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Soon I'll post my reflections on orlando: the job, my co-workers, my congregation, my escapades, etc. Should be entertaining, so check back soon.

Bio I wrote for a prospective employer

For people that wonder how or when I decided i wanted to be a writer, take a look at this bio I had to do for a job prospect. This is written from a sports perspective, but actually, sports was the first reason I wanted to write.

When I read it, I wonder if I was a lil too honest, especially about Pops and how he taught me to recognize some of the racial/social implications of sports. We'll see. One thing I won't do, however, is become one of those clowns that morph and assimilate just to get ahead. Sure, you have to adapt, but some niggas straight-up change personas. It's sickening.

Anyways, check it out:

I loved to read and loved to write, but for some reason I always hated book reports. I know that “hate is a strong word”, which is why I used it to describe the way I loathed book reports. There were books that I enjoyed – The Count of Monte Cristo; Things Fall Apart; Native Son – but too many times, the English teachers forced me to read and then write about a book I had no interest in, like Moby Dick.

Thank the heavens for Cliff’s Notes and some top-notch BS genes.
Perhaps that’s what made Mr. Duggan’s class so enjoyable. The three aforementioned enjoyable books, I read as part of his class’ curriculum.
I had Mr. Duggan my when I was a sophomore. He was a special teacher. Special, because he got us, he understood us.

I attended Buffalo’s City Honors High School, the toast of public education in New York State, since I was a 5th grader. CHS was a remarkable school, where bright kids of rich parents learned with overachieving ghetto-dwellers and everyone one in between. We were black, we were Asian, we were white, we were everything. We were smart and some of us were rather brilliant. Our teachers ran the gamut, too. Some old, some young; some stodgy, some hip; some sufficient, others memorable. But, for some reason, I was never a huge fan of my English teachers, even though English was my favorite subject. Mr. Duggan was the only memorable English teacher.

For me, in fact, he was life-changing. It was because of him that I decided to become a sports writer. And, it all started with a book report.

“Fab Five: Basketball, Trash Talk, the American Dream”
I used to talk sports with all my male teachers. Mr. Florey, Mr. Fitzpatrick, Mr. Francesco, all of them. So, when Mr. Duggan, like the cool teacher he was, allowed us to choose our own book for our last book report, he wasn’t surprised I chose a sports book.

“Mitch Albom? I thought you were a Wilbon guy,” I remember him saying.
He knew I loved the Sports Reporters show on ESPN. See, I used to kick it with him, not only about sports, but sports issues as well. To this day, he’ll tell anyone that I was Allen Iverson’s first fan outside of Hampton, Va. “But he’s a jailbird Vince,” he would say. “But maybe he shouldn’t be though, Mr. Duggan. And, I hear he’s gonna play for G’Town with Thompson. Wait ‘til you see him play,” I’d reply. (Georgetown was one of my other favorite squads.)
He also knew that Michigan’s Fab Five basketball team was my favorite since UNLV was running everyone off the court a couple years prior to that.

“Oh, I see now,” he said when I showed him the Fab Five book. It was blue and yellow, just like my boys’ jerseys.

“Should’ve known. You always like the thugs,” he said grinning. It was our inside joke. I used to yap his ear off about how the media unfairly gave my boys a bad rep and, because he was your classic cool teacher, he agreed with me even though he was 40 years my senior and grew up in suburban Syracuse.

Anyways, I wrote the (expletive) out of that book report. It only had to be four pages, but I turned in a nine-page behemoth sports masterpiece (I wish I still had it, so I could look back and see how awful it was). I was dropping Gary Grant, Roy Tarpley and Glen Rice references, commenting on the team’s social significance, making hair-brained, young-minded comments for the sake of controversy. It was the first time I had ever written about sports and I attacked it like I was Michael Wilbon or Jack McCallum.

Mr. Duggan loved it and I earned an A+. I think he would’ve given me a cheesy A++, if he were a cornball like Ms. Roachford was. But, he was too cool for that. He was a teacher, not the host of an infomercial.

He would also write long comments after his grades, either to scold a student for a terrible effort or commend one for a worthy effort. This particular comment in April, 1995 made me think, “You know what, I wouldn’t mind writing about sports for money. That’s not even a job.”

