Long hours, dull work, no pay. What activity fits this description? Prison work? No—writing and editing for Spec Sports.

As a sophomore, I was looking to improve my writing. Submitting weekly articles for the Spectator would surely do the trick, I thought. I went to a meeting at the Spectator office in the first week of the spring semester. Jon Kamran, a sports editor whom I’d met in Lit Hum, needed someone to take the tennis beat. This was just what I had been looking for—a regular assignment. I volunteered to cover tennis.

I knew I had to do something special with the post. I signed up for a Victorian poetry class with an inspiring professor and immersed myself in Tennyson, Hopkins, and Swinburne. I was so impressed by Tennyson that I tried to speak in his voice in my articles. It was a lovely idea, but tennis articles did not typically call for mention of the “Strong Son of God, Immortal Love,” or the “One far-off divine event/ To which the whole Creation moves.” So I made other allusions. For an article previewing the last game of the season for a losing football squad, I wrote the headline, “Do not go gentle into that good night...” I don’t know if Columbia won or lost that game. Perhaps the headline should have read: “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.”

In any case, at the request of the copy editor, I stopped trying to be Tennyson. I quit making allusions to poets and wrote facts and stats in simple prose. I adopted the many rules of the Spectator’s style book, even though the rules were often incorrect. The result was dry, colorless writing. I was once chided for using the verb, “temper,” without the words, “with something...” following it. Perhaps the New York Times should be chided for printing the headline: “In Bell Case, Black New Yorkers See Nuances that Temper Rage.” Following the style book put me in shackles.

As a junior, I became an associate editor and edited the section’s articles on Thursday nights. This has to have been the most tedious job of my entire college career. Associates typically work from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., depending on how late writers send in articles. If a writer doesn’t finish his article, then the associate is responsible for it. Associates frequently have to patch together articles at the last minute without any interviews.

I won’t mince words—this was horrible! My hatred for Spectator peaked on my 21st birthday, which fell on the Thursday that I was scheduled to work as an associate. I felt obliged to come in for my shift because I had recently taken a day off. A friend called that night and asked if I’d like to go to the jazz club Smoke for a drink. I took a break from Spectator around midnight and went to meet my friend. An hour later, one of the top editors at Spectator called me to say that the office was “banging on all cylinders” and that they needed me to come back right away. I wondered if, through some kind of secret surveillance system, the editors at Spectator could see me enjoying my beer and disapproved of it. I was a prisoner who had run across the yard and jumped the fence. I was a fugitive the authorities wanted back.

And I came back. I thought about quitting Spectator a few times but quickly dismissed the idea. The joy of working at this newspaper is facing the night’s toil and trouble with friends. And I count everyone at Spectator a friend. “Farewell! We lose ourselves in light.”