Jeff Duncan (Part Two)

An Interview with Jeff Duncan (Part Two)

Jeff Duncan: Interviewed on March 1, 2007

Position: enterprise sports reporter, New Orleans Times-Picayune

Born: 1964, Louisville

Education: University of Louisville, 1986, communications

Career: Louisville Courier-Journal (part-time), St. Petersburg Times (part-time), Monroe News-Star 1989-96, Florida Today 96-98, Nashville alternative weekly 98-99, Times-Picayune 99 –

Personal: single

Favorite restaurant (home): Jacquimo’s “the quintessential New Orleans restaurant – get the alligator sausage cheesecake – it sounds horrible and if you’re not from here you wouldn’t know to order it – 10,000 calories but worth every one”; Cochon “warehouse district – hottest new restaurant in town – specializes in Louisiana pork”

Favorite restaurant (road): Jake’s Del Mar Restaurant, Del Mar, Ca., “beachfront dining and Del Mar is one of the most beautiful towns in America”

Favorite hotel: Grand Marriott, Point Clear, Ala. “where we stay covering the Senior Bowl – old historic hotel on a bluff – you get the points and you’re in a nice hotel”

Jeff Duncan, “Desire Without End,” excerpted from the Times-Picayune, Dec. 11, 2005, published in “Best American Sports Writing 2006:

NICEVILLE, FLA. — It’s a typical sight on an October night in Louisiana: a group of coaches leading a high school football team into battle.

But nothing is even remotely typical about this night, or these coaches, or their players, or the school they represent.

They are a New Orleans school, but they are driving to the game from their new campus at Camp Timpoochee in Niceville, Fla., five hours away.

To prepare for the game, they have had just one week of class and one full practice in pads, on a potholed, unlined field that is better suited for sack races than football.

En route to the game, the team caravan has to stop at a sporting- goods store to buy helmets for some of the players, and maroon T- shirts for the coaches.

Before heading to Porter Field at St. Martin’s Episcopal School in Metairie to face the Crescent City Christian School Pioneers in their first game of the season, the team makes one more stop: Desire Street Academy, a fledgling New Orleans school for 7th- through 12th- grade boys.

It is their school, an offshoot of the Desire Street Ministry, in the heart of the 9th Ward and founded by Mo Leverett in 1990 to serve the impoverished, crime-ridden Desire-Florida neighborhood. Now it is in ruins.

On this night, on the way to their first game, the members of the Desire Street Academy Lions are seeing their decimated building, and their devastated neighborhood, for the first time since Aug. 29.

After the tour, they board the bus quietly and head to their game across town.

“They had to see it,” said assistant coach Mickey Joseph, a former standout athlete at Archbishop Shaw High School. “I think it helped them start to appreciate this place a little more, knowing they’re not going back anytime soon.

“They know they’re not going back now.”

—-

When Leverett planned the construction of Desire Street Ministry’s new school building five years ago, he did so with its rough 9th Ward neighborhood in mind.

He knew only too well that windows were an invitation for trouble in the crime-ridden Desire-Florida area; a few years back, a bullet crashed through the glass door of his back patio and rattled around the floor just feet from his wife and daughters.

Flying bullets and thrown rocks wouldn’t threaten the students inside Desire Street Academy. Leverett fortified the walls in the new building with stone and concrete and included only a few windows in the 36,000-square-foot fortress.

Figuratively and structurally, Desire Street Academy was built to withstand any hell that impoverished urban life could deliver.

Any hell, that is, except high water.

On the morning of Aug. 29, Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge tore a 50-foot-wide breach in the floodwall that stretches from Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River and protects the 9th Ward. The force of the current lifted train boxcars and 18-wheeler trailers at the France Street rail yard and deposited them a football field away.

The Desire Street Academy’s plush $3 million complex, two blocks northwest of the breach on the west side of the Industrial Canal, was directly in the path of the onrushing floodwaters.

Water burst through the gym windows, poured over the basketball court and eventually rose past the first seven rows of bleachers.

When Leverett returned to the building to survey the damage a month after the storm, he found a dead crab in the parking lot and half a telephone pole resting on the stage in the gym.

The contents of his office had been tossed on the floor like toys in a kid’s playroom. In the next room, a wooden bookcase had punched through a wall in the office of Danny Wuerffel, the former Heisman Trophy winner and New Orleans Saints quarterback who now serves as the school’s development director.

In half a day, Katrina destroyed what Leverett and his staff worked 15 years to build.

Q. What was the background to “Desire Without End?

A. Being a Saints reporter I was familiar with Danny Wuerffel and his association with Desire even before the storm. Danny felt called to this school and left the NFL – he was a backup quarterback for the Redskins bouncing around and he realized he was going to be a journeyman – and he made the decisions that this was more important to him. He came across Mo Leverett, the founder of the academy, when he played for the Saints – that’s how he was familiar with the ministry.

I was at a Zydeco barbecue after the storm eating with a bunch of journalists. Danny was on TV talking about the school. It was a big story to me. I knew the school was located right in the middle of the flood zone and I knew what they were up against in trying to administer and counsel the students and young of the Ninth Ward – the area Marshall Faulk came out of. How would they get this school back together? It was going to be the first year of organized sport when Katrina hit – it seemed like a no-brainer.

When I reported it I found out they had relocated to Camp Timpoochee on the Florida coast – these tough inner city kids were going to class along the bucolic shoreline on the Gulf and then playing football and driving five hours on a bus to play football games. How Danny and Mo and the rest of the administration used football to get these kids to come to school and to save some kids was one of the most compelling and rewarding stories I’ve written. Lots of factors were in that – Katrina and sports and poverty – you didn’t have to be a sports fan to get it, in fact, it ran in the features section. It drew a widespread response. Hopefully it helped the school get donations.

Q. How did you tell it to maximum effect?

A. You had two different story lines I felt needed to be addressed. One was the students, many of whom were in the floodwaters themselves, and their families who were scattered in the Diaspora, in shelters all over the country. The other part of the story was the school administrators – Mo and Danny and the faculty who had this mission and were seeing their dreams wash away, literally, in the flood. It was a complicated and difficult story to write.

I had to weave a narrative and go back and forth from Katrina and the Ninth Ward to Timpoochee and football. It took me a long time to write it because it was so complicated. Mark Lorando, our features editor, did a tremendous job of helping me maintain focus. It’s always a challenge to write a story of that scale – I spent a lot of time on it. I went to Timpoochee a handful of times and I went to games they played in this area – the reporting spanned months. It was an evolving story, with kids leaving and dropping out of school, and getting homesick to see their parents. It was such a unique situation it needed time to give it context and perspective.

Q. Why did you go back to sports at the Times-Pic?

A. To be honest, it was a grind. If you live this reality – this post-Katrina dynamic – its tentacles reach into every part of your daily life – you work it and live it. While I didn’t have that much damage – I had colleagues who lost everything. Living here is a difficult place to live and is going to be for the next five or ten years. We’ve seen it in the newsroom – it takes its toll. There’s been a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder and a lot of counseling needed in the newsroom.

I got to the point where I didn’t want to keep writing about everything wrong in the city. I found a niche in the sports department as the Katrina sports reporter – it certainly affected sports in the city. I had a unique perspective in that I covered the storm and sports.

Q. Did you write on the Saints this season?

A. Everybody was on the bandwagon. It was a huge story for the city and a huge national story. More colleagues came to town this year than the previous five or six years combined. The Saints were a tremendous story. The relationship between the team and the city was unique before the storm and now it’s more unique. New Orleans is a provincial city – because of its history and background and melting pot it’s different. The relationship to the team is similar to Green Bay but that wasn’t recognized on a national basis – the national reporters found out this year.

The story line initially was how the team lifted the city at a time when the city was looking for something to lift its spirits. Then the dynamic inverted and the city lifted the team. The players would admit that – they did down the stretch – they said they were along for the ride down the stretch – that it was bigger than just blocking and tackling and the team was swept up in it. You could feel the energy in the crowd – it was like a college experience – not the typical NFL experience, which is so managed and corporate these days. People kept coming back because it was different – I’m not sure they can capture it again.

I was brought right into the mix, obviously due to my experience knowing the team and players. I found the story to be less about the team and more about the city and the people and fans, and how they escaped the drudgery of post-Katrina life for four hours every Sunday. It was a unique story you’re not going to get in any other market.

One thing I liked about writing Saints stories this year was keeping in contact with the NFL reporting community. I can’t tell you how many offers of monetary help and assistance came from reporters all over the country. They helped out my colleague, Brian Allee-Walsh, who lost his house in Lakeview. He received assistance from the NFL reporting community – clothes and whatever they could send. People went above and beyond to help out – that said a lot about the character of people in our profession.

Q. Isn’t there a book in this?

A. I’m pitching one now – on the Saints season and everything we talked about. The publishers are a little leery – more of the Katrina stuff because there’s so much out already. I’m trying to convince them it’s not just Katrina – nobody has written a book on what it’s like living here now, enduring this in their daily life and putting this disaster back together, and how this team came along and lifted them up.

Q. Do you miss covering the NFL?

A. I got out at the right time. Access is becoming more limited now that you’ve got nfl.com and NFL TV.

I have all the respect in the world for NFL beat writers – they’re competing with guys like (ESPN’s) Len Pasquarelli and John Clayton and all those pit bulls on the major websites Beat reporters have to cover the team day-to-day without having the luxury of parachuting into town and writing a story. National reporters don’t have the challenge of writing a tough story and going out to practice the next day – that’s one thing I do miss.

The website guys are seasoned reporters with contacts all over the league who work 24 hours a day, and who become de facto reporters for local TV and radio, which can’t get out to Saints practice every day but can read the Internet. Lenny breaks a story on the Saints and it gets into local media – they become your competition as well. It’s a 24-hour work environment – you work in fear.

There are some guys in small markets who own their beats – John McClain (Houston Chronicle), Jim Thomas (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), Bob McGinn and Tom Silverstein (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Paul Kuharsky and Jim Wyatt (The Tennessean). Your job is to own your beat but you’re up against it with everybody coming in. That’s how we felt about the Saints this year – all the top reporters were coming in but we felt we could cover it better. We have the advantage of knowing the whole story – hopefully our readers appreciate it.

Q. Why is it hard to compete with the national website reporters?

A. They operate with different standards – they don’t have to attribute sourced material and they can protect sources that way. Local reporters are handcuffed by attribution standards most newspapers hold. Now people in the NFL have gotten comfortable with that kind of reporting and they don’t want to be identified in their quotes – if they are they get chewed out or worse. There’s so much money at stake that it’s become the normal mode – people aren’t going to go out on a limb and risk losing their job. ESPN can get away with it – we can’t. But our editors are coming around – they understand that if we don’t adapt we’re going to get beat unless we learn to work within the confines of modern pro sports.

Q. Are you a lifer at the Times-Pic?

A. I love it here. I feel like a New Orleanian now. This is by far the best newspaper I’ve ever worked at – there is tremendous talent in the newsroom. I was inspired by our work during the storm. We won two Pulitzers – I was part of that coverage and I feel a bond with a lot of people in the newsroom. I feel compelled to continue to cover the Katrina story. It’s a fascinating story – a great American city was devastated and broken and we’re putting it back together again. I’m not sure another story I’m going to come across is going to be that important and that rich – I want to continue covering it. But if another opportunity comes along I’m open to bettering myself, although I’m not looking for anything. Covering the NFL was a great experience – a great challenge. I had never covered anything of that magnitude – it prepared me to be the journalist I am today. After six years I was ready for another challenge. This role I have now is perfect – I can do in-depth reporting and take my time and sink my teeth in and challenge myself as a writer. That was difficult to do on the NFL beat, which is high intensity and high pressure. We need to expand as journalists or we stagnate.

Q. What should we know about Jacquimo’s?

A. I must have taken dozens of reporters there. If you’re not from here you wouldn’t know to order the alligator sausage cheesecake – it sounds horrible and it’s at least 10,000 calories but worth every one. Jack Leonardi, the owner, knows how to treat customers – they’ll bring you a free dish just to let you sample it. It’s the epicenter of the Jazz Festival – they’ll seat people on the sidewalk and it stretches down to the Maple Leaf. They seat people in the back of the pickup truck out front – I’ve seen two or three marriage proposals take place out there.

During Eagles-Saints playoff week I took Les Carpenter (Washington Post), Jere Longman (NY Times), Sam Farmer (LA Times), Ohm Youngmisuk (NY Daily News), Benjamin Hochman (Times-Picayune), and Ashley Fox (Philadelphia Inquirer). Sam goes with me every time he comes to town. A lot of the NFL reporters who come in on Saturday end up at Jacquimos and the Maple Leaf – it doesn’t get any better than that.

I always urge out-of-towners to get out of the French Quarter. Go uptown to some of the smaller clubs and restaurants.

(SMG thanks Jeff Duncan for his cooperation)

LIVING

Desire without end ; Its school building flooded, its neighborhood destroyed and its student body scattered, a 9th Ward ministry regroups a world away from home and finds hope in a high school football season.

Jeff Duncan Staff writer

4135 words

11 December 2005

Times-Picayune

English

NICEVILLE, FLA. — It’s a typical sight on an October night in Louisiana: a group of coaches leading a high school football team into battle.

But nothing is even remotely typical about this night, or these coaches, or their players, or the school they represent.

They are a New Orleans school, but they are driving to the game from their new campus at Camp Timpoochee in Niceville, Fla., five hours away.

To prepare for the game, they have had just one week of class and one full practice in pads, on a potholed, unlined field that is better suited for sack races than football.

En route to the game, the team caravan has to stop at a sporting- goods store to buy helmets for some of the players, and maroon T- shirts for the coaches.

On this night, on the way to their first game, the members of the Desire Street Academy Lions are seeing their decimated building, and their devastated neighborhood, for the first time since Aug. 29.

After the tour, they board the bus quietly and head to their game across town.

“They know they’re not going back now.”

. . . . . . .

When Leverett planned the construction of Desire Street Ministry’s new school building five years ago, he did so with its rough 9th Ward neighborhood in mind.

Figuratively and structurally, Desire Street Academy was built to withstand any hell that impoverished urban life could deliver.

Any hell, that is, except high water.

The Desire Street Academy‘s plush $3 million complex, two blocks northwest of the breach on the west side of the Industrial Canal, was directly in the path of the onrushing floodwaters.

Water burst through the gym windows, poured over the basketball court and eventually rose past the first seven rows of bleachers.

When Leverett returned to the building to survey the damage a month after the storm, he found a dead crab in the parking lot and half a telephone pole resting on the stage in the gym.

In half a day, Katrina destroyed what Leverett and his staff worked 15 years to build.

. . . . . . .

Katrina scattered Desire’s faculty and students across the country.

Leverett, most of the staff and several students evacuated to a Presbyterian church camp in Jackson, Miss. Wuerffel, wife Jessica and 22-month-old son Jonah, whose Lakeview home was destroyed by the 17th Street Canal breach, worked their way to his parents’ house in Destin, Fla. School Principal Al Jones stayed with family in Baton Rouge.

Most of the students, however, did not have the means to evacuate, and they fought for their lives in the swamped city. Some wound up stranded on rooftops. Some huddled with the masses in the Louisiana Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, or waited for buses on Interstate 10.

Gathered with staff at the camp in Jackson, Leverett anguished each time his cell phone rang.

“I was getting calls from these kids in the Superdome and Convention Center saying, ‘Coach, get me out of here,’ ” Leverett said. “Everybody was fending for themselves and doing as they saw fit. (One student) was scared. He was literally losing his mind and begged me to do something.”

Leverett called Wuerffel and board members to plan a rescue mission. They told him the city was off-limits. The National Guard would not let them in.

“Some of the kids were highly dependent on our ministry,” Leverett said. “Our school had become more than just a place to go to before these kids went home to be with their families. We had become their families.”

Leverett and Wuerffel made a commitment to keep the ministry afloat.

The next morning, Wuerffel woke before sunrise, went to the neighborhood church in Destin, sat at a piano and quietly played an old hymn:

In every high and stormy gale,

My anchor holds within the veil.

His oath, his covenant, his blood

Supports me in the whelming flood.

On Christ the solid rock I stand;

All other ground is sinking sand.

“I must have played that song for an hour straight,” Wuerffel said, “singing and crying.”

. . . . . . .

One of the kids Leverett and Wuerffel worried about was Deangelo Peterson.

Peterson stayed behind with family to ride out the storm at their apartment on Bullard Avenue in eastern New Orleans.

A wiry 6-foot-3, Peterson is built like an NFL wide receiver, with sinewy arms, long legs and massive hands that belie his 16 years.

Peterson’s preternatural frame was vital on the Tuesday after Katrina, when high water surrounded his second-floor unit in the Wind Run apartment complex.

“The water was rising,” Peterson said. “And it kept rising.”

Using every inch of his frame, Peterson propped his nieces, ages 7 months and 3 years, above his head and waded through the chest- high water to the safety of a nearby hotel. He returned to rescue his mother, his sister and an aunt.

“I was a little bit scared, but I knew I could walk through the water,” Peterson said.

The group survived at the hotel for three days, with minimal food and water, before military troops rescued them by boat and took them to the Convention Center.

Three days later, officials took Peterson and his group to Louis Armstrong International Airport, where they slept on the ground for a night before being evacuated to a shelter in San Antonio.

Desire Street officials found Peterson by sending a local pastor to the shelter with a bullhorn to call out his name.

. . . . . . .

Heath Davillier, a bright-eyed eighth-grader with an infectious smile, waded through chest-high water from his home on Bienville Street and headed toward the Superdome. He couldn’t make it.

“The water was nasty, and it was up to my neck,” the pint-sized 14-year-old said. “I had to carry my bag over my head to keep it dry.”

Deeper water blocked their path to the Superdome, so the group of eight found their way to an Interstate 10 ramp and tried to make their way across the Crescent City Connection. Halfway across, an RTA bus picked them up and dropped them at Worley Junior High School in Westwego. They stayed there for three days, sleeping on the gym floor and subsisting on a diet of granola bars, fruit cups and water.

Three days later, a relative picked them up and took them to Baton Rouge, where Heath re-connected with Desire officials.

