§ 1 · Twenty-three
When I was twenty-three, I thought I had made it.
I was working for the New York Jets. That sentence by itself felt like the whole accomplishment. The job didn’t pay much and I did not care even slightly, because it was the NFL and I was in a building full of people who were extremely good at their jobs.
It wasn’t a quiet time to show up, either. I came in during the Rex Ryan years — one AFC Championship run behind us, another about to start. Sanchez at quarterback. Santonio Holmes catching the things that mattered. Revis on an island. The Jets were loud and usually somewhere in the middle of the argument.
At twenty-three I loved every second of it. I remember thinking: I finally made it.
Five seasons later I had a completely different definition of the word.
§ 2 · I said I knew Avid
I came in as an editor. There was one problem. I didn’t really know Avid Media Composer — I knew Final Cut. So when I applied, I said I knew Avid better than I actually did.
There. It’s on the record now.
But I also knew I could edit, and the thinking was simple enough: editing is editing, I understand story, I’ll learn the software. Then they hired me and I had to prove it.
I learned fast. Highlights first, then player features, charity pieces, whatever needed cutting. Each season they handed me more. Eventually I was helping technical direct Jets Talk Live — players and coaches interviewed after practice, streamed straight to the team site. P2 cameras, P2 cards, TriCasters, all of it impossibly advanced to me at the time.
I didn’t walk in knowing how to do any of it. I figured it out because people gave me room to, and that was the first real lesson: you don’t have to be completely ready before you say yes. You need enough underneath you to know you can work out the rest.
§ 3 · Tone
Something else happened that first year that seemed like nothing at all.
I loved watching Santonio Holmes. During that 2010 run he kept turning up in exactly the moment the Jets needed him. One of my coworkers, Alex Darcey, noticed. So he started calling me Tone.
Santonio. Tone.
Then it grew. I’d talk about starting my own company one day, and Alex started calling that company Tone Media. There was no Tone Media. No website, no clients, no plan. It was two coworkers giving each other a hard time.
Years later it became the actual name of the company my wife and I built.
That’s the part I still can’t get over. The business I started after I left the Jets got its name inside the Jets building, by accident, from somebody making fun of me.
§ 4 · The cost of yes
Around 2013 and 2014 I started looking at the job differently. I got married. What I wanted changed. And I began to understand what working in professional sports actually costs, in a way I couldn’t have at twenty-three.
The schedule is the schedule. Games don’t care about your plans and training camp cares less. There were sacrifices around my honeymoon. There was outside work I turned down. Three times a director called about a job overseas, and three times I said no — that one has its own story.
Nobody made me do any of it. But I hadn’t worked out yet that every yes is also a no to something you can’t see from where you’re standing.
The other thing I misunderstood was how people actually find you. Freddy Garcia was freelancing for us as an editor — in an organization that size, somebody passing through. He opened the door for me at NBC, and he’s the reason I started thinking about real estate, which turned into an entire second life.
I thought career growth meant climbing something. The person who changed my trajectory was a freelancer who happened to sit near me.
§ 5 · Both things were true
By the end I had real responsibility, which is probably why leaving surprised people. From where they sat, I’d grown into someone they could depend on. That was true.
From where I sat, the workload had grown and I wanted to be paid like it, I wanted control over my time, and I’d spent five years in an edit room while people around me were shooting, meeting everyone, building something of their own.
Both things could be true. The Jets could value me more than they ever had, and it could still be time for me to go.
That’s what made it hard. If I’d hated it, this would be a much easier story to tell.
There was no villain. Chad Freeman, Jason Lavine, Chris Ubbens and plenty of others took a chance on a young editor and handed him experiences he had no business getting. Jason especially — a fan since he was a kid, and you could feel the Jets meant more to him than a line on a résumé. I respected the hell out of that.
At twenty-three, “I work for the New York Jets” was the accomplishment. I wanted the name more than I understood the craft. That’s hard to admit and it’s true.
And I spent five years inside an NFL media department barely picking up a camera. I was an editor. Which sounds impossible now, given what I do for a living — but maybe I had to become an editor first. The Jets taught me story, pacing, music, pressure, and how to work something out before I was ready for it.
I wouldn’t tell the twenty-three-year-old not to take it. I’d tell him to run at it. Go to Cortland. Learn Avid. Pay attention to people like Freddy.
I’d just add one thing: don’t confuse the name with the destination.
