As a kid, when I daydreamed about being a sports writer, I pictured myself at major events like the World Series, the NFL championship game (there was no Super Bowl, yet) and the Olympics.

Although I never did get to cover a World Series (I attended games at several), I did get to cover a Super Bowl in 1980 and my dream of covering the Olympics came true in 1984.

It's hard to express how excited I was when I got the letter from AP telling me that I had been selected to be part of the team covering the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. In that letter, was a sheaf of papers to be filled out and sent back asap.

Thanks to the International Olympic Committee, the paperwork to be filled out for the credential was infinitely more complicated and difficult than the mortgage applications for the three houses I owned in my lifetime. But it was certainly worth it.

When the credential finally arrived in the mail, I was over the moon.

It was a three-week assignment and I flew to LA by myself, with Judy and the kids to follow in a couple of weeks to visit family and friends in Southern California and, hopefully, see some of the Olympics in person.

The first week of the Olympics, I worked in the Main Press Center, which was in the LA Convention Center in downtown LA, doing rewrites, short stories on the results of minor events and editing copy. I shared a room at the downtown Hilton Hotel with New York Sports writer Bill Barnard, but our work schedules were so different that we hardly saw each other.

My work day started around 10 a.m. after a six-block walk from the hotel. Along the way, I spotted a real old-time diner called The Clock. Checking it out on my way back to the hotel that first night, it turned out to be a real throwback.

The front door had no lock and the diner had been open 24 hours a day for decades. There was usually a line of people waiting for tables and the specialty of the house, besides burgers, was fried liver and onions.

You might say, "Yuck!" But my dad loved liver and onions, so my mom made it quite often. I ate it and enjoyed it during my childhood. Later, I was put off of the dish after eating it _ or trying to _ while on active duty at Fort Leonard Wood. The army version smelled awful and tasted even worse. I didn't expect to ever eat liver and onions again.

But it was the specialty of the house at The Clock. So, why not?

It was delicious. I wound up eating there almost every night for the week I worked downtown, and I ate the liver and onions several times. It was the best I've ever had. Even better than mom's.

It was only my second time in Los Angeles. I had also been there in 1962 for the Wisconsin-Southern Cal Rose Bowl. But, this time, I got a real Southern California experience.

In the middle of the week, I got back to my room on the 28th floor of the Hilton around 10 p.m. I crawled into bed with a book and was reading quietly when I heard a strange scraping sound. I stopped reading and listened. I couldn't pin down where the sound was coming from, and then it stopped.

I went back to reading and the scraping started again. This time, I got out of bed and walked around the room, listening. I went to the window, felt the building gently swaying and it hit me what was happening: I was in the midst of an earthquake.

As the building swayed, the window frame was scraping on the brick structure around it. I called the front desk to ask if I should get out of the hotel. The clerk laughed and said, "No need to worry. This happens all the time. Our hotel was built to withstand much bigger quakes than this one."

I kept listening for that scraping sound, but there was no more that night and I eventually fell asleep.

Finally, it was time to cover freestyle wrestling, the sport I was brought to LA to report on.

This was the Olympics that the Soviet Union, East Germany and several other Eastern bloc countries boycotted, so the American team, led by coach Dan Gable, was heavily favored to dominate the gold medals.

Dan was one of the all-time great college wrestlers at Iowa State, going 117-1 in his collegiate career. He went on to a great coaching career at Iowa and also headed up the American team in three Olympics.

I called Dan a few weeks before the Olympics to interview him for a preview story. He was less than welcoming _ telling me several times how busy he was _ until I told him I had seen him wrestle at the Midlands Invitational in LaGrange, IL. I had gone there to watch my friend Steve Brown compete in the heavyweight division and Dan remembered Steve.

He told me that his biggest problem he was having was keeping the team from being overconfident since some of the best wrestlers in the world were boycotting the Games. It all turned out fine, though. The U.S won gold in seven of 10 events and silver in two others.

It was a colorful group and fun to write about.

