Jeff Duncan (Part Two)

An Interview with 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

01

English

© 2005 The Times Picayune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights reserved.

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.

. . . . . . .

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

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Gordon Edes

An Interview with Gordon Edes

An Interview with Gordon Edes

“I was surrounded by a ton of talented people at the Globe; it saddens me to see the talent, and institutional memory, that has been lost, a story repeated throughout our industry. It’s absurd to think they don’t have plenty of good people left, but equally absurd to think that they can absorb the hits they’ve taken without feeling the impact.”

“I’ve never accepted the premise that people don’t read game stories—I think they’ll still read a gamer written with style and information they can’t glean elsewhere, like the Series gamer I wrote last October about what led to Papelbon picking off Matt Holliday. That gave me great satisfaction, to have something no one else had among 500 or so other reporters at the Series.”

Gordon Edes: Interviewed on August 13, 2008

Position: National baseball writer, Yahoo! Sports

Born: 1954, Fitchburg, Ma.

Education: North Park College, Chicago, history, political science “hired as a copy editor at the Chicago Tribune three classes short of a degree”

Career: Chicago Tribune, copy clerk 1972-76, copy editor 1976-80; Los Angeles Times, 1980-89; Atlanta Journal Constitution, 1989; The National Sports Daily (RIP), 1990-91; Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, 1991-96; Boston Globe, 1996-2008; Yahoo!Sports 2008 –

Personal: Married (Bonnie) with three daughters, “one Iowa Hawkeye fan for a son-in-law and one 6-year-old grandson destined to be a Cubs fan”

Favorite restaurant (home): Walden Grill, Concord, Ma.

Favorite restaurant (away): Trattoria Contadina, San Francisco “neighborhood joint on Russian Hill, with 4-star food. Thank you, Blake Rhodes, Giants PR”

Favorite hotel: Marriott Harbor Beach, Ft. Lauderdale “the place that gave me a grand piano during the World Series”

Gordon Edes, excerpted from Yahoo!, Aug. 12, 2008:

ATLANTA – He was laid to rest on an off day, about right for a man who broadcast in the neighborhood of 5,000 ballgames. And while he couldn’t call his own funeral, Skip Caray almost certainly would have approved, except for all the people wearing neckties, which he loathed.

Still, the service didn’t run too long, it wasn’t interrupted by a rain delay, nobody did the wave, and there were plenty of funny stories from his old partners, Pete Van Wieren and Ernie Johnson Sr.

Best of all, his beloved Atlanta Braves
were there to see him at the end – Chipper Jones
was a pallbearer, John Smoltz
and John Schuerholz spoke, and front pews were filled with manager Bobby Cox, his coaches and Braves players past and present, Phil Niekro, Otis Nixon and Rick Camp paying their respects with Tom Glavine
and Jeff Francoeur
and Brian McCann
.

And no one was allowed to make Caray something in death he wasn’t in life…

…Over countless hot summer nights, Caray, who never lost the radio man’s knack of connecting with one listener at a time, as if he was sharing the same back porch, delivered smiles by the bushel. A foul ball would land in the stands, Caray would pretend to identify the hometown of the fan who caught it.

“He’d say, ‘A fan from Visalia just caught that one,’ ” said Ernie Johnson Sr., whose son, Ernie Jr., has become a fixture on NBA telecasts. “People would actually call up and ask, ‘How did Skip know?’

Q. As you leave the Titanic, er, Globe for Yahoo, what are your thoughts on the people who are left behind? How did it come to this?

A. My leaving is very bittersweet. Covering baseball for the Globe, and making regular appearances on NESN as part of my Globe duties, gave me about as high a profile as a baseball beat writer can have. The intensity of the beat trumped anything I had experienced in the past; former Globe sports editor Don Skwar gave me a taste of what was to come when he called my parents’ home at 8:45 on Thanksgiving morning my first year at the Globe because the Herald had a Mo Vaughn contract update in the paper and he wanted me to call Sox GM Dan Duquette—at his parents’ home—to do a folo!

This was my 12th season covering the Sox. I expected to retire at the Globe, working at my hometown paper. How could you ask for a better audience, knowing that one of my heroes, Doris Kearns Goodwin, as well as my high school English teacher, Pete Lincoln, were reading me regularly? But the Globe vision of my future did not match up with my own. I expected to return to my former job as the paper’s On Baseball columnist once they settled on a new beat reporter—Chris Snow had left in ’06 to become a hockey front-office man, and when they asked, I had agreed to go back on the beat until they found a replacement. I agreed to remain on the beat in 2007 and 2008 while Amalie Benjamin gained more experience.

But prior to the ’08 season, sports editor Joe Sullivan said that his plan was to have two on-baseball columnists, Nick Cafardo and myself. To me, that was like returning to half a job. I said if he wanted to keep Nick on Sunday Notes, that was fine by me, but I felt I had earned the On-ball designation, we had only one on-ball columnist for other sports and that’s what made it distinctive. He disagreed, and Steve Henson, the baseball editor at Yahoo!, offered me the chance at a baseball writer’s dream job, a national job in which you are restricted only by your imagination.

The Globe offered buyouts; I took mine, and subsequently was denied it. I appealed that decision, Yahoo! waited for that process to play out, but when it became clear it would drag on, I gave my notice and left on Aug. 1. I remain extremely disappointed that the New York Times Co. dispensed over $30 million in buyouts last year but elected to deny me; I remain hopeful that decision will be overturned, but in the meantime I made it a point not to let that impact my work.

I was surrounded by a ton of talented people at the Globe; it saddens me to see the talent, and institutional memory, that has been lost, a story repeated throughout our industry. It’s absurd to think they don’t have plenty of good people left, but equally absurd to think that they can absorb the hits they’ve taken without feeling the impact.

I told Joe Sullivan, and I meant it, that the nearly 12 years I spent at the Globe were the best of my professional life. I trust the friendships I made while there will endure.

Q. What can you tell us about your Yahoo job? How often will you write? Does it involve podcasting or any electronic work? Can you keep a straight face when you introduce yourself as Gordon Edes of Yahoo?

A. I’ll answer the last question first. That does take some getting used to, but I’m learning already that the recognition factor is high. I haven’t had to spend much time explaining who we are. I expect to write at least four times a week, if not more, and my sense of what the job entails, and what I want it to entail, is constantly evolving. I expect there will be a fair amount of videostreaming, mailbags, chats and the like, and I expect podcasting will be a component, too. Breaking news, analysis, opinion, features—the job gives me the freedom to do all of the above. And if Steve wants me to write the gamers during the World Series, I’ll be happy to oblige. And then there is the sweetest of words: No running.

Q. What attracts you to a story? Name a few of your favorite stories.

A. I love the telling of a story in detail, giving people the sense that they are seeing things through a unique window when they are reading me. The stories behind the story, like the pieces I did on the Sox failed attempt to trade for Alex Rodriguez, the signing of Daisuke Matsuzaka, or a reprise of the Kirk Gibson home run in 1988.

I’ve never accepted the premise that people don’t read game stories—I think they’ll still read a gamer written with style and information they can’t glean elsewhere, like the Series gamer I wrote last October about what led to Papelbon picking off Matt Holliday. That gave me great satisfaction, to have something no one else had among 500 or so other reporters at the Series.

I like breaking news, though in our 24-7 cycle scoops have a shelf life of about five minutes. I am drawn to the human element, like weaving Tim Wakefield’s joy at flying with the Blue Angels into the story of a Blue Angel pilot who was a huge Sox fan and died in an air show a couple of years after standing in the Sox dugout at the Series. I surprise myself, sometimes, that after 28 years in the business, I still find as much pleasure as I do in going to the ballpark. I was told long ago that the purpose of my job was to inform and delight: I still strive to do so.

Q. How would you grade yourself on your coverage of the Steroid Era? In retrospect, would you have done it differently?

A. I failed badly, out of naivete and ignorance more than anything else. I didn’t raise the issue enough, and certainly didn’t press it with my bosses. One of the biggest stories I missed was giving light treatment to the fact that the owners and players were willing to shelve drug testing as an issue in exchange for labor peace in the 2002 CBA.

How would I have done things differently? I don’t think beat reporters should have been acting as private detectives on a nightly basis—their primary responsibility was to tell the reader who won and lost and why—but in my On Ball role I certainly could have pounded away at the issue.

Q. You don’t call attention to yourself in your writing – why?

A. The power is in the story itself, not who wrote it. You tell a story well enough, the attention will come.

Q. How have e-mails changed your reporting process?

A. A good deal, I would say. It’s the primary way I communicate with Red Sox owner John Henry for example. In some ways it gives you better access; there are people more inclined to answer an e-mail than return a phone call. But I also think some give and take is sacrificed in the process.

Q. You tend to downplay the more advanced baseball stat measures – why?

A. On a nightly basis, I would agree with you that I downplay some of those numbers, though I think you would find that I have championed the work of Bill James and the people at Baseball Prospectus, and incorporated some numbers (OPS, WHIP) that I paid scant attention to in the past. But I also have never lost sight of the fact that I write for a broad audience that might get lost in the VORPs and WARPs and Win Shares, and the people who are into that stuff can find plenty of places to get their fill.

Q. How do you keep up with baseball? What and who do you read and watch?

A. I receive a daily file of newspaper stories written on every team. I also think Baseball-Reference.com is the single greatest resource to come along in my years in the business. I read Buster (Olney) and Peter (Gammons) at ESPN and Baseball Musings, Steve Henson has introduced me to ProSportsDaily, and I am now immersing myself in all that we have on our site.

Q. Beaver Cleaver – any relation?

A. What would ever make you ask?

Gordon Edes, excerpted from the Boston Globe, Oct. 26, 2007:

…The Sox won their sixth straight Series game and fifth straight of this postseason with one never-before-seen wrinkle. Papelbon, who had not picked off a runner since he broke into the big leagues in 2006, nabbed Matt Holliday straying off first base to close out the eighth inning. Holliday had nearly taken out both Papelbon and second baseman Dustin Pedroia with a line single up the middle, his fourth hit of the night. The ball appeared to glance off Papelbon’s leg and caused Pedroia, who gloved the ball with a sprawling spot, to writhe in pain after he landed heavily on the left shoulder he’d dislocated already once this postseason.

At the plate was Todd Helton, the signature player in Rockies history. But he never saw a pitch in the eighth, as Papelbon whirled and picked off Holliday.

“Probably will go down as one of the biggest outs of my career,” Papelbon said.

It was not happenstance. Holliday was intending to steal – he confirmed so after the game – and the Sox had a strong suspicion he was going.

They knew that the Rockies were scouting them in the Division Series against the Angels, when Howie Kendrick stole second and third unchallenged against Papelbon in the eighth inning of a tie game.

“If you were advancing us, you would have said the same thing, that Pap is 1.8 [seconds] to the plate, and he doesn’t pick,” Mills said. “But it was a different situation in the game against the Angels. We didn’t care if he stole, because we had confidence in Paps getting the hitter and we didn’t want to take anything away from him to try to get the runner on that situation.

“We know they’re advancing us, they’re watching it. That night I was talking to Pap in the shower about that exact thing, and about what was to come. [Bullpen coach] Gary Tuck was talking to him about it, [pitching coach] John Farrell talked to him about it, about different things we were going to do.”

When manager Terry Francona went out with trainer Paul Lessard to check on Pedroia, Mills noticed that Glenallen Hill, the Rockies’ first base coach, never stopped talking to Holliday. Mills also had a color-coded chart he keeps on every player, that showed that Holliday likes to steal on the first pitch with two outs. “It was right there in my pocket,” Mills said.

Indeed, it was right there on the chart, multiple steal attempts Holliday had made on the first pitch with two outs.

“You put all those things together, and it comes up, ‘Hey, we’re going to pick once to see where he’s at, and then we’re going to slide-step.’

“And, we were watching. I got a big lump in my throat because he kept inching, inching, inching off, and Pap did a great job of holding the ball, letting him get off there. And then I’m sitting there, with a lump in my throat, hoping he doesn’t throw [it] away.”

Papelbon made the play, Mills said. “He made the great pick.”

But while it was nowhere as dramatic as Kirk Gibson knowing that Dennis Eckersley was going to throw a backdoor slider on a full count before Gibson hit one of the greatest home runs in Series history, it was a stunning example of how inside knowledge and paying extraordinary attention to detail can turn a Series.

“There are a lot of times we don’t want him to throw over,” Mills said. “But in this situation with Helton and [Garrett] Atkins coming up, we couldn’t afford it, and it just happened to work out.”

(SMG thanks Gordon Edes for his cooperation)

Chris Broussard

An Interview with Chris Broussard

An Interview with Chris Broussard

“Usually when I send a blog in it takes 10 to 15 minutes before it’s up on the site. This one took probably eight hours.”

“One reason I wrote this column about the homosexuality issue is because everything I read, the overwhelming majority, basically came from a liberal standpoint.”

“In terms of being objective if a player was openly gay, that wouldn’t affect my coverage of him. A lot of players live lifestyles I won’t agree with but I won’t throw my personal beliefs into my coverage. People who know me know I’m a Christian and if a subject comes up I’m not ashamed to talk about what I believe.

Chris Broussard: Interviewed on May 24, 2007

Position: senior writer, ESPN the Magazine, espn.com

Born: 1968, Baton Rouge

Education: Oberlin College, 1990, English

Career: Cleveland Plain Dealer 1990-94, Akron Beacon-Journal 94-98, NY Times 98-2004

Personal: married, twin daughters

Favorite restaurant (home): Amy Ruth’s, Harlem, “soul food – the honey fried chicken is what I usually get”

Favorite restaurant (road): Heaven on Seven, Chicago, “Creole/Cajun place”

Favorite hotel: Marriott “everywhere, for the points”

Chris Broussard’s blog, espn.com, Feb. 13, 2007:

I think the NBA is ready for an openly gay player.

By “ready” I don’t mean that everyone on the guy’s team or in his organization will like the fact that he’s a homosexual, or that the guy might not get called names by opponents on the court, or even that his own teammates might not chuckle behind his back.

But by “ready” I mean that players will tolerate a homosexual teammate or opponent. Like Charles Barkley said, some have been doing that already.

Just look at the comments made by players, coaches and Commissioner David Stern when asked about former player John Amaechi’s recent disclosure that he is gay.

The overwhelming majority of comments have been politically correct, even the ones that were considered homophobic by Philadelphia’s Shavlik Randolph and Steven Hunter.

Go talk to guys at an open gym in your neighborhood, and lots of the comments won’t be so polite.

But America has become so politically correct — not to mention that, in my opinion, much of the media and Hollywood are promoting the idea that homosexuality is a normal lifestyle — that many players are afraid to voice their true feelings publicly.

Thus, whenever a current player comes out as gay, you will hear overwhelming support for the guy. And while I think Mark Cuban went overboard in saying the guy would be “an American hero,”
I do believe he would be embraced by a sizeable segment of the population.

He would definitely get marketing/endorsement opportunities, and some folks in the media would champion him and the gay cause.

Well, anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I’m not concerned with being politically correct. So here’s where I stand:

I’m a born-again, Bible-believing Christian (no, I’m not a member of the Religious Right). And I’m against homosexuality (I believe it’s a sin) and same-sex marriage.

But before you label me “homophobic,” know that I’m against any type of sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman. That includes heterosexual fornication (premarital sex).

Some cats in the NBA run around, sleeping with different women in every city — I don’t agree with their lifestyles.

Some players run around, cheating on their wives — I don’t agree with their lifestyles.

It’s all wrong to me and against the biblical teachings I believe in.

I’m saying all that to say that if I can play basketball with a homosexual, just about anyone can.

I’ve played in several rec leagues with LZ Granderson
, who is an openly gay writer at ESPN The Magazine.

I consider LZ a friend. I’ve gone out to lunch with him, talked music, sports, politics and lots of other things with him. I greet him with a handshake and a hug, just like I greet lots of other guys.

By the way, LZ can ball. In a league in New York City that features several former college players, we both made the All-Star team. He was kind of like our Shawn Marion minus the dunks (though he claims he can still slam!) and I was like our Gilbert Arenas (high game of 39, thank you).

Anyway, when we play in our rec league games, I give him high fives and hugs. Same with one of his friends who is on the team and also gay. When we’re on the court trying to get a win — or in the office talking about a story, for that matter — his sexuality is not an issue.

Granted, I don’t shower with LZ after games like NBA teammates do, and I’ll admit that if I had to, it might be a little uncomfortable at first.

But if a gay player just goes about his business in the shower, showing that he has no sexual interest in his teammates and that he’s not “checking them out,” I think the awkwardness would wear off fairly quickly.

LZ and I know where each other stand and we respect each other’s right to believe as he does.

I know he’s gay, and he knows I believe that’s a sin. I know he thinks I get my moral standards from an outdated, mistranslated book, and he knows I believe he needs to change his lifestyle. Still, we can laugh together, and play ball together.

That’s real diversity. Disagreeing but not being disagreeable.

For the record, I covered Amaechi as a beat writer for the Akron Beacon Journal when he was a rookie playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

I like John. He’s intelligent, nice and you can have a good conversation with him. I haven’t seen him in several years but if I saw him today, I’d smile and give him a hug. I think dinner with him would be a blast, with lots of great discussion/debate about race, politics, religion, Africa and yes, sexuality.

Since Amaechi came out, I’ve read lots of columns about being “progressive.” The implication — or outright assertion — is that anyone who believes homosexuality is wrong is not progressive or enlightened.

That’s where this thing becomes problematic, because those who hold to that view are saying I must change my entire belief system/religion because of your belief system.

Where’s the diversity in that?

Those folks don’t want diversity. They want everyone to agree with their “enlightened” opinion.

Look, I’ll accept your right to have your own belief system and to live as you please, but I’m not changing mine. Diversity is not just accepting alternatives to what has long been perceived as normal, but it’s accepting the significant number of people who hold to long-standing “traditional” beliefs as well.

Millions of Christians who follow the Bible — and Muslims who follow the Koran and Jews who follow the Torah, as well as many nonreligious Americans — believe homosexuality is wrong.

That doesn’t mean they’re unenlightened. That just means their moral code doesn’t fluctuate based on society’s ever-changing standards. As long as we’re not being violent toward one another, as long as we can be civil, everything should be fine. We don’t have to agree.

And please don’t compare being homosexual to being black. I consider that insulting to blacks for a number of reasons. The fact that some blacks make the comparison themselves only shows how crushed our racial esteem has become because of America’s oppression (witness our insistence on calling ourselves the n-word).

You can’t hide your skin color, choose your skin color, change your skin color or switch your skin color back and forth. Some argue that you can’t do that with your sexuality either, but there are many scientists on both sides of the genetic debate, and I believe a truly objective person would admit the biological evidence for homosexuality is far from definitive.

Nor has the Bible, the Koran or the Torah ever associated a particular skin color with sin (it was only racist whites who twisted the Scriptures 400 years ago who did that, never the Bible itself).

I’m not trying to get into a religious or scientific discussion here, I’m just saying that some people will accept homosexuality as fine and others will not.

Some will write me off as a bigot for this article, but folks, this is real talk. Unfortunately, we can’t have real talk in America nowadays.

Whites can’t voice their real opinions — no matter how legitimate — about race for fear of being called racist, and everyone’s afraid of offending anyone. It seems the only person who can be openly criticized, or disagreed with, is the President.

How crazy is that?

Until we can honestly hear each other out — and be civil while doing so — we won’t get anywhere. One thing I hope this article does is encourage people to have frank discussions about sensitive issues such as this one.

