I knew I’d never get him playing tag, so I just held my ground. Charlie approached half court and faked a throw. I dodged away and he almost hit me with his throw of anticipation. His ball smacked off the wall and bounced back toward him. I saw my chance, circled around and nailed him in the head when he paused to field his ball. I bet nobody remembers this win but me.

Now, for some serious stuff. Beyond dodgeball, dance contests and the schoolboy patrol, I’ve also recorded some impressive wins in my professional life. And once again, one of those—perhaps my most prominent—occurred when I didn’t even realize I had entered a contest. It also came at an unusual time—just as I began a 45-year career as a newspaper reporter and journalist.

JOURNALISM

On May 5, 1969, the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) honored me as winner of the Walter Williams Award given to the graduating senior deemed the “outstanding writer” in the class. Until I received it, I hadn’t even known it existed. Too much, too soon? Was I really worthy? I pondered these questions as I realized I would need to spend the entirety of my career proving I deserved it. To fully appreciate my dilemma requires more background about my academic career and Mizzou’s vaunted School of Journalism, ranked then alongside Northwestern and Columbia universities as the premier locations to learn the craft.

While those Mizzou rivals built their reputations on scholarly pursuit of journalistic principles, Mizzou functioned more like a trade school for reporters. The University of Missouri was only one of a handful of universities with a separate school of journalism awarding degrees known as bachelors of journalism. Thus, my degree from Mizzou is a Bachelor of Journalism with a major in news editorial, rather than a Bachelor of Arts with a major in journalism. Structurally, the Mizzou School of Journalism was built around the operations of an actual daily newspaper, The Columbia Missourian, which covered the City of Columbia, central Missouri and the University in competition with Columbia’s other daily newspaper, The Columbia Tribune. The Missourian was not the school paper. It survived on advertising sales and “employed” journalism students as its staff.

Instead of pay, staffers received class credits for their work. For example, when I had a three-hour course on Reporting 101, I did not attend a conventional classroom. Instead, I reported for duty to an editor at the Missourian city desk who assigned me to either cover a beat like Columbia city hall or the police station or to report on general stories that might differ from one day to the next. At the end of the semester, that editor with a professor title would award me a grade in that class. And these editors were not your normal college professors.

My best editor was an old veteran of Illinois newspapers who had never even attended college. G. Thomas Duffy had dropped out of high school in the 1930s to work on The East St. Louis Journal, rising from a position of copy boy to reporter and then to editor of the paper on the strength of his natural talents as a word smith but also his penchant for nosing out secrets. When he retired at The Journal, Duffy accepted an associate professorship at Mizzou where he could just continue to do what he had done at The Journal—lead The Missourian student staff in coverage of city government and industry in central Missouri. Duffy was the kind of editor who could read your tortured copy, laugh in your face, wad it up, knock the ashes from the cigarette constantly dangling on his lip, throw the paper at you and snarl, “Try again.” If we spent any time debating journalistic ethics or the proper place to use a semicolon like students at Northwestern or Columbia, we did it in a bar after publishing the daily paper, just like reporters and editors at real papers all over the country. Duffy supervised a team of similar “trade school” professor-editors to make sure we concentrated on our real job of meeting our deadlines and feeding that daily Missourian beast with all the news that residents of central Missouri needed to know.

I didn’t meet Duffy until my junior year at Mizzou, and I hadn’t gone to Mizzou specifically to study journalism. You could not even enroll at Mizzou’s School of Journalism until your junior year, after successfully navigating two years or 60 hours of courses that included required credits in foreign language, science, math, history and other electives. I enrolled at Mizzou after high school in St. Louis because Mizzou was the state university and I wanted to attend college. As well as an education, I sought a transition to independence and adulthood and Mizzou emerged as the next logical step in that direction.

I did well as a freshman, generating a grade point average high enough for admission to the honors college as a sophomore. What’s more, I enjoyed the academic process. I had a curious mind that attacked some classes like a sponge. By the end of my sophomore year, however, I had become a confused young man, unsure if I even had a goal for my life. I’m sure I wasn’t any different from thousands of other students at this age before me and in the years since. For the first time, I felt anxiety about my future because I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I knew I had a talent for the written word and a curiosity about current events. So, without a real blueprint for the future, I gambled on enrollment in the School of Journalism—J-School—for the semester beginning September of 1967. It turned out to be the best bet I would ever make.

Does any student ever really know what they expect in a career based on their choices in college? How can an accounting major, for example, understand how that job will actually look a decade down the road? And, if they could, would they shift gears and study something else instead? I consider myself fortunate in finding something that I really wanted to do. But it did not become immediately apparent that I had chosen wisely. The first two semesters of J-School involved some basic but somewhat boring classes where we learned the basics of newspaper writing style, copy editing, the history of journalism and even advertising.

My epiphany occurred in June and July of 1968, when I spent the summer session working like a dog for six hours credit as a cub reporter under G. Thomas Duffy at The Missourian. Working part time in a bar, I had bankrolled ample living expenses to allow me to spend that summer at school rather than on a job. It provided a great opportunity as a member of a reduced summer class population. At that time, enrollment in the Mizzou J-School ranked as the largest in the nation, the largest the school had ever seen providing The Missourian with one of the largest reporting staffs in the country that year at more than 200. Competition had been fierce that Spring for quality assignments. I knew a couple of students who had been told to walk up and down a few streets in Columbia hoping to find stories in the neighborhoods. By June, however, the staff had shriveled to a handful of us, and there were more stories available than reporters to cover them. My decision to delay my reporting classes could not have been more timely.

