An Interview with Michael Silverman

“You have to have repeated exposure to these guys so they know your face. Or in the case of an executive, repeated exposure to your phone messages. You need good people skills and sometimes you have to talk to them when you’re not looking for anything – get to know them as people – shoot the shit.

“Uggie Urbina – he was a scary dude. You couldn’t go near him. Now that he’s in prison in Venezuela (for murder) I can say it. I barely interviewed him. If I did I’ve repressed the whole experience. I didn’t enjoy him at all. He was a grunter.”

“When AP picks up stories it will say “as first reported by the Boston Herald”. Papers take great pride in that – it’s the way you keep score. Editors and higher-ups care about it…. It all comes down to the work the beat reporters do.”

Michael Silverman: Interviewed on January 23, 2008

Position: Red Sox beat reporter, Boston Herald

Born: 1962, Kansas City, Mo.

Education: Columbia, 1989, MJ; Michigan, 1984, English

Career: Harvard University Gazette 1985-88; New York Post 89; Boston Herald 1989 –

Personal: Married, three children

Favorite restaurant (home): JP Seafood Café, Jamaica Plain, Boston, “fresh sushi close to home”

Favorite restaurant (road): Bryant’s Barbeque, Kansas City

Favorite hotel: Harbor Beach Marriott Resort, Ft. Lauderdale

Michael Silverman, excerpted from the Boston Herald, October 18, 2007:

CLEVELAND – Three years ago, a gang of idiots clawed out of a 3- 0 ALCS pit and went on to win the whole thing.

Tonight, Josh Beckett will lead the 2007 Red Sox – comprised mostly of gentlemen with a couple of whack-jobs thrown in – onto a brand new battlefield. Down 3-1 to the Indians, they will find out what they are made of, having to win three straight games to stay alive.

Q. Who are the whack jobs?

A. Manny is a whack job. Papelbon qualified after his Irish jig dance. Pedroia can be interesting but he’s not a whack job. Tavarez is certifiable.

Q. Did you worry an editor would ax it?

A. Sure I did. But I guess it wasn’t offensive enough. It’s colorful. Idiot is on the verge too.

Q. But ‘idiot’ was a label they gave themselves.

A. True. Whack job was in a gray area. I took some literary license.

Q. Covering the Red Sox, who were your best interviews?

A. Mo Vaughn and Pedro (Martinez) were the top two. David Cone, for one year, was great. Bret Saberhagen. Mike Lowell. Gabe Kapler. David Ortiz.

They understood why we were there. As long as you didn’t catch them when they were trying to get on the field or do something, they didn’t mind sharing whatever the issue of the day was, or sharing nothing at all but being able to talk about non-baseball things. They all had a sense of humor and realized that the relationship between media and players does not have to be tense and adversarial.

Are you going to ask me who was the worst?

Q. Who was the worst?

A. Uggie Urbina – he was a scary dude. You couldn’t go near him. Now that he’s in prison in Venezuela (for murder) I can say it. I barely interviewed him. If I did I’ve repressed the whole experience. I didn’t enjoy him at all. He was a grunter.

Carl Everett had his moments where you understood after talking to him awhile that you could never communicate on the same level. He wasn’t an evil man – just different from most baseball players.

Q. What about Schilling?

A. I like him for the fact that he’s articulate and intelligent and always has opinions and isn’t afraid of voicing them. On the surface he should be every reporter’s dream to cover on a day-to-day basis. I have about zero relationship with him, pretty neutral, for whatever reason I’m not sure. But he’s an interesting guy and the source of a lot of stories in his four seasons here.

Q. Do you read his blog?

A. Sure. I wish more players kept blogs. I love the blog. It’s the source of stories. We’d have more interesting stories if players were more open about these things and whatever is going on in their lives. With Schilling sometimes it’s more than we care to know and sometimes it’s really interesting. He puts himself out there. That’s not a bad thing.

Q. As an organization how easy or difficult are the Sox to cover?

A. They’re certainly more enjoyable since the new ownership group came in. It was really difficult at the end of the John Harrington-led days. The environment was just miserable – there was a lot of distrust for the media up and down the organization – it was difficult to get information from the team. The media was the last priority of that administration and the fan base was taken for granted as well. When the new owners came it was liberating, almost like night and day. You didn’t have to walk on egg shells around the players and coaches and front office people. It made a huge difference in getting excited about your day.

Q. How do you cultivate sources?

A. It’s quantity and quality. You have to have repeated exposure to these guys so they know your face. Or in the case of an executive, repeated exposure to your phone messages. You need good people skills and sometimes you have to talk to them when you’re not looking for anything – get to know them as people – shoot the shit.

