In the days before computers, I spent much of my time in the old EVENING OBSERVER Sports Department on the phone and typing with two index fingers.

It all started innocently enough with an early evening phone call. When it ended several hours later, I realized my job had been unfairly placed in jeopardy.

Following her home victory, a first-year high school coach rang in to the EVENING OBSERVER Sports Department to report the results.

It wasn’t her first call so she knew the routine: statistics and her thoughts on the night’s top performers, her team’s win-loss record and the date and site of the next scheduled contest. Takes 15 minutes tops.

I’d already written the story by the time she called back less than an hour later and demanded I not print anything about the event.

This was a once-in-a-lifetime request in my decades-long tenure in local sports. It simply didn’t happen. No free publicity or notoriety for your team and your young players?

Back in those days when the EVENING OBSERVER was in direct competition with the Jamestown Post-Journal, we actually paid coaches or their designated managers/statisticians/scorekeepers $1 per call.

It wasn’t much, a check for under $20 for the season, but appreciated. It was a relatively inexpensive goodwill gesture to our local correspondents on our part.

When I incredulously asked why I should scrap my efforts to publicize her very successful team, she had an unexpected answer.

Her team and one from the Jamestown area were primed for a showdown in the next week. She launched into a diatribe against her opposing coach, accusing him of trickery and deceit.

Specifically, she was certain his team’s results would not appear in the P-J. She was sure it was a deliberate move to keep her from seeing them and devising a strategy to maximize her team’s effort against his.

Printing her team’s results and not reporting his would give him enough crucial information to win the league championship.

Tortured thinking, at the very least. The Kinks’ lyrics “Paranoia, the destroyer” came to mind.

Not wanting to throw away my work, I suggested a compromise. I would call the P-J to see if they had received the other team’s results and were going to publish them. If they were, I’d publish hers. Case closed. She agreed and hung up.

Just as I surmised, the P-J already had the results and was ready to print them. Truly a tempest in a teapot.

Soon she called back and before I could give her the news of the upcoming double printing, she demanded I kill the story. She claimed ownership of the results and I did not have her permission to use them.

She would not listen to reason and I suggested she was now doing what she had wrongfully accused her rival of doing. When I informed her I would be printing her results because we had made a deal, she began to cry.

“This is not over,” she promised and hung up on me.

It was far from over. In the next two hours I fielded no less than four angry calls from male school officials: athletic director, principal, school board president and finally, school superintendent. It’s amazing what a woman’s tears can do to some men.

I spent the better part of those hours defending my position and undermining hers. Eventually, I believed that I had convinced them her behavior was unhinged, unwarranted and unethical. Tears be damned.

How wrong I was. Near the end of the night, my publisher, H. Kirk Williams III, called me for the first and only time. Ever.

“What seems to be the problem?” he asked, audibly annoyed.

I presented my position on the matter and he listened intently before replying.

“Women,” he muttered. “Run it.”

Guess who never called again with her results, instead delegating to a student the job of dealing with the unreasonable sports editor?

For my part, I just changed the name on the season-ending correspondents check.

And by the way, if you were wondering, her team lost the showdown and the league championship.

ııı

Bill Hammond is a former EVENING OBSERVER sports editor.