With graduation looming in June of 1969, I realized I had accumulated a large number of impressive Missourian clippings because I received offers of employment from three newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune, a major daily with a national reputation. In those days, many newspapers sent editors to the Mizzou campus to interview potential recruits, so we had an easy time connecting with employment opportunities. I had already decided to accept a job with the smaller Flint Journal, in Flint, Michigan, because I concluded I would have greater opportunity to cover larger stories than in Chicago, where I would have been competing against more seasoned veteran reporters.

But one day in April, I received a strange phone call from the dean’s office in the J-School, summoning me to meet with someone there. When I arrived, a woman in the office told me it would be very important for me to attend the J-School awards ceremony scheduled for May 5. She said I might want to invite some family or friends to attend as well. When I asked her to elaborate, she revealed that the faculty had chosen me to receive the Walter Williams Award.

“Are you sure you have the right guy?” I asked.

“Let me check again,” she smiled and reviewed a document. She compared my student number and date of birth with those on her documents and confirmed, “Yes, it’s you. Congratulations.”

Nevertheless, I remained so convinced that they had made a mistake, I told no one about the achievement. I didn’t want friends attending only to see someone else receive the award with an apology to me for the error. Meanwhile, I spent some time researching the award and past recipients. It was named for the founder of the Mizzou J-School as the nation’s first dedicated school of journalism in 1905, and given annually to the student deemed the outstanding writer in the graduating class. Williams is often considered the father of journalism education.

The university’s publicity department took a photo of me receiving the plaque and circulated it to local newspapers that published a short story. The plaque still hangs on the wall above my desk. It reads “The Walter Williams Award given by the Missouri Writers Guild to Gary Dale Taylor May 5, 1969.” As I set out driving to my first job in Flint, I felt a tremendous responsibility to the school and to Walter to make sure they never regretted giving me the honor.

I should interject here and incorporate my thoughts on the relationship of writing to journalism as I eventually came to appreciate it. Journalism requires two basic elements: writing and reporting. Of those two, reporting easily ranks as the most important because it covers the activity of actually gathering accurate information while writing merely represents the ability to communicate that information in an organized and interesting fashion. An effective journalist owes success about 80 percent to reporting skills and only 20 percent to writing skills. Over my career, I would work with many reporters who would have failed at writing a grocery list. But they proved themselves much more proficient at reporting than me. There is always someone working on the city desk who can take a weak writer’s notes and transform them into a readable story. By the end of my career, I had concluded that I had been a pretty effective reporter, as well, but I always believed I relied more on my writing skills to cover lapses in my reporting.

Regarding the source of my writing skills, I’ve always credited a natural ear for language and a desire for communication. I know that I demonstrated writing skills almost as soon as I learned English. Besides an enjoyment of reading from the first grade forward, I also experimented with writing my own stories—two activities that obviously polished my ear for language. I suppose I would consider this a talent that could not really be learned, but it could be polished. And I spent most of my life polishing that talent.

As a professional journalist, I would go on to win only three more awards, and one of those would be only a nomination. But that came for a Pulitzer Prize, so the honor of even being nominated ranks as an achievement. And that nomination came for the story I consider the best of my career in 1976 while working at The Houston Post in Houston, Texas. I’ve already recorded many details about that story in another lengthy blog post. To summarize, my reporting here resulted in the release from prison of an aging convict.

My second award also came while reporting for The Houston Post, this time in 1978 when I shared the Texas UPI Editors award for enterprise reporting with a younger reporter named Glenn Lewis, now deceased. We won for a series of articles exposing corruption and brutality in the Jacinto City, Texas, police department. Our stories appeared on Sunday June 9, 1978, spread across the front page after a month of work interviewing Jacinto City cops and analyzing court documents.

As a new reporter, Glenn had been covering Jacinto City for our neighborhood section when several city police officers approached him as whistleblowers against their chief, Allan Jamail. They alleged that Jamail had forced them to coerce confessions from a large number of suspects using electronic shock batons and beatings. The victims covered a broad spectrum of suspects already convicted for charges ranging as low as misdemeanors to capital murder. In fact, one of the alleged victims was awaiting execution for the murder of his niece in 1977, and I had covered his trial. Glenn realized this story could be larger than he could handle, so he asked our city editor for help. The editor assigned me to join the story, since I already had a personal interest following my coverage of the trial of John Charles Zimmerman the year before.

Zimmerman’s case had captured national attention for the sheer brutality of the crime, which involved the rape and decapitation of his 10-year-old niece. Jamail and the Jacinto City PD had received acclaim for solving it so quickly. Although we would later learn that they did indeed torture Zimmerman, I had no doubt of his guilt at the trial because his attorney chose to employ an insanity defense claiming Zimmerman suffered psychic trauma from his service in Vietnam. Admitting the facts of the crime, he argued Zimmerman should be hospitalized. Jurors disagreed and sentenced him to death. Because Zimmerman conceded the facts with his insanity plea, the issue of an illegal confession never arose in court.

I faced a moral dilemma when learning about Zimmerman’s torture. I realized our exposure of the scandal likely would force a retrial for a man I believed guilty of a hideous crime. Before we published our stories, the prosecutor who convicted him practically begged me to ignore it. He feared they could not convict him again with that illegal confession. But he also admitted knowledge of the photos showing Zimmerman’s shock baton bruising, and conceded he’d been relieved when the defense opted for an insanity plea. I considered the issue to be larger than one case, however, and warned him the story was ready to break.

Jamail got his warning the day before publication. I told Glenn we’d have to visit Jamail at his home and allow him to refute or explain the massive pile of evidence we had accumulated. We found Jamail in his yard, cutting his grass and asked for an audience. He turned off the lawnmower. When he learned what we had, he sneered and replied with arrogant confidence. He invited us into his garage, where he showed us a stack of electronic shock batons in cartons. He admitted serving as the distributor for buyers in Texas. His attitude: “I did what needed to be done.”