I don’t remember all of his thoughts, but a particular sentence has stuck with me to this day. “I can really see you writing about sports for the New York Times or Boston Globe or Washington Post one day,” he wrote. That was that. I was sold – 16-years-old with my career etched in stone…or inked on the back of paper.

My Pops and I
I was a rarity in my neighborhood – a kid who grew up with his father. In East Buffalo, most young kids were fatherless. Their role models were either both Mr. Lumpkin and Mr. Garcia – the guys that ran the Masten Boys and Girls Club – or street dudes, drug pushers, gangstas.

My Pops was my man. Sure, I was physically disciplined a lot, because, in school, I was mouthy and a clown. And sure, Pops set high standards and had a temper,, it didn’t matter, though, because we always had sports. These days, it’s sports and jazz. Back then, it was just sports.

My first sports memories were of him sneaking me out of bed at 10:30 p.m. so I could watch Magic and the Lakers. My mother hated it, since I was only six or seven-years old at the time, and it was the impetus of many arguments. Still, I was his lil’ man and he knew Magic was like my idol.

At first, I only liked Magic because he did. I only knew he made a spectacular play when pops would jump off the couch, get real close to the TV and say something like, “That’s right Magic! Kill them suckas!” The suckas were the Celtics of course, Bird in particular.

Growing up, I should’ve been a Knicks fan, not a Lakers fan. But, Pops was a Canisius College poli-sci dropout, a black-power child of the 60s, and son of a defiant southerner that got fired from jobs as a teenager because he talked back to his white bosses too much. So, if it was Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson, Pops was rooting for the black kid from Lansing. If it were the media darling Celtics vs. the Lakers, Pops was rooting hard for the Lakers.

It’s funny, but it took my mother to convince me that Larry Bird wasn’t a bum.
“Dad is Larry Bird one of the best players in the NBA?” I asked him that in front of my mother, confident that he would set this unknowing woman straight.

“Yeah, Vince. The boy is a monster, real good. I just can’t stand him and those bum Celtics,” he said. I was crushed.

“Well he’s not better than Magic is he?” I was praying he’d say no.

“What? Heck naw. That jive dude couldn’t hold Magic’s shorts,” he said. If Mom weren’t there he’d have said jock strap.

Pops and I were ride-or-die Lakers fans and it bonded us. If I came home with a ‘C’ on my report card, he’d be steaming mad at me for a while and make my world miserable, but sooner than later, the Lakers would come on CBS and it’d be him and I listening to Brent Musburger and Tommy Heinsohn.

Heinsohn used to get him really upset, because he was so blatantly pro-Boston and Bird. Everything was a racial conspiracy with my father – Heinsohn, the referees, the fans, the sports writers. Everyone loved the Celtics because they happened to have three of the best white players of the decade (Bird, Kevin McHale and Danny Ainge), he thought, and although people loved the Lakers, they’d love for the Celtics to win the title every year. When the Celtics won, he would tell me, fans and the media took it as an indication that smart and tough white basketball players would always outplay the flashy, prima-donna black players.

He hated how the Celtics would bring “white goons” like Greg Kite off the bench to rough up Kareem and he swore the refs were letting the physical play slide because of race.

His outlook on Lakers-Celtics spilled over to everything. “Why do these people stay on Carl Lewis,” he would wonder. “They can’t stand Georgetown because they got a bad brother runnin’ the show over there in the nation’s capitol at that snob school.”

Without me even knowing, I started to look at sports as more than just a game. They were and still are very much a clear window into society. I can thank pops for that.

He would even play defiant music when we watched the game.

Like when he started blaring Miles Davis’ funk-drenched “What I Say” during the final minutes of Game 5 of the 1987 NBA Finals, when Boston had pulled ahead of L.A.

By this time, Pops had started making a little more money – he had to. Mom stayed at home to take care of my four siblings and me, so Pops was the sole provider. He never took sick days and routinely worked 50-60 hours in a week. Sometimes, the only time I would see him was when we went to our religious meetings, if I got in trouble at school or if a game was on.

