Grandma was an Irish Catholic from the North Side of Chicago. She was a sports nut who, among other things, taught me how to keep score when we’d visit Wrigley Field.
When my brother and I were in high school in New York, she sent us blank checks and told us they were for our applications to Notre Dame. I promptly shared our report cards with her and told her to save her money.
When I ended up at Penn State, covering the football team for the student paper, she called me during a game during my senior year. I couldn’t pick up at the moment, and I figured that she knew that I was “working” at the time, but I was surprised to see a voicemail from her, so I immediately listened.
Bless her octogenarian heart, it turned out to be a minutes-long rant about the recklessness of No. 1 on the Nittany Lions playing every snap as both a quarterback (Rob Bolden) and safety (Nick Suhey).
Google both players, see if you can spot the obvious difference between the two, and then take a moment to laugh as hard as I did that day.
When ESPN hired me in 2011, it was initially to cover Ohio State. I visited Columbus, put down a security deposit on an apartment near campus, then got a call shortly afterward saying the company’s plans to cover the Buckeyes had been put on hold. I was asked if I’d be OK with moving to South Bend to cover Notre Dame instead.
