Tomorrow I’ll travel the six hours to Birmingham for SEC Football Media Days but it gave me pause when I realized I’ve been covering media days for more than 40 years.
It started back in 1980 on the Southwest Conference press tour.
About 40 media types from newspaper, radios and TV would meeting in Dallas, board a bus and then travel the state of Texas for press conferences with all the SWC schools in that state and then finish with a flight to Fayetteville.
For more details see Sunday’s column.
There are a million stories about that press tour, some fit for a family newspaper.
One I’ll never forget. We had an 8 a.m. departure from Houston to Austin and everyone was on time except the bus, which had been parked in our hotel lot the night before.
Police were called and four hours later a replacement bus showed up, and as we turned a corner to get to the highway someone saw a bus in plain sight in the middle of a field. It was maybe four blocks from our hotel.
Someone commented they should have just brought us that bus and saved three hours.
As it turned out, that was our bus.
One of the braver TV types had "borrowed" the bus for a social engagement with an employee of our hotel.
Four blocks was all he could handle it before it jumped the curb into an empty field.
They walked back to the hotel and he made the decision not to tell anyone.
Every year at the end of tour there was an award for "Horse’s Behind." The TV reporter won that year. It was given in good humor, or at least that’s what I was told the year I won it.