Dawn Reiss’s first big professional assignment might have been a bad idea to begin with, but she’s glad, just barely, that she took it.
Advertising’s job was to find what Reeves called a “marquee” corporate sponsor, and late last summer the search paid off big-time. Associate publisher Paul Rothkopf calls the mix of Visa, the Sporting News, and the NFL “a confluence of very great things.” On the paper’s Web site, beneath Visa’s motto “It’s everywhere NFL fans want to be,” three young adventurers would live out “a fantasy” (Rothkopf), by taking “the ultimate road trip, every fan’s dream trip” (Reeves).
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In a nutshell, the Sporting News was throwing together three strangers in their early 20s and asking them to drive incessantly for four months, logging what would turn out to be more than 25,000 miles and seeing 30 games in 17 weeks. The paper designed the route, which Reiss says was constructed with an eye to hitting big games, not to minimizing time on the road. The paper didn’t ask about their driving histories. Last week I described the setup to an insurance industry spokesman, and she thought it called for the sort of “high-risk” auto insurance policy few companies would write. That wasn’t an issue at the Sporting News, which simply added Reiss, Murphy, and Carlton to its blanket policy.
Before the season ended, all three would be ticketed for speeding, one of them for driving 100 miles an hour in Nevada. Other misadventures were duly chronicled at www.sportingnews.com/nfl/roadtrip. In early November, for example, they reached their motel near the Saint Louis airport at 1 AM. Facing a 6 AM getaway and a 12-hour drive to Dallas, they left a lot of their gear in the backseat of their Grand Prix. In the morning they discovered a window had been shattered and the car looted. Reiss lost $500 worth of clothing. They rented an Impala and continued. Later that day Carlton would write, “We’re normally quick to laugh at just about anything. But as I finish this story, Dawn is driving the new rental car silently through the rain and Murph is trying to nap. The jokes may begin again tomorrow, but right now, there’s nothing too funny about any of this.”
Reiss’s story got more wryly affirmative as it went on. Even today, when Reiss has every right to wish she’d never heard of the Sporting News, she’s “60-40” on the side of not regretting that she went. “There were things difficult about it,” she says. “But overall, it was a positive experience.”
Today she’s mending at home. She’s hoping she’ll be allowed to go to the Super Bowl, but she told me last week, “They say it’s going to be a full year before I make a full recovery. I haven’t been able to sleep a full night. I took morphine in the hospital, then codeine for a month, and now Motrin. I’m not a big painkiller person. I’m going to physical therapy twice a week.”
“I sure hope so.”