Here’s the bottom line: If I can accept working side-by-side with a homosexual, then he/she can accept working side-by-side with someone who believes homosexuality is wrong.

If an NBA player can accept playing with a homosexual, then the homosexual must accept playing with guys who don’t agree with his lifestyle.

Believe me, when the ball goes up, his sexual preference isn’t going to matter.

Q. What was the reaction to your blog?

A. Reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Usually when I send a blog in it takes 10 to 15 minutes before it’s up on the site. This one took probably eight hours. They sent it to several editors, the top editors at espn.com as well as The Magazine, where I mainly work. It was controversial and they wanted different people to see it.

When they finally put it up I got about 1100 e-mails. I would say about 90 percent were positive. About 65 percent were from Christians who totally agreed with what I said. Another 25 percent were from people who disagreed with my view of homosexuality but liked the overall tenor of the article, including some homosexuals. About 10 percent were totally against it.

Within ESPN itself, from the things people said to me, it was received positively as well. A lot said they enjoyed it and liked it – I got that from several Christians who work there, as well as people of other religions and people who aren’t religious. It was read on “Mike and Mike in the Morning” – they really liked it. I thought the response within ESPN itself would tend toward the negative though I never doubted they would publish it. Then I thought public opinion would be 50-50 but it was overwhelmingly positive.

Q. Did you respond to the e-mails?

A. I put the results of the e-mails on my next blog. I responded to a few – I wouldn’t have had time to respond to all. I got a call from Athletes in Action, a Christian-based sports ministry – I was asked to appear at one of their events at All-Star weekend. They had me seated on the dais but I didn’t speak. There were over 1000 people at this breakfast.

Q. Would you describe yourself as a conservative?

A. No. Most African-Americans, socially, are conservative, largely because of their church background. In terms of my beliefs as a Christian I am against abortion and same-sex marriage. Socially, I would definitely say I’m conservative, but in terms of government and policies I would say I’m probably more in line with Democrats. I would love to have universal health care and I’m for affirmative action. I’m an independent – not registered with either party. No, I’m not a conservative in the technical sense of what a conservative is in terms of going back to the way things were. No African-American wants to go back to the way things were.

Q. But if you go back to the 1950s homosexuals weren’t claiming their rights – wouldn’t that appeal to you?

A. The big problem then and up through the civil rights movement was racism and the notion of white supremacy – those were the main problems. If I could remove the racism and the way people of color and Native Americans were treated then I do see a lot of great things about the overall culture that was America. It was more conducive to family values, which are important for any society and civilization to have. But the huge blind spot was racism. Obviously I liked the standards in other ways back then. In my opinion we’re gone way too far in terms of what we allow on TV and radio. You’ve got little kids watching these TV shows and being affected negatively, in my opinion.

Q. Does sports media tend to be liberal?

A. Media in general tends to be liberal. I was at the New York Times for six years and they were certainly liberal. Sports media – I would lean toward yes – but in sports it’s harder to tell. You’re not commenting on social issues. One reason I wrote this column about the homosexuality issue is because everything I read, the overwhelming majority, basically came from a liberal standpoint.

One black player said he was okay having a gay teammate as long he “don’t bring it on me”. He was ripped in all the columns I read. Anybody who made comments that were not pro-homosexual were taken to task as not being progressive. And I wrote before Tim Hardaway – that’s a whole different take.

Q. Do you find political correctness in sports media?

A. In this instance I did. I obviously butted my head against it. For the most part everything written before I wrote was politically correct. In some racial issues you don’t. Barry Bonds – you saw the poll numbers – the majority of African Americans support him. ESPN has been fair to Bonds and maybe has gone the other way. He had his own show on TV and the way they’ve covered his pursuit of the record they’ve taken it at face value – this guy has hit a lot of home runs. But columnists and talk show hosts come out negatively against Bonds. If you’re talking in a racial sense that political correctness means always giving in to people of color – I don’t think so.

That’s a hard question. Bonds wasn’t good to media so some of it is his personality. On the other hand he is going to break the record of an African American so you wouldn’t say it’s racism. But you might in comparing him to the treatment Mark McGwire got. We knew he was taking something, even though what he was taking wasn’t illegal back then. Steroids weren’t illegal when Barry Bonds took them – so he’s bearing the brunt of what McGwire got away with. Some people in the black community wonder about Roger Clemens. There’s no evidence that he took anything but there’s rumblings and certainly you have the circumstantial evidence on the field. To be getting better into his 40s is remarkable. Yet he’s still treated like a star and the Yankees shower tons of money on him.

Q. Where do you draw the line between acting on your beliefs and not acting on them?

A. When I’m talking basketball on TV or on a blog or in an article my beliefs govern how I interact with people. A lot of sportswriters talk about sex with athletes and who they’re sleeping with – the way guys do. I don’t do that. I’m not talking to an athlete about him cheating on his wife, about him out there fornicating. I don’t condemn them, but when we’re not talking about sports and I’m not interviewing them we may talk about kids, music, and numerous things. I don’t talk about those things with other people so I’m not going there with athletes.

In terms of being objective if a player was openly gay, that wouldn’t affect my coverage of him. A lot of players live lifestyles I won’t agree with but I won’t throw my personal beliefs into my coverage. People who know me know I’m a Christian and if a subject comes up I’m not ashamed to talk about what I believe. But I don’t bring it into the daily coverage when it has no place there.

In the blog I threw my personal beliefs in because it’s a blog and you’re allowed to do that in a blog. Columnists are allowed to do it in a newspaper and if I had had a column in the New York Times I would have tried to do that. Everyone who wrote a column about that issue brought their personal beliefs in. Most were ultra-liberal. Maybe their personal beliefs aren’t informed by religion but they’re informed by something that brought them to the side of being pro-homosexual. I brought my beliefs in and they happened to be on the anti-homosexual end. But what I did wasn’t different than anybody else.

My belief system is impacted by my faith. That’s what being a Christian is, and a Muslim and a Jew. I can’t have religion just on Sunday. It’s going to affect how I am at work. But when it comes to writing about sports – when it doesn’t deal with social or personal beliefs – I keep it objective.

Some people say you’re trampling on the separation of church and state. I don’t think so. I think I’m in line with the general principles of the founders. My view is that the intentions of the founders was not to divorce moral principles that come from religion – Christian religion in the case of this country – from the public discourse and public sphere. The Bible was used to teach kids how to read in school. The Ten Commandments were up in courtrooms. We still put a hand on a Bible to take an oath. The founders weren’t anti-religion – they just didn’t want one denomination persecuting other denominations or faiths. That had been the case in Europe.

Part of the idea of writing the column was that I felt a lot of people in the country were against homosexuality and I don’t think their viewpoint was being presented. You would think America was overwhelmingly pro-homosexual. That’s not the case. I felt it was 50-50 or even slightly tilted toward my view, and I thought in fairness this other view should be presented.

Q. What did your parents do?

A. My father was a personnel manager for Travelers Insurance Co. He stopped that after 20 years and began working with the federal court system. My mother worked in the school board. Some years she was at home and other years she was a teacher or administrator in the public school system.

My father got transferred a lot in his job. I was born in Baton Rouge and I lived in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Syracuse, Des Moines, and Cleveland. I graduated high school in Cleveland. Oberlin College is near Cleveland. I stayed near Cleveland my first eight years out of college. Oberlin is a very liberal school. Homosexuality was out in the open – I had a good experience there.

I do interact with LZ Granderson and other people who are homosexual. LZ and I are friends – we play basketball together. There are other homosexuals at the Magazine – I don’t know how they feel about me personally now. I would say to them – just like I put aside my personal beliefs to work with them and be friendly to them – I would expect the same thing from them.

Another point in the article I wanted to get across. This thing I called “diversity” is not just a liberal thing. It’s not just if your viewpoint agrees with the so-called liberal standard of diversity. Diversity is when you don’t agree with the liberal standard. In my opinion diversity is accepting people – being able to disagree but not being disagreeable. LZ and I disagree yet we aren’t disagreeable. We can laugh and go out socially together.

Q. You write about black athletes having “leverage” to help black social causes? Do black sportswriters have “leverage”?

A. Oh yeah – the power of the pen. Especially if you’re a columnist, you can shape other opinions. Even a beat writer – in terms of how you present athletes in a different light than the mainstream white media.

Sometimes in the mainstream white media racism does play a part. Sometimes I think it’s just ignorance in not knowing black culture and understanding where an African-American player may be coming from. I remember when players started wearing cornrows and some white sportswriters associated that with thugs and gangsta culture. But cornrows have been associated with African-American culture forever. When I was a kid a lot of kids were wearing them and they weren’t gangsta. My daughters wear them.

As an African-American writer you can present a more balanced and accurate and fair viewpoint than another writer who may not be familiar with African-American culture.

Today with sportswriters gaining such prominence and being on TV – that increases the opportunity to help the black cause. Your job is talking about sports and being objective but inevitably the opportunity arises where you can present another side. I was on “Cold Pizza” a couple of years ago commemorating Martin Luther King Day, on a panel with Swin Cash and Jay Harris, who was moderating. We talked about the Ron Artest brawl in Detroit. I brought up the fact that it was not the first time an athlete charged into the stands and that white mainstream media seems to have selective amnesia regarding black issues. In the 1970s Rick Barry charged after a 15-year-old boy who cursed him. Ty Cobb definitely did it. We talk about today’s athletes and how much trouble they get into – that’s code for black athletes.

Let’s be honest, throughout the history of American sports athletes have had a lot of boorish behavior. We know about Babe Ruth’s behavior. Cobb was an avowed racist; Mickey Mantle was an alcoholic and the media protected them. I know the media is different today, but to act like the athletes of yesteryear were such moral pillars and now today they’re thugs and criminals and womanizers – it’s not fair and accurate. There’s subtle racism in that because of the makeup of athletes – a majority are black.

As a black sportswriter you do have the platform to bring out these truths that may not have come out decades ago when most sportswriters were white.

(SMG thanks Chris Broussard for his cooperation)

Broussard’s phony iconoclasm would compel a lot more if he’d also:

– called for the execution of children who strike a parent (Exodus 21: 15, 17)

– defended the slave-master’s right to beat his slave without mercy since “the slave is his money” (Exodus 21:21)

– called for the destruction of anyone who worships any other god (Exodus 22:20)

– blasted people who eat shellfish

– noted the uncleanliness of any menstruating woman or those who touch them (Leviticus 15:19-32)

– acknowledged that dwarfs, the blind or other “limited” people cannot be priests (Leviticus 21: 17-21)

– advocated the execution of blasphemers (Leviticus 24:16)

– noted that a man can force his wife to drink the “water of bitterness” and that if she dies, that proves she’s an adulterer (Numbers 5: 11-31)

– defended men’s rights to sell their daughters into sexual slavery (Exodus 21:7-11)

– noted that Jews are the children of the devil and the fathers of lies (John 8:39-44)

Broussard yearns for a victimhood equal to that of others because he follows one absurdist and self-contradictory (if often beautiful) book that even he doesn’t really follow. It’s preposterous, and unserious in rational discussion.

posted: Tuesday, February 13, 2007|Feedback
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filed under: NBA

I think the NBA is ready for an openly gay player.

By “ready” I don’t mean that everyone on the guy’s team or in his organization will like the fact that he’s a homosexual, or that the guy might not get called names by opponents on the court, or even that his own teammates might not chuckle behind his back.

But by “ready” I mean that players will tolerate a homosexual teammate or opponent. Like Charles Barkley said, some have been doing that already.

Just look at the comments made by players, coaches and Commissioner David Stern when asked about former player John Amaechi’s recent disclosure that he is gay.

The overwhelming majority of comments have been politically correct, even the ones that were considered homophobic by Philadelphia’s Shavlik Randolph and Steven Hunter.

Go talk to guys at an open gym in your neighborhood, and lots of the comments won’t be so polite.

But America has become so politically correct — not to mention that, in my opinion, much of the media and Hollywood are promoting the idea that homosexuality is a normal lifestyle — that many players are afraid to voice their true feelings publicly.

Thus, whenever a current player comes out as gay, you will hear overwhelming support for the guy. And while I think Mark Cuban went overboard in saying the guy would be “an American hero,”
I do believe he would be embraced by a sizeable segment of the population.

He would definitely get marketing/endorsement opportunities, and some folks in the media would champion him and the gay cause.

Well, anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I’m not concerned with being politically correct. So here’s where I stand:

I’m a born-again, Bible-believing Christian (no, I’m not a member of the Religious Right). And I’m against homosexuality (I believe it’s a sin) and same-sex marriage.

But before you label me “homophobic,” know that I’m against any type of sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman. That includes heterosexual fornication (premarital sex).

Some cats in the NBA run around, sleeping with different women in every city — I don’t agree with their lifestyles.

Some players run around, cheating on their wives — I don’t agree with their lifestyles.

It’s all wrong to me and against the biblical teachings I believe in.

I’m saying all that to say that if I can play basketball with a homosexual, just about anyone can.

I’ve played in several rec leagues with LZ Granderson
, who is an openly gay writer at ESPN The Magazine.

I consider LZ a friend. I’ve gone out to lunch with him, talked music, sports, politics and lots of other things with him. I greet him with a handshake and a hug, just like I greet lots of other guys.

By the way, LZ can ball. In a league in New York City that features several former college players, we both made the All-Star team. He was kind of like our Shawn Marion minus the dunks (though he claims he can still slam!) and I was like our Gilbert Arenas (high game of 39, thank you).

Anyway, when we play in our rec league games, I give him high fives and hugs. Same with one of his friends who is on the team and also gay. When we’re on the court trying to get a win — or in the office talking about a story, for that matter — his sexuality is not an issue.

Granted, I don’t shower with LZ after games like NBA teammates do, and I’ll admit that if I had to, it might be a little uncomfortable at first.

But if a gay player just goes about his business in the shower, showing that he has no sexual interest in his teammates and that he’s not “checking them out,” I think the awkwardness would wear off fairly quickly.

LZ and I know where each other stand and we respect each other’s right to believe as he does.

I know he’s gay, and he knows I believe that’s a sin. I know he thinks I get my moral standards from an outdated, mistranslated book, and he knows I believe he needs to change his lifestyle. Still, we can laugh together, and play ball together.

That’s real diversity. Disagreeing but not being disagreeable.

For the record, I covered Amaechi as a beat writer for the Akron Beacon Journal when he was a rookie playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

I like John. He’s intelligent, nice and you can have a good conversation with him. I haven’t seen him in several years but if I saw him today, I’d smile and give him a hug. I think dinner with him would be a blast, with lots of great discussion/debate about race, politics, religion, Africa and yes, sexuality.

Since Amaechi came out, I’ve read lots of columns about being “progressive.” The implication — or outright assertion — is that anyone who believes homosexuality is wrong is not progressive or enlightened.

That’s where this thing becomes problematic, because those who hold to that view are saying I must change my entire belief system/religion because of your belief system.

Where’s the diversity in that?

Those folks don’t want diversity. They want everyone to agree with their “enlightened” opinion.

Look, I’ll accept your right to have your own belief system and to live as you please, but I’m not changing mine. Diversity is not just accepting alternatives to what has long been perceived as normal, but it’s accepting the significant number of people who hold to long-standing “traditional” beliefs as well.

Millions of Christians who follow the Bible — and Muslims who follow the Koran and Jews who follow the Torah, as well as many nonreligious Americans — believe homosexuality is wrong.

That doesn’t mean they’re unenlightened. That just means their moral code doesn’t fluctuate based on society’s ever-changing standards. As long as we’re not being violent toward one another, as long as we can be civil, everything should be fine. We don’t have to agree.

And please don’t compare being homosexual to being black. I consider that insulting to blacks for a number of reasons. The fact that some blacks make the comparison themselves only shows how crushed our racial esteem has become because of America’s oppression (witness our insistence on calling ourselves the n-word).

You can’t hide your skin color, choose your skin color, change your skin color or switch your skin color back and forth. Some argue that you can’t do that with your sexuality either, but there are many scientists on both sides of the genetic debate, and I believe a truly objective person would admit the biological evidence for homosexuality is far from definitive.

Nor has the Bible, the Koran or the Torah ever associated a particular skin color with sin (it was only racist whites who twisted the Scriptures 400 years ago who did that, never the Bible itself).

I’m not trying to get into a religious or scientific discussion here, I’m just saying that some people will accept homosexuality as fine and others will not.

Some will write me off as a bigot for this article, but folks, this is real talk. Unfortunately, we can’t have real talk in America nowadays.

Whites can’t voice their real opinions — no matter how legitimate — about race for fear of being called racist, and everyone’s afraid of offending anyone. It seems the only person who can be openly criticized, or disagreed with, is the President.

How crazy is that?

Until we can honestly hear each other out — and be civil while doing so — we won’t get anywhere. One thing I hope this article does is encourage people to have frank discussions about sensitive issues such as this one.

Here’s the bottom line: If I can accept working side-by-side with a homosexual, then he/she can accept working side-by-side with someone who believes homosexuality is wrong.

If an NBA player can accept playing with a homosexual, then the homosexual must accept playing with guys who don’t agree with his lifestyle.

Believe me, when the ball goes up, his sexual preference isn’t going to matter.

Chris Broussard grew up in the Midwest (Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Syracuse, Des Moines and Cleveland) dreaming of being the next great tailback at USC. Instead, he became the next underachieving point guard (“I should have averaged 20”) at Oberlin College. In 1990, he launched his sportswriting career at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Four years later, he started covering the NBA for the Akron Beacon Journal. He spent 2½ seasons as the Cleveland Cavaliers beat writer before going to the New York Times to cover the Nets (two years), the Knicks (three) and then the NBA (one). He joined ESPN The Magazine in September 2004.

When he wasn’t running the point at Oberlin – and of course, hitting the books – Broussard spent time working at the school radio station. Broussard has written one book, “Not Without Scars: The Inspiring Life Journey of Mark C. Olds.” Broussard lives in South Orange, N.J., with his wife, Crystal, and their twin daughters, Alexis and Noelle.

April 11, 2007

I wasn’t planning to write about the Don Imus situation because this is, after all, an NBA blog. But this story is much bigger than one particular sport, so why not?

Let me start by saying that I find Imus’ two-week suspension insulting. It’s nothing more than a slap on his wrist and a slap in the face of black people and women.

With every fiber of my being, I believe Imus should be fired. Period…..

Before I make my next point, let me qualify it by saying this: Imus is solely responsible for his reprehensible behavior. Rappers who routinely use the n-word and describe women as “hos” are not to blame for his comments. Black people’s behavior has never been the cause of racism and oppression.

That said, I hope the black community uses this as an opportunity for some self-reflection: we must stop degrading ourselves over the airwaves.

I have loved hip-hop music since I first heard Rapper’s Delight in 1979, and to this day, it represents about 80 percent of the music I listen to (I buy positive, intelligent, neutral or Afrocentric hip-hop on the Internet).

But the majority of hip-hop that’s played on the radio today — and therefore, the most popular — is a disgrace and an enemy of black progress.

Most of the songs they play all day, every day on your average “blazin’ hip-hop and R&B” station do nothing more than depict black people shooting, abusing, insulting, pimping and selling drugs to other black people.

They glorify the very behavior that has more than 60 percent of our kids growing up fatherless and our young men filling up the prisons and graveyards at record rates. (Commercial hip-hop is not the root cause of these problems but it certainly contributes to them.)

I am convinced that if there were a form of music that degraded any other race of people the way commercial hip-hop degrades blacks, it would not be allowed on the radio. Either the powers-that-be or that particular race of people would shut it down.

Yet we, blacks, defend this anti-black hip-hop. Ridiculous.

