As a graduate student at Virginia Tech I was working four jobs. One of them was as a sports stringer for the News Messenger in Christiansburg (known to insiders as the Mess). Another job was tutoring scholarship student/athletes in History and English (we all need help with English).
I enjoyed covering sports so much when the Mess offered me a full-time job as a sportswriter I took it. I quit school and my other jobs, but kept in touch with many of the student/athletes and staff I had worked with.
About this time, the NCAA started investigating the football and basketball programs at Tech. Bill Dooley was the football coach and athletic director and Charlie Moir (pictured above) was the basketball coach. Some of the people I knew from Tech started sharing information with me that wasn't getting into the Roanoke paper. I think the Roanoke paper was mainly covering the land swap deal with the Horticulture Farm and shopping mall developers.
Over time, with the contacts I had, I put together a series of stories. My editor was horrified. He knew how controversial the stories were and was in a better postion to understand the potential fallout from publishing them. He was also aware how inexperienced I was (at the time, I thought experience was overrated).
So, a veteran ACC reporter from a Charlottesville paper came down to help with the stories. We got the stories ready and then my editor and I went to visit the Tech VP for Public Affairs with the stories.
The VP tried to intimidate us (those who know me know that is not a good strategy), reminded us what a small-time paper we were and how Virginia Tech would sue us out of business if we published the stories.
After my editor and I laid out the proof we had backing the stories, the VP turned white. We published the stories as written. Within a few days the university president resigned and seven vice presidents retired or were reassigned.
The stories got national attention. I got calls from Sports Illustrated and other national news agencies. Dan Rather held up one on my stories on the 6 o clock news (three seconds is probably an exaggeration).
Within a few months, the Messenger got sold to a another chain and got a new publisher and editor. The new publisher was not interested in the stories I had on the hiring/resigning of athletic director Dutch Baughman.
This publisher also got upset when I ran a big story and photo on women's basketball. She said nobody was interested in women's sports , and I wasn't to run any more.
So when Tom Colley called me and asked if I was interested in moving on (he said he had been following my stories) I was ready to listen.
NEXT: Part Two: The Interview with Tom Colley
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