Hi, I’m Clay.

Welcome to Oklahoma Columnist.

Had I been here sooner, you might have read why there was never any question Lincoln Riley would choose Caleb Williams over Spencer Rattler (https://tinyurl.com/v4ebnxtn), how Giselle Juarez authored an unthinkable comeback at the 2021 Women’s College World Series (https://tinyurl.com/4xnpxawh) or how Norman High’s girls basketball team could not have shown more class on the way to an unbeaten championship season even as its players became targets of bigotry in its most ugly form (https://tinyurl.com/y8wvvzmm) right here.

Instead, those stories and hundreds of others appeared in the pages and digital space of The Norman Transcript, where beginning in March of 1997, after short stops in the Texas Hill Country, Woodward and Ardmore, I spent almost 25 years covering Sooner football, basketball, baseball and softball, the Oklahoma City Thunder and area high schools as a beat writer, the section’s sports editor and primary columnist. For the last bit of my Transcript tenure, as its senior sports columnist, I doubled, too, as the CNHI chain’s national sports columnist.

I’ve covered national championships, Final Fours, the NBA Finals and countless high school state championships, loving them all pretty much the same, the story perpetually more intriguing than the stage.

Here, I’ll continue to write many of those same stories, with the freedom to get beyond sports when required, to explain what’s really happening, why it’s happening, how it’s happening and what it means now that it’s happened.

A columnist can be a reporter, critic, historian, essayist, interpreter and reflector and occasionally each at once and the best of them have always been the most fun reads, too.

It’s sort of all I wanted to be since getting my first byline at The Trinitonian, the campus newspaper of Trinity University, San Antonio, in the fall of 1988 and I’ve been fortunate to do for all but a couple years in the wilderness since.

I’ve won enough awards to know I know what I’m doing, but never had the chance to do it on my own terms.

This is that leap.

If you have just a little time, I’ll have the words and you’ll enjoy it.

I’m sure of it.

Clay

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