Food, Football and Sportswriters Made for Memorable Thanksgiving Mix

I’m not sure when Thanksgiving grew to be my favorite holiday, but it is — and it’s been that way for decades.If you had a photographic timeline of my life (and my waistline), you’d have no trouble believing that. I’ve enjoyed food for years. I also enjoy a wide variety of food.

Several years ago, I took a series of escalating cooking classes, during which we prepared, cooked and ate foods and dishes most people never experience: rabbit ravioli, duck confit, vegetable terrine, cream-filled donut balls and other tasty treats. Although I can be a creature of habit when ordering food at restaurants, I’m not afraid to try something new. I’ve had snails and beef tartar. I’ve had a quail egg in saki, though I wouldn’t eat it again.

As a result, I want everyone to enjoy all kinds of food. And each other. So, put the three together — well-prepared food, a variety of it and friends and family — and you can understand my attraction to Thanksgiving. Oh, and football.

Away from Home for the Holidays

Now, many people don’t like Thanksgiving because the holiday brings together too much family. Old dramas play out. New dramas develop. There’s often too much alcohol involved. And it doesn’t take long for things to get crazy, nasty or both.

But those aren’t my memories.

After I left home following college, I rarely made it back for the holidays. My first career was that of a sport journalist, and after a few years of covering high school sports and mid-major university sports, I graduated to writing about bigger events.

Covering athletics at a major university meant being on the clock six and seven days a week from late July through early December. Work kicked up again on Christmas Day and pushed through mid-April. May and June often brought baseball and spring football assignments.

Football season, however, was the focus. So, every Thanksgiving, I was locked in at home with a workday set for the Saturday after Thanksgiving and sometimes a travel day on Black Friday followed by a working Saturday.

Several years after this pattern started, I was home preparing for the holiday when I realized I had half a dozen peers who were also in town — and away from their families for Thanksgiving.

So, I invited them to have dinner. “Bring what you want to drink. We’ll watch football and eat some snacks, then have a nice dinner, then have dessert with more football on TV.”

They did.

A handful of sportswriters had the hard duty of going to watch Charlie Ward win the Heisman Trophy a couple weeks after spending Thanksgiving together. (Charlie wasn’t at Thanksgiving.)

A Sportswriter Thanksgiving Tradition

It was the first of several Friendsgivings on Thanksgiving Day. They were a lot of work for me and my wife, and getting eight to 12 other journalists on the same beat to get along was a lost cause. Sarcasm ruled the day, though most barbs were soft-edged.

We nibbled on appetizers. We drank. We feasted on the main course. We drank some more. We burped, then had pie.

On Friday, we slept late and prepared for Saturday. Some years, a few of us covered a basketball game.

On Saturday, we were all together again in a press box in Tallahassee or Gainesville to work a Florida State-Florida football game. Most years, it was a matchup of Top 10 teams: Steve Spurrier vs. Bobby Bowden with post-season stakes high and in-state bragging rights even higher.

We worked for competing publications, and we were all competitive. Most days and weeks, we were together interviewing players and coaches. All of us would ask questions that most of us would hear, and we’d write down or record the same answers.

Often we’d break away for scheduled one-on-one interviews with specific players and coaches, gathering information that only we would have.

Then, after a couple hours, we’d eat lunch — sometimes together, sometimes not — and break away for a few hours to write.

Practice would start in the late afternoon, and we’d have to gather again. At Florida State, football practices were open to the media. It’s a foreign concept today, with by-the-second social media apps in play, but back then there was no Twitter (X), no Instagram, no Facebook. In fact, in the early days, it was before the cell phone. (Yeah, fine, queue the old folks’ jokes.)

After two hours of practice, the assembled media, now with local TV personalities involved, would talk to Bowden and his players. The questions weren’t that different from the ones we got answered earlier that morning. But there we were anyway.

Competitors and Friends

One year, the FSU beat writers met a real celebrity: actress Loni Anderson. Her then-husband, Burt Reynolds, was a former FSU football player.

After three months of football season and after football season after football season, you get to know your peers. Everybody didn’t like everybody, but we mostly got along. We certainly gave and got a large measure of professional respect.

If you got beat on a story, you vowed it wouldn’t happen again, dug in harder and worked to get a piece of news no one else had.

(It wasn’t until much later in my career that I discovered sports fans really didn’t care who got the story first. They cared much more about a newspaper getting it right. We cared about that, too, but we cared more than we should have about getting a scoop. Of course, our superiors cared even more than we did. Not healthy, but that’s true, then and now, about most things about the newspaper business.)

That was the backdrop for our little Thanksgiving gatherings. Every year the mix was different, and it depended on who, at that stage of their life, was married or who had somewhere else to go for the holiday. The roster included Garry Smits (Florida Times Union), Gary Long (Miami Herald), Craig Barnes (Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel), Steve Ellis (Tallahassee Democrat), Tom Spousta (Sarasota Herald-Tribune), Bill Vilona (Pensacola News Journal), Bob Harig and Brian Landman (St. Petersburg Times), and Scott Tolley and Tom D’Angelo (Palm Beach Post). Some years, young member of FSU’s sports information team joined in.

Our last gathering was in 1998. Nine months later, I surrendered the FSU beat and moved back to Orlando.

A few years later, the venue and the people changed as I helped coordinate larger gatherings for Thanksgiving and Christmas for a growing extended family (and vegetarians!).

But every Thanksgiving afternoon, the Dallas Cowboys take their place on the holiday stage, and it reminds me of those early Friendsgiving meals.

I can’t remember the jokes, but I can still hear the voices and the laughs.