Columns

Taking on a madness to march

By ANDREW SKERRITT
Published March 27, 2007

March Madness is mostly about the passion for college basketball. But this time of year many of us are afflicted by a another kind of itch - the irresistible urge to uproot our lives, move to a new town, a new state, in time for when schools reopen in the fall.

I was reminded of that itch when Winthrop University basketball coach Gregg Marshall was being courted by the University of South Florida. I was tempted to call Marshall and tell him to take the job.

This isn't about basketball; it's about taking on challenges. It's about starting from scratch after you've reached the top, wherever the top is.

I was in Rock Hill, the South Carolina town where Winthrop is based, when Marshall took his team to its first NCAA tournament game in Indianapolis nine years ago. Then a columnist for the hometown Herald, I drove with a photographer and sportswriter to the game to watch the inevitable loss, but I saw him become the toast of that small town as his college team grabbed national headlines.

Rock Hill is the sort of place people move to thinking that it's just a quick stop on the road to somewhere bigger and end up staying for much longer. That happened to Marshall. That happened to me. I stayed seven years - my longest of any tenure anywhere in this country. Then four years ago, the telephone rang. It was a friend telling me about an opportunity in the Tampa Bay area. During the previous six years, I always found reasons to stay ---- my neighbors, my church, my friends, my children, my volunteer activities. I had found emotional and spiritual balance in the most unlikely place.

I loved walking into the supermarket and talking to people I didn't know. I loved standing on the steps of the small Presbyterian church and talking about pig picking and sausage making. I loved my life.

But months before the phone call, I had begun to feel a creeping restlessness. It was subtle, but it was enough to make me mourn my comfortable way of life even as I conspired to voluntarily surrender it.

No, I wasn't crazy. Work was fun. My family had found a place that felt like home. And for many people - especially immigrants - that's one of the hardest things to do.

But I felt like it was time for a new challenge. It's the thing that makes men climb mountains and cross oceans. So when the call came from the St. Petersburg Times, I felt ready.

Of course it's never that simple. If starting over is scary, then starting over when you're thriving where you are is twice as scary. It's hard to leave a place where everybody knows your name to leave and be almost anonymous.

What if the move doesn't work? I couldn't bring myself to go back and ask for a do-over.

What if my family is miserable? We've heard the stories of the unhappy spouses and rebellious children who hated a move.

I've been blessed with no such fallout. It has been four years since I took the plunge. Turns out that Marshall isn't taking a similar chance on USF. That's a pity. As a Winthrop alum I feel no disloyalty. It'd be nice to have competitive college basketball games in Tampa for a change.

Picking up and moving is hard. But I believe that you can't see where you're going from where you're standing. That's why moving is so exciting. You never know how each move will turn out.

* * *

I need to set the record straight. After Patricia Wells read my Friday column about the first anniversary of Kristofer King's fatal stabbing by a suspected neo-Nazi, she called to say that she had not been dating a black man at the time. Wells, who was also stabbed during the attack, said the man in question was a friend who was helping with home repairs.

Andrew Skerritt can be reached at (813) 909-4602 or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 4602. His e-mail address is askerritt@sptimes.com.

[Last modified March 26, 2007, 23:16:07]