OCTOBER 2003

Babb at Bat
Writing for national sports magazine fulfills a dream for USC senior

Kent Babb, a 21-year-old senior from Spartanburg, has been writing for daily newspapers since he was 17. He began covering prep football in 1999 for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal; two years and many stories later, Babb headed to USC.

Since then, he has been a stringer for The State, for which he primarily has covered high school sports, ranging from game stories and features to enterprise pieces.

This summer, Babb spent 10 weeks in St. Louis at the Sporting News, a respected national sports magazine, as part of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund internship program.  

In the article below, he recounts his experience.

Written by Kent Babb

Step ... shlop. Step ... shlop. Step ... shlop.

Midday on a sunny Wednesday, and we're getting copy editing labs back. It all sounded normal enough.

Step ... shlop. "Uh, Kent, could you come to my office after class? Thanks."

Even if the gum I had been chewing hadn't gone down my throat, I couldn't respond because the professor's request started and stopped as quickly as Oprah on a treadmill.

OK, gotta concentrate now. There are all these subject-verb disagreements, brevity issues and misused abbreviations just waiting to bite me in the elbow.

Can't worry about what Doug Fisher is going to say.

I circled a few things, substituted a few more and condensed almost a whole sentence. I was finally concentrating. For about 30 seconds.

"Drop the class, drop the class, drop the class," I figured he'd say.

Somehow, I labored through the lab and made the walk that usually has virtually the same effect as walking the Green Mile, into Mr. Fisher's office. 

But instead of bad news, he told me about this Dow Jones internship thingy. "It's kind of like the Pulitzer Prize for college journalists," he said. "And I think you have a good shot."

A month or so later, I filled out the application, took the test and polished my resume, stuffed it into an envelope and sent it away. No problem.

Because I consider myself a rabid pessimist, I thought I had no chance. But I got it.

Come May, I was flying to Nebraska for a two-week residency and then on the Sporting News for a 10-week internship.   The freakin' Sporting News. And if you've ever met me, you know sports is to me what catnip is to a Persian.

At Nebraska, they fed us constantly, drove us everywhere and gave us more information than I could imagine. We met staff members from USA Today, the Portland Oregonian and the Miami Herald. Probably the most fun two weeks I've ever had, all at what my girlfriend affectionately called, "Nerd camp."

OK, fair enough. So I know how to spot a tiny, insignificant error that some people would just overlook. And yes, I know when to use a - gasp! - semicolon. So what?

Then, it was on to St. Louis for the summer to work at the Sporting News. It's the oldest sports magazine in the universe, and one of the most analytical and precise publications you can imagine.

Must be downtown, overlooking the Arch and the Mississippi, and with a staff as big as the capacity of Busch Stadium.

Nope.

It's 30 miles from the city, in a tiny office building and has about 50 people putting together a magazine that goes to 750,000 sports junkies every week.

They put me in the corner with the two TVs, next to a wise-cracking photographer, and slid me a proof or 12 everyday for 2 1⁄2 months. I'd go through some 2,000-word feature, searching for little mistakes. I loved it.

But what I loved more was that I got to write. They started out small - my first one was a 200-worder about the best players over age 40 - and got bigger and bigger.

My last piece, a long feature on Gary Sheffield, was the cover story until three days before the magazine went to press. They decided to pick the Red Sox over the Braves to win the World Series.

I left St. Louis having learned more than I ever thought I would, and it was probably the most amazing experience of my life.

Although I don't have plans yet for next summer, I'm ready to get it rolling.  

Hopefully, this time it'll be without having to take another long walk into a professor's office.