As a legal defense, that must have worked because he won an acquittal a year later on federal charges of civil rights violations brought after publication of our stories and based primarily on testimony from our sources inside the department, officers Jamail dismissed, of course, as “disgruntled employees.” Meanwhile, the outcry forced the Harris County District Attorney’s office to dismiss dozens of Jacinto City PD cases and retry them all, including the capital murder case on Zimmerman. They still managed to convict him, and Zimmerman has since been executed.

Just as my first award had occurred at the beginning of my career, my last award provided a symbolic bookend, coming in an unlikely place just two years before my 2012 retirement. After a career of newspapers and freelance magazine writing, I had spent the last 15 years of my career as a reporter for the so-called trade press, covering business developments in the chemical and energy industries. I had expected those last years to provide interesting yet undramatic reporting opportunities while padding the investments in my retirement account. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

While working from 1997 to 2004 as a deputy editor for a British Internet news service called Chemical News & Intelligence, I enjoyed the chance to travel the world filing stories on chemical industry business developments. Then, in 2004 I moved to a job in the Houston bureau of a McGraw-Hill daily newsletter titled Platts Oilgram News (PON). I did not travel as frequently as I had with the earlier publication because PON employed correspondents all over the globe.

PON was a large and historic publication able to charge an annual subscription rate of $3,000 per year by producing stories full of inside information for high-level energy executives eager to keep tabs on their rivals. The newsletter arrived every morning in the subscriber’s email box as a PDF that looked exactly like the print publication their predecessors had known in the years before the Internet, all the way back to the early 20^th Century when a man named Platt began to sell it.

In the PON Houston bureau, I found myself covering several nationally important news events that proved more complicated than many I had covered as a crime reporter at newspapers. These included the trial of disgraced Enron executive Ken Lay, the bankruptcy case of Russian oil giant Yukos and the investigation of a corrupt chief financial officer sentenced to prison for embezzlement of millions of dollars from his oilfield drilling rig company. But the biggest story for me at Platts erupted in April 2010, when the Macondo exploration well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven oilfield workers and destroying the Deepwater Horizon drilling ship.

The uncompleted well proceeded to leak oil into the Gulf and the operators at British Petroleum (BP) would be unable to stop the flow for five months, forcing the United States to halt all exploration drilling in the Gulf. The event itself would become the source for movies and books, but for me it became my only job during the summer and fall of 2010. PON assigned me to take the lead on a team of reporters covering multiple aspects of the disaster.

During my Macondo year, my daily routine changed significantly. Instead of working in the Houston bureau office in downtown Houston, I worked from home where I could more efficiently monitor the various telephonic press conferences conducted several times each day—and sometimes at night—as BP, the US Coast Guard and other government agencies explained their unsuccessful attempts to bring the oil flow under control by capping the Macondo blowout. Once the industry stopped the flow, we had many other subjects to report, ranging from the long-term impact on other companies working the Gulf to investigating the possible reasons why the deadly accident had occurred. In addition to filing a large daily story for the PON newsletter, I also filed smaller stories all day long to the McGraw-Hill real time wire service, so I stayed busy working twelve-hour days for much of that year. Still, as I mopped the sweat from my brow, I realized that I enjoyed the experience. It reminded me of the reasons I had chosen this profession, and I would not have missed the Macondo opportunity for anything.

But it came as a complete surprise later in 2010 when my top editor in New York informed me that the Macondo reporting team would be receiving the McGraw-Hill Corporate Achievement Award for that year thanks to our coverage of this significant event. The company brought us all to New York for the ceremony—and the celebration that continued through the night at one of the city’s finest watering holes. My editor noted this had been the first time in company history that PON had been recognized by its corporate mother in this fashion. And once again, while working on the Macondo stories, I had no idea any award like this would even be a possibility.

More winning? Well, in retirement I’ve experienced some other contests that qualify. For starters, I wrote a memoir in 2009 that has been recognized as a winner in five national book contests. Entitled Luggage By Kroger, the book collected these five awards: A True Crime Silver Medal from the 2009 IPPYs; a True Crime Bronze Medal and Finalist for Book-of-the-Year from the 2008 ForeWord Magazine Book-of-the-Year Awards; True Crime Runner-Up in the 2009 National Indie Excellence Awards; True Crime Finalist in the 2009 USA Book News Awards; and General Nonfiction Runner-Up at the 2009 New York Book Festival. You can read more about the book on its Amazon.com profile page and in a pair of blog posts at this blog. I didn’t write the book with the idea of winning an award. I wrote it for a number of reasons, all described in that post of my blog, a copy of a question-and-answer interview with another author in 2009. But I entered the book in contests as a marketing strategy, to assure potential buyers that “experts” had acknowledged its value.

Beyond the professional realm of winning, I can add several other competitive victories from the realm of so-called adult recreational athletics: darts, softball coaching and poker—specifically the game of Texas Holdem. I’ve always needed a competitive outlet for my recreational activities and those activities have served that role for much of my life. While I’d never qualify as a professional in either darts or poker, I have played more competitively than merely recreational to win and lose money at both.

DARTS

With darts, I started playing in 1980 at the age of 32, when a drinking buddy recruited me to play British steel darts in a Houston bar called Rudyard’s Pub On Kipling Street. Even before playing a game, I realized I enjoyed the physical challenge of simply trying to throw the dart at a target. Then, I learned about the darts subculture that includes a national ranking system and provides a competitive outlet for hundreds of players much like bowling. I learned that Houston had an association that organized team play on a seasonal basis, awarding trophies to members of winning teams. Recognizing a business opportunity, a group of bars sponsored the teams as a way to attract drinking customers on slower nights.

