Barstow Sports Blog

Like any good reporter, Paul Gutierrez had many, many stories to tell for our Q&A, and there was not nearly enough space in the newspaper to fit all of them.
Here’s a sampling of some of the stories:

• Paul talked about giving the readers behind the scenes information for extra impact. Well here’s the behind the scenes story behind our interview with Paul.
There were really two interviews with Paul. The first one went well but a recording malfunction (i.e. Matt screwed up) meant it didn’t get recorded. There were plenty of notes taken, but not enough to piece together an entire Q&A. Paul was gracious enough to agree to another interview and delivered even more interesting stories the second time around.

• Paul began talking with Sports Illustrated around the time he was graduating from UNLV in 1995. At one point during the hiring process the magazine called his parents home in Barstow. His mom answered the phone and very nearly hung up on them because she thought they were trying to sell her a subscription.
Guiterrez was taking post-undergrad classes at UNLV when he finally got the job. One of the classes was a television production course.

Q: Were you able to finish those classes?
A: It was funny. (Sports Illustrated) called and offered me the job on a Thursday, and the drop date was on a Friday. It was literally in the middle of the semester. I anchored the newscast that night because we had a weekly student-newcast in Vegas. During my signoff I said ‘This is my last newscast. I’m out of here. I got a job at SI.’ And then I dropped all my classes the next day and moved to New York a couple weeks later.”

Q: What was it like moving to New York?
A: It was a different world. It’s definitely the kind of place I appreciate more now then when I was living there. You are literally living on top of each other, there and you don’t see the stars. That’s the thing about Barstow that I missed — you go outside at night and you see the stars. In New York, not so much. You see building. There was a certain vibe and energy in New York that was really cool to be there at that time in my career. There’s no negatives; it was just a different atmosphere. It took literally about a year just to get used to being there.

• Paul once covered a Dodgers spring training game in Port St. Lucie, Fla., that turned into a Barstow reunion.
“I’m in the press box sitting next to John Olguin, who’s also a Barstow High School graduate and was working for the Dodgers PR department at that time, and down on the field is Dino Ebel,” Paul said. “It was three kids from Barstow in Port St. Lucie for spring training. All we were missing was Del Taco.”

• When asked about his favorite articles, Paul listed two different stories from opposite ends of his career.
He was working on a feature on Angels utility player Brian Downing while freelancing for the Desert Dispatch in 1990. Unbeknownst to him, Brian wasn’t speaking much to the Los Angeles media at the time.
“When I approached him after a game he was sitting at his locker, facing his locker, and when I came up, scared to death and asked, ‘Um, Mr. Downing, do you have a second?’ ” Paul wrote in an e-mail. “And he never looks up and says real low, ‘That depends; where you from?’ Shaking like a leaf, I gulp hard and say, ‘Barstow.’ And he turns, looks at me and his intensity is gone as he smiles and says, ‘Barstow? Well, I guess we’ve all got to start somewhere. Have a seat.’ ”

The other article came recently during his tenure with Sacramento Bee.

In “When baseball worlds collide”, Paul wrote about a subject he could relate to being an American-born Latino. He told the story of those players in Major League Baseball who cross both lines of heritage in a column.

Here’ s a snippet of the article:

“They are the ‘lost tribe’ of major-league baseball — the American-born Latino ballplayer. And — though they are as American as mom, apple pie, baseball and Taco Bell, and seemingly can walk with ease in both worlds to serve as a sort of bridge to the American way of life for their foreign-born brethren across that great cultural divide — they sometimes find they don’t fully fit in on either side.”

Thanks again to Paul for doing the interview twice! You can pick up his book he wrote with Dodgers legend Tommy Davis from Amazon.com.

— Matthew Peters, sports editor

Zach Niusulu was a little wary of playing for a coach who never recruited him. Dirk Koetter was fired as the head football coach at Arizona State and replaced by Dennis Erickson in early 2007. Niusulu, a redshirt sophomore and Barstow native, had his fears eased once he got to talking with Erickson during spring practices. Erickson looked at his roster and noticed Niusulu was from Barstow and remembered one of his other players who once shared the 92311 zip code — T.J. Houshmandzadeh.

“He figured out T.J. was from Barstow, and that’s how we connected,” Zach said. “That was a nice little ice breaker with my head coach.”

Erickson coached T.J. and Bengals teammate Chad Johnson at Oregon State in 2000 when the Beavers finished ranked No. 4 in the AP Top 25 College Football Poll.

“He told me about T.J. I told him, I remember watching T.J. play growing up, but I never really knew who he was because he wasn’t that type of receiver in high school. That kind of helped out the process of me taking in the process of my coach getting fired.”

Look later in the week for more questions and answers from Zach.