In addition to poisoning the minds of our youth, this music may be creating an atmosphere in which people of other races feel justified in casually insulting us.

Again, while Imus is solely to blame for his choice of words, “hos” is hip-hop language. He might have felt he could get away with it because of the climate being set by commercial rap music. (“Heck, look at how they talk about themselves … ”)

Blacks have to realize that we aren’t segregated anymore. When we used to say something, only blacks heard it (for the most part). Now, when we say something, the whole world hears it — and sees it in a video.

So when people of other races listen to rap music that constantly uses the n-word and calls black women “hos,” there’s a risk that white people, Asian people or whoever will start casually using the n-word and thinking of black women in those ways (especially considering the impact hip-hop has on pop culture).

While many of us are calling for Imus to be fired — as we should — we should also turn up the heat on these sell-out rappers who make a living degrading black people.

Anything else get that much response?

I was never a columnist at a newspaper. When I covered nba in akron 95-98 I wrote Sunday columns, I wrote one about billy packer, called alan Iverson a tough monkey, that got a lot of response. We weren’t even online. It won the award , third place in ohio, got a lot of resoen, would have got more if email had ben avaialb.e got phone calls to paper. It exposed a lot of racism still out ther. I called for respect. One point I made was because white fans fawn over black athlete doesn’t mean racism is dying. One comment how do you expect us to respect you when charles barkely is sptiting on fans. When blacks stop being sto violent then we’ll respect them. 90 percnet were negative for that column. Black people love dit. Most whote people seeme dnot to. Whites who liked it had been exposed to some type of black hstory, through classes or lving around blacks.

Harvey Araton

An Interview with Harvey Araton

An Interview with Harvey Araton

“There’s some currency in being angry and contentious all the time. I think it’s harder as a columnist now to…embrace nuance in writing. There’s a certain shrillness that comes across…there are so many more voices than when I started you almost feel you have to scream louder to be heard.”

“We have a situation with the Knicks where the organization is run on paranoia basically – there’s hardly an interview that gets done where the p.r. person isn’t standing right there with the reporter… The upshot is that the way the media covers the Knicks aggravates the situation. The idea should be to defuse the tension and make it more informal so that both sides benefit.”

“One of the things I strive for is to have people walking and talking in the column. There’s so much opinion available – it’s so cheap now – that if we stop reporting and stop asking questions, how are we going to define ourselves and separate ourselves from any guy with a website or a 12-watt radio station or a cable TV show? If we allow that to happen we just get sucked into the blogosphere and die. We have to try to take our columns and stories to places where other people don’t go.”

Harvey Araton: Interviewed on December 27, 2006

Position: columnist, New York Times

Born: 1952, New York City

Education: City College of New York, 1975, Humanities

Career: Staten Island Advance 1972-77, New York Post 77-84, New York Daily News 84-91, New York Times 91-

Personal: married (Beth Albert), two sons

Favorite restaurant (home): Raymond’s, Montclair, NJ “best omelets – egg whites”

Favorite hotel: Loews Monte Carlo “rooftop health club and pool overlooking the Mediterranean”

Harvey Araton’s “We Gave 110 Percent, But the Team Didn’t”, excerpted from the New York Times, December 5, 2006:

Before we get to next week’s game, I have to say I am pleased with the effort that we, the news media, gave last week. We worked hard. We committed to the packages. We attacked in numbers. We didn’t get the result we were looking for Sunday, but that will come if we continue to focus on our goal of making life so unpleasant for the Giants
that they become a red-zone-efficient and dumb-penalty-free machine that makes the playoffs and goes all the way to the Super Bowl.

Just bear with us through the next few days of wild speculation and willful agitation because, as the tattoo on Plaxico Burress’s back says: “Everything happens for a reason.”

Unfortunately, the Giants failed to make us eat our words in their 23-20 loss to the Cowboys, when they committed seven penalties on offense, failed to take a fourth-quarter lead after a first-and-goal and called a ridiculous timeout when they should have run the clock down so Tony Romo couldn’t beat them with a 42-yard strike to Jason Witten that set up the winning field goal by Martin Gramatica with 1 second to play.

We, the news media, take the positives out of the game, and we move on. At least our Eli Manning
bashing prodded the too-tranquil quarterback into his most inspired work in weeks, allowing him to stand tall in the Giants’ locker room yesterday and say, of their next opportunity to spite us, Sunday at Carolina: “This game is huge.”

No time for us to back off then, just when the Giants really need to tap into their inner hate. We know how obnoxious we have to be over the next four weeks to get these slugs over the hump and save Coach Tom Coughlin
’s job so we can have him around to bash again next year.

The good news is that we came out of the Dallas game healthy, with no significant setbacks or psychological breakdowns from the abuse we took last week from the Giants and those twisted e-mailers who actually believe we are trying to subvert the season.

Q. What were you doing with “We Gave 110 Percent but the Team Didn’t”?

A. That came on the heels of a week where the wheels kid of came off for the Giants, after they lost to Tennessee after being up, 21-0. It got ugly around the lockerroom when (Giants DE) Michael Strahan lashed out at an ESPN reporter – there was a lot of circling the wagons and shifting the focus to a typical New York media witch hunt.

I’ve been through so many of these things where a particular team fails to live up to expectations established by itself based on payroll, acquisitions and last season’s finish. Somehow all the fun starts to come out of the entire experience of covering a game.

I guess what I was trying to do was satirize the whole atmosphere surrounding the team, inclusive of the media, by writing a column that looked at it in a serious absurd way – so people would stop and say this is ridiculous – it’s a football team – not a government prosecuting a war in Iraq. I got a lot of interesting reader e-mail – a few took me seriously but most responded in the way it was intended. Even a few players grabbed me the next time I showed up and said they got a chuckle out of it. I was trying to bring some levity and a sense of perspective to what was going on. It does get a little too serious and sometimes you start to wonder if the media looks at its role in a way not totally objective and realistic from week to week.

Q. The column implies that the media plays a role in the team’s performance – how much truth in that?

A. Media, particularly in a place like New York – and Boston and Philadelphia as well – can create an atmosphere around the team that ultimately has an effect on the way players perform and also the way players and coaches relate to each based on things getting into the media. So yes, the media can – if the factors are there to begin with – exacerbate the situation. It all depends on how the team handles it. Some are more media savvy and handle it better.

We have a situation with the Knicks where the organization is run on paranoia basically – there’s hardly an interview that gets done where the p.r. person isn’t standing right there with the reporter. That’s happening more and more across the board, particularly at the Garden. They stand there and time an interview – the players answer three or four questions – and then the p.r. guy says, “Thank you, that’s all”. The upshot is that the way the media covers the Knicks aggravates the situation. The idea should be to defuse the tension and make it more informal so that both sides benefit.

It’s changed dramatically since I started – a wall got put up between organizations and sports journalists. The original explanation was that there’s too many of you, the media is growing, and they couldn’t facilitate all of this. I’m not sure it’s that. Yes, at major events there are more media. But by and large the daily coverage is still the beat writers from the papers. In the days when I covered the Knicks for the Post and News we traveled with the team, stayed in the same hotels, rode the bus with them and flew on charters or commercial with them. There was a sense of accountability. If you got on the bus at 8 a.m. and wrote something critical you had better be prepared to defend it. Now you have people lobbing grenades from across the wall. It has created a much more volatile and negative atmosphere and strained the relationship to a certain degree.

In New York the perfect marriage was Steinbrenner’s Yankees with Murdoch’s Post in the 70s. I was a young reporter with the Post. It changed the sports tenor in the city – it became more accusatory. There always had been firings and disappointments and fans booing – now you had Steinbrenner’s paternal disappointment combined with a newspaper trying to sensationalize in an attack mode. The News, which was a sleepier tabloid, changed its approach to compete with the Post. As we’ve gone into the 80s and 90s with talk radio and ESPN there’s so much chatter and discussion and accusation it’s really changed the whole feel of sports coverage.

Q. How has it changed qualitatively?

A. It’s coarsened – it’s much more negative and much less personal. There’s some currency in being angry and contentious all the time. I think it’s harder as a columnist now to – and maybe this runs parallel to political discussion in the country – embrace nuance in writing. There’s a certain shrillness that comes across.

We’re all so competitive with what we do – there are so many more voices than when I started you almost feel you have to scream louder to be heard. That wasn’t what I wanted to be when I became a columnist in 1994. Sometimes I have to pull myself back and tell myself it’s okay to write a column a little differently.

Q. Would the Post or News have run that column?

A. Not happily. Filip Bondy is a friend of mine – he writes for the Daily News and he is a very measured and pretty writer. I think he succeeds at the News in presenting opinions in a nuanced way. We’ll be at the same event – riding back to the hotel in a cab – and I’ll say I did a take on so-and-so. And he’ll say, “I had to feed them a back page headline.” He had to conform his column to the package they created for the back page. He does it pretty darn well without giving himself completely to the headline thing. But I think he feels frustration sometimes.

I would say it probably would get in. But I don’t think you could do it often. You couldn’t do anything too often. No columnist should write the same thing again and again but I would say one out of every ten or eight I try to do something lighter. Last summer I did a Clemens column on the eve of his comeback – I created a three or four-part column chronicling his four future comebacks and picked teams I could have fun with. The Times tends to be less playful with these things. I was writing a column for the News before the strike in 90 – then we went out for five months and I went to the Times. Occasionally I would write a light column and the News would dress it up with a cartoon – it made for a nicer presentation. The Times doesn’t know what to do with those columns so it slaps them in. But I get positive feedback from editors so there is a place for them.

Q. What kind of stories do you like to write?

A. Probably issue-oriented columns that allow me to make connections and try to put sports in a broader context – whether it’s the issue of big-time college sports which we had with Rutgers this year pouring a lot of money into football while cutting other sports and general academic programs. Obviously the Duke lacrosse case presented a story that was complex and polarized. It put people in different camps so I’m not sure my editors were thrilled by Selena Roberts and I taking it on several times. It got to the point where doubts began to be cast about the district attorney’s case and they felt writing about it was somehow conveying the notion that the players were guilty or that the case had more merit than it was proving to have. But I felt what I had to say wasn’t about guilt or innocence but a story about cultural sports entitlement. Based on what we knew about the behavior of the players – dealing with strippers and boozing and past records of abuses – I felt it was important to explore the story, but not in a knee-jerk fashion. I felt it was wrong to say it was about rape and therefore had no place in the sports section. I think I wrote three or four columns over four or five months.

So as time has gone on I have become far less interested in writing game columns than I used to be – I really used to enjoy writing game-oriented columns. The fact is it’s almost an unworkable situation these days to write the way traditional sportswriters did 30 years ago. The mechanics of it don’t work. Even before the Internet changed things I realized it. In the early 90s when the Knicks were a hot story in New York – always playing Chicago or Indiana in the playoffs – the city was riveted. Once we got into mid-May the games started at 9:10 – for the Times main run you had to have your column in by 11:30. In effect I was being asked to write running as commentary – to produce something intelligent with a point of view on something that wasn’t going to be over until the absolute moment when I had to press the ‘send’ button. And also I was writing while the game was going on when I should have been watching. It was an exercise in futility. Some nights you’d be guessing and hit one. Other nights it would be 95-94 with two minutes to go and you had to send. I’d walk out of the building thinking this is not what I signed up for.

Then the Internet comes along and while your story is in the paper nine hours later, in two hours some guy from a web service will be up with something far more readable. Sports journalists have to make certain concessions that our system is so anachronistic – we can’t continue to do it the way we did all those years ago.

You can write an early column on issues, or on something related to a series or the teams – a perfectly provocative column. It’s important for editors not to make you feel guilty for not ripping up whatever you prepared as an early column because Dwyane Wade scores 24 points in the third quarter and led Miami to a comeback victory. You have to gauge it night by night. If something extraordinary happens and you have 40 minutes to write a live column maybe it works better to write it into the early column. But too many columnists have been conditioned to just rip up whatever they wrote and rewrite just to say it’s live. The sports section can’t be as live as the Internet and ESPN and it just has to find a different way to compete given this kind of technology.

Q. Do I detect a note of frustration?

A. Yeah. I would say frustration in the sense that we haven’t quite figured out how to be as relevant as we can be. We do have our own website, no question, which gives us the same ammunition as anybody else. I guess we haven’t figured out how to live in both worlds – we’re trying to be a little too much of both. You’re seeing changes now. Just as the Times no longer has a weekly TV supplement and the daily doesn’t have stock table and we stopped running full NBA box scores. I grew up with the NBA and I’m an avid box score guy. I voiced an objection to removing them from the paper, but the reality is dictated by space and newsprint costs. The paper is shrinking a bit next summer, forcing us to change what we deliver to the reader on a daily basis.

Along with the sheer amount of information we bring is the quality of what we bring. I look at the reporting in our section moving toward enterprise and analytical – and not putting in a Devils follow or an Islanders or Nets or Jets story just because that’s the way we’ve don’t it all these years. Sometimes I think we feel beholden to every fan of every team. If nothing happens in the Jets camp on Tuesday afternoon why should there be a story on the Jets? The Times, as a national paper, could get away with that quicker than the Daily News, and we should. We should give readers a broader presentation of stuff you won’t find (Tony) Kornheiser and (Michael) Wilbon debating on PTI, which I like by the way, only because those two guys can laugh at themselves.

I do have great hope for the newspaper business. Whatever it’s going to look like in 10 or 20 years – the marriage of writing and the Internet is going to be a long and wonderful one. The process of what I do, column writing, is hardly endangered. Even though there is frustration created by awkward mechanics, I still enjoy the process of conceiving and executing a column. You have frustrating days but you also have days when you walk out and say, “That will work”, and it’s a terribly satisfying feeling.

Q. You wrote recently that the Giants are “an increasingly unstable team that is without question a reflection of its coach”. Were you saying Tom Coughlin is unstable?

A. No. I guess I was saying that the instability of the team – the kinds of things happening on the field – reflects a coach who is not in control of his own emotions. The grew out of the game in Tennessee where the kid had Vince Young in his grasp and he let him out because he was afraid of getting a penalty and when the kid came off the field Coughlin was a lunatic screaming in his face – even though the Giants were still leading by a touchdown at the time. It just seems to me that he’s asking players to control themselves and play with poise and here was an example when he was unable to control himself in the heat of the moment. He was setting a poor example and it was reflected in the way the team responded to competitive moments.

Q. You wrote recently that it was ridiculous for some critics to label Red Auerbach as a racist. But you also contended, in a column, that Auerbach pandered to white fans in Boston in the 1980s. Isn’t pandering racist?

A. If you pander to a certain mentality it doesn’t mean you are that mentality. What I meant was – and this is in a book (“The Selling of the Green: The Financial Rise and Moral Decline of the Boston Celtics”, 1992) I wrote with Bondy – that Red obviously was instrumental in positive things that happened in the 50s and 60s, with integrating the NBA and naming Bill Russell the first black coach – and Red never let festering racial issues of the day enter his thinking and never let them affect what he did with his team. I quoted Bob Cousy saying, “Arnold was no civil rights leader – he was about winning” – and pointed out that in his desire to win he would do whatever needed to be done including integrating the team – and that was admirable. So Red had that reputation in the 60s as someone who opened up the league and he deserves all that credit.

Our book also contended that in the 80s the Celtics came to represent something different. What changed was the economics of the sport. When the Celtics never drew at home there wasn’t a heckuva lot at stake. But in the 70s when the courts granted free agency to players in baseball and basketball you had to compete financially for players. Suddenly in the 80s the Celtics had to be financially competitive to maintain a level of success in the NBA. The case we made in the book and that I repeated in the column is that the Celtics became the white team in a black sport because of the financial benefits – it helped them maintain their status and ability to win championships. We had players quoted saying they understood that bench players had to be white – at the same time the Celtics were not very popular in Boston’s black neighborhoods. So in effect we’re saying Red wasn’t doing it because he harbored racist feelings but that he understood the economics of the sport, and by positioning himself that way it gave him a better chance.

Q. But if Red was pandering to racist attitudes isn’t that a racist attitude?

A. My definition of racist is someone who has contempt – someone who hates or wants to deprive. I think I pointed out in that column that even Larry Bird was quoted a few years ago saying the NBA would be better off if it had another white superstar like himself. I don’t think he meant more by it other than that there is part of the fan base that would prefer to watch white players – somebody they could identify with. I don’t think that way myself.

A lot of what you see in the NBA is somewhat pandering to that mentality – the objections to the image the black players create – whether it’s tattoos or the way they wear their hair. You could accuse David Stern of pandering the last two years with his rules, which come out of his business strategy. That’s also part of the Auerbach legacy – the 80s existed as much as the 60s. The point I was making was that Red gets credit for what he did in the 60s but that pandering should be part of his record as well.

I could see in some respects where you could discuss whether it’s splitting hairs. I think it comes down to what the definition of racism is. Even the players we quoted in that book – Paul Silas, Jo Jo White – the older players all spoke about it in a very casual matter-of-fact way though they did feel as the 70s gave way to the 80s that the Celtics put a higher premium on the worth of a white player, and they talked about what it was like for a black free agent to negotiate a fair deal as opposed to how the organization responded to the free agency of John Havlicek or Danny Ainge.

Harvey Araton’s “When Dreams Come True” excerpted from the New York Times, December 8, 2006:

The past several years have seen the incorporation of individual-sport parenting values into the team-sports arena. Whereas once it was mainly tennis players and gymnasts being primed almost from the time they could walk, we now require serious-minded athletic children to pledge allegiance and often exclusivity to their preferences at increasingly tender ages or risk being left behind.

In a multitude of ways, the results aren’t always pretty, especially when parents buy into the belief that a champion can be made, more than molded, when ”we” becomes the family pronoun of performance.

Q. You wrote a column recently about Yael Averbuch, a local New Jersey girl who has become a world-class soccer player. Were you criticizing Yael Averbuch’s parents, or in the end were you justifying their approach?

A. I wasn’t being critical of her parents – I know them. What I was doing was throwing out the dangers that are out there for parents who do have these super-charged athletic children. And what it takes these days because of specialization and sacrifice now demanded of kids in team sports – it used to be individual sports that demanded the most. I have two sons playing youth soccer and some of the stuff going on is incredible.

The way the column ended is how do you know – if your kid is being drafted on a super select team and being told to spend the summer playing soccer – how do you know it’s the right thing to do? I talked to her for two hours, and the quote I used was, “When the time invested is never a task, that’s how you know.” If the child really loves it – that’s really difficult parental place to be. It’s something I’m interested in, this whole youth sports culture. Yael’s one in a million – we lived around the corner from them until 1999 – then we moved a mile away in our town. My memory of her was this fragile little girl on the corner kicking the ball – now she’s on TV playing in the NCAA championship game and they’re talking about her like she’s one of the two or three best players in the country.

So many times we talk about parents and coaches going overboard. Here was a kid living the dream – how do you countenance that with the refrain of “It’s too much.” What I wanted to get at with her mom was how they dealt with it, and what fears they had. I had a wonderful quote from the mom saying, “I remember having to physically pull myself away once, go over by a tree and repeat over and over, ‘It’s not my life, it’s not my life.”

I wasn’t being critical. I’ve always been impressed with how they handled it. There was some criticism in town that Yael didn’t play for the high school and that she had no social life – there was some petty jealousy and some real concern that the youth sports culture had pushed her over the edge.

But we see it over and over on so many levels – parents are out of control, deluded into thinking all they have to do is push harder. I guess it comes down to a belief of whether you can actually help nurture a transcendent athlete or actually create one. I don’t think you can create one.