If there’s a slow moment at spring training talk to them about what they do in Fort Meyers. Some of the time you’re looking for something to write, but you don’t want them to think ‘why is he coming up to me – he hasn’t all year?’ You’ve got to schmooze some and sometimes you’ll be told something off the record. You have a choice to use it, but if you burn that bridge you’re sunk. That player will never trust you again and he’ll tell others – it can be a real mess. You have to be clear about what’s on and off the record.

Q. What’s hard about the beat?

A. Be prepared to sacrifice your personal life to a great extent. You work nights and weekends and summers in addition to a ton of time at home. You have to accept that. It’s a 12-month-a-year job with maybe January being the lightest month.

Q. What are the competitive pressures?

A. They’re real in a market like Boston and I assume New York and a couple of other towns. I love it because it makes the job edgier and more fun. No one is perfect but you take pride when your paper gets a scoop and your competitor doesn’t, and when they do you try harder next time. It just makes it more fun, and the readers are rewarded when the outlets competing to be first produce real news that’s accurate and important.

Q. Scoops you’re proud of?

A. When the Herald reported that Theo Epstein had not accepted the job to come back after the ’05 season, and we were also the first to report that he had left the job. The competition reported he was coming back – sort of a ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ – it was a good day for the Herald.

I had Damon coming to the Red Sox first, and some good one-on-ones with Pedro Martinez.

Q. How do you keep up with baseball news?

A. (groan)

I’ve been on the beat for 13 years. The first nine I spent a lot of time going to Spanish papers on the Internet. I’m not fluent, but sometimes the small Dominican papers would have scoops and I would follow up.

Then I went to individual sites, which seems so laborious and time-consuming now that we have feeders that update you instantaneously. There are some great fan sites like ‘Son of Sam Horn’. I go to ESPN, Fox, SI, CBS SportsLine. There are some great sites with contract numbers – Cot’s Baseball Contracts, mlb4u.com. For trade rumors there’s mlbtraderumors.com. Prosportsdaily.com contains news nuggets and a pretty complete list of trade rumors.

So it’s harder and harder to establish and maintain a scoop before everybody else has it – the lifespan of a scoop is shorter. The internal debate is whether to post it immediately or save it for the print edition. The print edition comes online at 12 or 1 a.m. at which point it’s hard for anybody to chase for the morning paper. But it’s rare that a scoop survives until morning. Your competitor can put it on their website as long as they credit it. We do that but first we verify it on our own.

Q. Is a scoop less valuable than it used to be?

A. When AP picks up stories they’ll say “as first reported by the Boston Herald”. Papers take great pride in that – it’s the way you keep score. Editors and higher-ups care about it. It gets repeated on the wires and local radio stations. Further out from where the scoop takes place they care less when it’s reported on ESPN or a national outlet that the Boston Herald is reporting this.

It all comes down to the work the beat reporters do. If some Boston columnist has an outlandish opinion it doesn’t really get picked up nationwide. But if we report that Tim Wakefield is going to be on the DL or has suffered an injury it will be reported nationally and credited to the Boston Herald.

Q. Are outlets honorable about crediting?

A. Some are – sometimes. Mostly, yes.

Q. Are beat reporters appreciated?

A. Depends how you define appreciation. Anyone in the business understands that the life of a beat reporter involves a lot of grunt work that just isn’t done by columnists. I think every columnist appreciates us – many were former beat reporters. Anyone who doesn’t is probably some sort of prima donna or windbag.

Q. Is there a skill to asking a good question?

A. Depends on the kind of story – feature or straight game. Try not to ask yes-no questions or you’ll get yes-no answers. Ask open-ended questions. And listen to the answers. Don’t go in with a preconceived list of questions and not be open to hearing something that is a better story than you thought you’d get. Be open to the unexpected.

Q. Which questions make you cringe?

A. I love it when someone calls Francona “coach”, as in “coach, can you explain this”. You know he’s just waiting to figure out first of all how to rip you to shreds or to bite his tongue that day. He has no patience for that. Sometimes people ask questions that you can’t go down the road with this manager. He won’t blast a player and he’ll always jump to their defense, so if someone asks a leading question to try to get him to rip a player and he has to dance around, I cringe. I know he’s not going to answer it and you wonder how he’ll turn it on the reporter.

I ask my share of stupid questions, too. Sometimes you ask someone how they feel after giving up five runs in the eighth inning, and they say, “how do you think I feel.” It’s never a good moment. We know the answer but sometimes we need the quote, even if the comments are rote and predictable.