A typical team roster numbered four or five players, so a pub hosting a team every Wednesday night, for example, might add a dozen to two-dozen patrons for the darts league contests depending on the number of friends who might attend to watch. While they did not charge to use the boards and they experienced some additional overhead from installation of new boards on a regular basis, bar owners understood the extra revenue from a larger crowd would easily recoup the $150 they paid to the Houston Darts Association (HDA) for organizing each three-month league and distributing trophies to the top teams in each division.

To ensure a truly competitive experience, the HDA operated leagues based on experience and ability that allowed novice players to improve their skills by playing each other. A typical league contest would involve play of several events in three basic games: 301, 501 and British Cricket. Team members would play rounds of singles, doubles and usually a team event featuring four players from each team against another. Teams collected league points for each event they won, and the league calculated the scores over the course of a season to determine the placement of the teams. 

Besides sponsoring league teams, many bars also conducted tournaments that allowed players to compete for money. Individuals typically would pay an entry fee of $5 or $10 to the bar’s volunteer tournament director, who would then randomly divide the players into doubles teams to vie for a share of the cash prize pool. One pair would play three games against another pair with the losing pair eliminated until only two teams remained to split the pot. Over time, the bars grew creative with these tournaments, devising ways to rank entrants so that weaker players would be paired with stronger players to provide more equitable competition and eliminate the possibility of two stronger players ruining the fun as teammates. The HDA also sponsored large tournaments twice a year, attracting players from all over the world to contend for a prize pool that might run as high as $100,000.

My darting career lasted from 1980 until about 2013, when I realized that age had taken the edge from my hand-to-eye coordination skills. During those years, I enjoyed competing both in league play and the money tournaments with varying results. As a league team player and captain competing in the HDA’s strongest divisions, I collected about thirty team trophies during those years and they still sit atop the filing cabinets in my exercise room where my descendants undoubtedly will find them after my death and mutter, “What the hell is all this junk?” But I still enjoy letting them remind me of times when I entered the arena and emerged victorious.

In addition to the team trophies, I also accumulated a number of individual league darts honors in the form of certificates now framed on the wall. The league maintained individual statistics and recognized winners in several categories like most individual wins in a season. HDA also awarded certificates for special shots, most prominently the “Ton-80” which occurs when a player executes the best three-dart shot available on the board: three darts together in the triple-twenty plot. I have about a dozen Ton-80 certificates framed on my wall above the trophies.

Although I never considered myself a professional darts player, I played with several players over the years who qualified by winning large sums of money on a national level. One in particular was Wade McDonald, a left-handed shooter who ranked number one in the nation for a while in listings compiled by the American Darts Organization (ADO). Once in a league night pairing I beat Wade head’s up in a game of singles 301 and still recall the thrill. Wade actually made his living as a carpenter, but for a couple of years he earned enough from traveling the professional darts circuit to take a break from the hammer and nails. Wade played several times as part of a hand-picked team challenging a British team in London, sponsored by the ADO.

In one memorable episode, I helped Wade avoid a drunken driving conviction by employing what I called the “darts defense.”  Our adventure occurred after I drew Wade as my blind-draw partner for Doubles 501 at one of the HDA’s large national tournaments. He left after we lost in the second round. But he called two days later asking my help. He’d been arrested after the tournament for drunken driving, but he had refused a breathalyzer test and protested his innocence. Now he wanted me to come testify that just before he left the tournament, he had made a difficult darts shot—so he couldn’t possibly have been drunk! I thought his strategy sounded ridiculous, but I agreed to meet with his attorney to discuss this novelty tactic. When the attorney began questioning me about darts and Wade’s skills, I suggested partially as a joke that we could play a game in front of the jury with Wade demonstrating his trick shot for his courtroom life.

“If jurors take the board into the jury room and try it themselves, they will think there’s no way he could have been drunk just half an hour later,” I said.

Wade was skeptical, but his attorney loved the idea. So did the judge, who obviously thought a courtroom darts game might break the monotony in his daily routine. Of course, the female prosecutor blew a fuse protesting this demonstration. When the judge agreed, however, and told us to fetch the dart board, she decided to just dismiss Wade’s case and move on to some other drunk driver without a defense. The attorney confided afterward that the case against Wade had not been very strong because he had not looked too drunk on his police station video.

Although I never considered myself a “professional” at darts, I did participate one season about 1984 in what the HDA promoted as a “professional league.” I recall it as the most interesting of my darts career, and it ranks as another example of something I considered a win.

The association invited all interested players to attend an organizational meeting at a large bar. We had enough interest in Houston to form eleven teams of four players each, who agreed to pay $25 apiece each week into a pool. We elected eleven captains and then conducted a pro-style draft to assemble the teams, with the captains selecting in reverse order of their elections. I was surprised to become the second player selected overall in this draft. Because we had drafted teams, this league proved to be highly competitive with six of the eleven virtually tied for first place at the end of the three-month season. My team finished high enough to recover the money we had each invested in the prize pool during the season.

As a darts tournament player, my most impressive win occurred in 1983 when I entered a major singles dart tournament in Galveston that had attracted players from all over the region. I only finished in second place, but that day remains fixed in my mind as one of my top athletic achievements. I played from about noon until close to midnight, dispatching one opponent after another in the game of 501. I realized something unique—almost supernatural—was happening in my performance that day, and I have tried to understand it through research into performance psychology ever since. I concluded that on this day I experienced what some psychologists have labeled “flow,” defined simply as a state of complete immersion in an activity. It’s too bad we can’t adopt a state of flow any time we need it. But then, if we could, no one would ever lose and all competitions would finish in a tie. For more information on the psychology of flow, look here. 