“I couldn’t wait to get back here,” said Davillier, a point guard on the Desire basketball team. “This is where all my friends are, and I knew I would get a good education here. They try to help you as much as they can here. This is like my family.”

. . . . . . .

Day by day, other students began to surface. The school opened an administrative office in Atlanta. Officials established a “people locator” database on its Web site and sent staffers into shelters with Desire Street Ministries T-shirts to locate evacuees. In other spots, they asked church volunteers to post fliers with the ministry’s phone number and Internet address. Wuerffel used his media connections to make appearances on TV and radio.

“We needed to resuscitate our school,” Leverett said.

One by one, the lost were found. Some were as far away as Kansas City, Mo. Most were in Texas. On a three-day reconnaissance run through east and south Texas, a group of coaches rescued 47 boys, picking them up in passenger vans borrowed from local churches.

Students in more isolated locations were flown in on private jets whose cost was donated by supporters. Some used frequent-flier miles of board members to fly commercial.

In the end, the staff located almost 75 percent of the school’s 192 students. The whereabouts of about 30 are still unknown to the school.

“The way those kids were calling, we knew we had to go get them,” said head football coach Byron Addison, who, along with his coaching staff, helped organize the bus run. “It was all on them. They wanted this.”

. . . . . . .

On Oct. 3, the academy re-opened its doors as a boarding school on a donated patch of peaceful countryside in the Florida Panhandle.

Camp Timpoochee sits at the end of a narrow dirt road on the outskirts of Niceville, hidden among a thicket of oak and pine trees along a bluff overlooking Choctawhatchee Bay. Once a playground of the Euchee tribe of American Indians, the area known as Stake Point is a favorite of artifact collectors, who still find remnants of pottery along its sloping, sandy beach.

First and foremost, Timpoochee is a 4-H camp. Deer roam the woodlands, dolphins play in the bay’s warm, shallow waters and box turtles creep along the forest paths.

“This is not normal for any of us,” said Jones, a native New Orleanian. “But we’re still Desire.”

To function as a school, though, Timpoochee needed work. During a few frantic weeks in late September and early October, a transformation took place.

Desire Street staffers worked with contractors to enclose an outdoor pavilion and create a set of classrooms. They converted log cabins into dorms. They cleaned and reorganized a cafeteria, a recreation hall and a handful of wood-paneled administrative offices.

“I like it so far,” Peterson said. “It’s fun. You get to hang out and sleep with your friends. It’s like college.”

And like college, hijinks are common. Eighth-grader Eric Green said he and his friends are fond of late-night canoe excursions in the bay. On a recent Sunday night, Jones happened upon a midnight pillow battle being waged between cabins. He discovered the sortie when he noticed “a big white blob” moving across the darkened courtyard.

“We’re still learning as we go,” Jones said. “This is new to all of us.”

Still, as idyllic as Timpoochee is, it’s not home. Other than the presence of an outdoor basketball court, it has little in common with the students’ former homes. For all the problems the Desire- Florida neighborhood has, for most of the students, it’s all they’ve ever known. And many are desperate to go back.

“I want to go home, too,” Jones said. “We all want to be in New Orleans. We’re just going to have to tough it out. If we can get through the transition stage, we have the perfect opportunity to train the total kid here.”

. . . . . . .

Desire demands a lot from its students. The school day runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The college preparatory curriculum remains unchanged at Timpoochee. Students are tutored in English, math, science, arts, music, physical education and Bible study. There are also elective courses in construction and culinary arts. Study halls are conducted nightly. Cornrows and braids are prohibited. Students must stay to the right at all times when walking down hallways. Cursing is strictly forbidden. Lights-out is at 10:30 p.m.

The discipline and structure are vital at Desire, where more than two-thirds of the students are raised by single parents or extended family members.

Deep-pocketed donors provide partial sponsorships for the majority of students because few can afford the $6,000 annual tuition. Sponsorships are determined by need (income and family size) and merit (academics, citizenship, athletics and parental participation). Each student’s family is required to pay or work for $500 toward the tuition amount.

Before the storm, Desire’s enrollment was a healthy 192, a nearly 300 percent increase from its original 70 in 2002. The goal was to increase to 240 in 2006.

Katrina derailed those plans. It decimated enrollment and plunged the academy into debt.

The ministry’s board of directors has tapped its national pool of supporters. Assistance has poured in from across the nation.

The University of Florida, where Wuerffel starred in the mid- 1990s, donated $50,000 from pay-per-view proceeds after the Gators’ game against Louisiana Tech.

Larry Arrington, dean for extension at Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, offered the use of Camp Timpoochee.

An Atlanta area church recently donated $66,000 to buy a new bus.

On one October night, a local family dropped off a television set that wasn’t being used at home. A couple of hours later, a truckload of desks arrived.

Three rooms at the facility are overflowing with school supplies, backpacks, clothing and linens.

And yet, it’s not enough.

The demands of operating a boarding school have stretched the ministry’s resources and 50-person staff thin. Staff members’ work schedules had to be re-structured to comply with U.S. wage and labor laws. Counselors were hired to assist the staff and help them cope with the stress. More “dorm dads” were added to supervise the boys overnight and give the beleaguered staff a break.

The school’s expenses have increased four-fold, Leverett said. The demands have forced Leverett and Wuerffel to spend the majority of their time on the road in fund-raising efforts.

“We’ve had to raise a truckload of more money,” Leverett said. “We’ve got a lot of challenges to survive as an organization.”

. . . . . . .

Despite the hurdles, school officials felt it was imperative to revive the District 10-1A football program.

Football is an integral part of the school’s mission, as indicated by its well-pedigreed staff. Leverett was a kicker at Tennessee-Chattanooga and an assistant coach at Carver High School. Wuerffel was the 1996 Heisman Trophy winner while at the University of Florida and a fourth-round draft pick of the Saints in 1997; he played six seasons for the Saints, Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers and Washington Redskins. Principal Jones was a standout defensive end at St. Augustine High School and Tulane University, and coached at Walker High School. Joseph, the offensive coordinator, was a star quarterback at Shaw High School and University of Nebraska standout. Head coach Addison prepped at Carver and played collegiately at Grambling State University.

“After all that they’ve been through, we owed it to them to play,” Joseph said. “These kids have worked so hard to get to this point. This is what they wanted.”

The Lions arranged to play an abbreviated schedule of games back in Louisiana starting Oct. 10, only days after their new equipment arrived.

They made their official LHSAA debut against the Crescent City Pioneers in uniforms that were rescued from high shelves in Addison’s flooded-out home two days earlier. Their nifty helmet decals with the block “D.S.A.” and Lions logo had not arrived yet, so the players played in plain black helmets.

At the opening kickoff, one assistant was still peeling the “XL” sticker off his just-purchased “coach’s shirt.” Water coolers and marker boards would not arrive on the sideline until midway through the first quarter.

On the Lions’ first play from scrimmage, they lost a fumble and one of their best players when running back Byron Weber injured his knee.

On the next play, Crescent City rambled 25 yards for a touchdown. Fourteen seconds into their season, the Lions trailed 7-0.

From there, it only grew worse. Two more quick touchdowns gave the Pioneers a shocking 20-0 first-quarter lead. The margin grew to 35-6 at halftime.

Bankrupt of confidence, the Lions’ play and attitudes devolved in the second half. They played two snaps with 10 players. They jumped offsides and were penalized for delay of game repeatedly. They fumbled twice, threw three interceptions and nearly snapped the ball over the punter’s head and between his legs on consecutive attempts. Players argued with each other and talked back to coaches. One player threw his helmet into the fence behind the team’s bench. Another tried to pull off his shoulder pads and quit on the spot. Another broke down in tears.

It was a startling contrast to the promising start of the Lions’ season. Four days before Katrina, the Lions had defeated Abramson High School in their jamboree. Back in the spring, they had tied St. Bernard (12-12) and Douglass (6-6).

By the time it was over, Crescent City had drubbed the Lions 50- 14. In the hectic rush to schedule the game, school officials forgot to arrange for post-game shower facilities. So the players and coaches boarded the bus for the five-hour ride to Niceville dirty and defeated.

They arrived back at Timpoochee at 5:30 a.m.

. . . . . . .

The season got worse before it got better. Off the field, some students left the program and came back; others left for good. Enrollment, which started at about 80, had decreased to less than 70 by the time the first academic quarter ended in late November, prompting the administration to begin accepting students from its waiting list, which numbered into the hundreds before the storm. The school opened its doors to about a dozen new students for the second quarter.

On the field, Desire lost to St. Charles Catholic 47-12 and then to Fisher 45-6. In their first three games, they were outscored 142- 32 and produced more penalties and turnovers than points.

“There was considerable digression in the four weeks after the storm,” Leverett said. “(The players) have had to deal with so much. The bottom line is emotionally there was a very thin layer of capacity to deal with disappointment. They spun out of control when they had to deal with adversity. It was a more difficult experience than I realized.”

Essentially, the Lions had become sacrificial lambs. Each game required a 10-hour round-trip bus ride. The home crowds grossly outnumbered their smattering of staff and students in the visiting stands.

But the team played on, and in the manner of the best Hollywood movies, its perseverance was rewarded. In its final game of the season, Desire Street defeated Ridgewood 36-8.

“It was one of the best sporting events that I’ve been a part of,” said Wuerffel, who guided Florida to college football’s Division National Championship in 1996 with a 52-20 win against arch- rival Florida State in the Sugar Bowl at the Superdome. “It meant so much more than just winning a football game to these kids.”

. . . . . . .

Leverett hopes to make Desire’s mission more manageable next year. He’s in the process of purchasing a church facility on 24 acres in Baton Rouge, where he plans to run the school next season while the 9th Ward is being rebuilt. Officials hope the Louisiana location will help them attract many of the displaced students who couldn’t make it to Florida.

“Our school is a very important school in our city and in our state,” Leverett said. “I think it’s highly important that we preserve Desire Street Academy. It’s addressing what was at the heart of the problem in New Orleans in many ways. It’s the only one of its kind. It’s desperately needed.”

Environmental contractors have cleaned the old facility in the 9th Ward. The building is structurally sound and salvageable, Leverett said. The Desire-Florida neighborhood, however, faces a more uncertain future. Leverett said he wants to become a catalyst in the area’s redevelopment.

Time is not on Desire’s side. The ministry’s lease at Camp Timpoochee expires May 20.

“I’m not entirely sure how it’s all going to shake out,” Leverett said. “But I remain committed to the goals of our ministry. Hopefully, we can be a launching point for the rest of the neighborhood.

“I miss New Orleans like crazy. I’m in a nice place on the Emerald Coast. I can ride my bike around the neighborhood and not get shot at, but it still don’t feel like home. The 9th Ward of New Orleans, that’s where my heart is. I can’t shake that.”

No one knows for sure when the 9th Ward will be ready for Desire’s return. Like so much else in New Orleans, its future is clouded by uncertainty.

Only one thing is certain: The experience of being away has changed the people at the school.

“It’s been difficult,” Leverett said, “but in the end we’ll look back on it and say it was worth it. We kept something going that is extremely important during one of the worst tragedies the city has ever seen. In the absence of families and resources, we made a difference.”

. . . . . . .

For more information about the Desire Street Ministry or to donate funds and supplies, call (866) 633-0070 or visit www.desirestreet.org
.

Staff writer Jeff Duncan can be reached at jduncan@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3405.

Caption: TOP OF PAGE: Robert Kelly sweeps the porches of his cabin at Desire Academy’s Niceville, Fla., campus. Students are responsible for keeping their cabins clean. [1840901] Biology teacher Daniel Ballard shows off examples of marine life at his new classroom near the beach. ‘The kids love this stuff,’ Ballard said. ‘We talk about guy stuff in here.’ [1840895] The Desire Academy Lions pause to pray after their first game of the season against the Crescent City Christian School Pioneers, delayed five weeks by Hurricane Katrina. [1840888] The Desire Academy Lions practice as the sun sinks into a faint glow over the campground that serves as their temporary school. [1840909] The frustration is apparent on DSA player Jonathan Rochon’s face when the team struggles in its first- game. [1840883] Members of the St. Charles Catholic Comets offer words of encouragement after trouncing Desire in the team’s second game. [1841862] A Desire Academy student walks to practice from his cabin at Camp Timpoochee 4-H Center in Niceville, Fla., a setting very different from the school’s 9th Ward campus. [1840912] In the cabins at night, Rosha Washington checks his cell phone for messages from home as Darwin Pechon, center, and Jarred Micken look on. [1840919] Jeremy Armstrong gets some one-on-one tutoring from his geography teacher, April Vandergriff, while his classmates joke around behind them. [1840910] Six feet of flood water engulfed the Desire Street Ministries and Academy building in the 9th Ward. [1840866] Mo Leverett looks over family photos and mementos inside his flooded home at Desire Street Ministries. [1840850] Desire Street Academy junior Jonah Leavell heads out from the equipment house for afternoon practice at the school’s makeshift Florida campus. ‘We kept something going that is extremel

Born: 1964, lousiville

Ecuaiton: ufnir of louarive, 1986, communicaoins

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Jeff Duncan (Part One)

An Interview with Jeff Duncan (Part One)

“I was the first reporter in the Dome…The Dome was such a symbol of Katrina and suffering. Even a year later talking to officers and military people we still don’t know what happened in there. There’s no way to nail down the deaths and rapes. Trying to peel away the myth and get to the truth was very difficult.”

It was the most rewarding experience of my career. I’m sure I’ll never cover another story of that magnitude…I was fortunate to sink my teeth into something so important and make a difference in the community…I’ve never felt my job was more important than it was these past two years.

“Obviously it changed my perspective on sports…I used to be the obsessive guy who watched ESPN all the time and would read the sports section first. Now I pick up the A section first and work back to sports. I watch…more CNN and broader-scope programming. It helped me become a better-rounded person.”

Jeff Duncan: Interviewed on March 1, 2007

Position: enterprise sports reporter, New Orleans Times-Picayune

Born: 1964, Louisville

Education: University of Louisville, 1986, communications

Career: Louisville Courier-Journal (part-time), St. Petersburg Times (part-time), Monroe News-Star 1989-96, Florida Today 96-98, Nashville alternative weekly 98-99, Times-Picayune 99 –

Personal: single

Favorite restaurant (home): Jacquimo’s “the quintessential New Orleans restaurant – get the alligator sausage cheesecake – it sounds horrible and if you’re not from here you wouldn’t order it – 10,000 calories but worth every one”; Cochon “warehouse district – hottest new restaurant in town – specializes in Louisiana pork”

Favorite restaurant (road): Jake’s Del Mar Restaurant, Del Mar, Ca., “beachfront dining and Del Mar is one of the most beautiful towns in America”

Favorite hotel: Grand Marriott, Point Clear, Ala. “where we stay covering the Senior Bowl – old historic hotel on a bluff – you get the points and you’re in a nice hotel”

Jeff Duncan excerpted from the Times-Picayune, September 12, 2005:

The concrete and steel titan on Poydras Street still dominates the New Orleans skyline. But the Superdome, like everything else in the brutalized city, looks much different now.

Hurricane Katrina’s 100 mph-plus winds relentlessly strafed the world-renowned stadium’s roof, peeled back its white weather- protective shell like a coconut husk. The force was so powerful it stripped off sheets of 2-inch foam and thick rubber and blew them all over the Central Business District. Three huge smoke dampers were blown from the roof. Seven other gaping holes were opened.

Once compared to a sleek futuristic spaceship, the Dome now looks like a beat-up car that has lost its primer. Sixty percent of the roof was damaged, said Doug Thornton, regional vice president for SMG, the company that manages the state-owned facility.

Thornton tagged the cost of damage at between $50 million and $100 million, less than some that have been tossed around in recent days, but substantial nonetheless.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the World Trade Center became an icon of their wreckage. After Hurricane Katrina, it’s the Superdome. Via helicopter fly-overs, TV networks beamed countless images of the hurricane-ravaged arena around the world in the days after the storm. As before, it symbolizes the city.

The unyielding eye of the cameras, however, never peered inside the 30-year-old landmark, which has been under armed-guard lockdown since the last of the 25,000 storm victims who sought shelter there were evacuated Sept. 4.

On Friday, Thornton led a team of 22 contractors and a handful of Superdome employees on a tour of the facility to assess the damage caused by the hurricane and the storm victims who used the building as a refuge. It was the first time anyone other than Thornton or National Guard troops had been inside the building since Sept. 4.

The group included representatives from several national companies that specialize in environmental disaster abatement and demolition services. They donned gas masks, white jumpsuits and rubber hip boots. Some even rubbed Vick’s Vaporub under their noses to block the stench….

Inside, the Dome’s 1.8 million square feet looks trashed. Its floors, concourses, ramps, meeting rooms, offices and restrooms are littered with debris and refuse from the evacuees who endured hellish living conditions in the building for as many as five days after the storm.

The floor and Momentum Turf playing field have been transformed into a mushy lake of inch-deep black water. The fetid soup coated a sea of trash and spoiled food. The bathrooms on the 200 level overflow with human feces and urine. In one men’s room, the human waste spilled out of the entrance and into the concourse. Blood stains several walls. Stagnant for days in the still air, the water, spoiled food and human excrement will require decontamination and will be removed by professionals…

Officials said at least 10 to 12 people died in the Dome, including a man who jumped or was pushed 50 feet to his death from one of the pedestrian walkways. A military police officer also was shot in the leg during an assault.

On the suite level, windows were shattered; holes and graffiti marred several walls. Damage to the luxury boxes varied from suite to suite.

In one, the liquor cabinets had been broken into and the chairs were rearranged but everything else was unharmed. Down the hall, one of the New Orleans Saints’ suites was ransacked. Leather couches were turned over. Holes were punched in the walls and pictures were shattered. A 10-by-18-inch picture of former Saints running back Ricky Williams lay in tatters on a bed of broken glass and splintered wood…

Friday’s tour was the first step in a two-month evaluation process to determine whether the Dome should be salvaged, renovated or destroyed.

There is a strong possibility the costs to save the facility will be too high. Thornton has estimated it could cost $50 million to $100 million to repair the Dome and as much as $500 million to $600 million to demolish it and build a new one.

