More Than a Game (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780692885284)

I have become many things in the 26-plus years I have spent on this Earth. I am a son and a brother, a writer and a reader, a high school benchwarmer and a halfway decent golfer, a beach bum and a college graduate, a North Carroll Panther and a Maryland Terrapin. There is one thing, however, that I quite honestly never thought I'd become: An author. I always wanted to, but it's hard, you see, writing a book. I'm not much of an outliner. Most of my thoughts come on a whim, unexpected and unbidden - on a run, reading, drinking coffee, watching my Terrapins blow another lead. And I'll grab whatever writing utensil I have and just let the words in my brain flow through my hands. Sometimes I don't even know what I'm about to write until I'm physically doing it. It's kind of fascinating, because I'm discovering what my book is about as I'm writing it. Maybe this isn't the most traditional path to literary success, but whatever, it works for me. I've always been a fan of homegrown styles. I was raised that way, anyway, in a sports-mad hamlet in northwest Maryland named Hampstead. The town is so small that, during my sophomore year of college, I had hitched a ride home for winter break with a friend from New Jersey. She typed Hampstead, Maryland into the GPS and nothing popped up. The town was literally too small for a navigation system. My dad, a fine American from Pittsburgh, and my mom, Jill, the most pleasant woman you'll ever meet, raised my brothers and me on a steady diet of church and sports. Sometimes the latter would interfere with the former, but we'd never let anything get in the way of our sports - golf, soccer, football, basketball, baseball, swim, beach volleyball. You name it, we played it. I wasn't good enough at any of them to play at a major college, so I did the next best thing: I wrote about them. Writing has taken me to the Florida Panhandle, where I wrote for the Northwest Florida Daily News and covered a number of athletes I now watch on ESPN on Saturdays and Sundays. And it has since taken me to California, where I'm freelancing and taking my first literary shot at non-fiction, in a book on beach volleyball. It's kind of cool, hanging out with Olympians, you know? On the pages of this site, you can find updates on the progress of all my books and the occasional piece I might want others to read. It's a good life we sportswriters live.