Keene-born Sports Journalist Reflects on His Career
WASHINGTON, April 24–Steve Goff always knew what he wanted to do when he grew up. By the time he was 10, he was writing his own periodic sports magazine, which he sold to friends and relatives for a nickel a copy.
At 35, Goff, now the soccer editor for The Washington Post, has realized his dream and couldn’t be happier with his job. A native of Keene, he got his start as a sports reporter at the Sentinel while in high school.
Goff played on his high school freshman soccer team, but even then his passion for writing about sports overcame his desire to compete in them. Because there was no Keene High School newspaper, Goff presented his services to the Sentinel.
“I asked them if they needed help, because it’s obviously a small staff, and offered to shoot pictures and write stories,” he said.
He arrived at the newsroom by seven every morning, where he would write a story before leaving for his first class at nine. Weekends and summers were spent covering American Legion baseball games and soccer matches.
By his sophomore year at American University, Goff was sports editor of his college paper, The Eagle. In the fall of 1985 the Eagles, AU’s soccer team, went to the NCAA playoffs, providing Goff his first introduction to professional sports writing.
At about the same time, he began working part-time at the Post, answering phones and covering high school sports and college soccer. He proved his abilities as a reporter and editor, eventually moving up to the full-time staff.
“I love to write, and I want to keep writing,” he said. “I’ve found a niche, and because of that niche, the Post soccer coverage is probably the best in the country, and it’s good to know I play a large part in that.”
For the Love of the Sport
While attending a media luncheon at the start of the 1992-93 basketball season, Goff met Karen Goldberg, a reporter from The Washington Times, the Post’s local daily competition. She had also been the sports editor for her college newspaper, and they were both covering George Washington University basketball games for their papers. They soon started dating. Despite Goff’s initial apprehension that dating a writer from the local competition would hurt his chances for a promotion, they maintained their relationship and a year and a half later were married.
“It was a little strange,” Goff said. “People were always saying to us, ‘You work for the Post, you work for the Times, you must have a nice house rivalry.’”
Goff noted that marrying a fellow journalist is far from unorthodox; bureau reporters and foreign correspondents are often found in pairs. A mutual understanding of the profession’s rigorously long hours for relatively low pay is crucial to the relationship, he explained.
“If you don’t have a passion for the business, then there’s not much reason for being in it. You’re not going to make a million dollars, and it involves working on weekends and nights – it’s not an easy life,” he said. “It helps to be married to someone who knows how it works and shares the same passion.”
After the birth of their son, Ryan, now 5 and a budding soccer player, the new mother decided to forego the traveling that goes along with sports writing. She opted instead to shift her career from the sports page to the family section, where she writes on health and medicine from their home in Reston, Va., a 20-minute drive from Washington.
Goff is typically at the Post from 5 P.M. until 1 A.M, helping to edit the newspaper’s four editions, a demanding schedule but one he prefers.
“I couldn’t function in a nine-to-five business suit world. It would be uncomfortable for me,” Goff said. “I like consistency. I know when I’ll be in the office, which is good when you’re married and have a kid.”
The World’s Game
It’s a crisp spring day at RFK Stadium. Goff is observing a scrimmage between the local Major League Soccer team DC United and the team’s younger opponents from American University. He is positioned at the border of the field, hands clasping a tape recorder, notepad and pen behind his waist. “It’s a lot of standing,” Goff says, lifting one hand to shade his eyes. The youngest DC United player, Justin Mapp, 17, rushes past in a blur of red and white, the team’s colors, and takes aim at the net.
“Goal,” the reporter says softly, as the ball cuts through the air amidst a tangle of limbs and acrylic uniforms.
Goff’s copy chief at the Post, Karl Hente, calls Goff “mellow” but adds that he still surprises his co-workers with his passion for the sport. “His intensity is fairly quiet,” Hente said.
A long-time friend, Ridge Mahoney, a senior editor for the weekly magazine Soccer America, explains Goff this way: “He’s not the most garrulous person. He has a great sense of humor but in a subtle kind of way, and he’s far more laid back than other guys who cover soccer, the ones who live on the edge. He’s not a wild-eyed enthusiast who only sees the positive in the sport. He sees the difficulty of growing the sport in this country.”
Indeed he does. The game received a much wider audience in America when the 1994 World Cup was held in this country, but having traveled to nearly every Central American nation and all through Europe to cover soccer, Goff knows how important the game is in other cultures, compared to the United States.
“International soccer needs to be experienced,” he says. “The game, the sport, the team means so much to the people that support it. Soccer for the most part is the world’s game. It’s not like that to the U.S. and it probably never will be, but to the rest of the world it’s everything. The pageantry, the intensity, the rivalry, the emotions, it’s all part of it. It’s not just what’s on the field. There’s a whole circus going on around the game.”
“That’s one reason I’ve grown to love it,” Goff continues. “Americans see it as dull, and it can be, but there’s an awful lot of dull baseball games and NBA games. In it’s context, soccer can be the most spectacular and exciting sport in the world.”
Beginning next month, Goff will spend six weeks in Korea and Japan, covering the World Cup for the Post. In the long run, he hopes to lend his sports writing talent to a literary work, an ode to his passion and his profession.
“My ultimate ambition someday is that I’d like to write a book. I’d pick 11 places in the world, because there are 11 players on a team, where soccer means so much in the life of the people,” and the soccer-worshipping citizens of cities like Glasgow and Buenos Aires would make up the chapters of the book, he said.
Though Goff has no intention of taking a time-out from covering soccer in the near future, he said the book would be a great thing to pursue. In writing it he hopes to change the way Americans perceive the game.
“International soccer transcends sport. It’s about culture, society, race. It means more than just kicking a ball around.”
Published in The Keene Sentinel, in New Hampshire