I recall entering states of flow on several occasions in my life, but nothing was more memorable or extensive than during that darts tournament in Galveston. The best description of the experience is simple: I reached a point early in the contest where the dart board seemed so close that I could just reach out and place my darts wherever I wanted. I’ve had a similar flow experience playing shortstop in a softball game as a 50-year-old when the batted ball seemed to move so slowly that I could see ever bounce and wiggle. I recall experiencing flow in basketball games when the other players appeared to be walking. All I had to do was dribble between them and take my shots. 

But those softball and basketball moments of flow occurred erratically compared with the afternoon of performance on the darts board that day in Galveston. One-by-one the players fell until only two of us remained. I stood head’s up with lights shinning on only one board and the crowd packed into the darkness. My opponent was a British expat named Roger Bick, who had played with me on a team a couple of years earlier. The crowd clearly viewed me as the underdog since I had never won a major event like this, while Roger had. We flipped a coin to determine who would shoot first for the bull’s eye to decide which player would start. The crowd sighed when I lost the flip and Roger followed by placing one dart into the single bull’s eye—that green outer ring around the red double bull that ranks as the best shot on the board. I stepped to the line, my flow still surging, and popped my dart straight into the red bull. The crowd roared as I prepared to shoot first.

Then, I realized something was happening to my flow. Perhaps I started thinking too much about the potential outcome of a glorious conquest. Somehow, I lost that complete immersion in the game, forgot the joy of hitting my target and focused instead on Roger, standing there waiting for me to fail. And that’s what I did. I proceeded to lose this showdown in two straight matches. I did collect $100 for my second-place finish. I never had another afternoon at darts like that again.

During my peak darting years in the 1980s, I always enjoyed strolling into “foreign” darts bars and playing the so-called local champion. I define foreign as any bar outside of Houston. Every darts bar boasts a reigning regular—the guy who plays there all the time and seldom loses. They are usually the definition of the “big fish in the small pond.” My favorite memory of playing a local champ in a foreign bar involves a showdown in St. Peters, Missouri, with a local champ I knew only as “JR.”

I first confronted JR about 1982 while visiting my dad over Christmas in St. Louis. Seeking a darts match, I learned the Pirates Cove Lounge in St. Peters just west of the city had scheduled a blind-draw doubles tournament for Friday night. So, I drove to the Pirates Cove, paid my $5 entry fee and drew as my partner one of the females. I carried her through our side of the bracket until the finals. As we prepared for the money round, she whispered, “JR.” I tried to hold my laughter, as I thought “Local champion, here we come.” We squared off and I won the money. But JR demonstrated great skill. He was a tall bearded guy, cigarette dangling from his lip, and he seemed irritated about the outcome. After I collected my winnings, another female approached and said JR wanted to play head’s up for money. She volunteered to keep score.

And, so, we squared off once more for one dollar per game. Every patron in the bar watched us play twenty or thirty games, alternating wins fairly evenly. I believe by the end of the night, neither one of us had netted any money. But I had a great time, left the bar and returned to Houston. A year later almost to the day, I was back in St. Louis and decided to visit the Pirates Cove for an encore. I walked through the door in the late afternoon. Before I could sit down on a stool, I heard the female bar tender yell, “Hey, JR, that guy from Texas is here again.” JR emerged from a back room, darts in hand, and grinned: “Let’s go!”

We shouldn’t leave the darts world without some discussion of the darts bar hustle. I was not involved in very many of these confrontations, but I did enjoy one memorable event in the late 1990s at Rudyard’s Pub in Houston that netted me about $100. If you recall the movie White Men Can’t Jump, you know that Woody Harrellson played a white guy who teamed with Wesley Snipes in a recreational basketball hustle that involved Woody pretending to be an awkward doofus just hanging out while Wesley goaded other players into a challenge for big money by vowing to take any fool for a partner—even that doofus over there. In my darts version, I played the Woody Harrellson character, but our event was not as organized as the movie. In fact, I didn’t even realize what was happening until I started raking the money.

Although I’ve been a regular patron of Rudyard’s, on this occasion I was just hanging out unrecognized, practicing my game alone on a board to the side while two other patrons played each other nearby. I’d been practicing about half an hour, drinking a beer, when an old acquaintance from the darts league entered Rudyard’s looking for a game. He simply nodded at me and then challenged the other two in a doubles match for money, agreeing to play with any partner, even me. I agreed and we decided to play for one dollar apiece. When we won, we offered double-or-nothing and they agreed. The winning streak continued, and double-or-nothing quickly grew into a fairly large prize pool. These guys lost every match, but they could not refuse the opportunity to try to eliminate their debt with a single winning game. They decided to stop when each of them had paid out $100.   

I should share one more darts anecdote before moving on to softball and poker, even though it has nothing to do with winning. It occurred in 2003 while traveling in England on an assignment for my company. With a bit of vacation time to burn, I hopped the BritRail train to Edinburgh and then traveled over to the English border town of Carlisle to spend a day touring the Roman ruin of Hadrian’s Wall and the old castle at Carlisle. While staying overnight in Carlisle, I grabbed my darts and visited a pub to have a couple of beers and compete against the locals there.

While warming up on a board alone, I heard a British accent ask, “Where you from, mate?” When I said Houston, he started laughing and chanting “Richmond Arms! Richmond Arms!” I couldn’t believe it. Here I stood thousands of miles from home and this guy was chanting the name of a Houston darts pub where I had spent many hours in competition over the years.