Q. Who do you read?

A. On my own staff I like Selena Roberts – what she does with words is amazing. George Vecsey takes his readers on a little journey, sort of like “Come take a walk with me.” Bill Rhoden has grown as a columnist in the last several years. Filip Bondy (NY Daily News) is good. Mike Vaccaro (NY Post) , Ian O’Conner (Journal News) Adrian Wojnarowski (espn.com). Gwen Knapp (SF Chronicle). Bob Ryan (Boston Globe) – I always liked his contentiousness. Bill Plaschke (LA Times) is a brilliant columnist. Michael Rosenberg (Detroit Free Press) – a young guy in Detroit. Dave Kindred (Sporting News), Mark Whicker (Orange County Register), Art Thiel (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) in Seattle.

Q. How do you stay informed?

A. I’m constantly reading. Online. Not only newspapers but blogs and websites. I do watch some of the shows but more than that I try to stay current and be informed not only in sports but in news and politics. I try to keep the column as connected as I can to the real world because I think readers of the Times demand that. So I go to a variety of sources. I have people in various sports – particularly in organizations around New York – whose brains I can pick and who I can talk to. I try not to turn these things into diatribes. I try to keep myself open and if I wake up with a notion about a column I might have a completely different point of view by 3 in the afternoon. One of the things I strive for is to have people walking and talking in the column. There’s so much opinion out there – it’s just so available. Jere Longman (NY Times) and I have this constant debate – he insists that everything should be a column. I completely disagree. There’s so much opinion available – it’s so cheap now – that if we stop reporting and stop asking questions how are we going to define ourselves and separate ourselves from any guy with a website or a 12-watt radio station or a cable TV show? If we allow that to happen we just get sucked into the blogosphere and die. We have to try to take our columns and stories to places where other people don’t go.

Q. Which blogs do you read?

A. Mostly political blogs. The Huffington Post. Andrew Sullivan’s blog. I’m probably more of a political junkie at this point than a sports junkie. Reading a cross section of material helps with the sports column. If I just read column after column on the Jets and Giants and Bob Knight the sameness of it is somewhat defeating. The broader the material the more refreshed I feel coming up with ideas.

I like Bill Simmons (espn.com). I read espn.com – so many people my age say they can’t read espn.com and can’t look at The Magazine. I don’t look at it like that – I don’t want to sound like some crazy uncle dismissing the younger generation. Having kids influences your outlook – on more than a few occasions both of my kids have changed my point of view on something. My 17-year-old is an ESPN junkie – he knows more about college football than I’ll ever know. He can tell you the backup running backs for the Chargers – it’s a little scary. I try to engage them and to see it through their eyes. I try not to be the 50-year-old talking about the old era – if I’m going to do this I don’t want to sound like an old fart.

Q. How did you get your start?

A. My high school history teacher thought I could write – the Staten Island Advance was using kids to moonlight. My first gig was to go to the AP building at Rockefeller Plaza and wait for the day’s top photos – they would give them to me and I would drive back to Staten Island and stay around till midnight.

Phil Mushnick is a boyhood friend – he was an agate clerk at the Post until he finally got a chance to write covering the Cosmos. He told me they were looking for a night typist – that’s where a reporter would phone in a story and the typist would transcribe onto old booklets of paper – I started doing that. I started at the Post in 1977, about the time they started moving out the old writers like Len Lewin, Paul Zimmerman, Maury Allen and Henry Hecht. The beats started opening up – I was 28 and suddenly I was out there covering the Knicks.

(SMG thanks Harvey Araton for his cooperation)

Scott Barboza

An Interview with Scott Barboza

An Interview with Scott Barboza

Scott Barboza: Interviewed on May 7, 2011

Position: Co-Editor, ESPNBoston.com High Schools

Born: 1984, Fall River, Mass.

Education: Emerson College, Bachelor of Science, Broadcast Journalism

Career: Taunton Daily Gazette, 2005-07; New England Patriots (Media Relations), 2007-10; ESPNBoston.com, 2010-present.

Personal: “I live with my wonderful girlfriend, Jenna, who is my best friend, my muse and my personal editor. She’s a features writer at the Providence Journal and is the best writer in the household, as far as I’m concerned.”

Favorite restaurant (home): “You really opened up a can of worms there. And Jenna’s big on “exploring” new places to eat for her job, so we eat out quite a bit. We live in Pawtucket, R.I. and I must say that the Providence area has a good food scene for a city its size. But I’m going to have to go with Persimmon in Bristol, R.I. It’s a hidden jewel.”

Favorite restaurant (away): “I’ll break this one down. I know this is a cop-out, but any chance I have to indulge in my inner-foodie, I take. In Boston, it’s L’Espalier and Craigie on Main, with a special mention to Barbara’s Lynch’s Drink for cocktails. In New York, you can’t go wrong with Jean George, classic French comfort. Most recent addition to the list is Eric Ripert’s Blue on Grand Cayman, which we got to last week. It was an unparalleled dining experience, practically theatrical.

Favorite hotel: “When I was working for the Patriots, we stayed at the Hilton La Jolla and the room overlooked Torrey Pines and the Pacific. My one regret is that it was a work trip and didn’t have my clubs.”

Q. Describe a typical week in your job?

A. The one thing I’d say that I’ve learned and have adapted to when moving to ESPN Boston is that the online news cycle truly doesn’t end. Dealing mostly with high schools sports, things tend to have a more established pace, with games held in the afternoon or at night. But it’s sometimes hard to settle into a consistent sleep schedule. We’re posting items as soon as we have them ready, so whether it’s 8 a.m. or midnight, we’re still on the clock.

With that being said, I probably allocate about 40 percent of my work week to writing. I’d say about 40 percent of the time is spent researching for our various polls, looking at feature story ideas, setting our budget and assignments for our freelancers. The other 20 percent, that comes with the managerial side of the job, is paperwork. You need to make sure everybody’s getting paid for their work at the end of the day. The one thing I can usually count on is a somewhat restful Sunday. There usually are no games, so that’s when I rest up, run errands and plan for the week ahead.

Q. Social media requirements?

A. I maintain the official ESPNBostonHS Twitter page. Mostly, we use it to link to our stories as they’re posted. Sometimes, particularly in the postseason tournaments, when people are looking for score updates, we’ll live tweet from games.

Q. How did you land your job?

A. I’m a firm believer in that things happen for a reason — not in the fatalistic sense, but more in the sense that there’s a unifying order to the chaos of the universe. I was working in my first full-time job at the Gazette when the paper was sold and there were a few jobs that were lost during the acquisition. That was a real-life reminder of what’s happened to many talented people in the business and it put the fear of God into me while thinking about my long-term career outlook. At that time, I was looking for another way to make writing my living and started looking at working for a pro sports team. My friend had been the season-long intern in the Patriots Media Relations department during the 2006 season and suggested I’d think about applying, given my mindset at the time. That eventually parlayed into a full-time gig with the Patriots and it was through that job that I made the connections to jump into ESPN Boston.

I can honestly say that this is the job I would have envisioned myself doing, coming out of college, with the ability to work in multimedia while writing. It was the right fit at the right time.

Q. What are the boundaries in covering high school sports that perhaps don’t exist for covering college or pro sports?

A. If anything, there are fewer boundaries. That obviously begins with access. It’s not as though you’re dealing with SIDs or PR people to set up interviews, etc. Most of the time when we cover a game, we still get the “Ooh, it’s ESPN” treatment, which makes the job a whole lot of fun.

Now, with that being said, I don’t think high school athletics is today what it was in my parents’ generation. I’m going to speak in a broad brush stroke saying that I think there are a good number of parents out there who view their child’s athletic abilities with rose-tinted glasses. That may have always been, but what I’m fairly sure hasn’t always been is the money that now surrounds high school aged athletes. Whether it’s the AAU coach painting a false image of a basketball recruit’s future or parents paying for private golf swing coaches, things have gotten a little out of whack and money is usually at the heart of it in one way or another. Where there’s money, there’s politics. And where there’s politics … well, you know how that goes.

Q. What sort of stories get the most hits? Least?

A. I’m not speaking from a statistical standpoint, but from a comment-based standpoint, it’s always features. I think the best way to gauge audience reception to our product is through their participation and, nine times out of ten, that will happen with a well thought-out feature over anything else. I think any audience gravitates to the human element of any story you can tell. At the end of the day, game stories are centric to the representing communities or people with interest in those sports. A good feature told well transects all demographics.

Q. The story you are most proud of at ESPN Boston and why?

A. I’d have to go with my first. We spent a lot of time and gumption in lifting the site off the ground last year, but it was a lot of fun, too. There was a lot of excitement seeing the final product in its digital “flesh” for the first time. I spent one early morning in Gloucester. The town has been a traditional power in football and part of the success has been this summer training program
. There was something very “Chariots of Fire” about the whole thing, watching the kids running through the surf. It was a lot of fun to report and it felt like the culmination to the beginning of something special.

I also have to give a shout out to my co-editor Brendan Hall, to whom I owe much gratitude and couldn’t do the job without. There was the great story of Mike Slonina, who decided to shoot baskets for 24 hours straight to benefit cancer research. Brendan stayed up all day and all night to follow the story and wrote this
. It was a true testament to his commitment to his craft.

Q. What sort of stories are you drawn to and why?

A. Mostly narratives. Life is just a long, continuous chain of conversation. And I find the stories that I enjoy reporting the most and are the best in quality are typically stories I’ve found by just talking to people. Those stories are out there in the ether and it’s just about asking the right questions to channel into them.

Q. What sports media do you consume and how do you keep up with sports?

A. Let’s start with ESPNBoston.com and ESPN.com on the internet. I do a lot of driving going out to games and whatnot, so I listen to a good amount of sports talk radio, too, for better or for worse. And then there’s the iPhone. Between podcasts and the apps, it makes the act of aggregating news so much easier with the benefit of taking it on the go. Smart phones are the next news platform.

Q. Who were your influences?

A. I don’t mean to be sappy, but I have to first mention my parents and my grandparents. From taking the time to read to me as a kid, they rounded me into the person that I am. Not to mention, they are the greatest people I know.

My high school English teacher, Dr. Sullivan, too, who first made me believe I could do this for a living.

In the literary canon, Hemingway and Joyce. I’d throw Vonnegut in there, too. Studs Terkel’s “Working” is probably the greatest thing anyone on this planet will ever write. Howard Zinn for his courage in making history accessible, relevant and telling it through the people — David Halberstam, as well. Michael Lewis, goes without saying. Steve Coll, for his reportage. I read everything of Charlie Pierce, Chuck Klosterman and Chris Jones. I’ll throw Stephen Hawking in there for the nerd in me. In television, Peter Jennings was the reason I wanted to get into journalism in the first place.

In working the pro sports beats, Mike Reiss is about as good as it gets and it’s a privilege to call him a co-worker now. While we’re at it, Gordon Edes is a real bard who even volunteered to cover a Thanksgiving Day game for us this year.

And, of course, there’s film with Federico Fellini, Terrence Malick, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson. If I’d never heard Radiohead’s “Kid A,” life would be empty.

Q. Advice for making a career in sports media?

A. I think if I’ve learned anything from my short experience is that there’s no one way to do it. There are many paths you can take to find the end. The one thing I do suggest is to always make yourself available. Once you have your foot in the door somewhere, anywhere, you’ll probably end up OK. The landscape seems a lot bigger and daunting than it actually is, but the truth is that pretty much everybody knows everybody else.

Also, ask questions. I was a know-it-all as a kid, then I grew up and found it’s much better to ask people who are older than you what they think. They’ve been there, they’ve done that. And that’s invaluable. More often than not, people are willing to help; that is just as long as you willing to help yourself.

Q. Career goals?

A. I can honestly say that I’m very happy where I am right now. I enjoy working with kids and the job is satisfying creatively. I don’t know if it’s so much a goal as it is an ambition, but I’d hope to write at least one book in my life. Actually, make that two — one non-fiction and one fiction. And I’ve always wanted to get into the director’s chair, so let’s add a documentary to that list, too.

(SMG thanks Scott Barboza for his cooperation)

Amalie Benjamin

An Interview with Amalie Benjamin

An Interview with Amalie Benjamin

“For me it was about putting my readers in this place. I wrote the lead sitting in the dugout there – sometimes I do that and as I work it will change or evolve – but I wrote this while watching these kids – my lead and kicker came from that. It was something I felt. I wanted to give people a snapshot of that moment – what I was seeing and smelling and feeling…”

“When you’re in a city that has this much passion and this much competition for every bit of news and insight it’s always intimidating every day, no matter how much you think you know. If you’re ever too sure of yourself that’s the day you fall down.”

“Female colleagues have told me that the more perfect you are in your knowledge, the less anyone can call you on something. There’s more pressure on females to not get anything wrong and to know more than male colleagues.”

Amalie Benjamin: Interviewed on August 6, 2007

Position: Red Sox beat reporter, Boston Globe

Born: 1982, Newton, Ma.

Education: Northwestern, 2004, English

Career: Boston Globe 2004 –

Personal: Single

Favorite restaurant (home): Brown Sugar, Fenway and Allston “I moved to Allston to live near it – best Thai food I’ve ever had;’’

Favorite restaurant (road): Wild Ginger, Seattle “memorable meal”

Favorite hotel: Grand Hyatt, New York “I covered the U.S. Open and was there two straight weeks – it was a home away from home”

Amalie Benjamin, excerpted from the Boston Globe, February 9, 2007:

EL TORO, Dominican Republic – They sit, slightly hunched, in anonymous blue baseball jerseys with possibility stitched across the front. Their pants, frayed at the hem and patched in the back, are myriad colors, gray and white and blue pinstriped with thin red lines or thick blue lines or nothing down the sides. They are wearing – against academy rules – caps from every team imaginable: the Pirates and Devil Rays, Cardinals and Nationals, and, most egregiously, the Yankees.

Thirty-two kids, some younger than 16, some much older, sit in the shadow of their street agents, their buscones, amid the idyllic skies of the Red Sox academy here in the fields of the Dominican Republic.

They have rolled up the unpaved dirt road, past the unassuming double socks logo hung near the four lounging men providing lax security on this Wednesday in mid-January, to try out, in hopes of signing a contract with the Red Sox. Though the evaluators know, midway through the session, that just four will be brought back for a second look the following week in front of the team’s vice president of professional and international scouting, Craig Shipley, the effort of each participant is epic, heard in the pops of caught balls and self-flagellation of mistakes.

These hopefuls bring nothing more than their talent and dream of trading their mismatched uniforms for the academy’s crisp home whites. They look, enviously, at the signed players, whose often meager bank accounts swelled by bonuses of $20,000 to $800,000 when they joined the Red Sox, in the batting cages or over on the other field doing drills. For both groups, the academy offers a chance, even though many go no further – not even to the lowest levels in the States. Fundamentals are taught. English is taught. Life is taught. And, as they learn, you realize the kids are not the only ones receiving lessons.

Q. How do you pronounce your first name?

A. It rhymes with family.

Q. What was the background to the academy story?

A. I was more passionate about it than my editors. I was going down to do a story on Julio Lugo and was talking to some Red Sox people at the academy – which is a place where 16 and 17-year-olds are working to get something they know could be the basis of their lives – a place where all these dreams are kept and held and worked on. To me it was something we hadn’t explored enough. I talked to a few kids and the people who run it. It wasn’t really deep but it was a picture of something we hadn’t shown our readers.

For me it was about putting my readers in this place. I wrote the lead sitting in the dugout there – sometimes I do that and as I work it will change or evolve – but I wrote this while watching these kids – my lead and kicker came from that. It was something I felt. I wanted to give people a snapshot of that moment – what I was seeing and smelling and feeling – what these kids were acting like and looking like. It’s an experience most people don’t have – going to this place an hour outside Santo Domingo – and I wanted to bring the readers there.

Q. Were you moved by what you saw?

A. Absolutely. I’d love to go back and do more especially as regards baseball – it’s such a force. So many players start in this place, so many people are cheering for them. It’s great resource for us – for an understanding of where guys like David Ortiz come from.

Q. Does it help to speak Spanish to cover baseball?

A. I don’t speak more than three words of Spanish. That’s my new plan – I’m hoping to learn the language. We’re asking these players to talk in a language that is obviously unfamiliar to them. I talked to some that came to the States and didn’t know a single word of English. They have to express themselves in a language they aren’t entirely comfortable in. I don’t know Spanish yet, but I think it’s something that would show how much a reporter wants to understand them, as opposed to listening to them parrot back these clichés. I’m hoping to get Spanish tapes in the off-season.

I took French in high school. Maybe it will help now that Eric Gagne is on the Red Sox.

Q. How did you become a baseball writer for the Globe?

A. Purely by accident. I ended up at the Globe covering high schools after my last college internship. In eight months I moved up to the main sports section when Chris Snow left and they needed more help on the Sox. I was available and around and I had a vague interest in covering baseball. My name ended up on the schedule there a lot. It could just as easily have been the Celtics or Bruins. I never covered baseball in college – I did basketball and football – but it’s something I grew up loving.

Q. Is it intimidating to be on the Red Sox beat?

A. When you’re in a city that has this much passion and this much competition for every bit of news and insight it’s always intimidating every day, no matter how much you think you know. If you’re ever too sure of yourself that’s the day you fall down. For me I need this edge. Can I do this, can I get there, can I make myself ready enough to go out and get the information I need?

Q. Do you worry about getting beat?

A. Yes. There’s always that voice wondering when you open the Boston Herald, ‘what are they going to have?’ Some days I am confident I will have something they don’t. Other days I’m not as confident. Tough competition goes along with a beat that so many people care about.

Q. What surprised you about the beat?

A. I was prepared for the straight journalism – the writing, reporting and building relationships. The thing I didn’t prepare for was all the stuff that came along with it – the multimedia, blogging and TV, and radio stuff. Perhaps that was me being naïve or not understanding the way the business was going or how it would directly affect me. I went though a number of journalism programs but I never took a class on broadcast. Would that have helped? Absolutely. The first time I was on TV my hands were shaking, my knuckles were white and I had a queasy feeling in my stomach. It wouldn’t have been so severe if I had been better planned.

Since then I’ve gotten much more relaxed.

Q. How intense is the beat?

A. I don’t think I could describe it. There’s always somebody else to call, something else to do, more agents to call, more transcription. Most people in my business would agree that transcription is the least fun part of the job.

There’s always more – always something you can lose yourself in – especially when you love it and enjoy it. I couldn’t count the hours. It’s very difficult for me to separate myself from work. I’m working to find some sort of balance.

Q. What do your friends and family think of your job?

A. I do get a lot of questions from friends and at family functions. It’s funny – I could have easily gotten a job at another paper that wasn’t in Boston. I’m sure whatever I would have covered outside of Boston wouldn’t have gotten as much attention as this.

Q. How do you handle the travel?

A. The great piece for me about the travel is that I went to a school that attracts people from all over – so I get to see friends in each city. It’s not easy – it’s never going to be easy. I’m lucky enough to be doing it as a stage of life where I don’t have family to worry about being away from.

Q. Is it possible to have a family and cover the Red Sox?

A. It would be really tough. There are people who do it – people on my beat who do it. Most of them are not women – all of them are not women. But I like to believe it is possible.

Q. Who do you read?

A. So many writers. Growing up I read all these people who are my colleague now. It’s an honor and it’s wonderful and a little intimidating. Jackie McMullen is so wonderful – how she writes and interacts with sources and athletes and other reporters. She’s someone who, when I walked in the door at the Globe, they all said, ‘Watch her – if you can grow in that direction that would be wonderful’. Hopefully I’m working toward that, though I’m nowhere in her vicinity. She continues to be my role model. Joe Posnanski (KC Star), Michael Wilbon (Washington Post) – with his Northwestern love – he befriended me when I interned at the Washington Post. Wright Thompson (espn.com) – I was just reading his latest e-ticket about Michael Vick.