The future of one of country’s world’s most recognized buildings, one that has hosted some of the biggest events in American history and along the way became one of New Orleans’ most enduring symbols, is now uncertain.

Six NFL teams won Super Bowls in it. The LSU Tigers celebrated the 2004 college football national championship in it. Frank Sinatra crooned in it. The Rolling Stones rocked it. And Pope John Paul II prayed in it.

The evaluation will be a laborious process. Thornton hopes to receive bids from the contractors by the end of this week.

“One guy asked me why we wouldn’t just want to tear down the Dome because it harbors so many bad memories of the storm, but we had 30 years of good memories here before the hurricane,” Thornton said. “It could be a symbol for the rebuilding of New Orleans, something people could rally around.”

But, he added, “there is a possibility that they’ve played the last game in the Superdome as we know it.”

Q. What was it like going into the Superdome after Katrina?

A. I was the first reporter in the Dome. The GM of the Superdome, Doug Thornton, contacted us about accompanying them on the first inspection after the storm. Because I had been the NFL reporter and had covered so many games there I was sent.

It was intense. We wore hazmat outfits – I remember putting on gloves and boots and a hat and thinking that two weeks ago I was concerned with who was making the Saints final roster -now I’m concerned about hazardous material – what a surreal experience. To get into the arena and see the damage – and to cover the renovation and the symbolism it had for the city – and to be there that night (Sept. 25, 2006) for the Falcons game – it was a tremendous experience beyond sports reporting.

A year later I worked on a story that was the most difficult assignment I ever had in sports journalism. They wanted me to write the Dome experience for the (Katrina) anniversary issue. They wanted me to relive the five days at the Dome, to write the definitive story of what happened in there. It was a year later and people still didn’t know. It was foggy. Traditional reporting methods were useless – you couldn’t call up a source at City Hall. Police reports weren’t issued – there were no public records you would traditionally go to.

It was boots on the ground, roll up your sleeves reporting and it took all of my time from July to late August. To dig that story back up and tell it was a great challenge. You had storm victims in the Dome, and the military, which was responsible for protecting those people. You had the Dome manager, Doug Thornton and his staff – they were trained in running a sport facility, not housing storm victims. You had the medical people who were there, and I found a group of tourists from England and Australia – vacationers who ended up in the Dome, trapped in sub-human living conditions. We ran the (anniversary) series daily – it started on Sunday before the storm and picked up the next day with the storm hitting. I tried to take readers into the Dome and what it was like.

The Dome was such a symbol of Katrina and suffering. Even a year later talking to officers and military people we still don’t know what happened in there. There’s no way to nail down the deaths and rapes. Trying to peel away the myth and get to the truth was very difficult.

Q. What is it like to walk into the Dome now?

A. There was a lot of criticism nationally that New Orleans’ priorities were out of whack in rebuilding the Dome. They don’t understand the significance of what the Dome means to people here. In a lot of ways it’s like Fenway Park or Wrigley Field – an iconic symbol that holds a strong place in the hearts of Orleanians – it was very important to rebuild it. For the NFL it was prerequisite to getting the team back. The city needed the Saints back here and it wasn’t going to happen without the Dome.

All I could think of were the workers who worked around the clock for nine months straight. Doug Thornton lost his home but he was at the Dome overseeing a project that should have taken three years condensed into nine months – all to lift the city and to provide a beacon to the city. That, to me, was the story of New Orleans.

Q. What did the Katrina experience mean to you as a journalist?

A. It was the most rewarding experience of my career. I’m sure I’ll never cover another story of that magnitude – it’s still ongoing and will be for the next decade in New Orleans. As a journalist you can go a whole career and never have something of this scale. I was fortunate to sink my teeth into something so important and make a difference in the community. That’s why most of us got into this – to inform the community and make a difference in everyday lives. It was tremendous on that level. I’ve never felt my job was more important than it was these past two years.

I remember after the storm – our base was moved to Baton Rouge and we had to truck the papers in – I would go down and hand out papers to military personnel and holdouts and some people were crying when we handed them out. It was very powerful to see the impact of that – the newspaper was a sign of normalcy for them.

Obviously it changed my perspective on sports. I look at it differently. I used to be the obsessive guy who watched ESPN all the time and would read the sports section first. Now I pick up the A section first and work back to sports. I watch less ESPN and sports-related TV and more CNN and broader-scope programming. It helped me become a better-rounded person.

Q. Was your home flooded?

I live in the Uptown area near Tulane and Loyola universities. My house is close to the Mississippi River – anything close to the river is on high ground because of years of natural flooding depositing sediment. So I’m on high ground, but I didn’t know about flood elevation when I bought my house – I’m a runner and wanted to be near a park. I had about $40,000 in damage from the actual storm including a new roof.

I also lost my SUV – it was parked at the Times-Pic and was lost in the flood. When I went out reporting Monday night I parked in front of the building in an area that was dry. As the waters rose overnight none of us knew what that meant – we knew the levies had breached but we didn’t’ know how high the water would get or how far it would go. I thought my car was safe – the next morning I saw four feet of water on my truck. We were awakened by the publisher and told to evacuate. It was pretty hectic, but I survived pretty much unscathed. Three weeks ago we had a huge tornado that hit my block and I escaped again.

The floodwaters got stopped about five blocks from my house, but when we evacuated Tuesday morning to Baton Rouge none of us knew. You can imagine the shock of seeing four feet of water lapping on the front steps of the newspaper where I had walked the night before – I can’t tell you how disorienting. We rode seven hours in the back of a delivery truck to Baton Rouge in searing heat. It was a brutal experience – almost like being a refugee.

I stayed at a colleague’s house that night. We had the radio on and Mayor Nagin came on and said they can’t stop the breaches in the levies and the city was going to fill with water. They expected eight feet of water on St. Charles Avenue before it leveled out. I figured there would be ten feet of water in my house. The next morning I received hundreds of e-mails from friends and colleagues around the country. I told them I feared I had lost my house.

Q. How long before you got back to New Orleans?

A. I was in Baton Rouge for two days. After watching events transpire I was dying to get back into the city – any journalist worth his salt is going to want to cover this story. We had a small band of reporters that had stayed in the city under the direction of David Meeks who was SE at the time. He had the perspective and foresight to realize we couldn’t abandon the city all at once – he had a handful of reporters working for two days and nights.

When I was in Baton Rouge in the initial days I talked to Gordon Russell on the phone. He had been where the police had shot a man and had got out his car to report it and the police threw him against a wall and put a gun to his head. He was on the phone with me afterward and he was terrified. Gordon is one of the most diligent bulldog reporters we have. To hear that in his voice spurred me more than anything to go help our team. They needed help not just for surviving but to cover the story.

I got through to the managing editor and asked to come join them. I knew there would be no power or water – that type of environment isn’t the easiest situation to work in and it’s not for everybody, but I’m healthy and fairly young. My colleagues were doing it and I knew it was dangerous but somebody had to do it. It was competitive – I knew the New York Times and Washington Post were there. But this was our story and we needed to cover it better than anybody.

I got in a rental car that night and drove with Michael Montalbano, a sports copy editor. We gathered supplies and drove to Houma (La.) – we were working out of the Houma Courier newsroom. We slept on the floor of the newsroom and went back into the city to report on Friday. Friday night we put out our first printed story after the storm – we were printing at the Houma paper.

Q. So now you’re a news reporter, not a sportswriter. What was your first story after Katrina?

A. I did a story on the zoo, which is in the back of Audubon Park. It struck me that no one knew what had happened at the zoo – were tigers running around? I had no idea. I went to the gate – they had metal gates down in front of the building – and I saw somebody in back. I called to them – the security staff came out but they would not open the gates because they were in such fear after what they heard on the radio. There was looting uptown and they were terrified and they wouldn’t open the gates for us. We interviewed them through the gates and wrote a decent story about the damage. I slept in the Houma newsroom that night.

The next day I went to the Wal-Mart in Houma and stocked up on supplies – I was preparing to stay for good. We stayed in a colleague’s house uptown – Stephanie Grace, a metro columnist – she let in this animal pack and regrets it in hindsight. Her house became the Times-Pic Katrina bureau for the next month. We slept on the floors and had fans powered by generators. We developed an efficient system. Walt Philbin, a police reporter, became the courier – he called every morning and asked what supplies we needed – fuel, ice, beer, food – he brought it in every day and took stuff back to Baton Rouge.

James O’Byrne, the features editor, had set up a (Baton Rouge) newsroom within 24 hours with laptops and a computer network and editors and started putting out a newspaper. For reporters and editors there was no difference in the work we were doing – the deadlines were different but the journalism performed was essentially the same – although it was more difficult because of the 24-hour news cycle. We were filing at 3 a.m. and blogging constantly on the website.

It was a fluid situation. The Times-Pic and (owner) Newhouse were wonderful in how they treated the situation. They announced to us that we could work if we wanted but we didn’t have to, we could take time off – whatever we felt was best. Some people evacuated before the storm and stayed at different spots around the country. October 10 was the day we had to be back at work and they would pay us for that time. People came and went in the newsroom and the bureau.

We had a core of six to twelve in the bureau the whole time. Once you were there it was a hassle getting back out of town – it was better just to stay there. You had food and water and you knew what was at stake – the story was unfolding before our eyes. For a journalist it was such a rich environment you were compelled to stay – nothing would pull you out of there.

After 10 days I went back to Baton Rouge for a few days. A colleague was kind enough to put me up. I had to take care of personal things – bills and insurance claims – once I got that under control I felt better about focusing on the story. Luckily I was able to break away and check on my house and see that it was fine – there was no looting. Early on all standards had broken down – there was no law enforcement in the neighborhoods – police and military were concerned with saving lives. It was a very dangerous environment early on. I distinctly remember the fear in the early days until the National Guard got in. We were armed – we had weapons in our bureau that our photographer, Alex Brandon, brought in, just because there was nobody to protect you.

Q. Were you at any point in a life-threatening situation?

A. No. I never felt like my life was in danger. I did feel some fear for my security in reporting some stories. We had a pact – reporters would travel in pairs or with photographers. We did some reporting on holdouts – stragglers who refused to evacuate. These people formed mini-societies, congregated and looked out for one another. There are going to be some bad people in that kind of crowd – you could see them watching you. I found myself interviewing them and being asked to go into out-of-the-way areas to see something – that’s when I felt a little fear because I was back there by myself.

(SMG thanks Jeff Duncan for his cooperation)

Mike DeArmond

An Interview with Mike DeArmond

“…I started feeling as if I wasn’t good enough at the things I did, and that I was at fault for nearly everything. My Aunt Helen’s suicide. My father’s expectations. Dan Devine leaving Missouri and handing over Tiger football to Al Onofrio, who could beat Notre Dame but could not beat Kansas. I’d like to say I’m kidding, but at some level, my taking blame for stupid things like that was very real.”

“In 1991, my dad died – his last heart attack. My mother found him on the floor of the garage in Joplin. I broke down on the telephone, though I soldiered on…And that was the edge over which I tumbled, although it was not until years later, in the summer of 2006, that I had a nervous breakdown. By the way, that’s the dumbest description of losing your self-control ever invented.”

“I told Barb I could not go back to work. I put my head on her shoulder. She gathered me in her arms. I cried for 16 straight hours. And then, the day after we got home to Kansas City, I went to a psychiatric hospital so broken in emotional pieces that they took away my belt and shoelaces and put me under observation for 24 hours.”

Mike DeArmond: Interviewed on March 25, 2010

Position: Sportswriter, Kansas City Star

Born: 1950, Butler, Mo.

Education: University of Missouri – Columbia, BJ ’72

Career: Kansas City Star, 1971 “through today – last I checked”

Personal: “Married to the wonderful and funny and smart and patient Barbara Withers DeArmond, son Gabriel, daughter Cortney”

Favorite restaurant (home): Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue, Kansas City, Missouri. “And if absolutely anybody says that isn’t the best barbecue in the history of the world, then they haven’t eaten there or they are a Kansas Jayhawk fan.”

Favorite restaurant (away): Pode Nostrum (Means Under the Bridge) in Prague. “Literally, it is under the Charles Bridge, is lighted by 150 or so candles, overlooks a slew in the river where the residents threw their handguns rather than give them to the Soviets back in the day. Cook their meat by charcoal grill in front of you and have a plum liquor that will knock you on your rear, which they served to us in a purple fabric-lined wooden box when the waitress found out it was Barb’s birthday.”

Favorite hotel: Club Intrawest, Zihuatanejo, Mexcio.

Mike DeArmond, posted on kansascity.com, August 24, 2009:

http://campuscorner.kansascity.com/node/152

I come not to criticize or praise Michael Beasley, but to empathize with him.
Yahoo Sports is reporting the former Kansas State basketball star, now a member of the NBA Miami Heat, is being treated for depression-related issues at a Houston rehabilitation facility. The Associated Press is reporting the same contention.

When I read those accounts today, I wanted to throw up.
Why?
Because I’ve been there. Three years ago, I spent a night in a psychiatric care facility under observation for depression.
It may have been the worst night of my life. They took my shoestrings, my belt. Informed doctors and nurses take depression seriously. I felt exactly how Beasley apparently felt when he left a cry for help on an Internet account:
“Feelin like it’s not worth livin!!!!!!! I’m done” and “I feel like the whole world is against me. I can’t win for losin’.”

It doesn’t matter why you feel that low. It matters only that you do. And trust me, you do.
I spent only the one night under lock and key, of my own volition. I spent several weeks in day-long group therapy sessions and it is those sessions that I honestly will tell you saved my life.
My last day of group therapy, I told my fellow sufferers that I would carry a part of each of them around with me for the rest of my life. The part that helped me gain perspective again.
It is why I’m sharing my experience. I was helped off a ledge by others sharing their experiences with me.
I don’t begin to know a thing about what demons are chasing Michael Beasley, if indeed there are any.

Depression’s causes and symptoms are as varied as the different people you’ll meet walking down the street.
Some depressives are alcoholics or drug addicts. Many, like me, are not.
For me, depression was – and on some days still can be – measured by the certainty that beneath my feet, just under the ground upon which I stand, lurks a deep, dark lake knowing no horizon.
Its surface is not ruffled by waves, or even a ripple. But to descend into the dark’s caress is to give up all hope. Loss of hope, I contend, beggars the loss of life.
If Michael Beasley is teetering over that abyss, then I pray he receives the help I received. I pray we let him seek that with the understanding I was granted by people at The Kansas City Star, by family, by friends.
It is the least we all could do.

Q. Your column was candid and courageous. What is the relevant history that preceded it – take us to the beginning and wind it forward.

A. When I was 12 years old and pitching Little League baseball in the birthplace of Harry S Truman (Lamar, Mo.) each night before every game I would crawl under the stands and lie face-down to the ground with hands supporting a stomach that felt as if it was going to burst. I was later told this was probably the beginning of an ulcer, which eventually did go away of its own accord and the understanding that no one but me gave a damn about Little League baseball.

That was the first time I remember wanting to do something and not wanting to do that something at the same time. But that soon was the case with competitive swimming as well. But at least in swimming, I had the good sense – and the rudeness I’m sure my swim coach thought – to say I would swim the free style and the backstroke and any relay involving either of those strokes, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to swim the breaststroke, at which I moved up and down the pool with the approximate speed of a corpse.

We moved from Lamar, upon my graduation from the sixth grade and right before my sister’s senior year in high school, to Joplin, Mo., and my parents were concerned how my sister would adjust. They should have worried more about how a small town boy would adjust to what seemed at the time to be a major city (population 40,000), in an era where pegged jeans were all the rage in Joplin and had yet to be heard of in Lamar.

The mortification of going to school with jeans that I rolled the bottoms up into cuffs lasted approximately two days. A girl I didn’t know kindly told me everyone would think I was a dork – which, of course, I was – if I didn’t get the bottom of my jeans sewn into a seam and if I didn’t get the legs tightened so much that I needed to bring a seam ripper and a needle and thread to gym class so that I could get out of the damned things and then tighten up the bottom of the Levi’s sufficiently to retain my air of cool. That is, more or less, how I managed to get through three years of what Joplin called Junior High School. Along with playing eighth and ninth-grade basketball, thanks not to any level of talent at the game but rather because I developed a defensive bravado that passed for supreme self confidence that so angered opposing players that they would make stupid mistakes trying to show me up.

There really was nothing remarkable about the three years at South Junior High, except for becoming modestly acceptable to some nice looking girls, and developing friends from two other junior highs through a church youth group we all attended for the social life rather than for any religious lessons.

It was here, in fact, that I had the audacity to inform the assistant minister that I thought organized religion was pretty much full of it and that half of the congregation of that particular church was probably as latently hypocritical as I was.

The first year at Joplin High School marked three big events. One, it became obvious I wasn’t a varsity athlete. Two, if I wasn’t going to play sports I could at least write about them. And three, I met Mary Wieman, the best teacher I ever had.

She happened to be the newspaper sponsor and my creative writing teacher. And was the first adult besides my parents and my Aunt Helen who actually said, “I love you.”

It was in the middle of the American Folk Music revival and I taught myself to play the guitar, began writing some of my own songs, and spending a lot of time on my own penning free verse that was somewhat influenced by equal parts Poe, the English murder mystery writer Edgar Wallace (who was also a sports writer) and by teen angst real and imagined.

Are you bored yet? I could go on for pages. But I won’t.

I thought I fell in love for the first time my senior year, with a girl from another town I had met at a summer journalism conference at Missouri the summer after my junior year in high school. And that generally meant I was either going over to Kansas to drink 3/2 beer with the guys or driving to another town to have a date or just an hour or two to talk about issues of the heart as if I understood any of them.

And then it was time to go to COLLEGE. Not Missouri Southern College in Joplin, which I informed my dear mother would be like high school all over again, but Mizzou. Where I pledged a fraternity, co-wrote its winning home-coming skit (the co-writer getting major credit because he could put a microphone into his mouth and actually sound like a Tiger), then along with some 30 other members of a 36-boy pledge class quit the fraternity. The exact moment of exit came within the first hour of Hell Week, when an active spit on a tile flood and handed me a toothbrush and told be to clean the grout. At which point I told him to shove the toothbrush up his tight ass, picked up my guitar and my other stuff and walked across the street and moved into an apartment the University didn’t know about.