Q. Does it annoy you if someone horns in on your interview?

A. It’s it pre-game in the clubhouse and I’m speaking to a player one-on-one in front of his locker and someone comes up and lingers over my shoulder I’m not shy about saying ‘I need a couple of minutes do you mind’. By the same token if I see a reporter one-on-one with a player I tell myself ‘forget it, I can’t go over there’. These days it’s harder and harder to get players to come to their lockers at all. After the game it’s a different story. Anybody involved in the story is fair game – we’re all on deadlines. You have to give people a little bit of time but eventually you have to ask a question of whoever made the important hit or important play.

Q. How did you vote on the new ‘bonus-clause’ rule of the Baseball Writers Association? (which disqualifies players for writers awards if their contract links cash incentives to an award)

A. I voted for it. Part of the catalyst was the incentive clause Schilling received from the Red Sox. I don’t blame Schilling for asking for it. It seemed to crystallize what the flaw is in our voting process. When I saw some of the ridiculous votes people made in the Cy Young vote this year it was easy to see a bad situation down the road where there could be an appearance of a conflict of interest. There actually could be a conflict between a reporter and a player he covers.

Q. Is it far-fetched to imagine a cash payment for a vote?

A. I can’t even imagine a player of that ilk existing and the same goes for baseball writers. But it was too easy for that to happen – the fact that I can’t imagine it means nothing – those types tend to find each other and make each other happy. I understand why the players’ union hates the new rule but I’m sure they can be creative and come up with some other incentive. I believe they’ve held an emergency summit since we voted for it. It’s now been tabled until the writers’ executive committee meets with the union. They want us to reconsider

Q. Why does the union care?

A. Incentive clauses were hooked to the writers’ awards. It was a way for agents to get more money for their clients. The teams can’t give incentive clauses – they’re illegal. It puts the player above the team. It drives players to achieve individual goals and puts pressure on the managers for playing time. Appearance clauses are allowed, but nothing directly pegged to wins or offense.

Q. Does the Herald allow you to vote on awards?

A. We’re allowed. One reason the writers association went down this road is more papers are not allowing their writers to vote. It feared this would become a sweeping trend and nobody would be left to vote on awards. The (NY) Times is the most prominent paper that doesn’t allow its writers to vote. One or two others have crept into it.

I don’t have any problem with it. Personally I haven’t voted for an award – it’s the way they pass out ballots in Boston.

Q. Does award voting affect relationships with players?

A. I hope not. It wouldn’t with me. I like to believe I could just vote for who deserves it and put aside all personal and professional relationships.

Michael Silverman, excerpted from the Boston Herald, November 1, 2005:

Once Theo Epstein finally decided that his dream job was anything but, the Red Sox were left wondering if this was all just a nightmare.

Epstein walked away from his general manager’s post yesterday, dealing a stunning blow to the heart and soul of an organization that had reached the ultimate pinnacle with a world title barely more than a year ago. That honeymoon period ended abruptly with Epstein’s decision to decline the club’s three-year contract extension offer worth $1.5 million a year.

Epstein’s decision seemingly came out of the blue, as many considered his return before the midnight deadline to be a done deal.

As it turned out, Epstein’s dismay with his job and his work environment overrode all other concerns.

The decision by Epstein was an agonizing one. The Brookline native weighed the job he always coveted against the intra- organizational politics, power struggles and lack of privacy issues that increasingly were becoming a burden to him.

The negotiations began late in the summer and intensified after the Red Sox were eliminated from the playoffs. At first, money and length of contract were central issues for Epstein, who had lobbied hard for an annual salary of more than $1 million a year. A private and almost shy person to begin with, Epstein had handled himself well in the spotlight but did not enjoy the sometimes oppressive media demands that came with the job and the intrusions in his personal life away from the ballpark.

Still, by Saturday evening, he had come close to agreeing to a deal, although he still had not officially accepted it. On Sunday, he began having serious misgivings about staying on. A key factor that ultimately soured Epstein on the job, according to sources close to the situation, was a column in Sunday’s Boston Globe which revealed too much inside information about the relationship between Epstein and his mentor, Larry Lucchino, and slanted the coverage in the team president’s favor. Epstein, according to these sources, had several reasons to believe Lucchino was a primary source behind the column and came to the realization that if this information was leaked hours before he was going to agree to a long-term deal, excessive bad faith existed between the two.

Epstein had not made up his mind about accepting the job before going to bed Sunday night despite a report in the Globe citing “multiple major league sources” that said the Red Sox and the GM had agreed to a contract extension. The Globe’s parent company, the New York Times, holds a 17 percent ownership stake in the Red Sox.