“You’re not buying another drink here,” he said. “It’s all on me, and let’s have a game!”  

He explained that he had been in the British Navy during the short-lived Falklands War of 1982 with his ship stationed for a while at the Port of Houston. At that time, the owner of the Richmond Arms was a British expat and darting pal of mine named Michael Holliday, and he knew an opportunity when he saw one. Mike rented a bus and sent it every night to the port so those homesick British seamen could have transportation to the Richmond Arms, spend their money, drink their fill and return to the ship after closing time like VIPs. For all I know, I had played games with him twenty years before meeting him in Carlisle. Small world, eh? So, we played several hours. And yes, he won every match! But I drank for free.

FAST PITCH SOFTBALL COACHING

I view my softball wins as a coach of girls rather than my own play on the field. I coached young girls softball teams for about a decade, from 1984 until 1994. As a coach, I enjoyed several winning seasons in terms of wins and losses, and I coached many teams to winning games. I also enjoyed watching individual players improve and learn from the competitive exercise. For me, those wins as a teacher rather than a coach have been the most satisfying.

 It is sad that my memories of service in Southwest Houston Girls Softball Association more often trigger feelings of regret instead of triumph. Emotions run high in little league and all parents find themselves crossing the line between calm and counterproductive more often than they would choose to admit. I like to think that overall, I was one of the good guys who volunteered his time to the greater benefit of all concerned. I even served as the elected president for one season. I umpired. I coached multiple teams—not just the select teams, but the regular neighborhood teams slapped together from the girls who could show up at the park. Now that those girls have all grown up, some consider me an adult friend.

I remember entering a bar a few years back and hearing the bar maid scream, “Coach Taylor!” I couldn’t remember the girl, but apparently I hadn’t been too rough on her since she bought me a drink. But I know I had my darker moments on the diamond in those years. Occasionally, I’ve encountered a former associate from the softball league and felt compelled to apologize for something without even remembering why. I only recalled that I had hurt that person some way in the past and wanted to make amends.

Of all the players and teams, however, one of each still resonates in my memory. The player was a nine-year-old girl named Lisa who asked if she could play on my 1985 team, the Ladybugs. I still had a spot, so I said sure. That night I got a call from her father, voicing his concerns. He explained that Lisa had been born with an ankle problem of some sort requiring surgery and rehabilitation. He added that Lisa’s mother had been unable to accept the medical issues, so she had abandoned them. He was worried about her ability to participate and how failure might affect her emotional growth.

“I talked with her today and she looked pretty normal, “I said. “Why don’t I meet with you two. We’ll try playing catch and see what she thinks.”

The next day we gathered at the field, where I told Lisa to use her bare hands catching a tennis ball. I showed her how to hold her two palms facing outward to grab the ball as I tossed it her way. She closed her hands around the ball and grabbed it. Her eyes opened wide and a big smile crawled across her face. She laughed. I looked at her dad, and he was starting to cry.

Lisa became the most memorable example of a personal rule I used while coaching children. I decided my primary goal for every team I coached would be to find the weakest player and at some point in the season to place that kid in a position to do something that she could never have imagined possible before the season began. Hit a ball in an actual game? Score a run? Catch a ball? This inspired me to work harder with the kids who really needed instruction. So, I worked with Lisa all season, But I kept her in the outfield so she couldn’t get hurt.

She went all season without a hit or fielding a ball. Finally, in one game, I decided to put her at third base for an inning, hoping my pitcher could strike out the side and keep Lisa safe. Well, every coach knows what happens almost every time you put a kid like Lisa at third base. I couldn’t look when a batter smashed a screaming line drive straight at her face. But I heard a loud pop of the ball hitting a leather glove, and then the crowd roared approval. I saw her wandering around with the ball in her glove, laughing and smiling. Now it was my turn to sniff back a tear—primarily because she had experienced what for her must have been an incredible moment of success like she had never imagined. But, also from relief that she still had a face. I felt like a winner that day for sure.

Lisa was too old to stay with the Ladybugs in 1986, after we had finished in second place in 1985. But she continued to play with the older girls, and her father volunteered as an assistant coach on her team in 1986. And that’s the year I managed my most memorable and satisfying team, the 1986 edition of the Ladybugs. The 1985 season had been a hard-fought contest with a rival coach of the Honeybees. In an effort to compete, I had worked hard at recruiting athletic little players from neighborhood soccer teams, trying to find a couple of nuggets who could win. It still hadn’t been enough to overcome that coach and his daughter, who had become the most dominating pitcher the league had ever seen. In 1986, however, Dick Hall and his daughter Shannon had moved up to the next age group, out of my hair. Still, I was worn out from the competitive bombast of 1985. So, I told the league president, “I don’t care if we win. Just put some kids on my team who live close enough to practice together at their own school.”

After signups I reviewed my list of names and their experience levels. I recognized that of the thirteen members of the roster, six had experience and seven did not. That gave me an idea. I reserved the practice field at Sutton Elementary for daily practices at four and divided the team into two groups: pros and amateurs. I worked with each group on alternating days.

With the amateurs, I took my time tossing tennis balls and teaching them to swing off a batting tee. The smaller group allowed me and my assistants to spend quality time on fundamentals without fear that their experienced teammates might injure or intimidate them. On the pro days, those girls hit the field full blast, improving their skills at a faster pace, no holds barred—and they loved it that the amateurs were not slowing them down. We did this for two weeks, and I was the only one practicing every day.

Just before I merged the two groups, one of the amateurs approached me and asked, “Coach, thanks for all your help, but I’m worried. I saw another team practicing and they were really good. We only have seven players and none of us is very good. Are we going to do OK?”