At this point -and finally we’ve reached the point of your question – I started feeling as if I wasn’t good enough at the things I did, and that I was at fault for nearly everything. My Aunt Helen’s suicide. My father’s expectations.

Dan Devine leaving Missouri and handing over Tiger football to Al Onofrio, who could beat Notre Dame but could not beat Kansas. I’d like to say I’m kidding, but at some level, my taking blame for stupid things like that was very real.

I met Barb, my wife, the second semester of my freshman year and we dated throughout college – with a minor spell when I thought it was a good idea to date around but then found there was absolutely no one but Barb who could put up with me – all the way up to our marriage the December following our May graduation in 1972.

By this point my poetry and free verse definitely had a lot of Poe and a lot of dark shadings. I could, and sometimes did, cry for the silliest of things. Simply wondering if my parents were proud of me would do it.

But after a sports stringing job with The Kansas City Star my senior year turned into a full-time job, I charged headlong into marriage, sports writing and the inability to handle criticism at all.

I was offered the No. 1 beat position on Kansas City’s new NHL franchised and turned it down for the No. 3 position on a two-paper system covering Royals baseball. That first year, I literally considered driving my car into a tree on several occasions. For two reasons.

One, pro athletes generally treat rookie writers – and at 23 I was a complete rookie – as poorly as they do rookie ballplayers. Amos Otis threatened to hit me with a baseball bat. I started to walk away and heard the wolves gathering with

every step of retreat, so turned around and told AO to swing away. We developed a good relationship quickly thereafter. God Bless John Mayberry and Hal McRae.

And two, I really could not stand to have my copy changed. Took it as a personal affront. Once drove back from the Lake of the Ozarks on a Sunday morning after arriving on Saturday so that I could personally confront an editor who had changed ONE word in my lead.

In 1991, my dad died – his last heart attack. My mother found him on the floor of the garage in Joplin. I broke down on the telephone, though I soldiered on. I remember Mrs. Wieman came by and we sat in her car and smoked cigarettes and I told her stuff I couldn’t tell my mother. How I wasn’t ready to be a man (at age 41). How unfair this all was.

And that was the edge over which I tumbled, although it was not until years later, in the summer of 2006, that I had a nervous breakdown. By the way, that’s the dumbest description of losing your self-control ever invented.

Q. In a reply to a commenter, you mentioned a nervous breakdown on a transatlantic flight – what was that like and how did you respond?

A. I survived the hell of covering the Ricky Clemons Affair and the 45 Days of Quin Snyder’s Implosion, but suddenly, on an airplane back from Switzerland, I saw a guy in the aisle next to me working on a computer exactly like my work computer.

I told Barb I could not go back to work. I put my head on her shoulder. She gathered me in her arms. I cried for 16 straight hours. And then, the day after we got home to Kansas City, I went to a psychiatric hospital so broken in emotional pieces that they took away my belt and shoelaces and put me under observation for 24 hours.

Fortunately, my shrink took me out of forced confinement, and put me in daily group therapy sessions for a month. I took another extra month off work. Until – through talking out my life and finding a proper, if minimal, medication dosage – I felt I was ready to go back to work. And knew I was when I told a co-worker in all seriousness that I was crazy. And he smiled and said: “Mike, we always knew that.”

Q. What role did your family, colleagues and bosses play in your treatment and recovery?

A. I told our sports editor at the time that my collapse was not his fault. And it wasn’t. I had an emotional fault in my foundation the size of the crack in the House of Usher. But I will say this. Were all my bosses as understanding as Derek Sampson – then the college editor at The Star – I might not have broken down completely. Too many bosses in journalism treat reporters and assistant editors and copy editors like donkeys. When you have a donkey like me who already thinks he isn’t good enough and that everything that goes wrong is his fault, well, people can break.

Q. How do you assess your condition at present?

A. I’m much more forgiving of myself and others. I’m calmer, and that is in part because of meds. I don’t have to scream and throw a fit to tell people I need a break. And the people who work with me seem to appreciate that. On the first day after I poured out my insecurities to a shrink, he asked me: “What took you so long to come here?” I might not have broken down if I had gone earlier. I wish I had. But perhaps I needed to hit an emotional bottom. I still refer to bad days as being able “to see that dark lake that is flowing right under my feet.” But I’m sound enough to have been able to help some other people who have had the same problems as I. I’m in a good place right now.

Q. Why did you decide to write about your depression in a public forum?

A. I wanted to help other people. And it helped me at the same time. Depression deepens the more ashamed you are of being depressed, the more you try to hide it. I wanted to tell other people “You’re not alone.”

Q. What was it like writing that column – how did you find the words?

A. I don’t think about writing. I don’t craft things. They just pour out. I’d be a better writer if I was able to write and re-write and re-write. I do re-write. But I hate it. It, to me, injects artifice into what pours out of my gut and my heart.

Q. Reaction to the column?

A. Generally good. A lot of people told me it took a lot of courage. I kept telling them it didn’t. It wasn’t courageous. I simply told a story like I’d told thousands of stories I’ve run across in covering the Royals from 1973 through 1980, from covering eight Olympic Games, from covering more than 20 years of sports of all kinds at the University of Missouri, and six or seven in the ’70s when K-State was good at basketball and sucked at football. From covering the Golden Gloves with some guy named Steve Marantz, and from going inside the collapsed Hyatt Regency lobby to help report and write the story of the Hyatt Skywalk Tragedy.

Q. What impact did your job, and career, have on your condition?

A. It both increased the pressure to break and served as a safety valve. I may have reduced stress by working at another sort of job. But I might have exploded out of frustration. I picked the right profession. Sometimes I just didn’t do it very well.

Q. Aside from the long hours and travel, how might a job in sports media put stress on health and happiness?

A. Journalism – all sorts, I’d bet – isn’t what it was when I graduated from Mizzou. The profession contends fairness and accuracy remain basic tenets. I don’t believe that is the case beyond the pride of the individual. Get it first. Whatever IT is. Too many people don’t really care. It is all about Internet clicks, and getting somebody to leave comments at the bottom of your stories. Journalism no longer takes the time to explain. We no longer try to change the world for the better. We’re just trying to get along, to survive. And I hate that.

Q. In the past year, other sports columnists have written about personal battles with alcoholism and sex addiction. Why are writers now more apt to reveal personal matters when in the past it was off limits?

A. I don’t know that is true. Maybe it is. Blame it on Watergate. And part of that is a good thing. I think we’re being more honest, by choice or not doesn’t really matter. Each person, at heart, is what we call an “Olympic story.” Full of humanity, pathos, pride, disappointment. Journalists are fully developed characters, not entities existing in a single dimension. I like the way Cheryl Wheeler – a singer-songwriter who wrote the song “Aces” said it in another song: “Life is short, but the days and nights are long.”

Q. Mizzou alums are afraid to ask, but will: Is depression an occupational hazard of covering Mizzou sports?

A. No. It would depress me more if I had to daily try to report on the quasi-religious experience of Kansas basketball, Nebraska football or St. Louis Cardinals baseball. Mizzou sports and I have something in common. We’re sometimes quite good, often-times flawed. Sometimes we are just downright pathetic. But at the end of the day, I’d like to believe we’re both without too much artifice. At the end of it all, we’re not that hard to understand.

(SMG thanks Mike DeArmond for his cooperation)

AJ Daulerio

An Interview With AJ Daulerio

“…come on, you’re telling me Shirley Povich didn’t canvas the titty bars to get inside information on the players he covered?”

“Every Deadspin post doesn’t have to be overly crude, or arched for it to work on the site. Sometimes it’s necessary to let the readership know that you are capable of being a decent human being. If it’s truthful and not stilted, I think the “earnest” stories can be just as successful as those littered with dick jokes and smart-assery.”

“I rarely monitor the comments to see who’s a good or bad commenter. I think what happens down below the post is its own universe and is self-policed…It’s very Lord of the Flies”

AJ Daulerio: Interviewed on November 15, 2008

Position: Deadspin Sea Captain (and editor)

Born: 1974, Philadelphia, “home of the World Fucking Champion Philadelphia Phillies”

Education:La Salle University, 1996 1/2, Communications/English

Career: “Various legal and financial trade publications, The Black Table, Oddjack, Philadelphia Magazine, Deadspin. Numerous other places before and in between”

Personal:SINGLE

Favorite restaurant (home): Mercato, Philadelphia, 12th and Spruce. “I could bathe in their short rib ragu”

Favorite restaurant (away): Blue Ribbon Brasserie, New York. “I think I could eat 96 oysters”

Favorite hotel: THEhotel, Las Vegas, “Mini flat-screen right next to the toilet”

AJ Daulerio, posted on Deadspin, November 12, 2008, 2:30 p.m:

http://deadspin.com/5084216/when-we-were-kings-one-night-at-ricks-cabaret

“I don’t get the Derek Jeter thing, ” one dancer named Julianne says from across a four top table in the dimly lit dining room of Rick’s Cabaret. “He’s so normal looking.”

Two other girls, Holly and, oh, I don’t know remember what her name was — Bambi, maybe?— agree. “Yes, he’s really not that handsome.”

This was the extent of the “athlete” conversations we had with the dancers, three of them, sitting around our table, boobs and bubble-headedness on full display. It was tough to get the girls to talk about the professional athletes they’ve had has clients. Most were willing to go there, but simply couldn’t remember any names, or teams, or what day of the week it was.

I’ve interviewed strippers before and, like all humans, some are brighter than others. Some keep careful track of the notable names and faces that they meet. Others could give a lap dance to the president and won’t treat him different than any other dude waving a $20 — unless they’re told to. Special treatment is a directive passed down from the host of the club. Athletes are the whales in these places and on Monday night, we played that role. Granted, it could only go so far, because everyone in the club could tell that we were just a couple of idiots playing dress-up. The staff happily obliged, though, and we experienced for one night what Rick’s Cabaret is like for those with athlete celebrity status and disposable income.

The reason we picked this Monday was also to watch the “beloved” Arizona Cardinals on Monday Night Football. Will was adamant about this. Whatever other kind of shenanigans transpire, he still gets to watch the game. “We get to watch the game, though, right, that’s why we came here…” Yeah. Got it.

Our host for the evening was accommodating, making sure that we had a table right in front of a television and ensured we were never lonely. ” If the girls get too annoying or distracting, just tell them to leave,” he said. I envisioned a scenario with Will politely asking strippers to leave the table so he could watch the game because, “I’msorryma’amthat’s my team, I love the CardinalsgoCardinals!Notthatyou’renotalovelyhumanbeingbutthisismyteamandI…I…I…I.” That whole thing.

We ate our steaks and watched our game and shared pleasant, awkward, nonsensical conversation with the women seen pictured in many of these photographs. This is what differentiates us between actual athletes — they’re smart enough to know that small-talk should be limited to money exchanging and if they want more drinks. Conversations about family or world economic policy are not they types of topics that should be broached before a woman jams her knee in your crotch.

But who does come to Rick’s Cabaret? According to our host, members of the Knicks, Yankees, and Rangers are all frequent attendees. They get steaks, they get their favorite girls and they relax — it’s decompression time. Not all of them partake in multiple lap dances or get embarrassingly shit-faced. No, some just ignore the girls and the drinks altogether and just want to go some place where they won’t be bothered. (No photos in the club enable most of the athletes to relax a little more. And autograph-seekers and fanboys are less inclined to bother them at a strip club.) Many of the visiting teams pick up their side-projects there — “road beef”, if you will — and plenty of women treat those arrangements like a part-time job.

While we’re still in blind item mode, one woman that was at our table for a little while actually broke character for a minute to ask one of us out on a date. And one of us retardedly thought that this was something be flattered about and followed through with said date last night. (Note to people who still think this is a fantastic idea, even in a purely anthropological sense: IT IS FUCKING NOT.)

Our food was great, our drinks were bottomless, our service was top-notch — we were treated like Very Important People. We were whisked away from the upstairs dining area and thrown into the middle table in the downstairs cabaret lounge, still with a front-and-center view of the Cardinals/49ers game which actually turned out to be a great game. We were over-served with drinks and over-compensated by dancers.

But as soon as the Michael Robinson ridiculously dived right into the Cardinals defensive line and the final seconds ticked down, it was over in a cruel, anti-climatic fashion. The waitress grabbed our half-empty glasses off the table, our host shook our hand and thanked us for coming, the girls that were fawning over us quickly pulled up their tops and moved on to the next table. We sat there looking at each other and realized we both became entirely too comfortable with this type of treatment, which at that point, had gone on for more than four hours.

” I think if I was a professional athlete, I would go to a strip club every night,” I yelled over to Will.

He just nodded, contemplating the statement and replaying the whole evening back through his head.

“I can see how that might be enjoyable .”

Q. Were you disappointed the strippers didn’t name names? Is this the future of sports investigative reporting?

A. No, I was not “disappointed”, per se, but I was definitely hoping for more salacious anecdotes. It’s safe to say I was pretty distracted. And, come on, you’re telling me Shirley Povich didn’t canvas the titty bars to get inside information on the players he covered?

Q. Who got the date?

A. I did. Nice lady. But after an hour of conversation topics ranging from “What’s your favorite color?” to “Do you like Christmas?” I realized it was not going to end well. It’s safe to say there will probably not be a second date.

Q. When Jason Whitlock (KC Star) recently posted on Facebook that he “wishes he could poop right now”, you put it up on Deadspin with the comment, “Good God. Somebody send the man a laxative”. Why are Whitlock’s bowels considered newsworthy by Deadspin? Have mainstream media missed the boat on this issue?

A. Absolutely. I’m surprised most regional newspapers don’t have daily updates on their sports reporters’ bowel movements. It would definitely help their circulation numbers. But Jason is still my favorite columnist,regardless of any gastro-intestinal problems he may have.

Q. Can you tell us about how Deadspin is produced? Who does what, and when? What’s the daily drill?

A. It definitely changes all the time, but this is a pretty accurate snapshot of the daily routine: Rick Chandler is usually the first one up, so he handles most of the morning stuff. Then Dash Bennett will begin to file. I’ll oversee what they’re doing, plow through email, check out some of the bigger blogs, deal with any managerial button-pushing issues, watch Sports Center, plan out my own stories for the day. I smoke constantly, eat sparingly, and am always, always checking email.

Q. How many sports blogs do you monitor? Are there young Will Leitches in the hustings waiting for a big break? How does one break through in the sports blogosphere?

A. I hit the Big Lead, Sports By Brooks, With Leather, Fanhouse, and The Sporting Blog every day. Then I’ll scan SI, ESPN, NY Times sports section, Philly.com, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, LA Times, etc.

Q. How does someone get to be a Deadspin contributing writer? What’s the ‘right stuff’ for Deadspin? Are Deadspin writers born wiseguys or do they come to it through experience?

A. It’s very arbitrary. Usually the writers will have a uniqueness about their humor or approach or expertise that caters to a specific section of our readership. You have someone like Drew Magary, who could pretty much write about anything and be entertaining. Then someone like Matt Sussman, whose freakish live blogging ability just completely blows me away anytime he does it for us. But a writer’s blogging experience doesn’t matter at all. It’s whether their style fits in with Deadspin.

Q. How much oversight from the corporate suits at Gawker? Where does Deadspin rank in the Gawker constellation?

A. There is definitely a lot more oversight than there was when Will was in charge, but it’s necessary right now. The site is no longer a mom-and-pop operation and requires some long-view suggestions from the higher-ups in order for it to continue to grow. But they’re definitely not overbearing and never question my editorial oversight. Right now, I think Deadspin is right in the middle, but upwardly mobile.

Q. Almost everything in Deadspin is ironic or snarky. Have you ever felt like writing something serious or earnest?

A. Of course. But you have to pick your spots for that. Every Deadspin post doesn’t have to be overly crude, or arched for it to work on the site. Sometimes it’s necessary to let the readership know that you are capable of being a decent human being. If it’s truthful and not stilted, I think the “earnest” stories can be just as successful as those littered with dick jokes and smart-assery.

Q. How does someone get to be a commenter? All-time best commenters? Do you weed out and discard dumb or unfunny commenters? Though the strippers didn’t name names, can you name commenters you wish would go away?

A. It’s not a very complex process. Readers who wish to comment either email me or Rob Iracane – our comment guru – and then get let in. I rarely monitor the comments to see who’s a good or bad commenter. I think what happens down below the post is its own universe and is self-policed. People quickly realize who is in charge and will usually hear it from the everyday crew if they’re out of line or unwelcome.

It’s very Lord of the Flies. I check in on the commenters from time to time just to see what they come up with — honestly, there is some funny, funny stuff down there that usually has me laughing out loud once a day. As long as they’re having fun, they can say pretty much anything they want. My job is to monitor what goes on up top. But every day, I’ll make it a point to throw a couple of posts up where the commenters can continue to build their own community and carve out their own little piece of real estate on the site.

Q. Are you ducking the question?

A. No, not at all. I honestly don’t get annoyed by any commenters.

AJ Daulerio, posted on Deadspin, Nov. 14, 2008, 6:15 p.m:

http://deadspin.com/5087820/a-toast-to-this-smut+filled-week-of-debauchery

Thank GOD this week is over. Christ. Between going out on dates with dim-witted strippers
, gloom-and-doom reports from management
, litigious MMA fighters
and threats from spatially-challenged U of F co-eds
, this week has been a perfect storm of corporate drudgery. Well, not the stripper. But that was soul-sucking in its own predictable way.

Here’s some stuff that was managed to amuse:

• Jamboroo

• Florida State brawlers

• Olbermann gives a shout-out to Civil Negligence

• The Nutt gals

• Piazza writing a book

• Jason Whitlock had some issues

This weekend, you’ll have a cavalcade of weekend editors from KOGOD’s Weekend Army to keep you occupied and let you know if Brock Lesnar survives his first real fight.

Thank you for your continued support of Deadspin. Fuck it, let’s SKEET
and drink like there are no more Mondays.