Q. How do you fare as a woman in the clubhouse?

A. It varies. All athletes are different – they’re all individual people. Some relationships are going to be as good as the male reporters, some rockier. I’ve been lucky in my dealings with athletes – no major issues or problems. Most have been receptive. Do I stand out? Yes, absolutely. Does it put me at an advantage or disadvantage? I have advantages male colleagues don’t. They have some I don’t. It all comes down to personality. In the end it’s whether you mesh with the person you’re dealing with, whether they trust you or like you or get your sense of humor.

Q. How important is it to do your homework?

A. Female colleagues have told me that the more perfect you are in your knowledge, the less anyone can call you on something. There’s more pressure on females to not get anything wrong and to know more than male colleagues. I’m not afraid to ask when I don’t know something – athletes appreciate that. Most male colleagues haven’t gotten down in a three-point stance, or hit a baseball at the level we’re dealing with. They haven’t done this any more than I have. Athletes appreciate it when you ask the technical question, or when you admit you need more explanation.

That came across to me when I was covering horse racing, of which I had no knowledge until I covered the Breeders Cup. Then I came across a situation where a horse had shed a frog.

Q. Huh?

A. Shed a frog. I had no idea either. Horses shed this shock absorber around their hoofs. When it’s gone it’s very hard to run. I had to ask about it.

I never had aspirations of playing pro anything. I gave up softball as a sophomore in high school. I have the athletic ability of a turnip. When you’re armed with that self-knowledge it’s hard to go wrong asking questions.

Q. How will the Sox do?

A. I picked them to make the World Series. I think I’m going to have to stand by that, if only for the sake of consistency. We’ll see how Schilling does on the mound.

Q. What are your career aspirations?

A. I try not to think too far ahead. I’ve been so lucky in what I’ve gotten to do so far that in some ways I don’t like to plan. Life goes in so many directions you never intended. I try to let it come – it’s worked out so far.

Amalie Benjamin, excerpted from the Boston Globe, February 9, 2007:

…So they are running, clay kicking up and hats flying. Running toward right field, toward scrub brush trees out past the outfield fence. Toward eight men, standing, stopwatches in hand. And, if they are among the lucky, toward their future.

(SMG thanks Amalie Benjamin for her cooperation)

Sports

Students of the game Sox academy gives kids chance to pursue dream

Amalie Benjamin

Amalie Benjamin Globe Staff. PHOTO COURTESY JULIE CORDEIRO/BOSTON RED SOX

2139 words

9 February 2007

The Boston Globe

3

EL TORO, Dominican Republic – They sit, slightly hunched, in anonymous blue baseball jerseys with possibility stitched across the front. Their pants, frayed at the hem and patched in the back, are myriad colors, gray and white and blue pinstriped with thin red lines or thick blue lines or nothing down the sides. They are wearing – against academy rules – caps from every team imaginable: the Pirates and Devil Rays, Cardinals and Nationals, and, most egregiously, the Yankees.

Thirty-two kids, some younger than 16, some much older, sit in the shadow of their street agents, their buscones, amid the idyllic skies of the Red Sox academy here in the fields of the Dominican Republic.

They have rolled up the unpaved dirt road, past the unassuming double socks logo hung near the four lounging men providing lax security on this Wednesday in mid-January, to try out, in hopes of signing a contract with the Red Sox. Though the evaluators know, midway through the session, that just four will be brought back for a second look the following week in front of the team’s vice president of professional and international scouting, Craig Shipley, the effort of each participant is epic, heard in the pops of caught balls and self-flagellation of mistakes.

These hopefuls bring nothing more than their talent and dream of trading their mismatched uniforms for the academy’s crisp home whites. They look, enviously, at the signed players, whose often meager bank accounts swelled by bonuses of $20,000 to $800,000 when they joined the Red Sox, in the batting cages or over on the other field doing drills. For both groups, the academy offers a chance, even though many go no further – not even to the lowest levels in the States. Fundamentals are taught. English is taught. Life is taught. And, as they learn, you realize the kids are not the only ones receiving lessons.

“To tell you the truth,” said Jesus Alou, who spent 15 seasons in the major leagues and now is the director of the academy, “I believe all of us are learning what an academy is.”

Latin American investment

Having shuttered their Venezuelan academy in December 2005 amid political concerns about the reign of president Hugo Chavez, the Sox have made the Dominican academy the center of their Latin American scouting operation.

Though Shipley emphasizes that the Japanese major leagues are increasing as a key source of talent – witness the signings of Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hideki Okajima – a larger percentage of the team’s scouting dollars are still poured into Latin America, with Venezuela (five scouts) and the Dominican Republic (three) leading the pack.

“It hasn’t just been a focal point in the last three or four years, it’s been a focal point,” Shipley said, of a country in which 28 of 30 teams own their own academy. (Milwaukee and Tampa Bay do not, though the Devil Rays recently agreed to share with the Dodgers.) “The Dominican and, specifically, the Dominican and Venezuela, have been focal points for a long time now. To be competitive at the major league level, you have to scout Latin America extensively.”

But finding the players is hardly enough. Signing players at such a young age – they must turn 17 in their first professional season – is even less of a guarantee than the high school and college draft. These are players who haven’t reached prospect status.

“It’s vital,” Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein said. “A lot of the best Latin American players sign at 16, 17, and are a long way from being able to play even at the GCL [Gulf Coast League] level. That’s really the place where we teach the game, teach the Red Sox way, get them ready to compete stateside. A lot of Dominican players don’t play a lot of games. They tend to focus more on skills that show up in tryout camps, but don’t manifest themselves in games.”

Because of the system of agents, players signed in the Dominican are often far behind in game experience. They have spent formative years – often from age 12 – working on the aspects of baseball education that can get them signed. That leaves them with crucial pieces missing: base running, throwing to the cutoff man, the infield fly rule.

“Most of them have their natural skill and most of the kids that we sign is because we see that they have, you know, the material, the raw material,” Alou said. “That’s why this academy is here, to see if we can polish and teach them how to play the game.”

Experiencing a rebirth

The lights go off.

It is quiet; something is missing. The hum of the generator is gone, sending Alou into instant relaxation.

“When I get to the academy, by the way [Jesus] is, I can tell if we’re running on generators or electricity,” said Eddie Romero, assistant for international and professional scouting, seriousness behind the quip.

In a country where 24-hour electricity is hardly a guarantee and the academy receives about half that, the generator sits as an imposing structure next to the building that holds everything: the dorm-style rooms and clubhouse, cafeteria, and baseball operations offices. As important as those are, the generator – and the fight to limit its (expensive) diesel fuel consumption – is paramount.

But it’s hardly the only concern. After lying dormant for about two years, the academy is beginning a rebirth. New flowers, touches of orange, line the gravel-filled space behind the clubhouse; workers strip the inside of the living quarters, leaving wooden dressers outside abandoned, and a promise remains of a paved road and new workout equipment.

And, at the end of an hourlong bus ride back into Santo Domingo, is another new facet of the academy: daily classes. Inside a building with wide-open windows, letting in both breeze and car horns, the students in the academy become real students, with classes ranging from biology to English to life skills.

“We’re really trying to nurture an environment where they go to the States and they’re well prepared for life off the field,” Romero said. “We want them to be able to speak some English. We want them not to be intimidated once they go over there. We’re trying to have them reach a certain level of comfort for when they do get over there, so they understand the law, so they don’t get in trouble, that they get along with their teammates.”

That’s why it is so helpful that the academy is located out here, in El Toro, where distractions are nearly nonexistent. Instead, they stay in, upstairs in the in-progress common room, with its dusty pool tables and lack of seating. Almost all of the players have laptops, and wireless Internet is nearly as important to them as the air conditioning that runs through their quarters only when they return from the fields, to conserve energy.

So it is expensive to run an academy, with concerns over diesel and electricity and transportation and teenagers. But Romero insists the Red Sox allot just enough to cover their day-to-day expenses each month, with extra coming for additional improvements, like the road and the proposed new half-field.

But, at this point, could a major league team operate without an academy? Or, rather, could it operate successfully?

“Probably they could,” Alou said. “But it will cost them a lot. Because they’re going to have to buy the player from somebody else’s.”

`A numbers situation’

Rice forms a thick bottom layer, covered by a liberal dousing of kidney beans, and spoonful upon spoonful of steak and chicken. Salad follows, with a rich coconut paste for dessert, and a choice of the freshest juices possible, orange or passion fruit. A small group of academy kids sits at a long wooden table, shoveling in food, their workouts done for the morning and school ahead.

Romero points to one of them, his bushy hair, and remarks that the barber will be coming for him soon.

Like the major league Yankees, regulations are tight. No earrings. No chewing tobacco. Red socks must be pulled up to the knees during workouts. And, most noticeably, no tufts of hair can stick out of their team-issued caps.

Want to make a statement? Get to the States.

Not that that’s an easy proposition, especially in a Red Sox organization whose minor leagues have morphed from sickly to stocked during the Epstein regime. That leaves fewer spots for everyone. Eleven or 12 Dominican academy graduates are expected to move up this season to the team’s Single A leagues.

“There’s a lot of talent at the lower levels, so a lot of the time it becomes a numbers situation where we would like those guys to be in the States. But because of the talent we have in the Gulf Coast League and in Lowell and Greenville, it’s tough moving those guys up,” Romero said, adding that very few are ready to go directly to the minors upon signing. “There’s just not a slot for them to get consistent at-bats.”

Besides, that’s not the point of sending them to the minors, especially in light of the limitations on minor league visas, a situation ameliorated when Congress passed a bill in December easing the restrictions that had formerly allowed teams just 48. If they get there, they have to play.

Until then, their reality is in the academy. The two leagues, winter and summer, provide those vital game conditions against teams from other organizations’ academies. It’s in the lengthy days that stretch from lifting at 6 a.m. to workouts at 8:30 to school at 3:30 p.m. to the return home at 7.

“Some people say it’s hard, but when you like something, you don’t think about the hard things,” said Alan Atacho, an 18-year- old catcher from Valencia, Venezuela, who’s in his second session at the academy. “I just think this will help me to get there. It’s just part of the work, being far from your family and your friends and your stuff. It’s hard, but you’ve got to do it. If you really want to get there, you’ve got to do it.

“Sometimes you think you’re going to be someone, like a star or something. You say, `Could I do that?’ But the coaches here say it’s true.”

Production costs

Two weeks into January, with the post-holiday to spring training session just beginning, only about 25 kids – most of whom won’t be heading to Fort Myers, Fla. – were at the academy. But now, eight more sets of bunk beds would be needed to accommodate all the bodies. With that trip to the States approaching, the full complement has arrived, nearly 70 – almost every Latin player not on the 40-man roster.

That includes players who could be the future of the organization, Carlos Fernandez and Felix Doubront and Miguel Socolovich, all of whom passed through the academy at one point (though none of them played in the Dominican Summer League). But the lack of home-grown Dominican talent on the major league club hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Hanley Ramirez passed through on the way to the Marlins. Anastacio Martinez played here, before reaching the majors with the Sox, being released, and signing with the Nationals.

“So you see,” Alou said, “it’s time to get going and bring a few [players], because it costs. It costs a lot of money to keep an academy. It costs a lot of money to build one.”

So it’s time for the organization to produce players, kids who could shoot to the top of those lists of prospects and eventually produce for the Red Sox. Because, like every other aspect of the team’s player development production, there is pressure here, too.

“That’s the beauty of baseball,” scout Luis Scheker said, walking over to watch the potential in the batting cages and on the basepaths. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

So they are running, clay kicking up and hats flying. Running toward right field, toward scrub brush trees out past the outfield fence. Toward eight men, standing, stopwatches in hand. And, if they are among the lucky, toward their future.

Amalie Benjamin can be reached at abenjamin@globe.com.

Caption: Students at the Sox academy received a star for the day in December when Dominican native David Ortiz stopped by.

Document BSTNGB0020070210

Mike Bianchi

An Interview with Mike Bianchi

An Interview with Mike Bianchi

“I don’t consider myself any more moral than your normal guy on the street who knows the difference between right and wrong…I think of myself as a fan with a forum.”

“College football is littered with scandal, and the newspapers are obligated to cover it because nobody else is.”

“…sports is important because it’s so unimportant. People want a diversion and they want to be able to laugh. I look at it like I’m sitting in a sports bar and talking to the guy on the next stool. I write about what we’re talking about.”

Mike Bianchi: Interviewed on March 20, 2008

Position: Columnist, Orlando Sentinel

Born: 1960, Gainesville, Fla.

Education: University of Florida, 1985, journalism

Career: Palatka Daily News, Gainesville Sun, Florida Today, Florida Times-Union, Orlando Sentinel 2000-

Personal: married, two daughters (8 and 12)

Favorite restaurant (home): Beef O’Brady’s, Winter Garden “good beer specials”

Favorite restaurant (road): Dreamland BBQ, Tuscaloosa, “they only serve ribs and bread – I wish they had salad”

Favorite hotel: any Marriott property

Mike Bianchi, excerpted from the Orlando Sentinel, May 23, 2007:

If only Ricky Williams were an alcoholic, he’d still be playing in the NFL.

If only he’d shown up for games haggard and hung over, he’d still have a job.

If only he’d been arrested for DUI manslaughter, he’d still be earning millions of dollars on the football field.

But Williams is seemingly just a harmless and hopeless pothead on the verge of being drug-tested out of the league because NFL powers-that-be have declared marijuana to be evil. I can just hear the NFL muckety-mucks now as they sit at the big mahogany bar at the owners meeting ordering single-malt scotches and vodka martinis and lamenting to each other, “Why in the world does Ricky Williams need marijuana to get through the day?”

Granted, it’s sad and pathetic that Williams is apparently so dependent on pot that he has allowed it to virtually ruin his career with the Miami Dolphins. But, in the grand scheme, is he really any worse than St. Louis Rams defensive end Leonard Little, who got drunk a few years ago, drove through a red light and into the side of car driven by a wife and a mother named Susan Gutweiler. She died a few hours later.

Little pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, got 90 days in jail and was suspended for just half-a-season. He was arrested again for DUI a few years later but was acquitted on a technicality. He is about to enter his 10th year in the league.

In contrast, Williams has been suspended for more than a season and may be suspended yet again because the NFL, like Major League Baseball, considers marijuana a banned substance.

How ludicrous is it that baseball players can be suspended for pot, but it’s quite all right for St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock to drink himself senseless and then kill himself behind the wheel of a car last month?

The NBA has the right idea. It tests players for marijuana and counsels them against using it but rarely suspends them. Kudos to the NBA for confronting the same moral dilemma that has confronted the nation in general for decades: Why are alcohol and nicotine — drugs that cause many more deaths — legal when marijuana isn’t?…

…The reality is that marijuana is no worse for you than alcohol. In fact, I had a prominent football coach tell me once that legality not withstanding, he’d rather have a player who smoked a lot of pot than one who drinks heavily. His reasoning: The heavy drinker is more likely to compound his dependency with other problems such as fighting, DUIs, spousal abuse, etc.

Perhaps UCF athletic trainer Jeff Allen put it best Tuesday when he said, “Both alcohol and marijuana, when used in excess, are a detriment to athletic performance.”

Which brings up the question:

Don’t our sports leagues have enough to worry about in policing performance-enhancing drugs without worrying about performance-diminishing ones?

Q. Reaction to your marijuana column?

A. It’s hard for me to remember a column I wrote yesterday.

It was mixed. I got e-mails from religious people who said, ‘hey, you shouldn’t be endorsing marijuana use’, which wasn’t what I was doing. People read what they want to read. I was pointing out the hypocrisy. I mentioned Leonard Little and how he’s still in the league whereas Ricky has been banned for two years now. A lot of people agreed with me on that column, which sort of surprised me. We do live in the Bible Belt here in Orlando. Feedback wasn’t as negative as I would have thought.

Q. Does the Bible Belt affect your writing?

A. Not at all. Even though Orlando is technically in the Bible Belt it’s no different than any other metropolitan area – very diverse. It’s got one of the largest Latin American populations in the country.

Q. Wasn’t it a bold topic?

A. I don’t smoke marijuana. I know a lot of people who do – they’re not evil people. A lot of people drink and they’re not evil either. It really makes no sense to me that marijuana is against the law and alcohol isn’t. Is one really worse than the other for you? I’m no doctor but I’m sure that if you ask one he’ll tell you alcohol is just as bad and addictive as other drugs. I’m not a politician or a government official who makes the law but if you look at it logically it seems hypocritical.

Q. Do you need a sense of moral outrage to be a columnist?

A. You have to have strong opinions. You have to believe in what you’re saying.

Even though a lot of people say newspapers are dying, I still believe newspapers and news columnists are the last bastion of real journalism out there. We’re not tied to any team – we don’t pay teams to be able to cover them the way ESPN pays the NFL to televise their games – which is sort of an unholy alliance. A lot of fan websites that cover teams are in business to write positive stories about the teams they cover. Newspapers are the last credible source out there – we’re independent. We’re not the official newspaper of the Orlando Magic or the Florida State Seminoles. We can write what we want without worries about the team cutting off our access.

Q. Personally, do you have a strong moral barometer?

A. I don’t consider myself any more moral than your normal guy on the street who knows the difference between right and wrong. When an athlete does something blatantly wrong and immoral – yeah – because they are in a public forum and people look up to them and they’re making a lot of money for the privilege of doing what they’re doing. They ought to do things right in and out of the athletic arena. I don’t think that makes me different than Joe Blow on the street. I think of myself as a fan with a forum. Fans are turned off by athletes who get arrested for cocaine use and for all sorts of sundry crimes.

Q. What were you getting at in the Plancher column? (see below)

A. I was saying this is what athletes do – push themselves to the limit – sometimes sadly over the limit. I don’t know what the autopsy report will say on this kid. But it seems like more than a coincidence that four players in the state of Florida have died in football-related deaths since 2001. They were all in workouts and were all younger players. I quoted one former player saying ‘hey, this is where young players try to impress the coaches’. Maybe they are working themselves too hard, or past a reasonable limit. I don’t know if it’s the coaches or the program. Maybe it’s the makeup of athletes – it’s what they’re always programmed to do.

Q. Will you follow up?

A. It’s something we’ll follow, myself and the paper. I’m not sure of the plans, but it’s a story we’ll continue to follow. I think offseason workouts are something that needs to be looked into. You look at every player who dies – it’s a rare occurrence, but even when Korey Stringer died in the NFL it was in training camp. It’s usually when these guys are getting ready for the season.

Q. What other issues concern you?

A. Down here college football is probably the most popular sport – more fans care about it than any other sport. Florida is a relatively new state when it comes to pro sports – when I grew up here we had one pro team – the Dolphins. But college sports are entrenched. One thing I keep an eye on is if the college programs are doing things the right way. We have a history dating back to the University of Florida in the 1980s blatantly cheating – Charlie Pell was put on probation. Miami was on probation, Florida State was on probation – there’s an academic fraud investigation going on there now.

College football is littered with scandal, and the newspapers are obligated to cover it because nobody else is. If you look at the scandals the happened in the 80s it was the St. Pete Times that basically uncovered a lot of the stuff. Sports Illustrated uncovered the Foot Locker scandal (in 1993). Print journalism is doing its job when it uncovers this stuff.