I realized she had seen the other half of her team without appreciating they belonged to us. I laughed and told her, “You’ve only seen half of our team. We’re practicing together starting next week. Take a look then and tell me what you think.”

Her eyes got wide on Monday when she saw the veterans join the team—firing the balls around the bases, popping their gloves and hitting moon shots into the outfield. She smiled and said, “OK, we have a team.”  She was right. That edition of the Ladybugs did win the championship for the nine-and-under playing division, but not without a battle from the Honeybees. Although Dick and his daughter had graduated, the Honeybees remained strong. The season ended in a tie that triggered a one-game playoff. I had concerns in the first inning when the Honeybees loaded the bases. Their cleanup batter smacked a ground ball to third base where one of the former amateurs had managed to secure the position. She fielded the grounder and, instead of tagging third base for the easy out, fired home to our catcher who stopped the run.

“We never worked on that,” I asked her. “Why did you throw home?”

“It just seemed like the right thing to do,” she said. I felt like a winner again because I realized she had become a player, not just some robot parroting my instructions. I had to believe that somewhere my skill as a teacher had found success.

We won the title game easily, and, looking back, I believe the successful execution of that out at home in the first inning provided an intimidating play that the young Honeybees could not shake out of their heads. I’m sure it rallied the rest of the Ladybugs with confidence they could succeed. I must confess, it did not hurt that one of my experienced neighborhood players turned out to be the best player in the league that year. But I know it took more than her. And that team reminded me of a conversation from a decade earlier among colleagues over lunch discussing our various career goals if we could not have worked as journalists.

“Morris Buttermaker,” I said, not even half in jest. I saw the blank stares and elaborated. “You know, Walter Matthau in The Bad News Bears. Driving around in my convertible, cleaning swimming pools, taking kids to baseball practice and filling out the lineup. Winning the championship with a rag tag bunch of little shits who never thought it possible. Maybe I will do something like that someday.”

Over the years, many young softball players rode around in my 1980 Ford Bronco, carrying gloves and bats and bags and gear. I let them autograph their names with markers on the inside walls of that vehicle. I was self-employed as a freelance writer in those years so I had plenty of time to run my bus to practices. No swimming pools for me. Morris Buttermaker indeed! I’ll take the 1986 Ladybugs any day over the 1976 Bad News Bears.

But children grow up. And when I looked around my empty nest in the mid-1990s, I realized I needed some new competitive activity to stir my soul besides darts. I had played all varieties of poker since my teenage years. But a relatively new variety was gaining prominence with televised tournaments. So, I decided to renew my interest by learning the latest more popular version of Texas Holdem.

TEXAS HOLDEM POKER

I immediately embraced Holdem as a near perfect game of chance, one that requires a good deal of skill while exercising the mind—a crucial consideration for anyone entering their senior years. Each hand requires a player to make dozens of decisions about folding, calling, raising or betting based on the psychological analysis of an opponent who may be holding anything from a winning hand to nothing at all.

In Holdem, each player receives two cards face down and then bets according to their assessment of the power of those cards. After this round of betting, the dealer provides three more cards face up called the “flop” for the remaining players to consider. After another round of betting or folding, the dealer delivers a fourth card face up, called the “Turn” or “Fourth Street.” After one more betting round, the dealer delivers the fifth and final card face up on the board, called “The River.” The five cards face up are community cards to be used in every remaining hand, combined with the two unknown cards each player held from the start.

Holdem is such a fascinating game, it’s enjoyable to play for fun. But playing for money adds a more interesting element, and the standard game is called “No Limit Holdem” because it allows any player at any time to bet or raise with all the money in stake on the table. I play primarily in tournaments where every player pays the same amount, receives equal chips and plays until their chips have been taken by another player or until they have taken all the chips. For example, I have played in tournaments where I paid $1,000 to receive 10,000 chips, and I have played when I paid only $30 to receive 3,000 chips. The value of the chips is irrelevant because you only play until they are gone. But the longer you last the more actual money you will receive at the end of the tournament.

I consider my play to be winning when I last long enough to recover cash. I have won several small tournaments in bars where the prize was $150 and I paid nothing to play. The bar benefits from selling drinks to all the players. But I also have traveled to Reno and to Las Vegas for larger tournaments requiring me to buy-in for a seat. I also maintain a disciplined record of my wagers and earnings. You won’t be impressed.

Although I could afford to lose more every year, I have a goal of limiting my total loss in any calendar year to $5,000. Reviewing the results for the last few years, I can report that in 2017 I wagered a total of $7,960 while winning a total of $2,939 for a net loss of $5,021. The next year I wagered a total of $6,535 while winning a total of $1,990 for a net loss of $4,545. In 2019, however, I managed to finish in the black, after wagering $5,485 to win $6,054 for a net gain of $569. So far in 2020, I have wagered a total of $1,740 while winning a total of $790.60 for a net loss of $949.40.

Behind those numbers, however, I can report several exciting wins as well as a bunch of funny stories, better suited for inclusion in a separate chapter for this book. Because we’re reviewing my wins in this chapter, I can share my best “win” of any poker tournament. It occurred in 2019 at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas, and actually ranks as quite an accomplishment.

You must realize that the WSOP is not a single event but a carnival of card games, with hundreds of tournaments running simultaneously every day for several months. When you watch the WSOP on television, you’re only watching one tournament called the Main Event in which the entry fee is $10,000 and many of the players are professionals who only play poker for a living. I don’t play in that event. But I have played in special tournaments such as the Seniors for players over 50 with an entry fee of $1,000. I haven’t cashed in any of those. In 2019, however, I paid $250 to enter a tournament with 936 players and finished tenth to win $2,109.