(SMG thanks AJ Daulerio for his cooperation)

Dan Daly

An Interview with Dan Daly

“Anybody who works for a newspaper knows the only way you know something is news is if you know what’s old… Be aware of what you don’t know. That’s some of the best advice you can give any journalist. Know that history is not your lifetime. History is history.”

“Can you imagine spending five or six hours on a train with a guy where you talk your life story away or the nuts and bolts of baseball? I’m so jealous of guys who worked in that generation and developed those relationships with players and got to learn things that are so difficult to learn now.”

“Overcoming hardship becomes a cliché. His dad wasn’t there or his mom wasn’t there or he grew up in a trailer with his grandma. We’re bombarded with these stories over and over again – the same story…My question is ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ Why do we have this infatuation with this type of story? To me it’s about the games.”

Dan Daly: Interviewed on October 5, 2007

Position: columnist, Washington Times

Born: 1953, Framingham. Ma.

Education: Williams, 1976, history

Personal: married, two boys (Danny 17, Patrick 14)

Career: Worcester Telegram 1976 – 1980, Arizona Republic 1980-81, Daily Oklahoman 82, Washington Times 82-

Favorite restaurant (home): Food Court at Montgomery Mall “spent my life there after games –the maitre d knows me”

Favorite restaurant (road): Outback Steak House anywhere “prime rib or steak – reasonable, reliable and fast”

Favorite hotel: Parker House, Chicago “Miller’s Pub next door – great downtown restaurant you can get food any hour coming back from an event”

Dan Daly, excerpted from the Washington Times, September 27, 2007:

The people have spoken — the computer-literate people, at least. Barry Bonds’ 756th home run ball won’t be shot into space or shipped to the Baseball Hall of Fame without editorial comment; no, it will be sent to Cooperstown affixed with an asterisk, sports’ version of the Scarlet Letter.

It’s a wonderful thing, democracy, and every once in a while it gets it right. Fashion designer Mark Ecko, owner of the historic spheroid, could have decided unilaterally what to do with the ball, could have imposed his own morality on the situation, but he realized the issue was bigger than him. So he put it to an Internet vote, and the Asterisk Party — his party, by the way — prevailed.

Cue the confetti.

After all, blasting the ball to the other side of the galaxy might have made for great television, but it wouldn’t have accomplished anything. The Neptunians, I suspect, would have been utterly flummoxed by the horsehide hurtling toward them — and might even launched countermeasures, thinking they were under attack. (Hell hath no fury like a Neptunian who has just had a baseball land in his yard.)

Instead, the Bonds ball will serve, as it should, as a reminder to future generations — a reminder of the evils of flaxseed oil and arthritis balm. Millions of Little Leaguers will be able to file past the display at the Hall, note ball’s unusual tattoo and be forever warned. It will be Barry’s greatest gift to baseball.

Besides, it’s about time Cooperstown was politicized a bit. The place has always been so darn neutral, so nonjudgmental. And let’s face it, the Hall is full of scoundrels, of players who used to grab base runners by the belt or throw pitches that defied the laws of physics. Maybe a separate wing should be built for them — to keep them quarantined, as it were. I can practically hear the tour guide now:

“And over here, folks, we have a jar of Gaylord Perry’s saliva. Yup, ol’ Gaylord really liked to load ’em up. The umpires finally caught him in the act in 1982 and ejected him from a game. Of course, he was 43 at the time, so it’s hard to know whether he was throwing a spitter or had just begun to drool.

Q. What makes a good column?

A. I try to look for humor where possible. I try to weave as much historical background where appropriate into any column I can. I was a history major in college – not journalism – I’ve always had an interest in history. I spend a lot of free hours going through newspaper archives on the Internet. Before that I spent days at the Library of Congress going through microfilm. Anybody who works for a newspaper knows that the only way you know something is news is if you know what’s old. What drives older readers crazy is when a writer writes about something as if it’s never happened before, or a performance that has never been surpassed, or an athlete is greater than any athlete before him – because older readers know different. They’re thinking, ‘this guy never heard of Bill Russell or never saw Roberto Clemente throw a ball in from right field.’

If you go into my study you would see 750 loose-leaf binders of printouts of stories – stuff I can use for background. A couple of years ago when Doug Flutie drop-kicked for an extra point, for the first time since 1941, I had a wealth of material on drop kicking. Two days later I had a 25-inch piece in the paper putting the whole Flutie event in a historical context.

Q. You’re saying young writers have to be aware of history?

A. Yes. Be aware of what you don’t know. That’s some of the best advice you can give any journalist. Know that history is not your lifetime. History is history. When you’re 25 you’re not going to have time to read the books and do the research on things somebody like me has found out in 31 years in the business. Over time you can acquire that knowledge. Some people who read my stuff probably are mystified why I would spend that much time with the historical part of my columns. It’s one of my niches – it distinguishes my column from somebody else’s.

After the Belichick spying story I wrote that this has been going on from time immemorial, in the time of George Halas and Paul Brown and probably forever. Are we supposed to revisit every championship the Browns won or the Bears won and put asterisks on them? The general reaction to the whole story was self-righteous furor, as if it was unprecedented, as if it was way over the line. It wasn’t way over the line – it was maybe a little more over the line than other people have gone.

Q. What was your historical perspective on the Ecko column?

A. One of the things I tried to talk about is how antiseptic these Halls of Fame can be. They go out of their way to be neutral and non-judgmental and non-political. I think in some instances you can overdo it. If you’re going to have the Bonds ball without editorial comment – how great of an idea is that? Obviously this is a grandstand play by this guy but I understand the spirit of what he’s doing and I agree. I talked about the history of the game and about Gaylord Perry’s habit of loading up on baseballs. Imagine a guy giving of tour of the Hall of Fame and pointing out Perry’s saliva, an odds sheet of Pete Rose’s, or Norm Cash’s corked bat from when he won the batting title in ’61. If the Halls of Fame tried to tell the entire story of their games they would have to have wings to keep articles like this. This will be a real exception going into the Hall identified as it is.

Q. Did you deal with Bonds?

A. I’m so away from baseball. The last World Series I covered was ’87. For years we didn’t have baseball here. Now that the Nationals are established I will have to do more, but I have to be careful because the interest in this market is still with the Redskins, I have to look for every opportunity to write about them – that’s just a matter of trying to serve the readership.

Q. Until the Nationals make a run like the Rockies.

A. That’s like a guy being married and a beautiful woman strides through the room and his head turns and a couple of weeks later the beautiful woman strides out the exit. They’ll still have the Broncos. There will be momentary flirtations, but it will take years of success to attain the Broncos’ popularity.

Q. Who do you read?

A. I like to read the iconoclasts. I don’t read columns to be agreed with – I read columns that help me look at something in a way I wouldn’t before. Bill Conlin (Philadelphia Daily News) is a little like that. He doesn’t necessarily worry about whether it’s in the mainstream, or agreed with by 75 percent of other columnists. He writes what he thinks. Dave Kindred (Golf Digest) – he weaves in stories from other generations.

The guy who influenced me the most was Ray Fitzgerald (Boston Globe). I didn’t get a chance to read him until I got to college, and that’s when I read Leigh Montville (Boston Globe), too. Ray’s columns had a perfect tone of humor – he kept it in the context of sports and not life and death. It was something you can’t imitate – it was all Ray’s personality, the kind of column writing that wears well on you. You can go back day after day.

Q. There’s an anthology of Ray Fitzgerald’s columns – have you seen it?

A. I have it. The great thing about the Internet is that it enables you to get old books – I used to search through old bookstores. I was glad to see some of the columns I liked the most, including one where people wrote him and asked where he got his ideas for columns. He walked you through the thought process – ‘always bash the Sullivans if you need to’ – he goes through seven or eight standbys when he was stuck for an idea – and the last sentence was ‘and this is another one.’

Q. Bob Ryan talks about how Ray was disillusioned before he died (1982). What would he think if he could come back and see sports today?

A. Money was just starting to come in when he died – that was probably a big part for him – the changes it created in sports and athletes. Every guy of his generation was used to having great access to athletes and coaches – access we can only dream of today. Can you imagine spending five or six hours on a train with a guy where you talk your life story away or the nuts and bolts of baseball? I’m so jealous of guys who worked in that generation and developed those relationships with players and got to learn things that are so difficult to learn now. There’s no way to spend that time and knock down the walls of suspicion that exist between athletes and writers today – there’s such guardedness.

Q. That distance – is it manifest in coverage?

A. Sure. I remember a conversation with Mike Wilbon (Washington Post) before a preseason game. He said ‘the thing that drives me crazy about writing sports is that the access is so much more limited. Before, you could get half a dozen guys and a couple of coaches walking off a practice field – now you settle for a couple of guys and one coach’. It forces you to lower your own standard – it forces you to write columns that have less information, less input from individuals. You just don’t have as many people for as long.

The news is so much more managed by teams now. They’re trying to develop websites as sources of revenue – they’re not inclined to make people available – they want exclusive stuff on their own websites. You’re in the same business with these teams and you’re not seen as part of the publicity machine – you’re seen as an actual competitor.

In sports, media is divided into two groups – one group puts money into the pockets of the sports, and one group doesn’t. Print media has become part of that second group, which relegates you to second-class status.

Q. But isn’t print more credible with the public?

A. I try not to speak for the public. Public tastes mystify me. I try to write things that make sense to me. I can’t be sitting over a keyboard worrying whether this agrees with 51 percent of my readers, because in our business I think that can be a concern.

I came across a quote – I’m not going to say from who – but a guy was talking about writing for Sports Illustrated and the pressures involved. He talked about writing stories off Sunday events and having to wait until the middle of the week until it got into print. He said ‘You worry because by the time it gets into publication ESPN has already shaped the national conversation’. And I’m thinking why does anybody in print media worry about what ESPN shapes or doesn’t. To me the biggest danger in the print media is the idea that we somehow have to mirror whatever opinions are being presented on TV. That if we get too far away we run the risk of alienating readership – that we’ll be seen as out of touch. To me I pick up a newspaper looking for different-ness. I know what TV is going to give me. I worry that we try to be too much like TV instead of doing what we do best.

Pete Hamill came up with a great term – he called it ‘necro-journalism’, which means that no story has enough gravitas unless it has a dead body. I envision somebody sitting down for an ESPN interview. The first question is ‘has somebody in your family died recently?’ Second question: ‘Does somebody in your family have a communicable disease?’ Third: ‘Does somebody in your family walk with a limp?’ Sometimes it seems that’s what the business has been reduced to – we’re getting too far away from the game.

Overcoming hardship becomes a cliché. His dad wasn’t there or his mom wasn’t there or he grew up in a trailer with his grandma. We’re bombarded with these stories over and over again – the same story – and it’s choking the life out of the business. I don’t love sports because of that. To me it doesn’t add anything to know somebody came out of meager circumstances. We all have sad stories. To me that’s not the heart of sports coverage.

A story ran in the Washington Post after the APSE awards came out in the spring, announcing the award winners. Mike Wise (Washington Post) won in the feature category for a story about Gilbert Arenas’ estrangement from his mother. The thing that made me smile was that Amy Shipley of the Washington Post won in the same category the year before for a story about an Olympic athlete’s search for his birth mother. Essentially the same story was awarded APSE’s highest honor for feature writing two years in a row.

My question is ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ Why do we have this infatuation with this type of story? To me it’s about the games. People don’t pay fifty dollars for the pay-per-view fight because some boxer spent his life in an orphanage. They pay fifty dollars to see them beat each other’s brains out. The other stuff is so far removed from what it is that causes people to be invested in sports. I don’t know if the attitude is ‘it’s all been done’. Maybe we’re in the era of post-modern sportswriting now. It’s all been done.

Q. You son is a high school senior and he’s interested in journalism – what advice have you given him?

A. My initial reaction was that it’s a tough racket and getting tougher. He’s looking at what I do and thinking it would be a great job. But it took me almost 15 years to get this – there was a lot of pain that took place before I got it. He doesn’t see the pressure of the job, the stories on deadline with a gun to your head when you cover a baseball or basketball team. He doesn’t see the time spend away from the family. It’s not easy on families or on guys traveling in the post 9/11 world. He’s not aware of the non-glamorous aspects of it. Sometimes I have him read SMG interviews. They educate him about this business but also strip away the glamour – the people talk about it’s like any other job and it’s very difficult if you want to do it well.

One thing I said was ‘I hope you’re not thinking about this to make me happy’. I was the first in my family to get in the journalism business – I’m not following anybody else – there’s no reason you have to feel like you have to’.

Q. He could become a hedge fund manager and rule the world.

A. He’d rather be a General Manager if not a sportswriter. He talks about sports management. It wouldn’t shock me if he switched off and headed in that direction. There’s a tough job – imagine having to deal with agents on a regular basis.

Q. You think that’s tough?

A. Sure. You’re talking a lifetime of being second-guessed. I can’t imagine having that job and not having high blood pressure – so many things are out of your control, such as injuries. Face it – how many good jobs are there in that field? If you got into management you might do it on a minor league level, or manage an Arena Football League team. God knows. Obviously it has its rewards, but you have to have the constitution for it. Like all these sports they become 365 deals – it’s so much harder to get away from it than it used to be. I’d like to think that whatever career you choose you have the opportunity for a bit of a life.

Q. Can you have a life as a columnist?

A. Yes. Being free from beat work gives you a lot more flexibility. I don’t work any less hard – I just think it has more flexibility. My focus a lot of the year is the Redskins – that beat is so much more important here than anything else – and covering the football team is so much saner from a travel standpoint. They’re on the road eight weeks, and one is a train ride to Philadelphia and another is a train ride to New York. It makes it easier on families – when the kids get older and need to be carted here and there – you’re not always tied up with night work.

Q. What did you cover?

A. My first beat was Holy Cross, and then I covered the Patriots and the Red Sox in the summer. Then I went to Arizona and was doing Arizona State football and basketball. I was at the Oklahoman for six weeks – I covered OU spring football. In the Alumni game an alumnus blew out his knee, went in for surgery, and died on the table – that was my big story in the brief time I was there. The Washington Times was starting up and a guy who had been with the Republic and was with the Time called me up. I had an interest in being in the east and working on a start-up – it seemed to be such a rare opportunity given the state of the business. How many major metros are ever going to start up? USA Today started a couple of months after we did – that’s it for the last 25 years.

Q. What did the Times hire you to do?

A. They hired me to cover Maryland sports but everything changed when I got here. Some initial hires didn’t work out. I did features for a few years – longer takeouts. In ’88 I started columns on a semi-regular basis. Mo Seigal had health issues – they had me fill in. Within a year it was a regular gig. I’ve been writing columns for 19 years.

Q. Have you mastered the format?

A. Mastered? No. If I did I would stop and do something else. I think I’ve settled into the form. You start thinking in 750 and 800 word bites. The way I knew I settled into the columnist life was when I came back from a vacation in the summer and the first column wouldn’t take so long to write. I had found my voice and my style – getting back was no big deal – it was an extension of me. In the early stages the columns are more of a struggle.

Dan Daly, excerpted from the Washington Times, January 5, 2006:

Today the drop kick, tomorrow the Statue of Liberty play.

It’s hard not to get giddy about Doug Flutie’s old-fashioned extra point the other day. Perhaps you saw the replay, oh, about 64 times on television. That’s how many years it had been since somebody had drop kicked a PAT in the NFL – one more reason to call it the No Fun League.

For the uninitiated, the drop kick is a vestige of the Pre-Facemask Era. It involves no holder, only a kicker standing about 10 yards behind the center. He receives the snap, drops the ball gently – as would a punter – and then, just as it hits the ground, boots it through the uprights.

Hypothetically, at least. It’s harder than it sounds – which is one reason it’s now a lost art. Back in the day, though, pro football fans thrilled to the drop kicking exploits of Fats Henry, Paddy Driscoll, Pid Purdy and Frosty Peters – not to mention Al Bloodgood, who booted four field goals in a game…

(SMG thanks Dan Daly for his cooperation)

Article published Sep 27, 2007

Ecko making sure 756* isn’t forgotten

September 27, 2007

by Dan Daly – The people have spoken — the computer-literate people, at least. Barry Bonds’ 756th home run ball won’t be shot into space or shipped to the Baseball Hall of Fame without editorial comment; no, it will be sent to Cooperstown affixed with an asterisk, sports’ version of the Scarlet Letter.

Cue the confetti.

“On your right is an odds sheet once belonging to Pete Rose, the all-time hit leader with 4,256. Pete denied for almost two decades that he bet on baseball, was suspended indefinitely from the game, then finally confessed to help sell a book he ‘wrote.’ He’s banned from the Hall right now, but a lot of people think he might get in the day after hell freezes over.

“Just ahead you’ll see the corked bat Norm Cash wielded when he won the 1961 American League batting title. Norm batted 75 points higher that year than he did in any other season, so it must have been pretty good cork. I’m guessing it came from a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, probably a ’59.

“There are also a number of other interesting items — Joe Niekro’s emery board, Kevin Gross’ Black-and-Decker sander, the telescope Herman Franks peered through to steal signals for the Giants in 1951 and Barry Bonds’ original size 101/2 cleats, the ones he wore before his feet began looking like Herman Munster’s. A pair of his later cleats, the size 13s, are in the Museum of Natural History …”

Bonds has already called Ecko “stupid” and “an idiot” for not according the artifact more respect, for not treating it as an investment property. “He spent $750,000 on the ball [$752,467 to be exact], and that’s what he’s doing with it?” Barry said incredulously.

But Ecko was undeterred. And indeed, why should he care whether he has the approval of Bonds, the guy who put the “ass” in asterisk? It’s clearly important to him to make this symbolic gesture, to express his concern that “some of the best athletes in the country are forced to decide between being competitive and staying natural.” And while he might have a weakness for self-promotion, his heart is in the right place.

So the ball, adorned with a “*,” will be packed off to Cooperstown, there to reside with Edd Roush’s 48-ounce bat and Joe Morgan’s kid-sized glove. The Hall is happy to get it, branded or unbranded. It’s the ball Barry Bonds belted to break Hank Aaron’s home run record, the foulest fair ball in major league history.