Q. What makes a good column?

A. A lot of times it needs to be topical. In today’s world people are talking about the issue of the day, whether it’s politics and Barack’s pastor, or sports and the NCAA tournament, people want topical stuff. They want commentary on the news. On another level sports is important because it’s so unimportant. People want a diversion and they want to be able to laugh. I look at it like I’m sitting in a sports bar and talking to the guy on the next stool. I write about what we’re talking about.

Q. When was the last time you were in a sports bar?

A. Last week. Beef O’Brady’s.

Q. Is your job consuming?

A. I write four or five columns a week and I’m starting to blog now. They’re teaching us how to do video online. It’s becoming more time-consuming. Even when it was only doing columns you’re always thinking about what you’re going to write next. Even if you have a column due in two days you’re thinking about what angle to take. Even when I’m at home – the Internet is almost addictive – you go into your little home office to see if anything is going on I need to write about. It’s pretty consuming.

Q. Who do you read?

A. I read a lot of guys in the state first of all – that’s my coverage area. Martin Fennelly at the Tampa Tribune. Dan LeBatard and Greg Cote in Miami. Gary Shelton (St. Petersburg Times). Nationally I read guys I know – I probably should read more of the renowned guys like Joe Posnanski (KC Star) but I read Bob Wojnowski at the Detroit News – he’s a good friend. I read (Bob) Kravitz (Indianapolis Star) and (Jason) Whitlock (KC Star). If I want to get pissed off I read Gregg Doyel at CBS SportsLine – I knew him when he was a student at University of Florida. I always tease him about being too controversial. I read Mike Freeman at CBS SportsLine and the ESPN guys obviously – Jemele Hill because I know her. I read the websites.

Q. Sounds daunting – how do you find the time?

A. It’s good and bad. I still get SI. I always used to read (Rick) Reilly in the back. I find myself on the Internet so much, reading sports around the country, sometimes I don’t even get to my SI anymore – there’s just no time. I still read who’s in the back – Selena Roberts recently. I try to read the front but I rarely get to the middle of SI anymore. To me that’s sad because I used to read it cover to cover every week.

Q. Any time to read outside of sports?

A. Yeah, in the last year I’ve got back to reading books. I used to read a lot of books when I was younger and wasn’t married with kids. It’s good for writers to read books and not just other sports articles. Also, because I have kids and I’m telling them to read it’s hypocritical if I don’t do it myself. My daughter is in the seventh grade. We went to the library and checked out Animal Farm – two copies. We’ll both read and discuss it. I’m fired up but I don’t think she’s so fired up.

Ask me about what concerns me.

Q. What concerns you?

A. A lot of what we do is based on the number of hits on the web. It concerned me the other day when I was looking at our website and the most-read story was about Sam the Butcher from The Brady Bunch, who had passed away. I e-mailed our sports editor and said, ‘how are we supposed to compete with that?’ I don’t think he responded.

Q. Do you watch the web hits on your column?

A. It’s a funny thing. I don’t watch it but I’m sure the higher-ups watch it and I just wonder what they’re thinking when Sam the Butcher dies and that’s what people are most interested in. It’s hard to compete with that if you’re just covering a football game. I’m going to write more Florence Henderson columns, obviously.

The other leading story was about Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island getting arrested for marijuana. I was always a Mary Ann guy. A lot of guys liked Ginger but I was always a Mary Ann guy. Now I’m starting to question my taste.

Q. Too bad it didn’t happen last year – you could have thrown it into your marijuana column?

A. Right. Even Mary Ann smokes.

Q. What was it like to work in Palatka?

A. I worked there part time in junior college. What was it like to work in Palatka? The joke back then was that Palatka was such a small town that you didn’t need turn signals on your car because everybody knew where you were going.

Mike Bianchi, from the Orlando Sentinel, March 19, 2008:

Almost always it happens during off-season workouts.

This is the time of year when football players are programmed to give absolutely everything they have.

To leave it all out on the field.

To pay the ultimate price.

Sadly, yet another one did just that Tuesday when UCF freshman wide receiver Ereck Plancher passed out after completing a conditioning drill.

He never again woke up.

Another good kid with a bright future dies trying.

Just like USF freshman back Keeley Dorsey last year at this time. And just like University of Florida
freshman Eraste Autin before that. And just like Florida State
freshman Devaughn Darling before that.

Four college players from this state have died football-related deaths this decade — all of them freshmen, all of them in the offseason. Teenage boys working and training and lifting and running and trying to build themselves into young men.

“Every young football player knows the offseason is when you work the hardest and try to impress the coaches,” former UCF wide receiver Jimmy Fryzel said Tuesday when he heard the news. “The offseason workouts are usually hell. That’s when you have to really push yourself to get better.”

There is still so much we don’t know about what happened Tuesday. All we really know is this: Plancher completed all the weightlifting and agility drills with the rest of the team. He listened to Coach George O’Leary give last-minute instructions about what was supposed to be the official start of spring practice today. Then, after the team dispersed, Plancher went down to one knee. And then he crumpled to the ground. And he never regained consciousness.

“There is no sign of anything that would lead us to think that something was inappropriate or improper,” UCF police Chief Richard Beary said. “It’s just a tragedy that happened to a fine young man.”

In the coming days, there will no doubt be a medical explanation as to what happened Tuesday, but there will never be a logical explanation. You can never explain how and why this could possibly happen to a kid like this.

All Plancher ever wanted to do was work hard and make something of himself. According to those who knew him in his hometown of Naples, he worked two jobs in high school, played three sports, never missed a Wednesday night Bible study, helped take care of his kid brother and still managed to make the National Honor Society and graduate early with a 3.9 grade-point average.

Don’t even try to make sense of this. It’s impossible. An athlete dying young — is there anything more devastating than unrealized hopes and an unexplored future lying motionless on a cold floor?

“When somebody so young dies on the football field, it’s the worst nightmare imaginable,” says Joan Autin, whose son Eraste died of heat stroke at UF in 2001. “You just don’t think it can happen to your child.”

But it can. And it did. Because if you’re an athlete sometimes you push your body to painful places the rest of us can only imagine. Eraste Autin died when his internal thermostat topped out at 108 degrees in Gainesville’s fiery summertime heat. Darling died when his heart failed as he was put through FSU’s famously fatiguing early-morning “mat drills.” Dorsey, a workout warrior, died of cardiac arrest while pumping iron at USF last year.

We don’t know yet how Plancher died, but his high school coach is pretty certain of one thing:

“I’ll guarantee you whatever drill they were doing,” says Chris Metzger, who coached Plancher at Naples Lely, “Ereck was giving it all he had to make himself better.”

Why — why does this happen on the day before spring practice is scheduled to begin?

Isn’t spring supposed to symbolize a new beginning, not a tragic ending?

And why is it we are told over and over again that offseason workouts are where our athletes are made?

Too many times, way too many times in recent years, this is the ghostly place where our athletes are lost.

(SMG thanks Mike Bianchi for his cooperation)

Paola Boivin

An Interview with Paola Boivin

An Interview with Paola Boivin

“It’s a constant battle to be sensitive to your readers’ needs and to be true to yourself. There’s a tendency in this profession to want to dumb down to readers. Sometimes it’s okay to make them feel like they have to look something up or ask about something. It’s okay not to be totally obvious.”

“It makes me wish as a sports section we had done more with the Tillman story. Is it wrong with a sports columnist to have issues with the government? I don’t think so – in this case. I don’t know why readers should be offended.”

“Phoenix is a very interesting area. It has an interesting mix of well-educated and redneck, for lack of another word. People had issues with me writing about Callaspo.”

Interviewed on August 12, 2007

Position: Columnist, Arizona Republic

Born: South Bend, Ind., 1960

Education: University of Illinois, 1982, English

Career: Chicago Tribune 82-84, Camarillo Daily New 85-88, LA Daily News 88-95, Arizona Republic 95-

Personal: married, two children (Shane, Jesse)

Favorite restaurant (home): Blue Wasabi, sushi, Scottsdale “they have the Jeff Spicoli roll – named for the stoner Sean Penn played in ‘Fast Times’ – unbelievable sushi”

Favorite restaurant (road): Nanbankan, Santa Monica “everything is cooked on skewers – I’ve been going for 20 years”

Favorite hotel: Princess Resort, Scottsdale “in the middle of desert – javelinas are walking around on the grounds”

Paola Boivin excerpted from the Arizona Republic, July 21, 2007:

It’s the resilience that gets me. Not from the damaged cartilage, but from the cyclone of bad breaks and bad intentions that follow Amare Stoudemire around like a cloud of Pigpen’s dust.

Q. Pigpen’s dust. How did you come up with that?

A. It just popped into my head thinking about Amare, who’s in the news week after week. There was a story about his mother getting arrested again, and then out the blue his half brother was brought up on a murder charge. I thought ‘My gosh, there’s always stuff following him around’. I’m a child of the 70s and somewhat the 60s and I have all those Charlie Brown specials in my head.

Q. Do you wonder if young readers might not connect with your allusion?

A. Yes. Sometimes my peers go out on that route too much. Our paper is so concerned about attracting a younger audience that we have to be careful. So many times I want to throw in 1980s music references and I have to stop myself, at the point where people would be asking ‘What does that mean?’ It’s good to get readers thinking – I’m not against having them look something up. It’s good to challenge readers, but if it’s just a musical phrase, it’s not that important and you have to be careful.

Q. On the other hand you don’t want to inhibit your own frame of reference.

A. Good point. Especially as a columnist you have to write from your gut. It’s very personal – you are what you write, and you don’t want to force yourself to be what you aren’t. It’s a constant battle to be sensitive to your readers’ needs and to be true to yourself. There’s a tendency in this profession to want to dumb down to readers. Sometimes it’s okay to make them feel like they have to look something up or ask about something. It’s okay not to be totally obvious.

Q. Do you worry about the craft of column writing?

A. Yes. My favorite part of reading sports is the storytelling. I love the storytelling as opposed to talk radio and print in which a lot of columns have become somebody screaming at you. I’m getting older now – I feel like I less have to please my peers. You can tell stories in a column. But I worry sometimes that there’s a great need to scream and shout and be like talk radio when you are writing. It’s nice to have diversity, some people are good at storytelling – some are good at opinion. Some are good at making you look at something differently.

I’m more the storytelling type, but it took me awhile to get there. I was so guilty of wanting to please my peers. As a woman in this business you are so sensitive to what others are saying and thinking about you that you try to imitate the popular columnists. Then you realize your best columns reflect who you are.

My better columns are when I spend time with my subjects and find out about their lives and let it unfold that way. It’s hard for me to get worked up about a coach making a bad decision or calling a bad play. As I get older I feel better writing in a storytelling approach rather than screaming.

The things that work me up aren’t Xs and Os. It’s the D-Backs putting a pitcher on the mound who is accused of spousal abuse. I’ll write that, and my paper is okay with it. Dan Bickley, our other columnist, is very much an opinion calling-the-shot kind of guy. My style counters that.

Q. What kind of stories capture your attention?

A. One that comes to mind was about a well-known high school football player, DeShawn Brown. As his family was driving back home from Texas they got in a horrible car accident. He died and others were hurt. I called his mom in the hospital to ask her how she was doing and I hit her at the moment she wanted to tell the whole story. I wrote about how their day started and how it unfolded. I didn’t want to sensationalize the incident or take advantage of her in this vulnerable moment. Telling it that way, I think, made people pay more attention. It raised awareness of this poor family, and some fundraisers were held to help them.

Q. Reflections on your Pat Tillman coverage?

A. If there was one universally loved athlete in this community it was Pat. People who don’t follow sports knew about him. When that news broke it was such – and this is a cliché – it was so much more than a sport story. To me it was important to make it go beyond the sports fans and reach the general public. For me it was about covering this tragedy and how it affected the team and the city, and then all these other things happened. People tried to exploit the situation – they were selling Pat Tillman bracelets they got free at a Cardinals game on E-Bay. Now it became an international story with a debate on how the government and military responded to what happened, and didn’t tell the truth to the family. I think our paper could be doing a better job in that area, to be honest. We’re a victim of a smaller staff – we just don’t have the people in Washington or the investigative resources.

Q. Did you write about the military cover-up?

A. So many people were offended that sports people were addressing this subject. We as a sports staff haven’t done much beyond the Xs and Os stuff. Our news writers and columnists handled it. I kind of feel as a sportswriter I should have done more with that. It seems our paper felt strongly it should be handled by our news guys.

Q. Did you have a strong reaction when the truth came out?

A. Very strong. A lot of it was because his mother and father had strong reactions. Whatever little information there was, they were getting it. The fact that they felt so betrayed made me feel betrayed not as a sportswriter but as a citizen of this country. His parents were so impressive – for them to have that reaction made me have it ten times as much. His wife Marie is such a bright, classy person. Friends of friends know her and talked about how broken-hearted she was.

It makes me wish as a sports section we had done more with the Tillman story. Is it wrong with a sports columnist to have issues with the government? I don’t think so – in this case. I don’t know why readers should be offended.

Q. It’s not like writing about the D-Backs bullpen.

A. It makes most other stories seem trivial juxtaposed against Tillman. As sportswriters we shouldn’t be afraid to go there. As sports reporters we have to be well-rounded – we certainly write about criminal behavior a lot. We should feel okay going there.

We have access to so much more information about athletes and things they’re dealing with – steroids and everything else. To be good at this craft you have to be informed. More than knowing the hit-and-run or the post pattern, you have to know how to use the Nexus database, and look at court records.

Q. What have you written that got hate mail?

A. Anything that is related to some of those issues, for instance, if a player is arrested. A DBacks player, Alberto Callaspo, was arrested for spousal abuse, but he hadn’t had his day in court. I wrote a column that he shouldn’t be on the team now, under this ugly accusation. Put him on paid leave. It seemed distasteful that they were putting him in the lineup, and his name was flashing on the screen when he came to bat and people were cheering.

Phoenix is a very interesting area. It has an interesting mix of well-educated and redneck, for lack of another word. People had issues with me writing about Callaspo.

I shouldn’t throw that redneck label out there. But moving here from LA – it’s a very different vibe than Southern California. You have a liberal element here, but go 15 miles out of town and you have pockets of militia.

Q. How do you balance work and family?

A. It’s a daily battle. Being a columnist has afforded me the ability to juggle my schedule, though it’s not a perfect scenario. I’ve done interviews locked in a bathroom with a magic marker on toilet paper. There’s an interview on our garage wall I did in pencil – one of my kids was screaming and needy and I needed quiet. I’m not proud of those moments, but my life in the last ten years has had a lot of them. I can write from home but I do travel a lot and attend sporting events. I love this enough that I don’t mind doing it with little sleep. Fortunately I have a supportive husband and two kids trained not to bother me on the phone.

There was one moment I thought I couldn’t do this. I’m embarrassed by this now. My daughter was three months old, and the Coyotes were coming to town from Winnipeg. The Winnipeg team was in LA and I was going to LA – they were playing the Kings at the Forum. But my babysitter cancelled at the last minute. I flew to LA holding my three-month-old, and I remember going to their practice and interviewing Teemu Selanne while she was spitting up and I was holding my tape recorder. Selanne was laughing. It was either tell my boss I couldn’t go, or take her and hope nobody was offended. Fortunately the Jets were happy with the coverage, but it felt very unprofessional.

Q. Something like that might improve the interview.

A. Once I was covering the Giants in spring training when I was 8 1/2 months pregnant. Barry Bonds came up to me and said he could see my bellybutton through my shirt and asked me when I was due. He said his wife was pregnant. That started a dialogue I wouldn’t have had with Bonds.

It can humanize you, but I wouldn’t want to do it often. I wouldn’t want to be stereotyped as someone who drags her kids around to interviews. I find myself trying not to remind athletes and coaches I’m female, or that I have kids. That’s terrible to say. You fight so much early on to fit in and be one of the guys. I find myself trying not to separate myself in any way shape or form.

Paola Boivin excerpted from the Arizona Republic, July 24, 2005:

It was almost 2 p.m. and the family had reached the halfway point of its journey. In Odessa, Texas, a city whose air was thick with moisture and high school football expectations, the player’s mother thought her husband might need a reprieve.

“Do you want me to drive?” Janice Brown said. “Are you tired?”

“I’m fine,” John Brown said.

A minute later, she heard a pop. The car zigzagged. It flipped. Again and again. “John! John!” she cried. She was confused. She worked her way out of the car and ran down Interstate 20.

“I kept running,” she said Saturday, five days after the accident. “When I turned I could see everybody laying on the road. I tried to cry, and I couldn’t cry. I tried to scream, and I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t understand what happened. I thought it was a bad nightmare, but I wouldn’t wake up. I just wanted to keep running.”

When does a mother’s grief become a sports story? Today, because Janice Brown, a 39-year-old Tempe mother of six, is now a 39-year-old Tempe mother of five. She wants you to know how quickly life can call an audible. And she wants you to know how important football was to her son, DeShawn Brown.

(SMG thanks Paola Boivin for her cooperation)

Sam Borden

An Interview with Sam Borden

An Interview with Sam Borden

“We’re in a hugely competitive situation with the Post. We’re competing for attention – people stop at the newsstand for 10 seconds – the way you get attention is by being different. That’s the driving force – to be different. I wake up nervous about what I’m going to see in the other paper. I’m competing against George King…It’s a daunting task.”

“In sports journalism so many things are given to writers – here’s a release and here’s a player to talk to. That’s fine, but my editor, Leon Carter, always begins the conversation by asking, “What do you have that nobody else has?”…If you sit around and wait for something to be given to you – especially with the Yankees – you’re going to do a bad job.”

“I haven’t lost any hair. I haven’t lost my girlfriend either which is a big deal…I’m away 220 nights a year and there are a lot of phone calls during dinner. There are abrupt exits to work on a story. The job can take a toll on your personal life.”

“One thing I hate is when people say the Daily News is doing sleazy journalism. It really isn’t. I consider myself an ethical and moral journalist – we’re not making things up or throwing things in the paper that aren’t confirmed. We hold ourselves to a high standard of journalism.”

Sam Borden: Interviewed on October 27, 2006

Position: Yankees beat reporter, New York Daily News

Born: 1978, New Haven, Ct. (grew up in Larchmont, NY)

Education: Emory, 2001, English major, Jewish Studies minor

Personal: single, (longtime girlfriend)

Career: New York Daily News 2002 – 2006; Florida Times-Union 2006 –

Favorite restaurant (home): Gramercy Tavern, Manhattan, “a gourmet restaurant that doesn’t have a snooty feel to it – great fish – very comfortable yet an elegant place to eat”; Gotham Bar and Grille, Manhattan, “the miso cod is out of this world”; Nobu, Manhattan

Favorite restaurant (road): Blue Room, Cambridge, Mass., “Sunday brunch is unbelievable – the only good thing about a Yankees-Red Sox ESPN Sunday night game – kooky brunch dishes like Creole salmon, scrambled eggs with Fontina cheese, and corn pudding”

Favorite hotel: South Beach Marriott, Miami Beach, “great restaurant on back porch overlooking the water – tremendous grilled grouper sandwich – I had it every day during the 2003 World Series”

Editor’s Note: Sam Borden was hired as general sports columnist for the Florida Times-Union shortly after this interview. His comment: “It was a tough decision to leave New York but I’ve always wanted to be a columnist and this opportunity seemed too good to pass up.”

Q. Is this a dream job for a guy from Westchester?

A. A lot of guys I grew up with dreamed of making big money on Wall Street. I went to college to be an English teacher. I tried to make the golf team at Emory and just missed it and joined a fraternity instead. Then I joined the school newspaper and it went from there.

