One awesome adventure.(My Turn)

What if Dick Vitale, basketball coach, hadn't become a basketball broadcaster 25 years ago? I would be dead today (the ultimate ziggy!).

You've got to understand, sports were my life. Growing up in Jersey, I could name every player on the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants. I was a big baseball fan. My plan was to graduate and coach basketball, my impossible dream. Friends told me, "Richie! Face reality, man! You don't know anybody!" But my parents--factory workers without formal educations but with doctorates in love--simply told me not to believe in "can't."

I guess the only thing that fascinated me besides sports was criminal law. In highschool, I would go down to the Bergen County Courthouse and watch all the great lawyers, imagining how it was to be in front of a jury. If only I'd been a better student instead of sitting in the back of the classroom reading Dick Young's notes columns.

In 1969, I was coaching at East Rutherford (N.J.) High School and teaching sixth grade, sending letters to the Bucknells, Lehighs, Lafayettes and, as my buddy Howard Garfinkelof Five-Star Basketball Camp fame would say, getting more rejections than the Harvard dean of business dishes out. All of a sudden, Rutgers gave me a chance. I went to the University of Detroit in 1973, we went to the NCAA Tournament, and then I was coaching the Detroit Pistons! Man, I was living the dream.

And on November 8, 1979, a guy walked into my house and said I was fired. I was a lost soul.

Right away, I was contacted by business people. They told me, "Dick, you'd be great in sales. You're a natural. My God, with your energy, you'd make millions." I had offers from the auto industry, computer companies, corporations, insurance companies, rich people and alums. My wife told me to give it a shot. But those offers meant nothing to me. I wasn't a salesman! (Unless you count the jobs I had as a kid at a Modell's sporting goods store and selling produce at a supermarket, or what you must do as a coach at a school with limited exposure to get players. We were recruiting head-to-head against Michigan and Michigan ...