Chance moments change a life

There are fortunate moments in life when you just happen to be in the right place at the right time.

The last one for myself was when I happened to walk into my parents' TV room in Grand Junction, Colo., the week before the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

The television was tuned to ESPN and a woman commentator was bragging to her male counterparts that she had picked the NCAA champions for two years straight; this year she was predicting it would be Kansas.

In a show of female solidarity, and also a need to follow the advice of at least one person who watched a few college basketball games this season, I took her lead and chose Kansas as the winner in a pool. This led me to a triumphant victory in the pool of 20, despite the fact that before the Final Four weekend, I was in 12th place.

So if I hadn't wandered through my parents' TV room during the short time that woman was on the screen, I probably would have chosen North Carolina as the eventual winner, as did a good percentage of the pool's participants. (Except my oldest son, who strangely enough, always goes with Georgetown, no matter where they're seeded or even if they didn't make the tournament.)

There was once a sportswriter at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, John Meyer, who in part determined the course of my life, just because he happened to be sitting at the bar at Chad's, a sports bar/restaurant in Lakewood, Colo., on a night I was busing tables.

Somehow, we got to talking about my goals to be a sportswriter, and he told me that the Rocky Mountain News always needed people to come in and take box scores at night when coaches called in their results over the phone.

It was the busy prep basketball season, when I was home from college on Christmas break, so I was quite happily received as a phone-answerer along with a legion of other young people, many of whom also had careers in journalism planned.

This led to assignments to cover high-school sports events as a stringer during breaks from college. For sports such as basketball and football, this required attending the game, interviewing a coach or two, then rushing back to the paper that night from schools scattered throughout the Denver metro area, sometimes having no more than 20 minutes to blast out a story once I arrived in the newsroom.

I was first assigned to the area's smaller high schools, then moved on to the larger, small-college sized schools, and eventually I got to cover state tournaments that required overnight stays in glamorous locales such as Pueblo.

Through that job at the Rocky Mountain News, I met my husband when he was an assistant coach for a basketball team I was covering one night. It was also instrumental in securing my first job at the Inter Lake as a sportswriter, with all the valuable experience I had received at a big-city newspaper. (Or maybe it was because I begged every editor there to call the Inter Lake and exaggerate about what a valuable addition I would be to the staff, but it worked either way.)

Never again did I hear about the opportunities for joining a sports department in the way I did with the Rocky Mountain News, so if I hadn't gotten into a conversation with John Meyer that night at Chad's, my life would undoubtedly have turned out very differently, including where I now live.

And had I not moved to the Flathead Valley in 1989, I wouldn't have been in this particular NCAA pool.

So those who are bitter about my admittedly lucky victory, please register your complaints with John Meyer, now a columnist at the Denver Post, but don't expect him to care. Though he had a profound effect on my life, chances are he would have absolutely no idea who you're talking about.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com