Sing Sing was tough in the ’30s.

Washington Times, The, May, 2005

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Byline: Dan Daly, THE WASHINGTON TIMES Though I’ve yet to see the movie – it opens nationwide tomorrow – I suspect the remake of “The Longest Yard” features more (Chris) Rock than rock pile. Adam Sandler as an NFL quarterback-turned-convict? Not a whole lot of verite in that cinema.

(At least Burt Reynolds, who had Sandler’s role in the original film, played some college ball at Florida State.) So let me tell you about a real prison football team, just so you’ll know the difference. Let me tell you about the team they had at Sing Sing from 1931 to ’35. The Black Sheep,

Publication: The Washington Times

Publication Date: 05-JAN-06

Delivery: Immediate Online Access

Author:

Article Excerpt

Byline: Dan Daly, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Today the drop kick, tomorrow the Statue of Liberty play.

Bryan Curtis

An Interview with Bryan Curtis

“There’s a false assumption that you can’t write sports unless you go the conventional route. I read the “Best American Sportswriting” anthology every year and half the pieces come from writers who aren’t conventional sportswriters – they’re just writers who have interesting minds.”

“…the attitude of ESPN.com is drawn from sports radio – sports radio is pugnacious and quick and fast – and they’ve applied it to the website.”

“I see many people my age who are imitators of Simmons. The problem is that he writes in a digressive style, about sports and pop culture, and he is uniquely capable of pulling that off. Not many can. Which is not to say Bill is a bad person to imitate. I just don’t think many can do it.”

Bryan Curtis: Interviewed Sept. 1, 2006

Position: staff writer, Slate.com; contributor, Play Magazine (NY Times)

Born: 1977, Fort Worth, Texas.

Education: University of Texas, BA, 2000

Career: The New Republic 2000-2001, Slate.com 2001 – , Play 2006 –

Personal: single

Hobbies: college football

Favorite Sports Movie: “hate them all equally”

Bryan Curtis excerpted from “Adrift on the Sea of Espn.com”, Play Magazine, June 4, 2006:

“ESPN, the television network, has long been able to hold the gaze of sports fans even when something rather dreary is happening on the screen. How else to explain the success of Texas hold ’em, lumberjack meets and “The Sports Reporters”? In recent years, that magnetism has passed to the network’s Web site, ESPN.com, another outlet for continuous grazing. A click or two will send you spiraling deep into the dark digital recesses of sports, into the N.F.L. draft, fantasy baseball, freestyle motocross or even worse. The other morning, I found myself reading an outdoors column about why fishermen don’t like to bring bananas with them on their boats, and I thought, in a rare moment of clarity, “What am I doing here?”

“ESPN.com is best understood not as sports pages or a sports magazine but as an all-purpose sports balm.”

Q. You wrote that if there’s a nagging concern about ESPN.com, it’s that the site has “grown too big for its gigabytes.” Can you elaborate?

A. I think that reading ESPN.com is like setting out in the Pacific Ocean in a canoe. You’re completely lost at the outset.

One, it’s clear to me that what ESPN.com has done and what the Internet has done generally is make sportswriting more “sophisticated” – put that in quotations – than it ever was. If you are a writer at a daily newspaper you have to consider the old lady who reads Marmaduke and might wander over to the sports page and you have to make it accessible to her. What we see on ESPN.com is that there are no worries about that. You can make it as insidery as you want. I’m totally stunned by the range of reference and how deep they go into sports – deeper than the mainstream sports publication ever has. They’ve taken Mel Kiper’s Draft Report and Baseball America – which were niche – and brought them into the mainstream.

Number two, the attitude of ESPN.com is drawn from sports radio – sports radio is pugnacious and quick and fast – and they’ve applied it to the website. You don’t have a formal newspaper style – columns are loose and rambling and tough and pugnacious. We recognize the style, for those of us listening to the radio for a couple of decades.

Q. Is that a good thing?

A. It can be. I’ll say that a little can go a long way. But it’s not the end of the world.

Q. In your profile of Bill Simmons you wrote that sports fans tend to view the neutrality of conventional columnists as “highly bogus and slightly implausible.” And you wrote that Simmons aims to reconnect sportswriting with the fan. Has Simmons made conventional columnists obsolete?

A. I don’t think so. I’m not an Internet triumphalist in the sense that I think it will replace all of journalism – or all of sports journalism. I love traditional sports columnists. What is strange is when they are at highly emotional events they come away and write very neutral columns. What Simmons did at the most basic level is break down that wall. He wrote as a fan would write instead of as a columnist would. What makes Simmons so appealing is that you have hundreds if not thousands of amateurs writing about sports on the Internet now and they look at Bill and say if he can do it I can do it. He made a brief attempt to be a conventional sportswriter with the Boston Herald – then he decided he would sink or swim on his own. Not only is he doing the writing many on the Internet admire he’s following the career path they themselves want to follow.

Q. Yet it’s unattainable to almost everybody, isn’t it?

A. It’s more plausible than paying dues for 10 years at a newspaper. One downside is that Bill writes so well, he’s so sui generis, that I think imitating Bill is a really bad idea. I wrote that he’s as imitated in his time as Dan Jenkins was in his – nearly every sportswriter of the last half of the 20^th century imitated Jenkins. Mike Lupica and Rick Reilly are imitators of Jenkins. I see many people my age who are imitators of Simmons. The problem is that he writes in a digressive style, about sports and pop culture, and he is uniquely capable of pulling that off. Not many can. Which is not to say Bill is a bad person to imitate. I just don’t think many can do it.

Q. Where does Slate.com fit into sports journalism?

A. I see Slate as covering sports basically analogous to the way non-sports magazines write about sports. You don’t think of Roger Angell at the New Yorker as being a critical part of the daily baseball coverage but you’re glad to have him writing about baseball in The New Yorker. Slate is similar. It does inventive things with sportswriting. Gregg Easterbrook’s ‘Tuesday Morning Quarterback’ column started in Slate in 1999 or 2000. It was a completely new kind of NFL column. It came at it from the viewpoint that anyone could write about sports on the Internet and that you didn’t need the so-called credentials sportswriters have sought over the years. Twenty years ago you would have covered high school football and bounced around from newspaper to newspaper and then gotten a gig writing an NFL column. The Internet said, well, there’s a smart guy from the Brookings Institute – let him write sports if that’s what he wants to write.

Q. Would you say Slate takes an intellectual approach to sports?

A. I wouldn’t use that word. The approach is just to write something completely new that you can reasonably assume no one has read before. It’s not a place where someone will weigh in on whether Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame. It’s a place where you look for new avenues that haven’t been explored.

Q. Why is a smart guy like you writing something lowbrow like sports?

A. Ask Michael Lewis. He made his career as a political reporter at The New Republic and he’s had a second or third act as a sportswriter. I would barely characterize myself as a sportswriter. If somebody asked me as an aspiring sportswriter – “Should I got to the Dallas Morning News and cover high schools or go to a magazine and try to come in through the side entrance?” – I would say both are equally valid. Michael wrote “Moneyball” and now his new football book and he would say sportswriting for him was a hobby at most. It’s just a matter of reporting and researching and writing like any other magazine story. There’s a false assumption that you can’t write sports unless you go the conventional route. I read the “Best American Sportswriting” anthology every year and half the pieces come from writers who aren’t conventional sportswriters – they’re just writers who have interesting minds.

Q. Your recent sports articles?

A. I wrote a profile of Troy Smith for Play (September 2006). I wrote a media column on Tony Kornheiser.

Q. How do you think Kornheiser will do?

A. He hasn’t said very much. He told me he might not say a word for the first few weeks of the season and he wasn’t kidding. I think he’ll be fine. It’s not fair to review him based on three or four telecasts.

Q. Writers you admire?

A. Dan Jenkins. Bud Shrake. They went to my high school (Paschal High) a couple of decades before I did. I saw them not only as great sportswriters but also from Ft. Worth. Beyond that I love Charlie Pierce, TJ Simers, Michael Lewis. Also Darcy Frey, who wrote “The Last Shot”; David Shields, who wrote “Black Planet”; and Buzz Bissinger, who wrote “Friday Night Lights”. Oh, and Robert Lipsyte, who wrote “Sports World” in the early seventies – a great book.

Q. Why does Slate Boldface its name every time it’s mentioned?

A. I think its vestigial thing from the early days of the Internet. Slate was saying “we are a magazine – really”. As the Internet has grown older we’ve gotten more secure about ourselves.

(SMG thanks Bryan Curtis for his cooperation)

Gerard Cosloy

An Interview with Gerard Cosloy

“I’ve read the same LA Times piece as everyone else that raised the notion we’re in some post “Costas Now” phase, but these are pretty wild generalizations. Some of the larger blogs have ownership and/or advertising issues to contend with, but I think most of ’em are pretty respectable to begin with (or at least down with the cultural status quo) to begin with. If TMZ can be shown on broadcast TV, I don’t really foresee, say, Coors Lite telling Gawker Media, “sorry, we can’t advertise on your site. We’ve got an ethical hang-up over what your new editor did to Stuart Scott.”

Gerard Cosloy: Interviewed on July 1, 2008

Position: Founder, editor and writer, Can’t Stop the Bleeding

Born: 1964, Norwalk, Ct

Education: UMass-Amherst, September 1983 – January 1984. “D-R-O-P O-U-T”

Career: “I’ve done this or that for a long long time. If anybody really cares they can look it up.”

Personal:Formerly married, currently single. No kids.

Favorite restaurant (home): Paul’s Place, 2nd Ave., NYC;Vegetarian Paradise, W. 4th St., NYC; Hai Ky, E.Oltorf, Austin

Favorite restaurant (away): Tu Lan, San Francisco

Favorite hotel: Linton Travel Tavern – “equidistant between London and Norwich”

Favorite punk rock band:The Marked Men

Posted by Gerard Cosloy on Can’t Stop the Bleeding, June 24, 2008:

The Will Leitch Farewell Tour of Deadspin continued today with a longish post
attempting to put my somewhat over the top attempts at antagonizing Will into some greater perspective.

Though admitting he once considered CSTB, “one of our favorites, though, and the one that seemed to have the best idea of how to run a general interest sports site” (keep in mind this was 2003, folks), Leitch also includes the caveat, “most of it was just long cutting-and-pastings of AP stories with a one-sentence ‘comment’ on the end.” So in other words, a mere parasite like me oughta have greater respect for someone who adds a two-sentence ‘comment’ to the end of stories cut and pasted from ESPN.com.

At the risk of C&P’ing far too much of Leitch’s self-described plucky midwesterisms, I’ll summarize the post in question. Outta the blue, mild-mannered Man From Mattoon was bulldozed by an invisible grouch
who proceeded to publish his cell phone number
and encouraged the homeless to use his fiancee’s portrait for target practice
. Though these missives were distasteful and oh-so-unprovoked, they ultimately help Young Will to buck up, grow-a-pair…and eventually blossom into the fragile butterfly we all saw torn to fucking shreds on HBO.

You’re welcome, Will. Anytime. But the following points need to be made : (continued at bottom)

Q. Will you miss not having Will Leitch to kick around anymore?

A. He’s still around. But if he were to disappear tomorrow, I don’t think I’d struggle to find someone or something to kick around. It wasn’t much of a problem before he turned up.

Q. Why don’t punk rockers get asked to sing the national anthem at baseball games?

A. I take it you don’t consider Adam Duritz to be a punk rocker. I don’t really know, I can only presume the folks issuing the invites figure Curtis Stigers is a better singer than David Thomas.

Q. Is CSTB a music or sports blog?

A. Neither, by design anyway. Though there’s obviously more sports content, there’s some things that don’t fall into either category. I kinda reserve the right to cover whatever I’m interested in at a particular moment. While I suspect it will always be a mostly sports oriented blog, I’d prefer not to be tied to that.

Q. What’s your first love – music or sports?

A. Probably sports but music came pretty soon afterwards. But I don’t think much about which I prefer — it just doesn’t occur to me. I don’t look for comparisons and two aren’t really related other than they’re both part of our culture and I tend to obsess over ’em a little too much.

Q. Describe a typical Cant Stop the Bleeding reader?

A. Honestly, I don’t know more than a few of the readers personally and that’s ok. I’m genuinely grateful anyone enjoys CSTB but I do this for my own entertainment. I’m not interested in pandering to any particular audience and I’m not sure there is a typical reader. I would like to think that CSTB has some portion of the audience who aren’t dudes, aren’t white and aren’t Americans, but without actually meeting the readers in question, I don’t know for sure.

Q. How much time do you put into it?

A. That varies wildly. Let’s just say I get a ton of help from the other writers and there’s a number of readers who make very useful suggestions from time to time.

Q. What’s your daily routine?

A. Again, there’s not really a defined routine. I like to be up early and going over the previous night’s events, but sometimes that just isn’t possible. As time goes on, I find myself doing a bit less headline scanning / feed trawling and actively looking for stories I’ve not seen elsewhere. But aside from day job stuff and day-to-day crap that can’t be avoided, actually watching the games – for fun – is a big part of it. If it ever gets to the point where I’m only attending games or watching sports on TV in order to blog, that would probably be a good time to give it up.

Q. Tell us about your real job in the music industry?

A. Y’know, I don’t wanna be a jerk. Especially because it’s nice that anyone cares enough to ask. But my rock biz activities are very well documented elsewhere and are in no way related to CSTB, which is solely owned and operated by me. I thoroughly enjoy my (real) work and feel incredibly lucky to work with so many amazing characters. But I’m not interested in using the blog to plug the label, nor would I abuse the Matador notoriety in order to generate attention for the blog. I think they both speak for themselves.

Q. It has been suggested that sports blogs, such as The Big Lead, are becoming more respectable as their readership grows? Your reaction?

Q. I’m sorry, I’ve not actually seen that suggestion. I’ve read the same LA Times piece as everyone else that raised the notion we’re in some post “Costas Now” phase, but these are pretty wild generalizations. Some of the larger blogs have ownership and/or advertising issues to contend with, but I think most of ’em are pretty respectable to begin with (or at least down with the cultural status quo) to begin with. If TMZ can be shown on broadcast TV, I don’t really forsee, say, Coors Lite telling Gawker Media, “sorry, we can’t advertise on your site. We’ve got an ethical hang-up over what your new editor did to Stuart Scott.”

Q. Your blogroll is amazingly long, Are there any you left off?

A. Absolutely. I make an effort to include the blogs that I personally read – not necessarily those that I endorse, though many of ’em would fall into that category. But if there’s a sports blog that isn’t featured on the CSTB blogroll, you can probably assume that I either can’t stand the site or am simply unfamiliar. I no longer think it’s possible to be aware of every decent sports blog — there’s far too many.

Q. Why don’t you run more photos of actresses, models and bimbos?

A. I’ve run a shirtless pic of Gabe Kapler several times. What more do you want?

In all seriousness, I think it’s a bit of a cliche. It someone wants to peruse such material, there’s no shortage of places on the web to do so. If I was doing a blog primarily about actresses, models, bimbos or about leering at any of the above, said photos would probably be appropriate visual ads.

Q. Are we in the Golden Age of sports blogs? Or has it already ended?

A. Y’know, I’m not too hung up on the genre, either way. There’s always gonna be a bunch of sports blogs that transcend the genre and there’s always gonna be a pile – perhaps larger – that aren’t gonna be remembered in a

year.

Posted by Gerard Cosloy on Can’t Stop the Bleeding, June 24, 2008 (continued from top):

1) The CSTB category “Will Leitch Sucks”
did not appear “within 25 minutes” of Deadspin’s public launch. Said category was created weeks after the fact, though for the purposes of proper indexing, old posts relevant to the matter at handed were edited to include the category.

2) It is true I posted Will’s phone number, but I only did so after some moron at CBS Sportsline
sent a press release that included it. There’s a breach in Leitch’s personal security and he wants to blame the whistleblower?

3) re : the bit about encouraging the homeless to get busy with pics of Will’s ex. Not cool (dude). Hardly my proudest moment — especially the part where I had to pay the homeless to do it. This was a reprehensible act and I don’t think I will ever fully live down the way I exploited…the nation’s less fortunate!

(seriously folks, did it ever occur to Will or his dipshit loyal readers that constantly mocking him was not entirely different from targeting, say, Stephen A. Smith or Chris Berman, neither of whom, to my knowledge, have ever met Will Leitch or done anything to personally hurt him? Or that this long-running schtick is someone’s idea of humor? That if Will were to disappear I’d have to go back to making fun of Mushnick’s beard everyday?)

4) “It can be difficult for the blog uninitiated — which we most definitely were — when they are being hammered online, but, thanks to CSTB, we grew used to it pretty quick. Heck, no one was gonna say anything worse than what he was saying.”

Not until recently

, no.

5) The revisionist history
is all well and good for lazy types who never bothered to notice how the majority of anti-Leitch posts at CSTB were not in fact, sneak attacks mounted as part of some bloggy traffic war, but directly referenced Deadspin’s real content
and totally legit questions
about such.

6) Good luck at New York
, Will. Hopefully, the magazine won’t “focus too much on New York City for our tastes” and you’ll last more then two days at your new gig before someone compares you to Jm J. Bullock
.

(SMG thanks Gerard Cosloy for his cooperation)

Gene Collier

An Interview with Gene Collier

“It’s an easy job…Basically, what you have to do for the day is read the sports section and go to the game. Who wouldn’t want to do that?…You’re getting paid to watch sports, go to sports and write your opinion. And you get in free. I got a tattoo on my butt, “Born to Get In Free”.”

“Even though I’m guilty of constantly criticizing (the Pirates) and the front office, for your own sanity you have to go down there. I try to look at it like a movie, either good or bad, as an isolated episode, rather than another manifestation of a hopeless situation.”

“I learned (to write) by learning how to read. I draw a parallel to music. You can’t be a musician if you don’t listen, and you can’t be a writer if you don’t read a lot. To see how language works, and what possibilities language holds for itself and you.”

Gene Collier: Interviewed on June 5, 2007

Position: Columnist, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Born: 1953, Coaldale, Pa.

