He Did It His Way
In June 2013, Tom Petrini graduated from Chaminade High School thinking that he would become one of three things — Lawyer, doctor, or investment banker — based on the fact most of the kids in the school were going into these fields. Four years later, he has covered the NBA Draft in-person; will be covering the inaugural NBA Awards Show later this month; and has a sportswriting gig lined up with the Boston Globe.
I met Tom in nursery school back in 1999. We were sent to different elementary schools but kept in contact through our parents. Unfortunately, his parents divorced before middle school started and he moved a few towns away. This caused us to lose touch for a couple of years but we reconnected through the wonders of the internet and Xbox Live.
Tom is a senior at Northeastern University in Boston primarily studying marketing in their business school. “I said ‘I don’t like law; being a doctor seems pretty hard; so I’ll give the investment bank thing a shot’,” he laughs. He quickly figured out that this wasn’t exactly what he wanted to do in life so he started to take to the marketing aspect of the school because he feels it is the most creative aspect of business.
One of the first steps he took away from business was when he started doing a little social media management for one of NEU’s libraries. The school offers “Cooperative Education” which is “a six month interneship where you get paid and you’re working 40 hours a week — no classes,” says Tom. The library gig didn’t work out as Tom and his boss didn’t always see eye-to-eye and he was fired before the co-op ended.
“I was pissed. I thought I was doing a good job and it was important I get a recommendation for the next one.”
While it didn’t end the way he hoped, he did pull some things from that first marketing co-op which would prove to be valuable to him, “I learned a lot about how to use social media and build a following. So I just used Twitter to connect with people in the field — Spurs Twitter.”
Tom is a HUGE San Antonio Spurs fan. His interest in the team was sparked by a girl from San Antonio he was interested in who also went to Northeastern. He fell in love with the culture of the team and how the organization worked on and off the court. This, combined with the fact he had a lot of free time after the co-op didn’t work out, led to him creating “Photoshops of things like Kawhi Leonard’s face on Luke Skywalker’s body and stuff that was just stupid.”
Through Twitter, Tom met Jeff Garcia, who ran a blog not affiliated with the Spurs, by jumping into a coversation he was having with other fans about Star Wars. Garcia reached out to him saying he’s seen his Photoshop work and would love to see a writing sample. And within a couple weeks, he’s assigned to write about how the Spurs and Golden State Warriors were so good despite playing such different styles of basketball.
This would end up becoming his next co-op for school. He wrote articles for the site and ran their social media account. “I did a lot of writing and I got a lot better at understanding the game I was covering.”
(One thing I love to give him crap for is how he would always made fun of my love for basketball in the past and now he probably knows the NBA better than I do).
His time with Project Spurs spawned the moment he felt he really thought he wanted and could do this for a living. The 2016 NBA Draft was being held at Barclays Center in Brooklyn and, knowing New York was his home turf, Project Spurs sent Tom a credential and he was assigned to interview whoever it was the Spurs picked in the first round that evening.
He remembers seeing Darren Rovell and other sports media personalities in the green room and while making it clear he wasn’t starstruck, said “you look around the room and am like ‘Oh shit, these are my peers — you know the same way the last guy picked is LeBron James’ peer, but I’m here.’”
The Spurs ended up going with Dejounte Murray, which surprised Tom, “Since no one expected him to drop this far, I didn’t do much research on the kid.”
So after the the commissioner annoucned his name, Murray is standing with a crowd of reporters, which includes Tom.
“So I get to the interview room and said ‘Ok, I’m going to ask him what he thinks he brings to a veteran squad besides a fantastic suit.’ So I raise my hand, ask for a mic and as they’re passing me a mic, someone else asks almost that exact same question. Immediately, I panic. I get the microphone, I stutter and I basically ask the question the guy before me did,” he recalls.
“I took a minute, I gathered myself and then I asked a real, succinct, original question. And for as bad as the first one went, I felt really good about recovering and getting back into it.”
He calls it the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to him and only recently could start laughing about it.
Another major factor in Tom’s decision to join the world of sports media/journalism came during his freshman year when he was attending the Beanpot, an annual college hockey tournament held between Northeastern, Harvard, Boston College and Boston University. During a game “I saw a reporter next to us jump from the seats to where the tunnel is and security comes right up like ‘Whoa, what are you doing?’ and she just flashes a pass and he just says ‘OK’ and stepped aside.”
This spawned an idea where Tom and his friend would “make fake press passes and wear suits to pretend to be reporters so we could go to games for free.”
“After the Beanpot, I went online and looked up what the passes looked like last year and I made a pretty nice forgery of the previous years’ pass, but it looked nothing like the current years’ pass. When we walked up, they just saw the lanyard, saw the shiny thing and let us through.”
The adventures came to an end around Christmas 2014 when he almost got caught at TD Garden and shortly thereafter, his father, Paul, passed away. The two were very close and this caused “a major shift in philosophy” as he puts it. His father worked at Grumman for many years and put in a lot of long hours.
“It was not very rewarding [work] and he was doing it to put food on the table. When he died, it was a heart attack or something you get when you’re overweight, overworked, and overstressed — and it took his life. When that happened, I said to myself, I’m going to do something that makes me happy until I have kids I need to survive for — and that’s sports journalism for me.”
