If you’ve ever run into me or seen me around, there’s a good chance I was smiling.
I may not know what you’ve been through today, or this week, or this month, but I know that it never hurts to see a smile. I smile in case you haven’t seen one yet today, and I smile hoping it was one of many.
I love to smile, and my time at The Michigan Daily has afforded me more reasons than ever to do so. It’s connected me with so many people whom I can’t help but smile at when I see them, and it’s given me so many experiences that I can’t help but smile about when I think about them.
Four years and 205 stories ago, I was smiling at the chance to write about sports for the very first time during a time when sports weren’t even happening because of COVID-19. I joined The Daily having no idea what it was about or what I wanted to do here. I just knew I had to do something besides Zoom classes and my older brother Hani mentioned The Daily once over the summer as something a prospective communications major could involve themselves in.
I didn’t send an email or really think too much of it, I just filled out a Google Form that I found online and ended up on the email list. I don’t remember what Theo or Ethan’s email said exactly, but I remember it making me smile — little did I know that I’d eventually spend a year as Managing Sports Editor sending emails like that myself and hopefully making people smile every time they read them.
Because at that time, I was simply re-learning how to smile.
When my dad passed away in the summer before my senior year of high school, I didn’t think I’d ever smile again, but I knew that I wanted to. His smile filled any room he was in, and I wanted to regain the ability to do so myself.
I don’t remember the first time I smiled after that, but I know I did eventually. I do remember the first time I felt a real thrill of excitement after it though. I was playing a ping pong match with my brother Peter, and with the game on the line I won a thrilling point. Slowly but surely I was rebuilding, but I wouldn’t talk about it much. Looking back at it though, ping pong is an Olympic sport, so that’s a sports story.
I threw myself back into sports as I tried to build back, rejoining lift sessions and helping lead football practices in the following weeks as one of the team captains of that year. The day before our first game of the year, following back-to-back 1-8 seasons and facing a team that hadn’t lost a regular season game in two years, I addressed my father’s passing to the team for the first and only time.
I told them not to be nervous, that it’s just a game that we’ve prepared for, not something coming at us out of the blue. I told them to play desperate and act as if you don’t have a fail-safe if things go wrong, a mindset my dad carried as an immigrant from Lebanon with no support system in the U.S. And I told them that I was learning how to smile again, learning how to laugh again, learning how to feel joy again. I told them that tomorrow I want to learn how it feels like to win again.
We won 7-0, and after the game my team presented a commemorative ball that they all signed before the game without me knowing, saying they were so confident we’d pull off the upset that they put their names on a game-winning football to prove it.
That’s a sports story. Sports stories have power. But when I came to Michigan, I left my own sports stories on the back burner. I knew how important they could be though, so I put my all into each and every one I wrote. From a tennis gamer for an early-season match to sidebars in this year’s National Championship in Houston, I took great pride in telling sports stories and writing them for this paper.
But the real stories of our times at The Daily are rarely the ones we write. I smile thinking of what I’ve written and where I’ve traveled to write them, but I smile more thinking of the people and the impact we’ve had on each other. I smile thinking of karaoke performances and late nights hanging out in the newsroom. I smile thinking of the trashketball games and NYPD runs, and how new people saw what we have going on and decided to stay.
The writing and the editing were fun, but I smile thinking how long I took editing people’s stories because I was more interested in talking to everyone and getting to know members of the section than anything else and that often got me distracted. And I smile when I think that after all the sports stories I’ve written and edited, I’ve also been able to add to my own.
Because as I alluded to earlier, I came here and left the past in the past. I could count the amount of times I talked about losing my dad on one hand in college entering my senior year, only talking about it on a rare occasion to a close friend or two. I was living a new life with a heavy heart, carrying what I learned from that to make a positive impact on people by focusing on spreading a level of positivity that I know everyone needs in their lives.
But as we were working through our final week of practices before a high-stakes touch football game with Ohio State’s student newspaper The Lantern, Ian mentioned that he found my high school football highlights and had no idea that I played. He learned that not only did I play, but I dominated. He saw an absolute menace on both sides of the ball, someone with a relentless motor and an uncanny ability to read the game.
So later that week, in our final Friday practice before traveling to Columbus, I told our team everything. One of my favorite parts of being MSE was being able to lead practices with Connor and high-five everyone when they arrived. I smile thinking of all the energy I got to bring and how much enjoyment we all got from it. In my post-practice speech I told the group that we need to be fearless going down to Columbus, that we’re getting their best shot. So I told them about the ball my teammates signed after what I was going through at the time, how we pulled off the upset, all of that.
And when we went down to Columbus and beat The Lantern in a historic revival of our football rivalry between the two papers — an accomplishment every single sports writer should smile at for being a part of — Connor presented me with a football post-game that the entire section signed. That’s a sports story, and one that makes me smile every time I think of it.
Sports stories are the best kind of stories, and you don’t need to play them to be a part of them. Being a part of the sports section at The Daily makes every memory associated with it technically a sports story. Whether it’s directly Lantern and State News stories, or a door code reader not working that eventually led to Panera Bread taking lemon cookies off the menu, anything associated with this section is a sports story that makes me smile.
So I smile thinking of the friends I’ve made on this section that are like family to me now. I smile thinking about driving from Los Angeles to Houston with John and Connor, or creating a Fresh Coast Offense route tree with Nate, or finding a new State News practice field with Sam. I smile thinking about Lindsay moderating a debate between Jack and I over travel down to Illinois only to have my booking of a smoking room clear the air, or driving to Wisconsin with Abbie on a holiday that left the check-in agent confused. I smile thinking about how I read Jared and Nick’s wonderful SportsMonday goodbye columns this time last year and thought it would be a long long time before I ever had to worry about that. I smile thinking of all these sports stories and many more.
So as sad as I am to think that this is my last story, and that I’m leaving this amazing place, I still can’t help but smile. I see freshmen who joined this year and smile thinking of all the memories they have left to make. I see upperclassmen that will continue fostering a newsroom that creates billions of reasons to smile. I see seniors like me who joined a virtual newsroom during a pandemic and watched it transform into a place of unimaginable excitement. I smile because sports are fun, sports stories are amazing — both the ones we made together and the ones we write about — and I was part of it all.
I smile hoping that my smile made you smile too.