A Story From the Life of Bill W.
Ghostwritten by Andrew W.
Life
After my four years at Marshall, playing basketball I enrolled at Marietta College to get my Bachelor of Arts Degree in Business Administration. I married my wife Sharon and had my first of two sons, in 1969. Now that I had a family I needed a job that would support my family and I for a long time, and also had good pay.
I was hired by Standard Oil of Ohio in 1970 and had my first real sales management job.The starting salary was $ 7200 a year much better than the $4800 in coaching. However the good news for a sales job was that your could earn extra dollars over and above your salary. Sometimes, there were sales events that the company would have where you could earn extra money, so with my athletic background and my competitiveness, I worked hard and won quite a few sales contest. I always wanted to win… I guess that’s what life is like when you play sports for 15 years. I worked for Standard Oil for 3 years and made some good money as a salesman.
We had heard about it for a while, but when the time finally came it was extremely shocking to hear what they were going to do. The truck drivers that transported the oil had rioted. The drivers are supposed to deliver the gasoline to the Sohio stations, they were not doing it. And guess who did? The sales guys did. We had to drive the semi gas trucks along the highway and through the ports. When we were driving through the picket lines in the refineries the rioters would throw rocks at the trucks, try to cut the gas lines, and some guys would come out with guns and try to shoot out the tires, it was nowhere near fun. Men were shooting at our gasoline filled trucks. Not a safe situation to be in.
The next day or so, I sat down with my wife Sharon and we talked about my job. We had agreed that this was not what I had signed up for and I was going to resign from my position. Shortly after resigning I had received a job offer. Harley Davidson Motor Company had offered me a position as Sales Manager for the company for their dealers in the state of Ohio. At the time they were owned by AMF Corporation which was working with the Sporting Goods department at the time. This gave me an opportunity to do something with sports, something that I really wanted to do with my life since High School. This new job came easy to me because I knew a lot about sports, so it made it really easy to sell products to companies.
The moral of the story I am telling you is that life isn’t always going to go as planned. You know, back in High School I wanted to play sports for a living, that would be the coolest thing ever. Athletics just came easy to me, I wanted to be pro in something that I loved to do. I was competitive and athletic, with big dreams ahead of me. But at the time I didn’t have my head on straight and face reality. I focused too much on athletics and I was not putting enough time in getting higher grades in the classroom. I was an athlete before student, I didn’t realize it at the time. I didn’t blame anyone but I needed to realize it myself. I decided it was too late to coach, so I found a different life choice. And this was the story of the life choice that I chose.
