Pat Bradley ’14, Sports Editor
For a long time as a kid I thought I could play professional basketball. When I got cut from my high school’s freshman team, those dreams sort of shattered. While I still think a 5-11 white kid could make it in the NBA, over the last four years my beer belly has grown to be slightly larger than my free throw percentage, ultimately ending my hopes of being a basketball star. If I can’t play sports, watching the athletes every day and writing about them is the next best thing.
To me, writing is an outlet. I can stop everything I’m doing and engross myself in someone else’s world, someone else’s story and forget about life for a while. I can say in writing what my heart feels and what my brain tries to comprehend more legibly and eloquently than I could just standing around babbling. When frustrated, some people yelled into pillows as kids; I wrote love songs, poems, journals, and stories. There’s just something about the written word that accesses a unique place in our hearts and minds, and that’s special.
Sports are the same way. It’s not just a game. Sports provide things you don’t find almost anywhere else. There’s nothing like 40,000 fans cheering at once, blindly believing in the face of adversity that their team can push the winning run across. It’s the way time slows down as a ball sails towards a fence or a hoop. It’s the moments like when the entire TD Garden sang the national anthem before the Bruins’ first home game following the Marathon bombings last April, a scene both somber and full of healing at the same time. Sports are a journey, a lifestyle, and an escape full of love and passion, and that’s something special too.
Writing and sports intertwine at one of the deepest places of my being. Having the opportunity to write about sports is a blessing.
“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible form of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it.” – Albus Dumbledore
As one of my favorite quotes from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter describes perfectly above, words are magic. In the past two years, The Beacon has given me an outlet, an adventure, a place to heal, a place to share my thoughts and speak my mind. I’ve been blessed with the ability to let my passions bleed onto the pages you’ve read, and that’s something I can’t explain entirely in words what it means to me. This newspaper and its readers have given me someone to write for, an opportunity to do what I love, and, hopefully, the chance to put some magic into your lives, even if just for the five-minute escape you have while reading one of my stories.
To our faithful readers, my editors, adviser, writers, colleagues and friends, thank you. To the athletes, coaches, and administrators that let me ask you questions and tell your stories, thank you.
The final buzzer may have sounded on this chapter of my life, but I’ll always remember where I started.
