My first great adventure was going away to college—all the way to Stanford, ninety miles across the bay. The university accepted me partly because of my tennis, but I also tested well, and they wanted to be nice to my father, who had gone to Stanford Medical School and still lectured there occasionally. The day I arrived in 1977 to begin freshman year all I was really thinking about was making the tennis team and playing in national tournaments. But I was like so many kid athletes—I had been wound so tight for so many years, I was ready to pop.

And so I did. By the spring of freshman year, it was clear that life had more to offer than hitting small yellow balls. My internal spring went unsprung with amazing suddenness—certainly amazing to my parents when I told them in April that I had dropped off the freshman team. But it was the right thing to do. I had realized in those first few months at Stanford that while I was an adequate college player, I would never be a superstar. And, in truth, I was ready for bigger challenges than hitting those damned tennis-ball cans.

Like all college students, I read poetry—do we ever really read poetry again, after college?—and I cried with my girlfriend, Annie, every time we read “Ariel” together. But men do not live by poetry alone, except when they’re trying to get laid, and I began to realize that I missed sports—not playing them, but being around them—so by the end of sophomore year I had begun writing sports stories for the Stanford Daily, and then regular news stories, which I loved more than anything I had ever done. There was a cleanness to news-writing, a directness that reminded me of what I enjoyed about tennis. One night when I was sitting in the Daily office, the president of Stanford had a heart attack, and I was asked to cover it because I was fast and didn’t make mistakes, and we were approaching deadline. And I nailed the story. I was totally, completely, in the zone. I worked the next summer for a small newspaper in the Bay area, the Santa Rosa News-Herald. By the time I graduated, I knew precisely what I wanted to do, which was to work for a great newspaper and write stories forever. Boom-boom-boom-boom. Set them up and knock them down. I applied for internships at the Times, Post, Journal and Mirror; the first offer I got came from the Mirror.