Education: Penn State, 1975, BA, journalism

Career: Pottstown Mercury 1975-77; Philadelphia Journal 77-81; Camden Courier-Post 82; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 82-84; Pittsburgh Press 84-92; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 92-

Personal: married, two sons

Favorite restaurant (home): PF Chang’s China Bistro. Pittsburgh

Favorite restaurant (road): “don’t know – I’m not a foodie”

Favorite hotel: Grand Hyatt, New York “good location – next to Grand Central Station”

Gene Collier, excerpted from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 31, 2006:

From Day One — or was it The Get-Go? — it was evident the campaign for the 23rd annual Trite Trophy was Gonna Be A Dogfight.

Oh yes, you’ve stumbled into still another of these fruitless annual episodes in which we dishonor the worst sports cliche of the fast-fading year by flooding all examples of insipid sports language with the harsh rhetorical light of reason.

Or something.

…All right, please set your cell phones on vibrate. No flash photography. Yada yada yada.

Our third runner-up:

Managed The Game — Bit of a regression here as Managed The Game got Left At The Altar last year, but again, far more quarterbacks managed the game this year than mismanaged the game, at least in cliche world. This is sportspeak for not throwing interceptions.

Our second runner-up:

Blitzing Off The Edge — A first time finalist, this nonsense conveying the rush of a defensive end or outside linebacker (and sometimes a corner) might have won the Trite had it not morphed into two or three related phrases like Getting Help On The Edge, Attacking The Edge and Protecting The Edge.

Our first runner-up:

Thrown Under The Bus — No one was literally thrown under a mass transit vehicle, but hundreds of coaches, managers, players and even broadcasters were dismissed or scapegoated this year, almost all of them said to have been thrown under the bus. The derivation of this is too frightful to think about, particularly as it might apply to Jerome Bettis.

Now then without further undoing of our reputation, a reminder the three criteria for The Trite Trophy. It has to be essentially meaningless, it has to be pervasive and the Trite Committee (me) has to really, really hate it.

And the Trite goes to …

It Is What It Is.

Again.

Ohmygawd the first repeat winner and the first two-time winner of the Trite Trophy, It Is What It Is was even more ubiquitous than it was in winning the 2005 Trite, when it was merely revoltingly everywhere. Its list of star turns simply would not fit in our disappearing space.

The Steelers couldn’t repeat as champions, but they played a huge role in a second consecutive title for IIWII.

If Bill Cowher said it once, he said it 500 times this year, even to the extent that special teams coach Kevin Spencer said in December, “To quote coach Cowher, it is what it is.” Ike Taylor, having lost his starting cornerback job three months after signing a new contract, told the Post-Gazette’s Gerry Dulac, “It doesn’t even have anything to do with the contract. They said it is what it is … I don’t know what that means. It is what it is.”

And we all know why Ike doesn’t know what it is what it is means, because it doesn’t mean anything, meaninglessness being the first protocol of all Trite winners. It’s the equivalent of saying, “I don’t know what to say, so I’m saying this instead: it is what it is.” And that’s what everybody said, pretty much coast to coast, in lieu of actual communication.

Baltimore’s Ed Reed and Atlanta’s Michael Vick said it on the same sports page on the same day about two completely different topics. In Vick’s case, he’d just been fined $10,000 for giving fans an obscene jesture, and decided to contribute another $10,000 to charity. Asked to explain, he said, “it is what it is, 20 grand.”

…Not even Red Zone, the greatest living cliche, having spawned both an official NFL statistic and a deodorant, could repeat in 1995 in the face of the West Coast Offense.

But again, as Cowher would say and has said and said and said and said and said.

“It is what it is. And you deal with it.”

Q. Early favorites for the 2007 Trite Trophy?

A. Someone e-mailed the other day and mentioned something I’ve been hearing for years but haven’t included: ‘put a crooked number up’. You don’t want to score a couple runs – you want to ‘put a crooked number up’. Sort of like ‘put points on the scoreboard’ – a former winner that never goes away. Almost as though if you could put points on the scoreboard you wouldn’t have to play the game.

I got another e-mail – there’s a new thing proliferating – this business of saying “clearly”. Mike Greenberg says it 50 times a day. Buster Olney, answering a question about coverage of a players’ private lives, said, “Clearly the line has been blurred.”

Q. Is there an endless supply of trite-isms?

A. I’m amazed. I guess it was kind of a conceit to think if I pointed them out annually people might think about them and they might go away. But the opposite has happened. The Trite Trophy has had no impact other than to become trite itself.

Q. Is it a popular column?

A. Yes. There are a couple of dozen people who look forward to it. I got a letter from a guy, who was probably drunk and making it up, describing his Super Bowl ritual. He gets together with a couple of guys before the game, in a rec room, and they’re not allowed to say anything that is not a cliché. If you do you have to leave.

Q. Why is triteness rampant in sports?

A. It has to do with the expansion of the news hole. Sports coverage used to be whatever total number of newspaper column inches were allotted to sports that day, and a couple of minutes on the local newscast. With ESPN and its imitators people have to talk 24/7 and you can’t do that without crutches. Nobody can speak for hours on end and say something that hasn’t been said 50 times. People have to talk about sports too much and write about it too much.

Q. Are you saying there is too much sports coverage?

A. Yes. But there’s too much of everything. Too much weather on the Weather Channel – 24 hours of weather – it’s ridiculous. People want choices – marketers have figured everything out. Before long there will be a Left-Handed Golf Channel.

Q. As a writer, what is your gut feeling about triteness?

A. It’s an over-reaction on my part. In college I thought I was going to be a writer – one of the first things they tell you is don’t use clichés. If you heard it before, don’t use it. That scared the hell out of me – how am I going to write? When I figured out I could do it, I didn’t have to be afraid. I made it my thing. That’s why I do it. That’s me pounding my chest. I don’t consider myself to have any great natural ability. But I don’t think anybody else should have any trouble either. That’s how come they (clichés) aggravate me.

Q. On another subject, will the Pirates ever have another winning season?

A. Maybe not. I don’t think it’s as hopeless as five years ago. There’s more revenue being shared within baseball itself. They’re not as bad off financially as they were five years ago. But they’re not in the position we were told they would be in with the new ballpark. They’re somewhere in between.

It looks like they’ll tie the Phillies record for 16 consecutive losing seasons. I don’t see any reason they can’t keep it going and set the record.

Q. How do you approach the Pirates as a columnist?

A. Good question. People are getting sensitive to it. I always said when there was a chance the Pirates wouldn’t be here that bad baseball is better than no baseball. Even though I’m guilty of constantly criticizing them and the front office, for your own sanity you have to go down there. I try to look at it like a movie, either good or bad, as an isolated episode, rather than another manifestation of a hopeless situation.

I grew up watching the Phillies and they were horrible until the late 70s. My baseball experience was bad there, and now I’ve been here for 25 years and it’s been bad. I’m very much at home.

Q. How did you learn how to write?

A. I learned by learning how to read. I draw a parallel to music. You can’t be a musician if you don’t listen, and you can’t be a writer if you don’t read a lot. To see how language works, and what possibilities language holds for itself and you. Read a lot of different magazines and books. I was lucky enough to grow up in a house where my father and grandmother got out-of-town newspapers. I got to see a lot of different ways to write.

I went to college to be Walter Cronkite, but that was too much stuff to carry around. It was easier to carry a notepad.

Q. Your writing influences?

A. The guy who wrote the Hardy Boys books under a pseudonym (Franklin W. Dixon). Bill Conlin (Philadelphia Daily News), Stan Hochman (Philadelphia Daily News), Phil Pepe (NY Daily News) , Dick Young (NY Daily News). I grew up in Coaldale, Pennsylvania, which is equidistant from New York and Philadelphia. It was also the birthplace of cable TV. It’s mountainous, which is why they put cable in. We had the Phillies and Mets and Yankees on TV when I was growing up.

Q. Who do you read?

A. I read mostly people I come across on the Internet. I’m not going to buy out-of-town papers anymore. Mark Whicker (Orange County Register) is a tremendous columnist. I worked with him on the Phillies beat. The usual suspects.

I try to read things out of the sphere – The New Yorker, New York Times. I don’t have the mentality where I can read about and watch sports all the time. I got so tired of sportswriting at one point I got out of it. I was out for six years and I got pulled back in. I had forgotten how easy it is.

I was out from January 1998 to May 2004. I wrote feature stories, and columns on politics – that was fun, too. But there’s nothing out there as easy as sportswriting, unfortunately.

Q. What do you mean by easy?

A. It’s just easy. Once you figure it out – who’s available, who’s not available, what they’re going to provide for you. I never pretended like it was a hard job. It’s an easy job, which is what I was looking for when I went to college. Basically, what you have to do for the day is read the sports section and go to the game. Who wouldn’t want to do that?

This is a great gig – there’s nobody who wouldn’t want it. You’re getting paid to watch sports, go to sports and write your opinion. And you get in free. I got a tattoo on my butt, “Born to Get In Free”.

Q. But isn’t covering a beat tense?

A. In Philly it was. The baseball beat had Jayson Stark, Whicker, Conlin – you could barely turn around without fearing that someone would beat you. Even at that I was going to the Phillies games and writing about them and how cool was that? And I had my own parking place.

Past Trite Trophy winners

2005: It is what it is.

2004: Shutdown corner

2003: Cover 2

2002: Running downhill

2001: Put points on the scoreboard

2000: Walk-off homer

1999: Somebody’s gotta step up

1998: Eight men in the box

1997: Show me the money

1996: Been there, done that

1995: West Coast offense

1994: Red Zone

1993: It hasn’t sunk in yet

*-1992: Mentality of a linebacker

1991: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist

1990: Smashmouth football

1989: He coughs it up

1988: They went to the well once too often

1987: Crunch time

1986: Gut check

1985: Throwback

1984: Playing ’em one game at a time.

*-Awarded on WDVE during newspaper strike.

(SMG thanks Gene Collier for his cooperation)

Joe Castiglione

An Interview with Joe Castiglione

“You try to paint a word picture of what’s happening on the field and you try to entertain and inform between pitches. That little sphere with 108 stitches is only in play for about eight minutes out of three hours. You have to be more prepared than any other sport because there’s so much down time. You prepare a lifetime.”

“Part of my on-air personality is really my off-air personality. You can tell I want the Sox to win. People say they can tell if the Sox are ahead or behind by my tone of voice. I take that as a compliment, though if I were an objective reporter I would not. I give you an honest report but it’s with passion. It that’s the case I’m proud of that. I do take wins and losses to heart.”

“I try to be conversational and friendly. I don’t have the booming pipes. Be as conversational as possible, which I think is what the audience wants. Be consistent. You have to be wearable. We’re on three hours a day 162 times a year. I would say my voice is wearable.”

Joe Castiglione: Interviewed on November 16, 2007

Position: play-by-play radio broadcaster, Boston Red Sox

Born: 1947, New Haven

Education: Colgate, 1968, history; Syracuse, 1970, Masters TV and Radio

Career: Youngstown, Ohio, TV and radio, 1970-72; Cleveland TV and radio, 1972-79; Cleveland Indians TV play-by-play, 1979-80; Milwaukee Brewers pay-TV, 1981; Cleveland Indians and Cavaliers, cable TV, 1982; Red Sox radio play-by-play, 1983 –

Personal: married (Jan), three children, two grandchildren

Favorite Restaurant (home): Luciano’s, Wrentham, “best Italian restaurant in New England – a little more upscale than North End spots”; Bunker Tavern, Scituate “great swordfish”; Assaggio, Boston North End

Favorite Restaurant (road): La Scarola, Chicago; La Scala, Baltimore; Foley’s, New York

Favorite Hotel: Renaissance Vinoy Resort and Don CeSar Beach Resort, St. Petersburg “old pink hotels that were built in the 1920s and have been renovated”

Author of: Broadcast Rites and Sites, 2005 “so many Red Sox fans plan vacations around the Sox schedule I wrote a book about restaurants and things to do before games”

Joe Castiglione’s call of the final out, Game 4, 2004 World Series:

“Foulke to the set, the 1-0 pitch, here it is … swing and a ground ball, stabbed by Foulke. He has it. He underhands to first. And the Boston Red Sox are the world champions. For the first time in 86 years, the Red Sox have won baseball’s world championship. Can you believe it?”

Q. Did you plan your call of the final out in 2004?

A. It was pretty much spontaneous. I thought about it for years – what am I going to say? I thought about it through the Yankee series, which was the greatest win in Sox history even thought I was 10-3. It was the only time the Yankees lost to the Sox with the season on the line since 1904, when the Sox won on a wild pitch by Jack Chesbro, but the Sox couldn’t go to the Series that year because there wasn’t one. Other than that the Yankees always had won with the season on the line. I planned to say that.

With the World Series the only thing I thought about was to not say anything that would be trite or wouldn’t stand the test of time. Keep it simple. Don’t interfere – get across the greatest comeback of all time, especially get in the 86 years. ‘Can you believe it’ sort of came out – I probably had used it in the past – I used it when Bill Mueller hit the home run off Rivera in July of that year. I wasn’t conscious of it. I only use it for big moments, like Papelbon’s pickoff in this Series because it was startling. It’s become a trademark. When the Sox won this year I made sure to mention that they were the first team in the 21^st century to win two titles.

’04 probably will always stand by itself, though the two Series were fairly similar. You can’t pick between world championships – there were different players – it’s like picking between your children. ’04 was about history and the end of curses and winning for people no longer with us, our deceased relatives. ’07 was about having the best team in baseball.

Q. What are the ABCs of broadcasting baseball?

A. You try to paint a word picture of what’s happening on the field and you try to entertain and inform between pitches. That little sphere with 108 stitches is only in play for about eight minutes out of three hours. You have to be more prepared than any other sport because there’s so much down time. You prepare a lifetime. It starts when you’re playing sandlot and Little League and collecting cards and reading bios and stats about the greats of the game. It’s important to have a total background. It’s like a pyramid – what happened today is built on what happened yesterday and last year. It’s built on the last generation and on the generation when Ruth and Cobb played.

Q. How do you paint a word picture?

A. You have a blank canvas and you put a painting on a canvas. Describe every move of the pitcher in going to the stretch and as his arm comes around, the batter swings and fouls it, where, right field line or upper deck? Be very descriptive about what happens to the ball. You have to fill between pitches with interesting material, and not just stats. Bio material, or things that have nothing to do with baseball. We do that a lot. Always be ready to capitalize on action, because you never know when it’s going to happen – it could happen in the first inning or the twelfth. The great thing about radio is that nothing happens until we say it does. Baseball is an announcer’s medium. TV is an analyst and director/producer medium.

Q. Is talking too much a concern?

A. Yes. You have to let it breathe. You have to back off of superfluous information when the game is on the line. Set the scene, the count, where the runners are, who are the runners and who is up next, who is up in the next inning. Anticipate what the audience wants to know – the audience wants to know the same things you want to know. If I’m watching a game I get irritated if they don’t tell me who’s up next and who’s available to pinch hit. You have to focus on those things when the game is on the line. The rest of the time you might tell a story or laugh about something or come up with an anecdote. No game has the same pace – you have to change gears. Baseball is the only sport where the defense controls the ball.

Q. Do young announcers rely too much on stats?

A. I don’t know if we can generalize by age. Guys older than me were stats crazy. Stats should tell a story – not just be a number. Given a choice between a human interest story and a stat go with the human interest story – people are more interested. Some audiences are turned off by stats. Not that you have a great story every day, but it could be something you read or hear on the way to the ballpark.

Q. Do you look for anecdotes and human interest?

A. Yes. They come up in normal conversation. We spend a lot of time shooting the breeze with players, executives, and scouts for other teams in the media dining rooms – it’s a great source of information. We get to the ballpark three or four hours before the game – there are so many pre-game shows to do. If you’re not recording an interview you’re still talking baseball and getting information. It might be a scouting report or something humorous that happened to a player – you always have your antenna up.

Q. How is your job different from print reporters?

A. In some ways it’s the same. I’m looking for updates, injuries, status of players and reaction. But in many ways it’s different. We are the first line to the club – we’re not paid by the club but we’re still part of the organization and we know that. The newspaper guys are entirely different concept. The electronic media took the game story away from the print media. They do other things – features, gossip, rumors. Our job is to describe what happens in the game – we call balls and strikes – and our other job is to entertain.

Q. What type of print stories do you avoid on the air?

A. You can’t make a general statement. The difficult stories involved off-the-field issues. When Wade Boggs had Margo Adams we didn’t get into that because he still hit .370. When we had a pitcher charged with spousal abuse we reported it because he wasn’t with the team. Every case is individual – you can’t make a blanket statement.

Q. Are you more circumspect with criticism than print?

A. I would think so. We’re still an arm of the club – though not employed by the club. You use common sense with each story. You have to be honest. If a guy makes an error or doesn’t hustle we have to point it out no matter what uniform he’s wearing. You’re not going to say that’s a horrible signing they just made – though you might later if it doesn’t work out.

Q. Does your tone of voice convey more than the words you use?

A. Part of my on-air personality is really my off-air personality. You can tell I want the Sox to win. People say they can tell if the Sox are ahead or behind by my tone of voice. I take that as a compliment, though if I were an objective reporter I would not. I give you an honest report but it’s with passion. It that’s the case I’m proud of that. I do take wins and losses to heart. Nothing is more euphoric than winning a World Series. I always said my greatest call hadn’t come yet till ’04. Now it’s happened twice.

Q. How would you describe your voice?

A. I try to be conversational and friendly. I don’t have the booming pipes. Be as conversational as possible, which I think is what the audience wants. Be consistent. You have to be wearable. We’re on three hours a day 162 times a year. I would say my voice is wearable.

Q. Does the frequency of ads intrude on the call?

A. Most are natural breaks and come at the half inning. When you have to drop in an announcement into a live half inning you try to do it with a foul ball or a batter stepping out – now when the ball is in play. If you have a sense of timing it doesn’t interfere. There are plenty of opportunities with all the down time.

When rights fees are $16 million there’s not enough inventory. It gets back to paying the players. The Fallon Community injury report. Volkswagon keys to the game. Verizon call to the bullpen. There are some creative salesmen working for the club.

