I interview ... Paul

The fifth edition of the interviews, brought to you from sunny (though not right at the moment) Sacramento. Four questions for Paul!

Name: Paul
Age: 30
Location: White Plains, NY
Interview date: 10/31/07

1. You've seen a lot of concerts. What is the concert or musical event you feel most fortunate to have witnessed in person?

Wow, that’s a tough one. I wish I could say it was a legendary show like one of Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band’s early gigs or something like that. But the truth is, I didn’t actually go to a lot of concerts until after I graduated from college and moved to New York. I think part of the reason I have packed (or at least tried to pack) so much showgoing into the past seven or eight years is that I didn’t get to go to a lot of concerts growing up.

But to answer the question, I guess I’d say that the single event I feel most fortunate to have been at was the first so-called “living room show” that Jeff Tweedy did in my friend Sooz’s basement. Really, I feel that way about all three of those shows that she has hosted. Just knowing everything that went into making those nights happen, seeing the joy it brought my friends and thinking about the people those events helped makes them special. The music was pretty great, too. Those shows remind me of how people really can be brought together through music, which I guess is one reason why a lot of us go to the lengths we do to see as much music as possible.

2. What is your favorite sports-related memory?

It’s funny. I can probably come up with a lot more sports-related memories that I’d like to forget: Cubs lose in the playoffs in 1984, Cubs lose in the playoffs in 1989, Cubs lose in the playoffs in 2003—you get the picture. Such is life as a Chicago Cubs fan, I guess.

Anyway, I probably have two favorite sports memories. The first was the last football game of the season when I was a junior in high school. I went to a boarding school called Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and our archrival was Phillips Andover Academy. One Saturday every November, there would be an Exeter-Andover Day when all of the sports teams played each other. The day culminated with the varsity football game. We had a pretty good team, but we hadn’t beaten Andover in like seven years and we found ourselves losing 21-0 at halftime on our home field. It didn’t look good, but somehow we came back. We had a great running back named Erik Bashaw, who I remember literally hurdling a guy on the drive for the go-ahead touchdown. Somehow our defense stopped Andover one last time and we won 28-21. The crowd went crazy, rushing the field. I have a videotape with that scene and I still get chills every time I watch it. (Full disclosure: I barely played at all in that game, but I had started most of the season because of an injury to one of our seniors, so I felt very attached to that team. The next year, as a senior, I played a lot more and we wound up tying Andover, 20-20. We would have won, actually, if not for a missed extra point. Argh!)

My other favorite memory is from my first year of college. It was the fall of 1995 and that was a heady time to be at Northwestern because the football team became a national story when it went 10-1 and went to the Rose Bowl for the first time since the late 1940s.To fully comprehend the story, you have to understand how bad the program had been. NU hadn’t had a winning season since 1971 and once had the longest losing streak in major-college history at 34 games. So for the 1995 team to do what it did just boggled everybody’s minds. It started with a 17-15 upset of Notre Dame in September before classes had started, but I don’t think I realized the full magnitude of the season until a November win over Penn State. The following week, the team was the cover story in Sports Illustrated. I hadn’t expected to be going to a big-time sports school — I mean, NU certainly wasn’t a big state school like Penn State or Ohio State — but that’s what that fall felt like. It was exciting. And I think maybe more than anything else, that whole experience really cemented my desire to be a sportswriter which, in turn, ended up shaping my life for the next 10 years.

3. Would you rather be forced to spend at least one full month in Minnesota every year for the rest of your life, or never be allowed to set foot in Minnesota again?

I’m curious why you’re asking specifically about Minnesota, but I’ll bite. As long as the one full month I was forced to spend in Minnesota wasn’t, say, January or February, then I’d definitely rather be forced to spend a month there than never set foot in the state again. I think one of the coldest nights I’ve ever experienced came in Minnesota when I had to cover a basketball game between Northwestern and the University of Minnesota in the middle of January. It was like a –50-degree wind chill or something crazy like that. So I didn’t like that much. But most of the other times I’ve spent in Minnesota have been wonderful. I remember spending a really fun couple of days there a few years ago when the full lineup of Golden Smog played at the 400 Bar. And I went to a college friend’s wedding in Minneapolis once and had a great time. I think it was on that trip that I first tried a fried cheese curd. It was at the Mall of America. I was skeptical, but it was really good! I’d be sad never to get a chance to have one again. (I know they make them other places, but I’d miss that nostalgia factor.)

4. Please make up an aphorism, a la Poor Richard's Almanack, to impart some wisdom.

Here’s two that I recently learned firsthand:

1. He that driveth behind a tractor-trailer on a foggy night ought not be in a fog.

2. Good friends, good food and a good roll down a hill make getting older much more tolerable.

Multimedia supporting that last statement can be found elsewhere on this blog, if you know where to look. By the way, I just realized I forgot to ask Paul the traditional opening question for all the interviews. I'm hereby christening him Ppaul, entitling him to answer five questions instead of four, and I'll post his additional answer sometime soon.