Being an electronics-nut, he treated himself with a 40-inch screen and built a makeshift family room in the basement. The seats were benches made out of plywood.

(We had some great sports moments in the basement. None more memorable than Super Bowl XXXX, when Pops, my three older cousins and I were on our knees, holding hands, waiting for Scott Norwood to kick the game-winning field goal; only groan and curl up into separate fetal positions of angst when it sailed wide-right. “Do I have to go to school tomorrow Dad?” I remembered asking.)

Anyways, they we are – Pops and I – June 1987. He has his 40-oz. beer and I have my two-liter of Pepsi (All that caffeine and it’s after midnight? No wonder Mom was always upset.), and I probably have a school exam coming up soon, but who cares? Pops is blasting “What I Say” between timeouts and the Lakers have the ball with less than 10 seconds and their down by one point.

You know the rest. Magic gets the inbound on the left wing, studder-steps McHale out of his Converse and goes up for the “Junior, Junior sky-hook” near the foul line, over McHale and Robert Parish. Swish, game, and series – basically.

That night Pops and I walked to Scottie’s on Jefferson Ave., for a 1 a.m. celebratory steak hoagie. And, we talked sports. I was eight-years-old talking sports with my 30-something father.

Sports journalist in the making
As I got older, we just didn’t talk sports -- we argued sports. I would go with Pops to his friends’ houses to watch games and I’d be arguing with them – a preteen know-it-all arguing about whether Kenny Anderson is the greatest freshman point-guard ever. My friend Craigy’s father called me Stat-Man, because I knew I needed statistics to back me up. Otherwise, I was just a kid running-ff at the mouth.

I also needed those stats as ammunition on those Sunday mornings when he was cutting my hair and I’m trying to prove Kevin Johnson is the best point guard in the league or for when we were in the basement and an argument would erupt and he’d try to bully his point across. That’s when I’d go upstairs, get the Buffalo News out of the 0 ft. x 0 ft. room that I shared with my two younger brothers and prove my point.

“Look Dad. It’s right there, Randall [Cunningham] was like 12-30 and threw five interceptions,” I’d say. “Now, I know he’s a black quarterback and we should support him, but [Buddy] Ryan had every reason to bench him.”
And, I read all the time. I was a fanatic Sports Illustrated collector before I turned 10-years-old. I used to ask my gym teachers to get Bob Gibbon’s high school basketball reports. I used to buy those stupid, no-information, 30-page books they would write about Isaiah Thomas or Barry Sanders, they sold in the school Book Club catalogs. I read as many sports sections as I could get. Once we finally got cable and I had access to ESPN it was game over.

I was obsessed with sports.

So, when Mr. Duggan flicked on that 100-watt light bulb over my head, I was sold. Pops was, too. He knew I’d be the next big thing in sports journalism. He knew he’d see me on ESPN telling everybody what to think about the NBA some day or setting the record straight on some social issue.

If I ever get to the point where I’m talking to Bob Levy on Outside The Lines, reporting a story on HBO’s Real Sports, writing a 300-inch magazine piece on Yao Ming and the NBA’s effect on Communism or finishing my first book on fathers, sons and sports; I’ll have Pops and Mr. Duggan to thank.

Back in the Strict: Jobless, but hopeful

Aight. So here's where I stand gig-wise: I don't have one.

This isn't the first time I've been in this situation, though. When I moved to DC in the summer of 2000, I didn't have a job. Nothing. But I swung through, got on the grind and in less than a year I had a job makin real dough on a job that, on paper, I wasn't qualified for. But I made it happen, with Jah's help of course.

When I decided that it was time for my old-*%* to finally finish college, I quit that job. Did I have a job lined up? Nope. But, I was focused on my goal. Which was to finish school and that couldn't happen without me freeing up my mornings and afternoons. So that meant quitting a job that I could have made very good money and a career out of; and getting that HU thing done. But, everything worked out. I kopped the Washington Post nightside gig, which is will probably be a reason for any future job I get, just because of the people I met.

Fast forward...I come back from Atlanta and get comfortable doing the nightside thing with the Post again. That, however, was a dead-end gig -- the editors weren't going to wake up one day and say, let's put Vince on that Wizards beat or let's send Vince to the 2008 Olympics. So, I had to make a move. That lead me to Orlando.

