It started, like most jobs do, with a phone call.

I was sitting in my car in a Long Island parking lot nearly two summers ago sweating and waiting for my phone to ring. My internship at Newsday was nearly over, and I was expecting a call from SportsBusiness Journal’s executive editor about an opening at the magazine. I didn’t know what to expect but was hoping for an offer.

“We want you to cover hockey and soccer and probably action sports, but I really want your focus to be on the Olympics,” SBJ’s Abe Madkour said. “We’ll probably want you to go to China.”

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And with that, I found myself assigned to the most anticipated global sporting event of my lifetime — the 2008 Beijing Games. The collision of East and West was to be China’s coming out party.

Ever since, I’ve been preparing for an event of monumental proportions. For a rookie reporter who’s never been to an Olympics, it’s been a two-year education process on not just China but the Games.

My first lesson came when I tried to get credentialed to cover the event. When I joined the magazine in the fall of 2006, registration was closed. I spent a year sending almost a dozen e-mails to the U.S. Olympic Committee asking if any credentials had been turned back into the organization. It wasn’t until November 2007 that I received approval for a credential.

By that time, allocations had already been made to most reporters for their accommodations in Beijing, so I rushed to fill out an application. For reporters to receive hotel accommodations through the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee (BOCOG), they have to stay a minimum of nine days.

To guarantee you planned to stay that long, you also had to send a deposit in advance by wire transfer. That seemed easy enough, but accounting mistook my request to have 14,000 yuan (roughly $1,900) sent to BOCOG as a request for a $14,000 transfer. That didn’t go over well when it rolled across the desk of the budget planners at SBJ.

With that sent, the only other things to do included figuring out how to get a phone that works in China and register with BOCOG’s radio frequency service so that I can use the phone in Olympic venues.

For China, the path to the Games hasn’t been much easier.

The country has faced intense international criticism. Darfur, Tibet, human rights, press restrictions, resident relocation, environmental devastation — the long list of criticisms of the People’s Republic has saturated the news and dotted protest signs from San Francisco to Paris.

Then an earthquake rocked Sichuan Province, killing 70,000 people and leaving another 4.8 million homeless. Understandably, the tragedy overtook Olympic preparations in national importance. The government rushed to assure the world: There would be no earthquake during the Games.

If China is nervous about natural disasters or anything else happening this August, it’s not letting on. I wish I could say the same for myself.

Am I overwhelmed? Only about as much as Sam Houston at the Alamo.

We’re not only sending a reporter to the Games for the first time, we’re also rolling out our first Olympics business Web site. The site, which launches today, will be updated daily throughout the Games with a mix of news, executive interviews and photographs.

I have no idea what to expect. One thing is certain: Beijing is going to take a toll on my body.

People who have been to Beijing tell me that the smog is so bad that you wake up the first day and feel like you smoked two packs of cigarettes the day before. The fact that earlier this month the government decreed that restaurants would not be permitted to serve dog during the Games makes me wonder about the food I’ll be eating. And the fact that the “Water Cube,” Beijing’s new, $200 million aquatics center, features squat toilets designed more for hovering than sitting makes me wonder what I’ll find at my hotel — a local establishment called the Jingmin Hotel.

But traveling abroad is an adventure no matter where you’re going, and I’m grateful that my adventure is taking me to Beijing this month.

It’s a place — like me — that has been challenged over the past two years in its preparations for the world’s biggest sporting event. It’s a place filled with people, change and exploding growth. Most of all, it’s a place where I will be just one of a billion bearing witness to history.