Circle of life

It's funny how things go full circle sometimes.

I owe a lot of my journalism career to two places: The Press-Enterprise and internetsoccer.com. My first full-time reporting job was with the PE, though it was covering Moreno Valley news and such. For two years I worked there and eventually left but still freelanced with the PE. Over the years, they began to use me more and more for covering soccer.

While at the PE, I also wrote for internetsoccer.com. That was a cool web site even though the pay was non-existent at first. After a while there was some money involved but then the pay-off was far greater than money. internetsoccer.com was owned at the time by TEAMtalk and somehow that company got a deal with FIFA to provide online content for the Under-17 World Championship in 2001, slated for Trinidad & Tobago. I was asked to help out with the coverage and was floored. That was easily the best experience of my career, even greater than covering the 2002 World Cup in Japan.

Anyway, about six months after the tournament in Trinidad, internetsoccer.com went belly-up. I don't know the specifics. That was a pretty bad time for me. I had gotten to count on the money from internetsoccer.com and was forced to consider other options, which I pursued, unhappily.

On Tuesday, I helped out a friend with a story on Rangers. It was for PA Sport, a British company that is I believe some sort of wire service type of outfit. Anyway, one of the places that picked up the story I wrote was TEAMtalk.

(As an aside, the story was edited around to fit their style, I suppose.)

I'll be writing a few more stories for PA Sport tonight so I guess I should expect to see more of my words end up on TEAMtalk. It doesn't really bother me or anything; I don't hate TEAMtalk for throwing a monkeywrench in my life in 2002. It's just sort of ironic.