I’d love to go back there.
To be able to enter a room and share my knowledge about what you are about to embark on. None of that crap about how you are going to make it if you work hard and treat people well. Sure, anyone can get far with that mindset, but at the end of the day, people who don’t work well, especially with others, can make it to the top as well. They didn’t name the show “My Big Beautiful, Nice, Astute Boss” did they? Every fighter has a plan until they get hit and that pretty much goes for college students.
You think you know, but you have no fricken idea.
I’d tell them that the real world sucks. No. That’s too harsh and narrow-minded because its coming from someone who’s bitter.
How about this?
The real world is a competitive ass-kissing place in which you will see and hear things that will make you turn around and wish you faced the problems of how many beers you can drink without being too impaired to drive after a frat party. There aren’t many nice guys or people who are looking out for your best interest. You will be alone and you will lay there in bed contemplating, “What the hell did I spend almost 25,000 bucks on school for?”
This is hell…and I wish I could walk into a Buffalo State classroom to warn you all of this.
I’ve been doing TV for 10 years and I’d like to tell you that I’ve made it… but really, I still feel like some tourist in France who only knows how to order a croissant and a glass of wine. Some days I’m happy about this road I’ve traveled while other days I wish I would have just stayed at my parents’ restaurant and flipped pizza dough.
I remember being at Buff State and hearing all the professors tell us that we were going to embark on this happy life of broadcasting. They made it sound so easy. They talked about how you had to do all these extracurricular activities. “Help our college TV Station! Make our radio station sound professional! It will help you in the end! Bosses will love how you were the sports director and called Bengals games!”
In the end, no one in NYC gave a crap what I did in college. School was out and so was what I did there.
So now that I have my little rant out of the way, let me give you guys some practical advice about not giving up…because I did.
Since I was around 10-years-old, I wanted to be a sportscaster. As horrible as it sounds now because his schtick is so old and repetitive, I idolized Chris Berman. Yes, maybe it had to with his Buffalo love, but I really thought he was a funny guy at the age of 10. I just know that in some way, I wanted to do sports on TV. George Michael’s Sports Machine? How about In the Sports Zone with Joe Pinzone!?
College was suppose to be the place where I’d get my start in learning basic TV presentation. I’d get to do standups, voiceovers, anchor the sportscast on the campus station and all that fun stuff that the professionals seem to make look so easy. Alas, it wasn’t easy at all. During my junior/senior year, I did all that stuff and I wasn’t really good at it. I just couldn’t be a cookie-cutter anchor guy. I wanted to be like a Berman. I wanted to spin the news in my bombastic way because that’s who I am. I’m Joe from Buffalo, a guy who spits out incoherent sentences but can nail a bunch of one-liners about sports at any given time. Someone who speaks from the heart and doesn’t sound like some sort of robot. Alas, that way doesn’t work on TV unless you make Around the Horn or First Take. I needed to be well-spoken and vanilla. I tried being a corporate suit who would just blend in with the other Ken dolls out there, but I was defective.
Could I have changed? Yes, but there was one thing I couldn’t understand, and that was the concept of getting better. I wanted to be great right out of the gate, but I wasn’t. I was my own worse enemy.
I melted down during my 2nd-to-last semester while I was taking 18 credit hours and doing all this extracurricular stuff. I should have been out trying to bang co-eds, but instead I was trying to bang out the perfect voiceover, one that sounded like John Murphy. I just sounded like someone who was reading from a sheet of a paper. A bunch of words that had no meaning because it wasn’t how I normally talk.
The last straw was when I burned out trying to record a voiceover for a Buffalo State basketball piece and I hated everything about the way it sounded. My voice sounded nasally, the words didn’t make sense, and I was about as natural as a hot dog. I raced out out of the broadcasting center at Buff State at 11pm angry and pissed off at the world. I then crashed my mom’s car on Elmwood Avenue because I missed the red light while yelling at myself for not sounding like a natural.
At that point, I gave up.
My contingency plan was set in motion. I knew people in NYC who worked at MTV and being behind the scenes seemed like an easier road to travel. I kind of dug MTV during that time and they actually had music then. Why not try that? For my last semester, I had an easier schedule and pretty much knew that sports wasn’t going to be my play anymore.
Fast-forward 10 years later and I wish I would have stuck with it.
I’m not so sure anchoring or reporting would have been my forte, but I should have given it more time when I left college. Now I’m just working in reality TV and frankly, it wasn’t what I dreamed about doing when I was younger. I kind of fell into it and if I want to live in NYC, I was going to have to keep working in it to pay for an overpriced 600-square foot apartment. I’d give anything to try and get back into the sports race, but it is too late for me. I’ve tried and I will keep on trying, but not many folks are going to hire a 32-year-old with no experience in sports production.
However, like Craig Rivet, I can take to the minors to live out a portion of my dream. I think one of the main reasons why I keep blogging about Buffalo sports in May is because talking about it was what I genuinely wanted to do when I was younger. What makes this site so great for me is that I don’t have to play the cookie cutter-reporter with Aqua Net in my hair who laughs at Mary Alice Demler’s stupid-ass jokes when she tosses it to sports. I can do whatever I want and in a way, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Even still…I regret not working at it longer when I was leaving college.
So college graduates, my message to you is simple: Don’t let your dreams be dreams.
Even if you wake up one day and realize your dream is becoming a nightmare because you can’t find work or your entry level job pays you 8 bucks an hour, I believe the cream will always rise to the top if you work hard at it. Just get that foot in the door and be endearing to everyone around you. Don’t settle for anything less than what you dreamed of when you are facing some adversity. Just look at adversity as your friend and how it will make you stronger. If you believe in yourself then fight for it cause no one else is going to do it for you. The strangers you will meet are just friends who you just haven’t met yet.
Yes, there are still haters out there who will throw boulders at you when you are trying to climb the mountain, but hard work will pay off in the end. Just learn from your mistakes and don’t give up. If there’s one thing you have on me, it is time. There is time for you to grow up and if you believe in yourself, you can accomplish anything.
Your class is dismissed, but the learning will never end.
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