I was paired for the wrestling with Kansas City sports writer Doug Tucker. The matches were at the Anaheim Convention Center, but Doug and I roomed together at a hotel in Long Beach during the two weeks of the wrestling competition. We alternated writing the stories for the morning and afternoon papers.

After the final event, I wrote a quick lede in media center as Doug went to the interview area in another part of the building. As I was finishing my first story, I looked up and saw a telephone company worker taking phones off the tables.

I asked him what he was doing and he replied, "The competition is over, so we're taking our equipment down."

I explained to him that most of the writers were doing interviews and still had work to do for at least another couple of hours. He looked at me like I was from outer space and said, "I have my orders."

Not knowing what to do, I decided to hurry to the Olympic office near the interview area and get an official there to stop this guy from taking all our phones. Walking fast, I dashed through a security area, flashed the big credential hanging on my chest and kept going, knowing I had to hurry.

The next thing I knew, I hit the ground face-first - hard. One of the security guys had tackled me from behind. I had the breathe knocked out of me, but I was able to turn over and  show the guy my credential and blurt out, "What the hell?" He shrugged and said, "I didn't see your credential."

"You could have asked me," I said.

Then I remembered I had to keep going. I jumped up and found an Olympic official, told him what was going on and he was able to save our telephones.

I was kind of shook up and decided to wait to write the story for the next afternoon's papers until we got back to our hotel.

 At that point, we were writing our stories on a TRS-80 Model 200, a flip-top PC that displayed 16 lines at a time on the screen.

The stories were sent by attaching a phone handset to acoustic cups, a process that often proved to be difficult and inefficient - particularly if there was any interference on the phone line or any background noise.

For whatever reason, the connection through the hotel phone system would simply not work. After numerous unsuccessful attempts from the room and the lobby, it was getting close to midnight, New York time, and I was getting a little desperate to get my story sent to NY Sports.

I told Doug I'd be back shortly, took the car and went looking for a phone booth. Instead, I saw a 7-Eleven store with two pay phones hanging on the outside wall, across from the gas pumps.

I quickly determined that one of the phones was missing pieces. But I screwed off the bottom of the other handset, took out the speaker and attached the acoustic cups to the phone with handy alligator clips that I had used many times in auto racing press boxes.

Just as I started the dial-up sequence on the laptop, their was a loud roar from the street. In rode a half dozen big men on motorcycles, all of them dressed in Hell's Angels-style leathers.They kept revving the bikes and my laptop kept refusing to connect to the computer system in New York.

Finally, it was quiet for a moment and the story began to send. But a sudden burst of engine noise from one of the nearby bikes ended that attempt.

Several of the bikers were eyeing me, apparently wondering what I was doing with the phone. But nobody said anything. With some trepidation, I set my laptop and the coupler down on the ground and walked over to the bikers.

I explained what I was attempting to do and why and all of them just stared blankly at me for a moment before one said, "Let's see how you do that."

The six of them stood ominously around me, not making a sound, as I sent my story. When it finished, I turned and said, "That's it. It's in New York now."

One of them said, "That's cool. Will it be in tomorrow's papers?" I said, "That's the idea."

At that point, I excused myself, jumped in the car and drove back to the hotel, about as relieved as I could be that the story was sent and I was still in one piece.

One of the biggest disappointments about the LA Olympics was that, despite my best efforts, I never did find tickets to any of the events for my family.

Thanks to Peter Ueberroth's genius idea of pairing with corporate America, the Olympics wound up $250 million in the black. But also thanks to that, most of the tickets, especially for lesser events like wrestling, wound up unused in desk drawers in that same corporate America.

The wrestling competition was held in front of a nearly empty arena while I could not find tickets for my family to come and watch. They wound up going with a friend to a session of the equestrian competition at Santa Anita Racetrack only to find out it was televised from somewhere outside of LA proper.

At least they got to spend time with family and friends, and even a little with me.

My family headed for home before I was done with my event. When I finally did fly home, by way of Chicago, I had the suitcase with most of the souvenirs I had collected stolen, apparently from the baggage carousel.

It was definitely a memorable assignment, both good and bad.