Q. How do you ask a tough question?

A. I tell my students (at Northeastern) there are three keys. Be prepared. Be sensitive. Listen. You try to be sensitive and ask in a way that will get a better response. This is not investigative reporting where you’re pounding on the door of the slum landlord. Put yourself in their shoes and ask in a sensitive way so you get an answer that’s expansive. It’s always tougher to do an interview after a loss than a win.

Q. The season is long – how do you keep from getting on nerves?

A. There are 25 players. If somebody doesn’t want to talk you get other people. You deal with the manager every day and they become friends, although they come and go. I don’t find it to be a problem – there’s always somebody – you can move on if somebody doesn’t want to deal. Not many have been difficult over the years. Manny might not want to do an interview but he’s always hugging people.

Boston is a tough place to play – not everybody can play here – they don’t have the temperament. Our job is not to be confrontational. Sometimes a writer might have to be more confrontational. We’re probably more conscious of the words we use in asking questions because we deal with the spoken word.

Q. Do you miss not having Jerry Trupiano in the booth?

A. I missed him personally and as a partner but I enjoyed my new partners. The transition was seamless from my standpoint but that’s something the audience has to judge. Both Dave (O’Brien) and Glenn (Geffner) are really good guys. We won the World Series – everything was upbeat.

Q. Pirates Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Prince was an early influence on you. What can you relate about Prince for people who never heard him?

A. The Gunner. He was a great star, a huge star – one of the great characters in baseball history, off and on the field. He had a larger-than-life personality. In some ways he was bigger than the Pirates, which probably irritated some management people and probably got him in the end.

I can’t use his style. He would say ‘We need a bloop and a blast’. That doesn’t work in New England. I can’t openly root like Gunner did. He was a wild guy – there’s a story about him jumping out of a third story window at the Chase Park Plaza into a swimming pool. The Hall of Fame has one of his sport coats with his sayings sewn on, like ‘a gnats eyelash’. ‘We had em all the way’ – I use that sometimes. I don’t know if he would be as successful today – the audience is more sophisticated. He struggled when he went to ABC – he was a fish out of water – not used to working with analysts.

I remember visiting him during rain delays. I was in Youngstown working high school games and anchoring TV and I would go to Pittsburgh on weekends. Once I asked him for advice on how to make it in the business. He said ‘the only sure way to make it is to hit .300 or hit 20 home runs’. He was a tremendous entertainer and a very generous guy, too.

Jim Woods was his No. 2. He was probably the best No. 2 in baseball – he never wanted to be the top guy. Woods was great – he should be in the Hall of Fame. He was here with Ned (Martin) in the 70s – they both hated doing sponsor things. Their last game was the ’78 playoff game and then they were fired – there was a great story in SI about it. I quoted Ned in ’04 and ’07 – ‘pandemonium on the field’ – that was Ned in ’67. He was doing TV when I was doing radio – we never worked together. Ken Coleman was my mentor – he brought me here. It was great to be associated with those guys.

Q. Do you study other broadcasters?

A. We copy. We have models. I know Vince Scully doesn’t listen to other broadcasters but I do. My ultimate hero was Mel Allen – the greatest who ever lived. I met him late in his life – he did the Righetti no-hitter on cable. Ernie Harwell is a good friend – I still go see him when we play there.

Q. Was more personality permitted in those days?

A. I think there are more broadcasters today and more venues – TV, cable, radio, satellite. In those days Mel Allen did radio and TV – he was a star on both. Same with Prince. When he went on TV he said it was like time off – he’d say ‘ball one, ball two’. I don’t think it’s not allowed. In some ways there’s more personality today because there’s more time to fill. The games are an hour longer. We have more byplay with partners than they did – those old guys were one-man bands. What do you do at a ballgame? You b.s. with the person sitting next to you – that’s the approach I take with my partners, except when the ball is in play.

(SMG thanks Joe Castiglione for his cooperation)

John Canzano

An Interview with John Canzano

“Five years ago I didn’t know about Freedom of Information requests. I couldn’t live without it now. You can get a lot of good stuff – budgets and coaches’ contracts – the contract details are invaluable.”

“I align myself with Joe Fan who has kids and wants to be entertained and doesn’t want to be worried about whether the power forward is drag racing with a gun in his car. That happened with Zack Randolph on Broadway over the summer.”

“I once locked myself in a meat locker that was minus-5 degrees to simulate what it’s like for Bret Favre on a frigid day in Green Bay. It wasn’t a good idea. I lasted 22 minutes and I was bundled up…My computer battery drained in less than 20 minutes.”

John Canzano: Interviewed on November 2, 2006

Position: Columnist, The Oregonian

Born: 1970, Medford, Ore. (grew up in Bay Area)

Education: Cal State – Chico, 1995, English

Career: Gilroy Dispatch, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Fort Wayne News Sentinel, Fresno Bee, San Jose Mercury News, Oregonian 2002 –

Personal: single

Favorite restaurant (home): South Park, Portland

Favorite restaurant (road): Original Joe’s, San Jose, “no better burger in the Bay Area”

Favorite hotel: Marriott “anywhere”

John Canzano excerpted from The Oregonian, September 19, 2006:

The seventh threatening telephone call at Gordon Riese’s home came a few minutes after eight o’clock on Monday morning. It was from an Oklahoma fan who told Riese, the Pacific-10 Conference replay official from Saturday’s Ducks-Sooners game, he was going to fly to Portland, find the family home, and kill Riese and his wife.

“I called the police,” said Riese, 64, “then, I unplugged the phone.”

The deputy who arrived to take the report assured Riese that murderers don’t typically alert their victims before flying in from out of state to commit the crime. Then, the deputy added, “Maybe you should leave town for a couple of days, if it makes you feel better.”

Football is a game, you’re thinking.

Q. You were the only reporter Gordon Riese talked to. Why?

A. I went in the right way.

Q. How?

A. I found his daughter. I figured if anybody would be agonizing for him it would be his kid. I called her and told her how I would handle the column. She facilitated it. He would have said “no thanks” to me but she told him that this thing was going against him and he needed to get his side out there.

I also think people know I’m my own person because of the heat I take for the Blazers stuff I write. They know I’m not going to buckle.

Q. How did you find his daughter?

A. Public records. Voter registration.

Without sharing too much… we have access here at the newspaper to DMV, criminal records, property tax records, licenses, liens, court records, USPS change of address, etc. I use all of these. I was able to determine that his daughter had a different last name but had shared an address. I then found her using voter registration.

If I had struck out, I would have found another way, or located her home address through property records, and just dropped by to talk.

Q. Those are news reporters’ tools.

A. It helps to have editors who have worked in other areas. Five years ago I didn’t know about Freedom of Information requests. I couldn’t live without it now. You can get a lot of good stuff – budgets and coaches’ contracts – the contract details are invaluable. You can see how it’s structured – if there’s an extension date and it hasn’t been extended you know he’s in trouble.

Q. Do you have police sources?

A. Yes. That’s standard. You’re finding more sports departments bringing in editors with expertise in cops and courts. Two years ago the Oregonian’s crime team leader transitioned into the Deputy Sports Editor position – finally we had somebody who knew his way around the courts.

Two stops prior to coming here I was covering Fresno State, which had Jerry Tarkanian and all their incidents. I got experience with public records and developed police sources. Sources talk to me simply for the fact they know I’m not beholden to any team or organization. If something is wrong they can talk to me and know that I know what to do with the information. A lot of times the police can’t prosecute – they might not have enough evidence – but they can get a message out if somebody will listen to what they’re saying.

Q. Can a Blazer get a drink in town without you knowing about it?

A. Yes. But a lot of times they get a drink and I know about it and it’s not relevant and doesn’t end up in the paper. We had an incident with Darius Miles recently…you get a call and Darius is at a bar – ‘Henry’s’ – having a mixed drink. You get repeated calls – which is alarming because he showed up to practice once last season smelling like alcohol – and you pay attention. You make the call to the team and they think he’s getting treatment at the practice facility. Combine that with the fact that the team was getting dressed for its final exhibition game, and he’s one of the highest-paid players, and it’s newsworthy. Darius was at a strip club one night and people called. I said, “There’s nothing illegal about it.” He played that night. As long as performance isn’t affected and the police don’t care I don’t have much interest in it.

Q. I’m going to read from a column you wrote recently (October 28):

The next day, just before tip-off, a taxi pulled up to the steps of the Rose Garden. A twentysomething blonde slipped out of the taxi and headed toward Will Call, where she collected a complimentary ticket and came through the turnstiles.

She told me she had been flown from Seattle to Portland by one of the Lakers players and had spent the night in his hotel room. She then explained, “The hotel doors of the other players were swinging open and closed all night there were so many different women coming in and out.”

It’s a scene that goes down all the time in the twisted culture of the NBA.

Do the Blazers consider themselves part of a “twisted culture”?

A. Players don’t. I think they view what’s going on as normal – the permissive attitude is caused by the salaries they’re making and by being coddled their entire youth – an extended youth. They feel entitled. I’m talking in general because there are some good guys in every lockerroom. But there are a lot of yahoos.

Management is so focused on the bottom line – the league is more concerned with image – that management is focused on day-to-day operations and marketing the team and selling tickets. They don’t look at the culture – that’s the league’s issue.

Q. Do the players resent being referred to as a “twisted culture”?

A. They don’t see themselves in it. When you talk to players they think it’s guys on other teams – they don’t see their roles in it. We had four Jazz in a restaurant at closing time, good guys, but they didn’t want to leave and they basically said, “How much money will it take to keep the restaurant open? What’s it going to take? We’ve got money.” Nothing is above reproach. That attitude permeates into other aspects.

We’ve had a rash of 911 calls involving NBA players in this community – two in six weeks although prosecutors say they don’t have enough to make a case. Prior to that there were other incidents with Blazers and visiting teams.

I view myself as a representative of the community and there are females in this community and if players are going into restaurants hassling them I have to say something.

The league has a problem in that there are no female executives in power. It would be healthy if the players could see a female in a position of power. The Blazers have one female vice-president out of seven – she’s in charge of marketing and outside sales. That’s a problem throughout the league.

Q. You’ve written about that – is anybody listening?

A. I’ve gotten responses from various executive and coaches who pulled me aside and said “You hit it on the head – these guys don’t have a healthy attitude toward women.”

Q. Would it help if more women covered the league?

A. Yep. It would help. That is an issue – most people covering the teams are male. But if you’re a journalist – male or female – you have the obligation to see things and voice things and not go along with the herd. I’ve got to walk in my own shoes.

Q. Would you rather cover a good team of reprobates, or a bad team of altar boys?

A. I can’t have a good team of altar boys? I would rather cover a good team, for the simple fact that there’s more interest in a good team. It’s a lot of fun to be writing about things that people care about. I’ve covered good teams with questionable characters – I was at Fresno State during the Samurai Sword incident – and you wonder about your obligation to protect the community from the team.

Q. So you view yourself as a watchdog?

A. You have to be. You’re part of the community. You’re certainly not part of the team. Frankly, members of the organization would prefer I wasn’t around because I write about things they prefer to keep quiet. I align myself with Joe Fan who has kids and wants to be entertained and doesn’t want to be worried about whether the power forward is drag racing with a gun in his car. That happened with Zack Randolph on Broadway over the summer.

We had a player – Derek Anderson – who drove through a McDonalds. Normally that’s not newsworthy, but it happened during a game that he called in sick. He was buying a milkshake and somebody called us during the game. It became relevant and important because he was supposed to be at the arena. He’s making $8 million a year to play basketball and people are buying tickets with the expectation of seeing the team at full strength.

Q. Aren’t things magnified in Portland more than in the big cities?

A. Nobody denies that. But no more than football in South Bend, or basketball in Bloomington – which I covered. You have the opportunity in a fishbowl to amplify positives or negatives. If you’re doing the right things it’s a valuable asset. If you’re screwing up it can be a huge negative.

Q. Why is the Oregonian hiring a free lancer to write about the paper’s relationship with the Blazers?

A. Ask the executive editor and sports editor about that. I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea – I don’t think we have any explaining to do to the public or the team. We do a good job of covering the team. Management is trying to give readers and independent objective outside look at the relationship and how contentious it is and how difficult it is to be in a fishbowl for them and how difficult it is to cover them.

When I covered Fresno State PBS did a documentary on how difficult it was to cover Tarkanian in a small town – they followed me around with a camera. I don’t necessarily see the value. I don’t think readers care that much if they’re making life difficult for us. They want to read about the team and what’s going on with the team. Readers are smart enough to make up their own minds. I know we’re having an independent writer and editor do this story, but it feels self-conscious to me. What explaining do we have to do? We hold ourselves to a high standard.

Who knows? It might be riveting. I was interviewed for it – people are asking me about it. I’m not that interested in what it says because I live it. It would be the same to me as a reporter following anybody in their jobs and examining the natural friction. If a grocery clerk has problems with the delivery people are you interested in that? I’m not, as long as I get my groceries. Readers are that way with news.

Q. How would you describe your writing style?

A. I would say I’m opinionated. Hopefully I make people think – I have a fairly good range as far as being critical and maybe writing a good story now and then. I don’t have one style – my approach is determined by the subject.

I’m outside a sports bar now. A former NHL player (Jim “Redeye” Hay) who was a goon sits in here every day and watches hockey and drinks beer. I’m going to sit in his seat and watch him walk in and watch how he reacts. I’m going to have fun with it. I’ll introduce myself after he comes up and knocks me off the stool. I got this from a tip. He comes in every day at 5 o’clock. He won a Stanley Cup in the 60s.

Q. How do you come up with ideas?

A. People tell me I have original ideas. At the World Series of Poker I was going to write about Greg Raymer, but I found the guy sitting to his left – his main opponent at the table – a computer programmer. So I wrote what’s it like to set next to Greg Raymer. You have to adjust your lens. There are so many stories out there – you have to take a step back.

I once locked myself in a meat locker that was minus-5 degrees to simulate what it’s like for Bret Favre on a frigid day in Green Bay. It wasn’t a good idea. I lasted 22 minutes and I was bundled up. I called some Army researchers who told me some people can handle the cold and some can’t. My computer battery drained in less than 20 minutes.

I called Jeff Garcia from the meat locker – the 49ers were playing Green Bay. I said, “I’m in a meat locker.” He said, “Where?” When I told him he laughed. He appreciated it because he had played at Calgary.

Q. Writers you admire?

A. I read a lot – there are so many good writers out there, who write things I wish I had thought of. Sally Jenkins (Washington Post. Bill Plaschke ( LA Times). I read 10 or 15 things every morning – from around the country. It’s important to see what people are doing.

Q. How much time do you spend on it?

A. I spend an hour or two in the morning blogging and keeping myself informed. I also go to a lot of Blazers practices – which is not normal for a columnist. People are so engaged in this team it helps to be there.

Q. What’s the difference between your column and your blog?

A. The blog is an extension of the column. When they came to me to do the blog I wasn’t comfortable. I’ve been doing this for 10 years and this was sthe first time I’ve been asked to share information outside of the column. The blog gives you a chance to air things you couldn’t fit in the the column, whether it’s an elaboration or a nugget. Blogs aren’t going away – everybody is doing it – but if they went away it would be fine with me.

I rarely read blogs. Somebody will send me something sometimes. I get 300 e-mails a day and I answer all those. I was an English major in college so I read a lot of non-sports stuff.

Q. How does someone become a columnist?

A. Kids always are asking me that. I don’t have a good answer. I tell them to do good work and try to keep moving and to watch what people are writing.

(SMG thanks John Canzano for his cooperation)

You wrote about Gordon Riese (the official who messed up the call in the Oregon State-Oklahoma game) “This is probably a good time to remind ourselves that sports isn’t war. It’s not life or death. College football is supposed to be a pleasant, passionate weekend diversion, void of death threats for sure. There’s just something that doesn’t feel right about villifying Riese, especially after further review.”

You’re cautioning fans against being overwrought. Do columnists get overwrought?

Football is just a game, until you’re on the clock

John Canzanohas been asports columnist at The Oregonian since Dec. 2002.

Canzano has worked at five other daily newspapers including The San Jose Mercury News, where he coveredthe National Football League and Major League Baseball.

Canzano also worked at The Fresno Bee as a sports columnist. As a beat reporter he’s also covered a variety of programs including Purdue football and basketball, Notre Dame football and Indiana basketball under coach Bob Knight.

Canzano has won numerous writing awards, including Associated Press Sports Editors awards in column (2002) and enterprise writing (2001). He’s been a frequent winner in the Football Writer’s Association Awards. And in 2004, Canzano was recognized by The Press Club of Atlantic City with a first place among all sports writing entries in the National Headliner Award

Excerpted from the Oregonian, October 28, 2006:

It’s a scene that goes down all the time in the twisted culture of the NBA.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

The Oregonian

Canzano: Official wasn’t shown all replays shown on TV

John Canzano excerpted from The Oregonian, September 19, 2006:

“The seventh threatening telephone call at Gordon Riese’s home came a few minutes after eight o’clock on Monday morning. It was from an Oklahoma fan who told Riese, the Pacific-10 Conference replay official from Saturday’s Ducks-Sooners game, he was going to fly to Portland, find the family home, and kill Riese and his wife.

“I called the police,” said Riese, 64, “then, I unplugged the phone.”

Football is a game, you’re thinking.

Right up to the point where an Oregon player touches an onside-kick attempt a step too early, turning the scramble for the ball into a melee where players are rushing the field celebrating, and the ball is squirting through everyone’s legs like they were wickets in a human croquet match. Then, the officials on the field blow the call. Then, the review process, instituted to rectify situations just like this, upholds the bad call, causing many of us, including some self-important university president at Oklahoma, to wonder, “Was Mr. Magoo in the replay booth?”

Well, no.

It was Gordon Riese in the booth. He has a name, he has a life. And after visiting with him on Monday, and learning more from some others about what happened in that review booth, I’m convinced that every honk who criticized Riese in the last 72 hours owes the man a swift apology.

Said Riese: “I’m having a difficult time letting the blown call go. I always prided myself on getting it right. I didn’t get the job done. I didn’t get it right.”