Q. How many stories did you write yesterday?

A. A lot – three or four. That’s part of the attraction of the Daily News. There are a lot of stories and headlines and pictures. That comes with the territory – especially with the Yankees and baseball. I can’t think of a time I called in and said I have a Yankees story and they said they don’t have room for it. That’s rare. They know how important the Yankees are to circulation.

Q. After the Daily News splashed with Joe Torre’s “firing”, Neil Best wrote in Newsday, “When the dust settled, the New York Post was poised to declare victory today by gloating over a coup that it will be reminding the rival Daily News about for the next, oh, 50 years or so.” Your reaction?

A. Sure they felt good that day. But there are plenty of days the News has stories that made them feel bad. That’s the nature of the battle in New York. It’s good for readers – competition is critical to how each paper operates. I don’t know if they’ll lord it over us for 50 years or vice versa, but I do know it’s a day-to-day battle for 365 days, and a lot of people are motivated by that. I don’t know if I tried any harder after that came out or if George King (NY Post) tries any harder after one of our stories. You wake up every morning motivated to find the news that day. You love it if you find it and the Post doesn’t – that’s the nature of doing business in New York. I don’t have a problem with competition.

Q. It’s only fair to mention that you didn’t write the story.

A. I don’t look at it as a situation where it wasn’t my story. I feel we’re a team. I work with Bill Madden, John Harper, and Anthony McCarron. We all work together – it’s an undertaking covering the Yankees and Mets. I get help from them and try to help them if I can. I felt bad it didn’t pan out the way we reported it. Some people feel we got it wrong – I don’t think we did. It didn’t pan out the way it was represented to us – George Steinbrenner changed his mind. We didn’t take something and throw it against the wall and hope it stuck. We had good solid sources giving us excellent information. Nobody at the Daily News is happy with the way it turned out but we’re not shamed by it.

Q. Was the News set up?

A. That’s not for me to say. When you have a good relationship with people and they’re telling you things and they’ve been trustworthy in the past – you have to believe your sources. We had multiple sources – it passed the test of what a story need to have to run. We have a great Sunday editor who was on top of that story all day – each piece of it was handled correctly. There are instances when the Times and Post wrote stuff that didn’t pan out – with George Steinbrenner nothing is for sure until it happens.

One thing about this job is it makes you humble. There aren’t that many scoops. There are lots of ties – one other paper will have what I have. Or if I don’t have it two other papers will. There are too many good people covering the team. It’s very hard to have a clean scoop.

Q. Are you wary about bad information?

A. A lot of times they’re steering you the wrong way – you get wind of something and check it out and they just lie to you. I’m not saying that’s necessarily with the Yankees but everybody has an agenda and wants to put a message out there – the teams, players and agents. Sometimes the hardest part is trying to figure out what’s true and what’s not – who’s steering you and who isn’t – what’s legitimate and what’s not. You’re putting together pieces to come up with the real story. Probably nobody can be trusted 100 percent – the key is figuring out what percentage is true and how you put it together with what somebody else is saying.

Q. Would you say the baseball beat for a New York tabloid is the most pressurized job in sports journalism?

A. I can’t say for sure because I’ve only worked for the Daily News – but I would believe it if other people say that. Just the sheer volume of games – and the access – 3 1/2 hours every day – and the constant flow of news on and off the field – the trades and free agency and minor league affiliates – it’s a huge task. Covering the Kansas City Royals in a one-paper town is an incredibly difficult job. Add in that we have the Daily News, Post, Times, Bergen Record, Star-Ledger, mlb.com, Hartford Courant – 10 people covering the Yankees full-time – it makes for an incredibly competitive situation. If somebody says this is the most competitive beat in the country it would be hard to argue that it wasn’t.

You can say maybe the Cowboys beat in Dallas or the Lakers beat in LA, but in neither case is there the number of outlets covering day to day. We have a traveling party that’s huge – sometimes our traveling party is bigger than the home press corps. There are good things and bad things about it. I think it makes me a better reporter. It makes me pay attention and be on the ball. There are a lot of talented guys doing this – there’s no lack of motivation to make the extra call.

Q. Do you ever dread waking up in the morning?

A. Yeah. Less now than when I first started. Like it or not, that’s what you’re judged on. We’re in a hugely competitive situation with the Post. We’re competing for attention – people stop at the newsstand for 10 seconds – the way you get attention is by being different. That’s the driving force – to be different. I wake up nervous about what I’m going to see in the other paper. I’m competing against George King, one of the best beat reporters in any sport. He’s been doing it a long time. Ask anybody and they’ll say he’s at or near the top in getting news. It’s a daunting task.

Q. Do you have ulcers?

A. I don’t think so. I haven’t lost any hair. I haven’t lost my girlfriend either which is a big deal. People always ask me how we’ve stayed together. You have to have somebody extremely understanding – and my girlfriend is. I’m away 220 nights a year and there are a lot of phone calls during dinner. There are abrupt exits to work on a story. The job can take a toll on your personal life. It may seem like a dream job to guys from Westchester, but guys also like having beers with their buddies and Friday night dinners with their girlfriends.

Q. What does your girlfriend do?

A. She’s a lawyer – a great person. She works a lot of hours too and she understands that a lot of passion goes into work. You have to be committed to it to do a good job. There are a lot of 6 a.m. wakeup calls. There’s a lot of drinking and divorces in baseball beat writing.

Q. Is it the most important beat at the paper?

A. People tell me it is. I have trouble thinking it’s more important than national news. When I first started doing baseball I talked to Bob Hohler – he covered the White House for the Boston Globe before covering the Red Sox. He said covering baseball was harder than the White House. I was shocked but now I can see how it can be true. I can’t imagine a much harder thing to do.

The biggest difficulty and challenge is that it can be all-consuming – if you want to do a good job. The best beat writers really let it consume them. You have to – it’s a 12-month a year job. That’s the difference between now and 20 years ago – it’s an every day thing. The old-time beat writer wonder why guys don’t do this for 10 years. The difference is that we’re on call for 11 1/2 months out of the year. You go from the World Series to free agency to the winter meetings to spring training. With the Yankees everything is a big story from the owner on down – there’s no such thing as a small story.

I devoted the last three years of my life to covering baseball at the expense of friends and family. I started near the end of the 2002 season and was the Mets backup guy in 2003. I was the Yankees backup in 2004 and the Yankees beat writer in ‘05 and ‘06.

Q. How are your editors when you get beat?

A. They’re focused on the bottom line. I don’t make excuses just because George King’s been doing it a long time – he’s a worthy adversary. Tyler Kepner does a good job for the Times. A lot of talented guys are on this beat for the reason that it’s one of the top beats.

Q. What kind of personality does it take to compete in New York?

A. Everyone has his own personality and style. I look at it from the fans’ perspective – what do they want to know and why should they buy my stories. I’m not a big numbers guy – I wasn’t a baseball fan growing up – and I’m not a Sabr-metric guy. Especially with the Yankees people are interested in the stars and there are millions on that team. Fans want to know what’s going on with the players they care about – what can I tell the readers about those stars – something they can’t see on SportsCenter. Newspapers survive on giving readers what they don’t know – a piece of news that TV didn’t report.

Q. Is there a tabloid style of writing?

A. I interned at the Dayton Daily News and Baltimore Sun and it would be foolish to say that the styles at those papers aren’t different than the Daily News. But there’s probably a false perception that there’s only one way to write for a tabloid. Our sports section has a lot of smart writing – we don’t dumb it down or water down good writing. I don’t feel I can’t write something the way I want to write it. The news section may be different but I don’t’ deal with that.

Maybe I’ve adapted my style a bit, but if you read the Daily News on a daily basis you wouldn’t feel we appealed to the lowest common denominator at all. There are a lot of good solid stories with colorful writing. Do we sensationalize sometimes – sure we do – maybe more than other papers. But when it comes down to it we have solid descriptive evocative writing.

One thing I hate is when people say the Daily News is doing sleazy journalism. It really isn’t. I consider myself an ethical and moral journalist – we’re not making things up or throwing things in the paper that aren’t confirmed. We hold ourselves to a high standard of journalism. We’re like any other newspaper when it comes to putting stories out there – you have to have a source and be able to back up what you’re writing. I’m never told to push a story that isn’t there.

Q. Derek Jeter was quoted saying the reporters don’t really know what’s going on in the clubhouse? How true is that?

A. Interesting statement. Baseball beat writers probably know more about what’s going on in the clubhouse than other beat writers (in other sports) because of the access and time we spend there. Does it mean we know everything about them – no – and I don’t think we should. You need some distance to write objectively. The Yankees nowadays aren’t the most media friendly team – they don’t spend the most amount of time in front of their lockers. Do we know what’s going on? I think we have a pretty good feel. When you spend 200 days with guys you get a feel. That’s Derek’s opinion – it could be his defense mechanism for a story out there he doesn’t like.

Q. Could he be referring to columnists?

A. He could be. Columnists in New York and everywhere else drop in and have opinions that may not be popular with the players. I’ve never been upset by that. Most players have a good understanding of how it works – I’ve never been held accountable by what a columnist wrote. Most guys are savvy about the difference. If you’re around every day you can handle a problem as it comes up. If you’re not a problem can fester. It’s possible Jeter was referring to that.

Jeter is one of the most media savvy guys I’ve ever run across. He has a good feel for being available and avoiding controversy. He knows how to play the game and keep his nose clean. That’s a good trait – something Alex Rodriguez could copy. Alex runs into problems the way he says things.

Q. If more players were like Jeter how boring would your job be?

A. Certainly we love guys like Alex and Gary Sheffield and David Wells – I can’t deny the fact that they provide good copy. Whether they’re nice to reporters or like having you around isn’t that relevant. They provide good copy and say interesting things and that’s refreshing a lot of times. But when you’re a beat reporter it’s nice to have someone who’s understanding and accommodates the job you have to do. It’s pretty rare to find a combination of both.

Q. Do you think covering the Yankees now is harder than during the Bronx Zoo era?

A. I’ve heard the veteran writers talk about the Bronx Zoo days. It’s been a circus in the Bronx for a long time – that much is clear to me. That’s part of the allure and attraction to covering this team – it really is it’s own show – and not just what’s on the field. The biggest difference to covering the Yankees is the amount of off-field reporting. The Carl Pavano situation, the Balco case, Dwight Gooden’s latest legal problems, Cory Lidle – all of these things have little to do with what’s on the field but they’re necessary and readers care about it. My reporting skills had to get better over the last couple of years. There’s so much news and so much happening that you’ve got to get your hands on as much as possible. Very little is given to you – everything is self-generated. In sports journalism so many things are given to writers – here’s a release and here’s a player to talk to. That’s fine, but my editor, Leon Carter, always begins the conversation by asking, “What do you have that nobody else has?” It can be tiring to hear that but the truth is that’s what you’re judged on.

If you sit around and wait for something to be given to you – especially with the Yankees – you’re going to do a bad job. It’s easy to say you’re a sportswriter but the bottom line is you’re a reporter. Would I want to cover City Hall – no – but I think the skills I’ve developed would translate. Anybody who does a good job on a high-profile sports beat could cover City Hall – the skills are the same.

Q. How closely do you keep an eye on George?

A. There’s a difference between what he was 10 years ago and now. I hear stories about guys – before cell phones – who couldn’t leave their hotel rooms all day – they sat by their phones. It’s not like that now – he doesn’t really talk to the media. No doubt he’s a figurehead at the top of the organization and he’s still a huge part of the image and how it’s perceived. If he decrees something it’s huge news. Yankee fans have adopted the attitude he wants them to adopt – that they should be disappointed if the Yankees don’t win the World Series. There’s a certain sense of entitlement Yankee fans have – whether it’s fair or not – and it comes from George.

(SMG thanks Sam Borden for his cooperation)

English

© 2006 Daily News, New York. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights reserved.

ST. LOUIS – Derek Jeter reiterated his familiar line about Alex Rodriguez yesterday, saying he expected the Yankees’ embattled third baseman to return next year and maintaining that there isn’t much he can do to help Rodriguez get more comfortable in New York.

“What would you like me to do?” Jeter said. “You’re there, you support him. Everyone supports your teammates at all times. I don’t know if there’s anything else I can do. Maybe I’m not that smart (to think of something else).”

Jeter was in town to receive the Hank Aaron award, presented to each league’s best all-around hitter as voted on by the fans. Ryan Howard was the NL recipient.

After the award ceremony, Jeter, who said he had not seen any of the World Series because he had been traveling in Europe, answered a variety of questions, most of which had to do with either A-Rod or Joe Torre.

Some had to do with both. When asked if he felt there might need to be a meeting to clear the air between Torre and A-Rod, Jeter said, “Clear what air? I haven’t heard that there’s any air that needs to be cleared.”

Trade speculation has loomed over Rodriguez and it figures to remain there all winter, though A-Rod’s agent, Scott Boras, told The News on Tuesday that he got a phone call from GM Brian Cashman assuring him that Rodriguez wasn’t going anywhere.

Still, many observers believe that Rodriguez simply isn’t a good fit with the Yankees. Jeter, the Yankee captain, said anyone who thinks there is tension in the clubhouse is mistaken.

“You (reporters) are only in there for a short time,” he said. “Everyone tries to assume what’s going on in the clubhouse, (but) pretty much when you guys are in the clubhouse (the players are) not around each other anyway. There’s always assumptions of what’s going on, what people think they know, what they think people are doing. They have no idea.”

Larry Borowsky

An Interview with Larry Borowsky

An Interview with Larry Borowsky

“So I decided to start a blog. I thought, ‘What’s a subject I can write about without having to think too hard?’”

“I like to think I’m providing high-quality analysis of the Cards and that’s why I’m attracting a large audience. It means something about the site is desirable for other people to participate. Maybe you can’t put your finger on it – but it means the blog is doing something right.”

“Lots of bloggers are hostile to mainstream media – mostly young bloggers – and mostly bloggers who haven’t worked in media. It’s very popular and easy to take potshots and to have a lot of attitude that comes across as being smug and know-it-all…Snark is in – it’s the decade of snark.”

“I would probably say that even though I’ve written for large publications before, this is as rewarding as anything…In terms of emotional payoff this is the best.”

Larry Borowsky: Interviewed on January 10, 2007

Position: Blogger, Viva El Birdos

Born: 1963, St. Louis

Education: University of California-Berkeley, 1988, History

Career: software technical/promotional writer; travel writer; history journal editor; free-lance writer/editor; Viva El Birdos 2004 –

Personal: married, two children

Favorite restaurant (home): Taqueria Patzcuaro, Denver “neighborhood Mexican place, family owned”

Favorite restaurant (away): Roberto’s, Taos NM “we go every year –the best Mexican place in the country”

Larry Borowsky excerpted from Viva El Birdos, January 4, 2007:

By lboros

Posted on Thu Jan 04, 2007 at 04:45:27 AM EST

“insomnia sucks. i’m awake; might as well blog.”

Q. Do you often write in the middle of the night?

A. I couldn’t sleep so I figured I might as well write about the Cardinals. No, I don’t usually write in the middle of the night. My posts are time-stamped – somebody was going to notice so I might as well mention it.

Q. How much traffic does Viva El Birdos generate?

A. Now, about 5,000 visits daily, but during the season closer to 10,000. It spikes during a big event. During the World Series I was getting 20,000 visits. When the Cards make an acquisition it goes up to 10 to 15,000. I have between 2000 and 2500 registered users.

Q. Does cream rise in the blogosphere?

A. I think so. I think that people who know how to write stand out. So many people who just want an outlet to express themselves but don’t necessarily have great writing skills – in most cases they don’t gain much readership. Any blogger with an audience has a writing background or writing skills – in that sense cream rises to the top.

Beyond that a certain market function goes on. If you’re writing on a subject that has a natural constituency – which is the case with me – you can draw an audience. I have a friend who blogs about knitting – the natural constituency for that is not as large or well-defined but it’s still a very good blog. She’s a writer and journalist and within that niche she’s got the best knitting blog out there.

Q. How would you know?

A. Fair question. I can say I have not read any other knitting blogs than hers. Why do I think it’s the best? It’s widely read.

With sports blogs there are two types of success. You can have a large audience with a high degree of interactivity. If you have an audience you have people talking back and forth – having comments adds value – you’re getting everybody else’s opinions as well. Having a large audience enhances that feature and helps make the blog better.

Some don’t have a high degree of interactivity but the blogger is so good it’s good anyway. Rich Lederer (Baseball Analysts) rarely has more than 10 or 20 comments to a post, whereas Jon Weisman at Dodger Thoughts might get 300 or 400. My blog at the World Series got over 1000 comments to some game threads – people were typing comments while watching the game. Rich’s writing is so good and interesting it’s still a daily read for me. Rich also has another writer for variety – it was Bryan Smith until he moved on – and now it’s going to be Patrick Sullivan, who used to write a Red Sox blog.

That’s the second form of quality – how good is the blogger? Is he compelling enough to read – it’s the same as picking up the paper and going to a particular reporter or columnist.

When you evaluate success on some large-traffic blogs the comments can be more interesting to read than the main post. You want to participate in the community aspect of it – to talk to other readers.

Q. That’s a sign of cream rising?

A. I think so. It means that blog has attracted an audience that attracts a crowd other people want to be a part of. That’s why I say it’s a marketplace type of success. It doesn’t mean that objectively its analysis is the best – though it might be. I like to think I’m providing high-quality analysis of the Cards and that’s why I’m attracting a large audience. It means something about the site is desirable for other people to participate. Maybe you can’t put your finger on it – but it means the blog is doing something right.

Q. Do you get credentials for events?

A. I never have applied. I don’t have a huge amount of interest – some bloggers feel differently. I don’t really have a feeling one way or another about whether bloggers “should” get credentialed. I don’t idolize or worship the players themselves. I don’t have a desire to interact with them.

Q. You don’t want the same access as newspaper reporters?

A. No. They perform a different function and it’s already well-covered. They provide a medium for the participants to describe events directly to the public and to get that inside thing. I don’t need to join hordes of reporters talking to players on a daily basis. We already have a good sense of who these guys are and what’s on their mind. I don’t know that I could add insight or information that’s not already there.

Some bloggers get credentials because they do worship the players. They start as fans and build an audience and then get the option to get access and interact on a one-on-one basis. But I don’t feel the need to do that. I don’t feel the need to add to the flow of information being produced by mainstream beat and broadcast reporters.

It would be nice to convince the front office to give me access to do a Q&A. I have made overtures that were not well received. The Cardinals organization is not one to adopt that kind of approach to p.r. and reaching out to its fan base. The Atlanta Braves general manager has granted interviews to bloggers. Billy Beane has granted lengthy interviews to Athletics Nation.

Another thing I will try to do is provide good access where there is not good coverage. I did a Q&A with Rick Hummel (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) – people were grateful to have information about Rick that wasn’t available elsewhere.

I did that with Cardinals prospects during the season – the minor league guys. I didn’t go through the Cardinals front office – I went through the minor league teams. Access was much easier – I would call up a 25-year-old media director who didn’t have a big league attitude. He was grateful anyone was interested at all. I talked to the No. 1 draft pick, Adam Ottavino.

Q. What about the Bill Simmons theory that a team can be covered better, or just as well, from a distance, without lockerroom access?

A. I disagree with that. I’m not trying to cover the team in the same way the beat writers are. They provide a function that is needed and that I rely on. My main source of information is the Post-Dispatch. I read all the articles I can online, and one of the beat writers, Derrick Goold, writes a good blog. He puts in things that don’t get into the paper – sometimes he takes up issues that were in the paper and that he wants to add depth to. Occasionally he can drop things in there that he can’t put in the paper yet. Bernie Miklasz is on a chat board that is nominally his – called Bernie’s Pressbox – where he goes to interact with readers. Quite often he will post tidbits or rumors he thinks are credible or whispers coming out of the organizations – for all the St. Louis teams. Those are daily visits for me to see what’s going on.

