After playing college basketball for North Carolina, Steve Hale had two career choices: NBA player or medical school. He chose the latter. Yet Hale’s dedication on the court was obvious. As David Halberstam wrote in Playing For Keeps, “Steve Hale ... played with an intensity that bordered on the violent. Years later, when Michael Jordan was asked who defended him well in the NBA, he often mentioned that Steve Hale back at Chapel Hill had been as tough on him in practice as anyone in the professional game.”

The first thing I noticed about Jennifer Shook was her beautiful eyes and smile. I also noticed her wheelchair. During several interviews with her and her parents, I visited Craig, Colorado, where she grew up and where fate nearly took her life.

I interviewed Shalane Flanagan a week before she defended her national collegiate cross-country title in the fall of 2003. Certainly one of North Carolina’s greatest athletes, she turned professional after that school year. The profile I wrote tracks her rise, beginning as a preschooler insisting that she could run with her parents around the block.

While covering the Great Outdoor Games in the summer of 2002 for the Burlington Free Press, I saw Big Air Dogs in person for the first time. The sport’s premise: the master stands at the edge of the dock and throws a ball or toy into the water as the dog leaps for it. The longest leap wins. A year later in Connecticut, in Stamford and Norwalk, I met the owner of two dogs that gained big sponsors for their big jumps.

Camille Little and Ivory Latta will be remembered as two of Carolina’s best women’s basketball players. I interviewed them before practice at Carmichael Auditorium in January 2004. Although just freshmen at the time, they didn’t play like it.

This story was the biggest breakthrough for me as a writer. It was my final exam for a creative sports writing class. We could choose any then-current Carolina athlete and write a 2,500-word profile on that athlete. Tim Crothers, a former Sports Illustrated senior writer who graduated from Carolina in 1986, taught the class. I chose Chris Maples, who was drafted by the Detroit Tigers after graduation, for obvious reasons, one of which was his willingness to chat candidly with me for a few hours in the Boshamer Stadium dugout. This was the first story I am proud of and since then I knew I could be a great writer if I kept working hard and learning from other great writers.

I didn’t have to ask Ray Bardis, a former PGA Tour caddy, many questions. Instead, he just told me one story after another at the Stamford Senior Center in Connecticut. He filled in many of the details so I wouldn’t even call it an interview. It was one of my first stories I did while writing for The Stamford Times in the summer of 2003. After we chatted for a couple hours, we had a putting contest on the Astro Turf putting green which overlooked the bustling city of Stamford.

If I could sit down and have dinner with any three people, other than family and close friends, Tom Brennan would be the first person I’d invite. What other college basketball coach ends his morning radio shows, “Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery, today’s a gift, that’s why we call it the present. So tear into it like a 5 year old on Christmas.”? He ended his 19-year coaching career at Vermont with three straight conference titles and the upset of Big East champion Syracuse. I interviewed him in his Burlington office in August 2002. I had written for the Burlington Free Press that summer, and did this profile on him in anticipation of when Vermont played North Carolina in Chapel Hill that December. After chatting with him for 50 minutes I told him I only had a couple more questions and, looking at the clock on the wall, that I was sorry for taking up so much of his time. He told me that I could take as long as I wanted and that “I don’t even see the clock.”

As a senior at North Carolina, I interviewed my landlord’s father, John Brooks, a 97-year-old who lived in the same housing complex as me. I wrote this story in the fall of 2003. When I returned from spring break in March 2004, I received a call from my landlord. John had died in his sleep at age 98. At the church ceremony the priest was filling in and did not know John so he read my story and handed it out to John’s family and friends. Before John died, he had given my landlord an envelope and said, open it when I die. Inside the envelope was $200 with a message to have drinks on him. After the church ceremony, John’s family and friends went out for drinks.

Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT) is a therapy that helps people recover from various injuries or illnesses and prevents injuries, according to Patty Bennett and other MAT therapists. It looks like a massage but it’s not. This story, written in December 2004 for the Aspen Daily News, looks at the history of MAT, from its origins in the NFL to its growing popularity. Yet it is still relatively unknown.

The first time I had heard or seen Barack Obama was on my televison. His charisma and articulation at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was refreshing to see from a politician. Then I saw him in person at the Aspen Institute a year later. He did not disappoint.

The sport of climbing became much popular in America toward the end of the millennium. The best climbers come from states with high mountaintops. Vermont, ironically, rarely produces top climbers. Nikki Whelan is an anomaly. This is a story, which I wrote in the summer of 2002, of Whelan and a more experienced climber who met by chance and gained more passion for the sport because of each other.

Working at the Hotel Jerome as a doorman and bellman, I met dozens and dozens of celebrities and famous people. Hunter S. Thompson pulled up in his maroon Jeep one afternoon with his wife Anita, a half-full rocks glass and a lit cigarette. I’d expect nothing else from a man who lived and wrote what he thought. That was the fall of 2004. He went in for drinks at the hotel bar called the J-Bar. A few months later he committed suicide. I’m still glad I met him. I can’t say that about many of the hotel’s patrons.

For a feature writing class I took in the fall of 2003, we had to write a story about a place. I chose Michael Jordan’s high school, driving to Wilmington, N.C. on a weekday (it was fall break so we had no classes on Friday and Monday). I talked to Jordan’s former junior varsity coach and noticed something odd about the trophy case outside of the basketball gym.

It was my first trip overseas. I traveled with my mom during spring vacation in 1996 to Cairo, Egypt. As a college senior, I wrote this story about my adventure in a desert tunnel.

As far as my skiing life goes, the Aspen Highlands Bowl in Colorado is as intense as it comes. Following a couple of chairlift rides to the top of the mountain, I hiked for almost an hour with my skis on my shoulder to the top of the Bowl. It was fun and tiring, just for one run.

I was reading The Professional and The Sweet Science – two books on boxing by two great writers, W.C. Heinz and A.J. Liebling – at the time Ron Artest and the Indiana Pacers were in one of the worst NBA brawls ever. I came to the conclusion that professional basketball was headed in the same direction that boxing had already made.