Collegiate Times

The people at Virginia Tech are so great. After dealing with this high-priced athletes, and listen — they are all really quality people. All of the people, when I was covering Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA, everybody was really wonderful to work with. But, there are a lot of games you have to play, there’s a lot of waiting, there’s a lot of this and a lot of that.

At Tech, everybody’s just so relaxed and I think Frank Beamer fosters that feeling, that family feeling. I kind of had a little bit of trepidation going back there, and wondering how I would be accepted after being gone for so long.

And everybody just welcomed me right back like I had never been gone. That meant a lot to me.

They were very supportive and went out of their way to help me out. And the players, guys like John Graves, who is just a first class human being. They would answer any questions that you had. The coaches were fabulous, all really good, open and honest.

It was just a really wonderful experience and I’ll tell you what — I think going off and playing that national stage for so long helped me. It made me really appreciate what’s going on in Blacksburg. If I had never gone out and seen how it is everywhere else, I probably would have just taken it for granted. But to go out and see it, see how special that thing is they got going on down in Blacksburg — that was great.

CT: When the book was finally finished, how did it feel?

COLSTON: After you’ve spent so much time on something, you get a little postpartum depression. You always worry when you’re producing something that you’ve missed a typo or there’s something in there that’s going to be inflammatory. You just worry about it, it’s part of the business.

So people say, “How much of a relief was it to be finally finished?” Yeah, it is. But there is also, and maybe it’s just my personality, but there’s a little bit of dread. You say, “It’s going, it’s done now — right or wrong.”

Bruce Springsteen used to always talk about that. He never wanted to release “Born to Run.” He kept saying, “It’s not perfect. There’s something that’s still not right,” over and over again. But finally, Steve Van Zandt said, “You’ve got to just let this go.” And he did, and it turned out well — of course, one of the greatest rock albums of all-time.

Now, I’m not saying that about the Annual, but I can understand what it means when there’s a lot riding on it. A lot is riding on this thing. If this thing sucks, then I’m going to have to pursue something else.

There’s a lot riding on this thing too, so I wanted to make sure it was as good as it could possibly be. I hope that comes through. It’s something that I hope people can feel the passion in, the hard work. They’re getting something that wasn’t slapped together.

It’s the absolute best effort that I could do and if people don’t like it, there’s nothing that I can do. It was a labor of love.

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A version of this article appeared in the Jun 24 issue of the Collegiate Times.