I disagree with Bill Simmons. I couldn’t do what I do if I didn’t have the information the beat guys are putting out. But I have the luxury the beat guys often don’t have – I can take that information and think it over and put it into context of things I’ve read while surfing for 45 minutes. I’ll put it into a context that synthesizes their information with information from other sources.

Essentially the service I’m providing is to distill a lot of information and provide a one-stop shop for people to get what they need to know about the Cardinals without having to surf around. I might spend 90 minutes surfing to get that information, and then I put it into my post and they can get it in five minutes. A lot of guys spend more time surfing than I do and they bring even more information.

My opinion is that the beat guys are drawing out information. Just their mere presence forces things to surface that might be kept under raps in they weren’t there. That way of doing business assumes a certain give and take with the beat guys. Players and managers know there are certain secrets they must share unless they want to be portrayed in certain ways. If you want to come across as credible you have to address certain things because guys in the lockerroom will call you on it if you give a pat b.s. answer to a question. There needs to be somebody who says, “Hold on a second coach, or Barry Bonds, let me follow up on what you said”. My opinion is that the beat writer model is essential and we bloggers benefit from it.

Lots of bloggers are hostile to mainstream media – mostly young bloggers – and mostly bloggers who haven’t worked in media. It’s very popular and easy to take potshots and to have a lot of attitude that comes across as being smug and know-it-all.

Q. You mean a snarky attitude?

A. Yes. Snark is in – it’s the decade of snark. A lot of people want to read that, but I think it’s pretty self-serving, frankly. I don’t read Bill Simmons on a regular basis. I do read Deadspin. Will Leitch is a fan of Bill Simmons. I actually have a good relationship with Will, although he is a snarkist, if you will, but he also has journalistic instincts as well. He has broken stories. I don’t get the sense he’s hostile to mainstream media – he worked at the Post-Dispatch. I don’t know that he would share Simmons’ opinions. Will has been a friend to my blog – he has linked to it a number of times. Last year he did a guest post for me when I went on vacation. I read his blog often – his snark is not always directed at mainstream media. It’s often directed at sports figures themselves.

Q. How many Cardinals blogs are there?

A. If I include mainstream media blogs – not including chat boards where there isn’t really a blog format – that’s a separate animal – I would say about 30 I know of. There’s probably some I’m not aware of. There’s another half dozen or possibly ten chat boards.

Q. Do you monitor all of those?

A. I have ones I like and are worth reading – other ones I don’t read as often. The ones I try to read are Get Up Baby – named after Mike Shannon, the Cards broadcaster, who says “Get up baby” when someone hits a fly ball. Dan Moore, a journalism student, writes it. I also read Cardinals Diaspora – I’ve got all the links on my sidebar and will periodically link to them.

Q. What about links? Who gets them and who doesn’t and are there hard feelings?

A. Sometimes there are. I’ve never taken it that seriously or had enough ego invested to get my feelings hurt. I’ll link almost anybody who asks me. In a couple of cases I had requests but the blog was so inept I didn’t feel I would be doing readers a favor by listing it – anyone who went there would curse me for wasting their time. If it’s so-so I’ll put it up. I don’t require them to link me back but usually they’ll do it. But as far as linking in the text of my post – only if somebody wrote something really good or interesting or funny. Putting it on the sidebar – no sweat. I’m happy that most people feel that way. I guess there are bloggers who have a more restricted sense and only link somebody they personally endorse – you have to make the cut with them.

Q. What’s the difference between what you do and what Will Leitch does at Deadspin?

A. He’s a professional blogger getting paid a salary. I’m part of a blog network – SB Nation is the corporate entity – but I’m not paid, though I have equity in the site. I sell some advertising myself – it provides a trickle of income, certainly not enough to support me full-time. A few bloggers are trying to do this full-time – like David Pinto. Geoff Young at Duck Snorts quit his job and is trying to make a go of it. I do it for the exposure and creative outlet.

Q. Would you call yourself a corporate blogger because of your SB Nation network?

A. You could say I’m more corporate than Get Up Baby – Dan Moore’s not affiliated with anybody. I’m affiliated with a network that’s not a public company but is a money-making enterprise – the people who own it are trying to make money.

Q. Why belong to SB Nation?

A. I benefit in a couple of ways. Exposure. My traffic has been increased because their network links to me. Credibility – when I ask somebody for an interview it helps to be part of a network. Having a brand affiliation increases readership. If it ever becomes profitable it could trickle down to me in the form of equity. But none of this is to get rich – for most of us it’s to scratch an itch or showcase what we can do.

Q. What would be your ideal job? How about newspaper columnist?

A. No – that wouldn’t be it. I think I have the ideal job in the sense of being a free lancer and working for myself and having a number of different projects I can work on – each of which serves a different need I have professionally. Having this forum is definitely a blast – it’s fun for me to have an audience – every writer wants an audience. I would probably say that even though I’ve written for large publications before, this is as rewarding as anything – I know readers are coming because of what I’ve created. I’ve contributed to Slate and Wall Street Journal – both national publications with large audiences but I was just in there. In this case I know people are coming to read because of what I created and by now a lot are coming to read each other, which is also rewarding. In terms of emotional payoff this is the best. It’s really nice to have that – it’s akin to having written a play and attracting an audience for that one thing.

Q. You have a background in traditional media?

A. Yes – like many bloggers. My first job in journalism was as a copy editor for Denver Westword – I worked up to associate editor. Then I left and became a free lancer – mostly for regional publications and magazines like In Flight and Aspen – also a Denver city magazine called 5280. I wrote a lot of features and a back page column for a couple of years. When I started a family I needed to shift my emphasis away from activities of greatest interest to me to ones that were more income oriented. That meant taking more corporate work and public relations. I also started editing a journal for the state of Colorado – I have a background in history. That led to some museum-related work. All of which was good but I missed the journalism outlet. So I decided to start a blog. I thought, “What’s a subject I can write about without having to think too hard?”

Q. (lol)

A. Another way to put it is I think about this stuff anyway – it’s how I amuse myself during the course of the day. I’m constantly thinking about baseball – having grown up in St. Louis it gets in our blood and synapses. In idle moments I find myself thinking about the No. 2 left-handed reliever in the bullpen or which free agent pitchers are available. I’m already thinking about it so why not write it down and put up a blog. That’s how it started – it flowed from my desire to have a journalistic outlet of some kind.

It started after the 2004 season. That season played a part in it, too – 105 wins by far was the most in my lifetime, and I can remember back to the 69-70 seasons – I came along too late to remember the great teams of the 60s with Gibson and Brock – which were nicknamed El Birdos. The 2004 team was the first great team I could root for – it was a great season followed by a pratfall. I was thinking about them even more than usual and all these things came together.

Q. Who are the main writers for Viva El Birdos?

A. There are three. Me, and I added a couple of guys who were longtime posters. One was one of the first registered posters – his screen name is Valatan. He’s Jerry Schirmer, a grad student at University of Texas. The other is Erik Manning. He lives in Iowa – I’m not sure what he does for a living. He used to write a blog called Reverend Redbird but closed it down because the demands of daily blog posting were becoming too time-consuming. I liked his blog, and liked the comments he occasionally posted at VEB, so I asked if he was interested in writing once a week at my site – less of a time demand. He said yes, and so it happens weekends are the most convenient time for him, so he writes on Sundays.

Both Erik and Val started writing on the front page last September or so – they wrote through the playoffs and have continues through the off-season. Having other voices and perspectives on the front page has made the site better without question.

Q. Why would a poster not want his name known?

A. I don’t know – maybe privacy issues. Maybe in certain cases if somebody is telling secrets about an organization the obvious reason is they might want to remain anonymous.

Q. You mean if they work in the organization?

A. Yes. There are cases of people who got fired from (non-sports) organizations because their identities got revealed. They were talking about office politics on (non-sports) blogs – a couple of well-known examples resulted in lawsuits over wrongful dismissal. One involved an airline person.

Q. You have no problem with anonymous posters?

A. I had an anonymous person come on purporting to have inside information – in that case I really wanted to know who that was and to check him out. He posted a diary in the last off-season – 14 months ago – saying he had talked to a Cardinals scout who said the Cards were interested in Javier Vasquez, who at the time was with Arizona and had demanded a trade. The Cards had missed on A.J. Burnett but were still looking to add a pitcher. This guy posts on my blog that they’re in serious discussion and speculated on the players who would be sent to Arizona. I posted a comment and said I would try to find out who this guy is before anybody takes this at face value – I tried to issue a caveat. I sent him an e-mail and he wrote me back – he convinced me it was good information and it turned out it was. The particular players he named were correct with one exception. The Post-Dispatch reported on this trade two days later possibly as a result of this post on my site. It was good information but I needed to know who this guy was – he had represented himself as someone inside the organization in his post.

Whenever anyone puts up a post of that type they’re still entitled to remain anonymous. I almost function as an editor, in a sense, because I feel responsible for what’s going up there. If I can’t be convinced I put up a comment saying it’s a rumor and take it as such. I help readers evaluate it. Either it’s suspect or not, or it’s inconsistent or not, or I can’t verify it. Those situations don’t happen that often on my blog. Mostly it’s opinions and trying to back them up with arguments. Occasionally anonymity becomes an issue.

It’s the same as on talk radio when somebody says “I think the Cards blew it on this trade”, or “the manager has the wrong idea with this guy in the rotation”. Anonymity is okay on the radio – same thing on a blog. It’s only an issue when somebody is purporting to report anything – then I think it’s important to exercise the same kind of judgment I would at a newspaper. I check out the source and decide whether I want that to appear on my blog with my stamp of approval or to keep my distance from it.

Q. Is your blog unusually disciplined?

A. There are others. Athletics Nations, which is on my network, SB Nation blog. Jason Fry’s blog (Faith and Fear in Flushing) – for him it’s an outlet of opinion and passion – he’s got the same instincts – it certainly reads like it’s got journalistic sensibility. Dodger Thoughts by Jon Weisman. Bronx Banter by Alex Belth. Baseball Analyst by Rich Lederer. Rich’s dad was a journalist – he has that sensibility. Baseball Musings by David Pinto – he often evaluates rumors in the mainstream press and does a good job of helping readers put them in context. A lot of people who have journalistic experience are writing these sports blogs.

Q. Are you different than most bloggers in that you know how to go after a story?

A. Most, but not all. I’m not one of a kind. Quite a number of blogs do the same thing – go after a story.

Q. What did you write about Mark McGwire and the Hall of Fame vote?

A. I didn’t write about it this year because I wrote so much last year. My opinion is that the truth needs to come out and that McGwire’s stance hurt him because he has knowledge he isn’t sharing. The only way we will get past this as fans is for the entire thing to be aired – we need to know which players were taking stuff and which managers were winking at it. We know some of the names that might be involved, but we need to know what were the stances of the front offices and what was their degree of guilt. What did members of the media hear in clubhouses, whether in whispers or direct knowledge? We need to have the whole truth come out and all of us have to take responsibility, even the fans, for participating in that charade.

Mark McGwire is a symbol for that and to some degree a scapegoat. I don’t think he should be in the Hall until issues are resolved. What he could do to clear the air would be a heroic thing. What I wrote is that he should say, “Here’s what I did and here’s the context in which I did it. There was a certain culture at that time enabled and encouraged by the powers that be. I regret that it has now caused a taint on the game, but let’s all understand what happened and how it happened and just get it all out there and not insult the intelligence of the fans by pretending it didn’t happen.”

I’m critical about his saying, “I’m not here to talk about the past.” That’s the wrong way to go about it. There was a lot of discussion last year – people get very emotional. I deliberately stayed away this year although a lot of readers were talking about it. I didn’t want to put it on the main page because it’s an inflammatory thing and you end up with people discussing legal issues and first amendment issues and privacy issues and things they know nothing about. The discussion often degrades pretty rapidly. If he’d gone into the Hall I wouldn’t feel it’s a huge travesty nor do I think it’s a huge injustice he didn’t get in. A large part of the public thinks, “who cares?” I don’t agree – it’s incredibly relevant. We need to know the truth. Somewhere there will emerge another player who does what Canseco did but doesn’t have Canseco’s baggage.

Q. Did you ask Hummel what he knew in 98?

A. No. It was really sort of a puff piece – a congratulatory thing. I didn’t ask him why he wasn’t tougher or what did he know. I asked him what regrets he had about his career.

Q. The Daily Fix guys seem to like Viva El Birdos – what’s with that?

A. I did a piece for Jason (Fry) last June and we kept up correspondence – we were in touch during the playoffs. It was for WSJ Online – about the broadcast landscape – inspired by the Cardinals move off of KMOX radio after 52 years. This was their first year on a station on which the team had bought controlling interest. It’s a pattern. The Pirates are leaving KDKA – next year will be their first on a station other than KDKA for the first time in 60 years. Same with the Tigers and Phillies. The article was about what was happening from the baseball side and the radio side and where they fit in with mlb.com and MLB TV and online radio.

Q. Sounds like mainstream journalism.

A. That piece was – I was wearing my reporter’s hat for that.

(SMG thanks Larry Borowsky for his cooperation)

Steve,

Thanks again for the conversation this morning. A few quick items, then I’m off to my lunch appt.

The post I wrote last season about McGwire and the Hall is at this link —

http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/story/2006/1/21/101359/392

Then there’s a followup post here

http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/story/2006/1/23/10259/6850

And here’s what I wrote after Pujols’ big HR vs Lidge.

http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/story/2005/10/18/3133/6882

i particularly like this part:

and so it continues — the series, the season, the stadium; larry walker’s career. we go back to wondering who will be healthy enough to play, and which mulder is going to show up, and can the bullpen hold a lead, and will la russa keep the irrational decisions to a minimum. . . . . . or maybe we don’t. maybe we just let all that stuff go. maybe, in this newly born season, we simply watch like the newly born — with little understanding but much wonder. maybe we mull nothing but newborn thoughts: so this is what it’s like to be alive. well i’ll be damned.

Numbers: who are the main bloggers, how many members, page views, visits

Wher do you go in the baseball blogosphere?

What are your favorite subjects to write about?

You can write me back here, or call me at (720) 855 6199. Thanks again for the note, look forward to talking with you.

By lboros

Posted on Thu Jan 04, 2007 at 04:45:27 AM EST

insomnia sucks. i’m awake; might as well blog.

programming note: right before the holidays i had a long chat with rick hummel, the post-dispatch’s hall-of-fame-bound writer; look for the Q+A transcript in the next day or two.

in today’s p-d: the mulder bidding plods along
. texas and cleveland are in for two guaranteed years, and the bet’s to jocketty: call or raise? i say fold ’em. a mulder signing would be worse than no signing at all, imho, because it would make the cards apt to sit back and count on mulder for their midseason rotation boost, instead of aggressively pursuing walk-year pitchers who hit the market as the trade deadline approaches. jake westbrook and mark buehrle are both pending free agents and prime candidates to be moved; see derrick goold’s entry at Bird Land
today for a long list of other players who might shake free on that basis. if they have mulder in their hip pocket, the cards won’t feel the same urgency to bring in reinforcements. but mulder, whenever he returns, is just as likely to undermine the rotation as stabilize it — the guy hasn’t been right for two and a half years, and he’s recovering from a torn rotator cuff. i’d sooner have the cards take a flyer on tomo ohka or john thomson, the latter of whom tops jeff sackmann’s list of free agents still worth watching
.

sackmann’s list also names jeff weaver, who (according to the p-d article cited above) remains on the cardinals’ radar. if he’d sign for a year or two, sure — but why would he do that? he’s got a better resume than jason marquis and adam eaton, both of whom signed for three years in the low $20ms; if it takes more than that to get weaver (and it will), it’s too much. sure, he looked great in october; he also has posted era’s pushing 6.00 in two of the last four seasons
. weaver has had just one winning season in an 8-year career, and just one year with a sub-4.00 era. jocketty got him for next to nothing last season, and next to nothing is about what he is worth going forward . . . . well okay, that’s a little harsh; maybe not next to nothing, but in the same subdivision. will weaver be appreciably better than brad thompson over 30 starts? i’d put it at 60-40, maybe 65-35. if that’s worth $30m to ya, be my guest . . . .

it might be worth it to the seattle mariners, who per this diary at Halos Heaven
may empty part of their unspent zito purse into weaver’s lap. before you dismiss that as a worthless internet rumor, you should know that the socal-based HH seems to have an in with the socal-bred weaver; this blogger scooped the mainstream media by two days last winter when weaver signed his one-year deal with the angels. the diary also notes weaver’s fondness for st louis and hints that this factor might even trump seattle’s dollars. if jeff would grant the cards one of those coveted Hometown Discounts, i’d discount my reservations about him commensurately.

one other thing before we leave this morning’s post-dispatch: the last paragraph says st louis is considering adding a right-handed bat, with preston wilson among the possible targets. i’m not wild about preston, but he has his uses; i’d still rather have the other wilson, craig, who has better on-base ability.

randy johnson won’t be joining the cards
. . . . .

final item: the first of the diamond mind simulations have appeared, courtesy of Replacement Level Yankees Weblog (RLYW). for those not familiar with diamond mind, it’s a simulation game — think strat-o-matic, but a lot more sophisticated. the game first impressed itself upon cardinal fans back in the spring of 2004, when it correctly forecast that st louis would reclaim the division title
after its 85-win, 3d-place finish in 2003. that was not a widely shared prediction, you may recall; the astros had signed clemens and pettitte, and the cubs had added greg maddux to their terrifying wood/prior combination, while the cards were counting heavily on a reclamation project (chris carpenter) and an inexperienced 25-year-old (jason marquis). but in 100 full-season diamond-mind simulations using projected stats for 2004, the cardinals finished first nearly half of the time and had the highest average win total (92) over the 100 simmed seasons.

RLYW has run preseason diamond-mind simulations the last couple of years, with mixed results. in 2006, this exercise correctly called 6 of the 8 playoff teams; in 2005, it only went 3 for 8. the sims that appeared at RLYW last week are preliminary and should not be taken very seriously; they used data from one of the less established projection systems, CHONE, and only 100 seasons were simmed. by the end of spring training, RLYW will have run several thousand simulations using multiple sets of projection data — those are the results i would place the most stock in.

but we don’t have those yet. the results we do have, flimsy though they may be, are at least encouraging. the CHONE-driven sims project st louis as the best team in the national league
, with an average record of 90-72. the cards won the nl central in 54 of the 100 simulated seasons and took the wild card in another 15. even more shocking than that result was the following: the sims project st louis, with its uncertain starting rotation, to yield the lowest number of runs in all of baseball.

i e-mailed SG, who runs the sims for RLYW, and asked who he had slotted into the cardinal rotation for these simulations. he answered that carpenter, wells, wainwright, and reyes were in the first four slots, with narveson and blake hawksworth splitting the #5 slot. it so happens that CHONE thinks reyes and wainwright are just swell — both are projected to have era’s in the mid-3.00s — and it’s reasonably bullish on kip wells, who projects to an era of 4.41. if those pitchers can meet such rosy projections, then st louis will indeed have a hell of a staff.

but don’t order your playoff tickets just yet. it’s only one projection, and it’s based on so-so data and incomplete rosters. i recommended to SG that he use brad thompson as the cards’ #5 starter in future simulations; if they sign mulder or weaver or anybody else, that will alter the simulation results. i’ll keep an eye on his site and let you know how the make-believe cards fare in the thousands of make-believe seasons to be played in the coming weeks.