The National Football League strike came as such a relief.

After working 50 hours a week for the sports department of a small-town daily this summer, I was sick of sports, and ready to give up sportswriting for good.

My rural, one-stoplight town has one thing in abundance: bars. When all the college kids go home for the summer, these bars fill up with beer-drinking, tobacco-spitting, tavern league softball junkies.

My first duty at work each morning was to report on the tavern league's exploits from the night before. Facing that dirty stack of game reports at six in the morning always seemed to bring to mind all the things I hate about sports. Things like:

.John McEnroe, Bo Jackson, and Brian Bosworth

.baseball pitchers that throw beanballs

.football cheerleaders who can't tell a fourth down from a touchdown

.the format of the National Hockey League playoffs

.field hockey and lacrosse skirts

.the smell of Ben Gay

.bleacher seats in the endzone

.the World Wrestling Federation

.pushy parents at Little League

.drug testing

.college football Bowl games

.sweatpants missing strings

.high school coaches who forget that kids are, well, just kids

.mouthguards

.polyester uniforms

By the time Big Ron's Bar and AJ's Tavern were in game seven of the playoffs, my list was long enough to qualify for a Gov. department thesis and I was beginning to wonder what I was doing in this business anyway.

Certainly not for the paycheck. K-Mart employees make more than I did.

The perks? Free access to Buffalo Bills training camp isn't exactly uplifting. My closest contact with a sports personality was a coast-to-coast phone interview with Roy Firestone.

Who?

Just when I was getting really frustrated, I was assigned to do a feature on a local businessman who had started a track and field club for underprivileged youths.

Every evening this man held open practices for the local kids, teaching them how to run, jump and throw. Wednesday afternoons he would leave his company at noon, rent a bus, and take the team for "meets" against clubs in other counties.

I shot three rolls of film the afternoon I went to a Wednesday meet. Looking through those pictures, I couldn't help but remember the things that make me love sports:

.sandlot stickball

.high school football games

.hot dogs and $1 beers at baseball games

.Wimbledon

.Chris Evert, Joe Namath and Joan Benoit

.the Special Olympics

Who knows? By November I may even miss the Buffalo Bills.