The email from Glenda, a deputy editor at Forbes.com, flitted into my inbox at precisely 8:31 a.m. on April 21. That’s right — Glenda the Deputy Editor (as opposed to Glenda the Good Witch, of Wizard of Oz fame) was writing to say we needed to talk over the phone.

I was pretty sure I knew what it was about: She was going to shut down the Sixers-related blog I had done for Forbes for almost exactly two years. And truth be told, there was ample reason for that. My traffic had been pathetic: 183 hits for an April 20 piece about Maurice Cheeks, who I had judged to be the best point guard in team history (not exactly a radical line of thinking) … 114 (!) for one on April 17 about Larry Costello, who was No. 2 on that list … 162 for one on April 10 about Wali Jones … and so on.

I hadn’t had over 1,000 clicks since Feb. 3, when I wrote a piece about what the team should do at the trade deadline. That one drew 2,460 sets of eyeballs, which is good only by comparison to my other anemic totals. It was also instructive: Apparently people would rather read speculative BS as opposed to demonstrable facts.

Understand that I wasn’t unhappy with my work, only with the fact that it wasn’t attracting any attention. The higher-ups obviously weren’t too thrilled, either. Which is what Glenda the Deputy Editor told me when we spoke late on the afternoon of April 21: Finish out the month, and then be on your way. She was nice enough about it, if a little stilted; it seemed she had either rehearsed her delivery or was reading from a script. So it goes. To paraphrase Brother Bluto, 40 years of sportwriterin’ down the drain.

Forty bleepin’ years. It really has been that long, hasn’t it? Forty years since I came out of Gettysburg College, certain I would someday be working for Sports Illustrated. But first, there was the matter of getting a job. Any job. So I interviewed at the Carlisle Sentinel. The sports editor at the time, guy by the name of Jim Quiggle, gave a written quiz. Asked, for example, what a banana kick was. 

I guessed and got that one right, and hit on enough other ones to pass the test. For the princely sum of $164 a week, I was on my way. (As an aside, I have to say there’s a certain symmetry in seeing one’s career begin with a quiz about banana kicks and end with a call from Glenda the Deputy Editor.)

Let me be abundantly clear here: This is not one of those journalistic horror stories you hear virtually every day, where there are layoffs and downsizing and buyouts, oh my. I have a full-time writing job, albeit outside sports, and it involves working with smart, dedicated people. The Sixers thing was just something I was doing on the side.

So there are no complaints, and there is not a shred of bitterness. But I’d be lying if there wasn’t a tiny bit of nostalgia. (Also a ton of regrets, but that’s another story for another time.) 

I remember some of the stories that came out OK, and all the ones that didn’t. I remember springing out of bed at 3 a.m. and running to a Turkey Hill in the pre-Internet days to see if I did in fact make a mistake I thought I had. And, sadly, I did. 

I remember the wonder of it all. I remember the first Redskins training camp in Carlisle, and catching sight of a defensive tackle named Dave Butz, who at 6-8 and 295 pounds was the largest human I had seen to that point in my life. (Now, of course, he would be given some of Lenny Dykstra’s “really good vitamins” so he could bulk up another 50 pounds, enabling him to hold the point of attack against some similarly sized behemoth.)

I remember the humor of it all. Of Butz seeing the Redskins’ kickers and punters return from a jog during practice and asking them, “How’s our track team?” Of one of Butz’s teammates desperately trying to get a woman’s phone number before curfew in a Carlisle bar called the Gingerbread Man. (I was there for research purposes only, of course.) Of the time a few years later, after I began working in Lancaster and was covering a Sixers-Knicks playoff game, that I overheard a New York writer trying to clarify his blistering critique of Knicks center Bill Cartwright over the phone to some editor: “AND ‘INVISI-BILL’ WAS AT HIS ‘INVISI-BILL’ WORST … THAT’S SPELLED ‘I-N-V ..”

I remember all the people along the way who helped, especially those at the beginning, when I clearly didn’t know what I was doing — guys like Harry Chapman and Jim Dooley, the football and boys’ basketball coaches at Cumberland Valley, respectively, who patiently walked me through what was what. Both are gone now, and I regret not having reached out to them in the interim. Great men, both of them.

I remember that for a very long time there were problems sending stories from remote locations.  First it was via telecopier, which invariably garbled one’s typewritten copy. Then it was via Radio Shack laptops, which were cutting edge for about a week in 1984. Again, there were landlines involved, and you had these couplers that fit over the receiver, only if you didn’t do it just right it didn’t always work and … (insert profanity here). It’s funny now, anyway.

I remember the excitement of starting new full-time jobs — twice — and the gut punch of being laid off, via telephone, while in a dorm room at Lehigh University in July 2008, covering Eagles training camp. Can still picture the room, the phone, the dresser it was sitting on, all of it. 

I remember all the places I freelanced over the following decade, near and far. Got a couple bylines in the Philadelphia Daily News, which was a cheap thrill, and seemingly everywhere else — Lancaster, Harrisburg, Reading and Lebanon, of course, but also such far-flung locales as Naples, Fla., Houston, Tex., Springfield, Mass. and Rock Island, Ill. Even covered the National Spelling Bee one year. I believe there were 20-some outlets in all. And shortly after I took on my current full-time job, in March 2018, a family friend said she was happy I was “working again.” Never stopped, lady.

So yeah, it’s been an interesting ride. Even fun at times, though I’ve gotten ripped on occasion for saying that, by certain “serious” journalists. So it goes.

Was it all worth it? I can’t pretend to know. There are those who are fond of saying that storytellers have always had their place throughout history, but that sounds so pretentious, so highfalutin. I mean, c’mon — I’ve spent most of my life writing about basketball and such. It’s not like future generations will be pondering my coverage of Solanco-Ephrata from 1994.

All I can say is, there is a certain challenge in getting it right and saying it right, and a certain satisfaction in doing so, every now and then. And that’s what I’m going to try to continue to do, over in this little corner of the Worldwide Web. Clicks don’t matter anymore. It’s all on my dime now, so come visit. I’ll try to make it worth your while.