A little luck, a lot of fun in 20 years.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

Ipass a few milestones in the next month or so, the kind that make you stop, and look back and wonder, not so much at where the years went, because that implies regrets, but simply at how many years are memories now.

It was 30 years ago, in early September, when I moved to Eugene. It was 20 years ago this month when, after nine years at this newspaper, I moved from news reporting to the sports department.

Now, at the end of September, I turn 55, which in some places gets you senior citizen discounts and makes you wonder whether the next decade will go by even faster than the last one did.

I look back and think about how tremendously lucky I've been.

Lucky to have found Eugene, this jewel of a place, and be able to live here. Lucky in my family, and our frenetic lifestyle. Lucky to make a career at a newspaper of this quality. Lucky to have found my way back to sports two decades ago, to work with colleagues who are also best friends, and to have covered such a vibrant, exciting era in Oregon athletics.

When I came here, Norval Turner was being booed at Autzen Stadium, not that there were many folks there to do the booing. Ernie Kent was playing basketball for the Ducks. Steve Prefontaine was running; he was scheduled to speak to my journalism class on the day he died.

I never could have imagined, as I watched the Ducks get pummeled one day in the fall of 1974, what Oregon football would become; indeed, I still wouldn't have envisioned it a decade later, when I left business coverage for sports coverage. I never could have envisioned, listening to the Kamikaze Kids on the radio, that Kent would one day be coaching the Ducks and win a league title.

I never could have envisioned that I'd cover so many track meets, or watch three sons play sports in all sorts of Eugene rain, or one day find the game of golf to be so captivating, despite a lack of talent that borders on pathological.

Or that, 30 years later, and approaching the double-nickel, I'd be getting ready to drive a freshman to high school and a boy to grade school. Third grade, at that.

By the fall of '74, I'd graduated from Cal, worked two years as a sports reporter for The Sacramento Union newspaper and decided to come to graduate school for a year at the University of Oregon.

I left friends in Sacramento, and family in the San Francisco area, and I didn't know a soul in Eugene. I remember sitting alone in the New Oregon Motel that first night, all my things stuffed in my car, wondering what the heck I'd done.

I'm still here, with no regrets. In the summer of 1975, I started working for this newspaper, part-time, and was hired full-time as a news reporter a year later.

In August 1984, I moved to sports from news, gratefully, knowing that nothing in Business Week would ever move me the way Sports Illustrated could.

Probably one of those trades that was good for both teams; certainly, it's been very good for me.

I've enjoyed this immensely, and still do.

I can't identify with sports reporters who aren't enthused about their jobs. Though I figure that, unlike me, they never covered sewer commission meetings.

I often wish I'd been here in time to see Pre run; I've written so much about his career and legacy.

But I've seen a lot here, and as another football season approaches, I find myself thinking back to the humble beginnings of this era of Oregon football, the fall of '87, my first football season as a columnist, when redshirt freshman quarterback Bill Musgrave, with his quiet, Jimmy Stewart persona, led the Ducks to wins over Colorado, USC and Washington.

It's been fascinating to see where that's led Oregon, and to write about it, and along the way to cover a few Olympic Trials, and a Masters, and a Rose Bowl with Oregon in it, and an Elite Eight with Oregon in it. And to be able to be a part of this community by writing a column.

What great memories, from the last 30 years, and the last 20, and I look forward to more in the decade to come.