I was a distance runner.

That was my thought, in August 2003, as I walked from my open double in Shaw Hall to Manley Field House to appeal to then-SU distance coach Jay Hartshorn. After rehashing the plan several hundred times in my head during the walk down Comstock Avenue, I knew exactly what to do – plead for a chance to walk on the Syracuse men’s cross country team.

Luckily for my ego, Hartshorn was out practicing with the team. I left a message with a secretary, who walked it into the coach’s office. Days, months, semesters passed without so much as an e-mail from the Syracuse cross country program.

Rejected, thus began my career as a D.O. hack. For a few months, I still carried the hope I would one day wear an Orange singlet, passing the time by writing a few articles for the campus newspaper.

I relayed this hope in my first meeting with the rest of the D.O. sports staff. A senior replied, ‘The cross country team sucks. We don’t.’

I only knew this senior based on the recap of his activities the previous night, which included consuming wings and pitchers of beer at Chuck’s and nearly decapitating his friend in a ceiling fan. Considering the source, he was surely right.

Three years, more than 180 articles and one large case of sleep deprivation later, I’ve found The Daily Orange has helped me find a love (writing) and a hobby (my girlfriend).

Or maybe that’s reversed.

Still, this paper allowed me to do some unbelievable things most professional journalists work more than three years to do.

I’ve covered women’s lacrosse (the honor was all mine, Coach Miller) and women’s basketball (at least I saw Rutgers play a few times). The D.O. sent me to Jacksonville, Fla., to work on my Irish tan, which quickly turned red, and to cover a basketball game there while I was at it.

I learned a lot about journalism at that game – especially not what to do. Stationed courtside with a clear view of the Texas A&M cheerleaders, but not the court, I had plenty of time to learn a thing or two from the Salt City’s resident writing sage, Bud Poliquin.

As games go, the 9:40 p.m. tip wasn’t the greatest. But Poliquin had a leg up on the earthly journalists who actually had to wait and watch the game before scrambling to write their stories before deadline. Poliquin wrote his entire column before the game.

In Bud’s world, Gerry McNamara torched the Aggies for 26 points in a rousing Orange win.

In the real world, Bud had to delete his entire column with about 10 minutes remaining because, well, McNamara wasn’t going to score 26 and SU wasn’t going to win. Turns out waiting for the game to start before writing my story wasn’t such a bad idea.

It’s clear now I could never make up for missing these experiences But during it all, I cursed the fact I had to wake up at 4 a.m. to drive to Springfield, Mass., for a morning press conference at the Basketball Hall of Fame or miss my Monday classes so I could sit in the Oakland Zoo, the Pitt student section, and write a game story.

I’ve sort of made up the sleep and the work I missed, but I could never make up for seeing Don Vito from MTV’s ‘Viva La Bam’ drunk, or at least acting that way, in Baltimore’s ESPNZone while in the area to cover a men’s lacrosse tournament.

Or could I make up the friendships I hope I made. Or the conversations unrelated to sports I’ve shared with athletes, like when SU basketball commit ‘Scoop’ Jardine and I chatted briefly about driving after he got his driver’s license last week.

Sure, I’d be in a lot better shape now if somehow my 16-minute, 50-second 5-kilometer time allowed me to walk on the Syracuse distance team. But life worked out for me, in a strange way.

As much as anyone who spends more than a semester in the sports office acts like a bitter veteran after being blasted with hate by numerous Orange coaches and even more Orange fans, saying goodbye has caused me to take a break from my bubble world and reflect.

While I know my time has come to move on, I’ll miss the decrepit D.O. office, the other sleep-deprived editors, eating food and sitting courtside at Big East basketball games for free and, of course, all the inside jokes that come with belonging to an organization like a student newspaper.

The world may be able to take away my position at The D.O., make my hairline recede, tell me I should have done things differently, but I know my experiences are priceless and I’ve gone places I never could have if I was just taking classes or even running cross country for the Orange.

That’s not to suggest my life wouldn’t be good if that happened. Let’s just say the senior who came close to losing a friend to a ceiling fan was shrewder than his reputation would’ve suggested.

So thanks Coach Hartshorn for not calling me back and to The D.O. for taking a chance on a runner from the suburbs of Trenton, N.J., who wasn’t quite sure if he was a writer or a runner.

Now that my time here has mercifully finished, maybe I could try the running thing again. God knows I’ll have the time.

Rob Anthes was an assistant sports editor at The Daily Orange, where his columns will no longer appear. E-mail him at rmanthes@syr.edu.

Published on May 1, 2006 at 12:00 pm