As North Decatur Jr/Sr High School continued its bi-annual resurrection of the Chautauquas held in the area up until 1930, the school welcomed a variety of notable guests.
Mike Lopresti, sports columnist for USA Today, spoke to attendees for 50 minutes beginning at 10 a.m. Tuesday. Lopresti was raised in Richmond and spent his first five years as a journalist there, he explained. One of his most memorable stories, he noted, will always be a play-off game in his home town, which he was covering for the local paper. When he returned to the newsroom to write his story, he was suddenly stricken with terrible abdominal pain. So, he went home to lie down. He then went to the doctor and learned it was appendicitis and had to dictate his story on the game over the phone while being put under anesthesia. He has no memory, he said, of the story, but readers later told him it was his best story ever.
This year, he told the students, the final four included a player from Tanzania. He learned that the president of Tanzania had been a basketball player and decided to try and make contact for his final four column. The Tanzanian phone system went out before the President could return his call, but the call was returned this Monday, three weeks after the playing of the final four.
These sorts of expanded views of sporting events are typical for Lopresti, who also sold peanuts at a Cincinnati Reds game in order to get a different view point on major league baseball. When in Beijing for the Olympics, he visited Tieneman Square and asked questions of those he passed, even going so far as to contact the photographer who captured the now iconic image of a lone student standing before the tanks. He told the crowd at North that had it not been for students in the photographer’s hotel who found film for him, the picture would never have been taken.
Also in China, Lopresti decided to challenge a 65-year-old woman to a game of table tennis.
“She couldn’t play badly enough to let me win,” he laughed.
Lopresti was also one of the first few journalists to interview the security guard who found the backpack of explosives during the Olympics in Atlanta.
“He single-handedly saved the Olympics,” Lopresti said.
For a brief time, it was believed the guard had placed the backpack there himself. However, when the truth was revealed, Lopresti was the only journalist who was not on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
For the students, it was an opportunity to see where journalism could take them. They had the opportunity to ask questions and learn about life far away from the fields, hills and streams of Decatur County. Following Lopresti, the crowd heard from Russ Pulliam, columnist for the Indianapolis Star.
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