Now, I could've asked the Post to take a leave of absence, like I did when I went to ATL, and still had a job when I got back -- if I came back. But, what good would that do? It'd just lull me into a sense of comfortable. I wouldn't be on the grind, like I am now.

So that's where I'm at now. Here in DC, not much dough and no job, but a pretty good deal of prospects.

Let me put you on to a couple of the places I could turn up at within the next month or so (hopefully much sooner than that). Depending on where I land, I could either be there for less than a year or a couple years. But, I'm still not at the stage where I'm ready for a paper or magazine that I'd spend a decade at. That's how we do it in our industry. You probably jump jobs 2-3 times in your first 3-6 years. It's just the nature of the beast and I don't mind it much. What's not hot about getting a chance to live in different parts of the country doing something you love?

I would get into a very detailed assessment of each city, but I think I'll save that for the city that I'll be moving to.

Meanwhile...

TAMPA: Well, St. Petersburg, actually. The St. Petersburg Times is the largest newspaper in Florida. It covers Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater. It's probably the best paper in Florida, but I think Orlando's sports section is better. I wouldn't mind living in Tampa. As a city, it's probably a lil better than Orlando and definitely bigger.

They have two positions at one of their bureaus in the sticks. When I interviewed with the editor, I asked dude straight up, "Have minorities had problems in this county?" He hemmed-and-hawed until he gave me an unsure answer. But, I wouldn't worry about it. He did say that one of the last reporters assigned to that county was a black woman and he said she never expressed any safety concerns.

My worst fear: That I get stuck out there. The editor told me that some of the Preps writers have been there for 6 years. I'm not down with that.

AUSTIN: Out of all my prospects, this is kind of where I want to be -- working at the Austin American-Statesman. It's fairly big city (about 750,000, bigger than Tampa, Baltimore, etc.). It's a young city, too. University of Texas is there. Since so many young people make it their home, the arts and entertainment scene is thriving. A lot of tech companies that can't afford to be headquartered on Silicon Valley are there. And it passes the Real World test, since this summer's Real World season was taped in Austin. It's also the state capital.

The paper is good, too. It's probably one of the bigger mid-sized papers and it's considered on of the best of it's size.

Austin will probably be my next interview. We've already had a phone interview and they sent me two papers to critique (a tiring process, where I had to read and critique every section of the paper. Final thought: Pretty good sports section, great Metro section, good A section, horrible Style section (which is unacceptable in a city that calls itself "hip") and a pretty good business section.

My worst fear: That I'd get knocked for public drunkenness and sentenced to the death penalty. Or that I get into a heated argument with some Cowboy-boot wearing government worker and he takes me to rural Texas and hangs me from a sturdy tree-branch.

TWIN CITIES: A gig just opened up at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis-St. Paul. My mother grew up in Minneapolis. It produced Prince, Mint Condition, Kahlid El-Amin and a bunch of Good Life babies -- matter fact, it's the Good Life capitol of the world. That's all good though.

I wouldn't mind living here for a couple years. I'm used to the snow and used to the square blacks, since I grew up as the son of Linda Thomas and nephew of her siblings.

The paper is not renowned for its sports section, but that's cool. A good writer will make his job hot. It also has a franchise in every major sport and covers the University of Minnesota, so opportunities would abound.

My worse fear: I'll be drugged into living the Good Life.

WICHITA: You know I don't want to live here. But trust me, it could be worse. I could be forced to spend a year writing for a paper in a small-town in Alabama. But I'm committed to this writing thing, so if this is what I need to do, then this is what I need to do.

Worst fear: Take my previous three fears and then add every other scary prospect and those are the causes of my trepidation with this Wichita deal.

So there you have it. As soon as something happens, I'll let you know.

As the world turns

I'm back in the Strict folks. Next move coming soon. I'll have a couple posts online by the end of the day. One on my job search. One on my time spent in Orlando. And another misc. joint.

Everybody go kop that new Mint Condition album. It's called "Living the Luxury Brown". It's an exceptional album. My best kop in years.

My Life update coming soon...