This tournament lasted 15 hours, so my hourly rate would have been $140. But it provided some exciting moments. You can’t win any of these tournaments without getting lucky a few times during the games. My signature hand occurred about three hours into the tournament when I wagered all my chips (“All-in!”) after receiving a pair of kings in my hand. I felt strong until I heard two other players call. With all of our chips in the middle we flipped our cards. My kings easily covered a pair of sevens. But the third caller rolled pocket aces, giving me the second-best hand before the flop. The flop included a seven, so suddenly my kings had fallen to third place behind three sevens and two aces. The dealer pitched a meaningless four on the Turn. But the table gasped when the River produced my third king, allowing me to triple my original stack of chips and eliminate two players from the tournament on one hand! Great fun? You bet. But don’t expect that to happen very often. I looked at the player with aces and said, “If you want justice, you’ll have to try the courthouse.”

The most disheartening part of this tournament occurred after I had collected my $2,109 for tenth place and returned to the table to observe how the final nine players would fare. I arrived just as they were deciding to go ahead and split the prize pool among themselves for about $11,000 apiece. Had I lasted one more spot, I would have covered all my losses for the previous two years! But, that’s poker. Coincidentally, my elimination came while holding a king and a nine against a player with a pair of kings. The kings giveth and they taketh away.

Before then, my best finish at the WSOP had occurred in 2017, when I entered a tournament against 1,019 other players for $235 and finished 60^th to win $591. But it marked my first time to cash in a major tournament. My signature moment in that event occurred when I was moved to a new table about two hours after the start. I arrived at my new seat and placed my rack of remaining chips on the table just as the cards began to fly. Before I sat down, I peeked at my hand and saw the ace and king of diamonds. I looked up and couldn’t resist. “All-in,” I announced, adding, “maybe I won’t even have to sit down.” My new table of opponents folded around to one younger guy who sat fondling a fidget spinner and staring me down.

“So fast?” said my young friend. “I think you have kings. Is that right?”

I just smiled and stood behind my chair while he reviewed the monster stack of chips in front of his seat. He easily could call and lose without surrendering much of his stake. So, he called and rolled a pair of nines. I was behind with ace high—but not for long. A second ace arrived on the flop and my pair of aces held high ground. As I raked my pile of chips to double my stack, I pulled out my chair and sat down. Fidget-spinner shook his head, spun his toy and said, “I’m not calling you again unless I have aces. Remember that!”

Is it fair to call me a winner at this game? I believe I have the skills to win when fate deals me some cards to play. I usually know what to do. But I also realize I have personality quirks that affect my skill set. For example, I am a natural born tightwad. As a result, I sometimes have trouble calling a large bet even on a minimal risk. I’m sure I have other tendencies that hurt or help, and I would like to understand those better. My self-analysis will continue.

I play regularly with a poker club in Houston composed of about forty players from several professions. We have a tournament twice each month and our commissioner maintains rigorous statistics. While all of us could afford to compete for an entry larger than the $50 used by our club—Houston Risk Management—each of us will kill to rise in the rankings. Sidelined in 2020 by the Covid-19 pandemic, we actually play more often now by going online and transferring money via Venmo. We hold a daily tournament for $30 and additional events for larger amounts.

I like to view a Holdem tournament as a single experience similar to a lifetime where survival is paramount and prosperity is a win. It includes moments when fate has control, and all I can do is react. Then it has moments when I can seize control by recognizing opportunities as they knock. And then, almost always, it will offer a moment that knocks me down offering a reminder that I can’t always dominate or think of everything. Always, however, there’s another new deal just ahead, reminding me to put that last loss aside and take another chance at survival.

HOW TO WIN?

For someone who says he does not like to brag, it sounds like I have done a lot in this post. But you asked the question and I have tried to answer in a way that will provide more than the raw statistics of winning or losing. And, if I have any conclusion about winning, it stems from the observation that almost all of my victories have occurred when I focused only on the enjoyment of an activity itself rather than the opportunity to place a winning feather in my cap. How many times above did I describe a victory that came when I didn’t even know I was competing?

 I want you to understand: You need to do the best job possible without thinking of the awards you might win. The same rule applies to winning in athletics as well, I believe. The best example springs from analyzing winning in two sports: darts and baseball. The old coach’s cliché of “Just have fun” should always work. But we all know that’s easier said than done. How can you concentrate and have fun at the same time?

 Analyzing that question for years, I finally concluded that the answer is to forget about the potential result of your effort and think back to the real reason you enjoyed the sport. In hitting a baseball, for example, the real fun comes from feeling the bat strike the ball. Standing in the box with runners on base, ignore the thoughts of glory that will come from driving them home. Do not say: “If I get a hit, we will win the game.” Instead, think about that last time you swung the bat, connected with the ball and felt that unique electric jolt of satisfaction from knowing you really clobbered it.

 I’ve experienced the same conclusion in competitive darts, standing at the line and realizing I would win the game if I just toss one dart into the bull’s eye. Instead, I should’ve been recalling the magical feeling that comes from simply achieving a bull’s eye, as if I’m not even in a game but just enjoying the challenge of hitting the bull.  I know—it’s not always so easy. But any time you can clear your mind, ignore the potential result and substitute fun for pressure, I believe you will improve your chance for success. The trick is to clearly define the reason an activity is fun. Do you enjoy the feel of putting a basketball through the hoop, or are you just hoping to win the game? If you are an actor, do you enjoy making the audience laugh or are you thinking about that Oscar?

 Analyze your activities and determine exactly why they bring you joy. That will provide your best chance to succeed.