(SMG thanks Michael Silverman for his cooperation)

An Interview with Mike Sielski

“It’s a story that touches on a lot of themes and topics: the connection between sports and the military – as much as there is one – small-town America, football, the war, parents’ feelings over their son’s decision to join the military, the impact that sports can have on someone’s life. It was important to me to find a story like this to explore in depth; I didn’t want this to be a stereotypical sports book.”

“On one memorable night, with my tape recorder running, I did my best to go beer-for-beer with a half dozen members of Bryan’s company, hoping that I wouldn’t pass out before the Marines finished telling stories about Fallujah. “

“Usually, I’m chewing my fingernails and slurping down a cup of cold, bad, press-box coffee while I’m typing. But the sense of accomplishment you get from writing something halfway decent under the gun often exceeds the satisfaction that accompanies reporting and writing an in-depth takeout.”

Mike Sielski: Interviewed on August 21, 2009

Position: Sports Columnist for Calkins Media Inc., syndicated in the Bucks County (Pa.) Courier Times, (Doylestown, Pa.) Intelligencer, and Burlington County (N.J.) Times.

Born: 1975; New Brunswick, N.J.

Education: La Salle University, 1997, BAs in Communication and English; Columbia University, 1998, MS in Journalism.

Career: The (Doylestown, Pa.) Intelligencer, 1996-2002; The (Allentown) Morning Call, 2002-03; Calkins Media, 2003-present; Adjunct professor at La Salle University, 1999-2002 and 2008-present.

Personal: Married (Kate)

Favorite restaurant (home): Bridget’s Steakhouse, Ambler, Pa. “Great atmosphere, great burgers, great steaks, and a shitake mushroom sauce that will buckle your knees.”

Favorite restaurant (away): River City Grille, Dallas Airport Marriott South. “Hard to beat a restaurant that stayed open late on Christmas night 2006 to feed a dozen hungry Philly scribes who had just covered an Eagles-Cowboys game.

Favorite hotel: Conrad/Hilton Maldives–Rangali Island. “My wife and I went to the Maldives for our honeymoon, and the place was unlike anything we had experienced or will experience again.”

Author of: “Fading Echoes: A True Story of Rivalry and Brotherhood from the Football Field to the Fields of Honor”

Mike Sielski, excerpted from “Fading Echoes: A True Story of Rivalry and Brotherhood from the Football Field to the Fields of Honor”:

Tuesday, September 1, 1998

The football field wasn’t so much a football field as it was an expansive lawn with goalposts, fit for the front of one of the elegant, colonial-style homes that rose, alp-like, from the emerald earth of central Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A slight hill sloped up from the student parking lot behind Central Bucks High School East to one sideline, and beyond the opposite sideline were trees, nothing but trees, a wall of them tall and green and brown. There were no bleachers or stands surrounding the field, just a low, gray chain-link fence and an oval track of charcoal gravel; it was a practice field, nothing more. But on days like this, when the sky was clear and the sun was warm and practice felt like one of the touch football games he had played with his father in the yard, Colby Umbrell was happier nowhere else.

The previous spring and summer had been memorable for him — life-changing, in a way. He had attended a football camp at the U.S. Military Academy, an experience that reconfirmed a lifelong desire: to become a cadet and then an officer in the U.S. Army. The thought had been a daydream for him when he was a young boy; his family’s annual vacations to Washington, D.C., and to Arlington National Cemetery stirred a sense of patriotism within him, and after he experienced firsthand, if only for a few days, the history and honor at West Point, his mind and heart were fixed on the goal of getting there. Since participating in the camp, he had received a nomination to the academy from his congressman, Republican Jim Greenwood, and playing football for Army now had become an option for him, too, because he had bulked up so much over the previous months. Charlie Packman, the new strength coach for CB East’s football team, the Patriots, had had players pair up as workout partners during the off-season, and Colby and one of his best friends, quarterback Steve Kreider, had attacked Packman’s weight-training program with vigor. Kreider had put on fifteen pounds, but Colby had put on thirty-five, adding mass and muscle in anticipation that he would change positions on East’s offensive line from his junior year to this, his senior season. He had played center the year before; he would play offensive and defensive tackle this season. The extra weight took him up to 240 pounds. Standing six feet one, he had a puffy blond crew cut, a slight gap between his two upper front teeth, and a large lower jaw that jutted forward as if it were in search of a left hook. During practices and games, he usually did not say much.

Colby’s reticence had been the reason that Larry Greene, East’s head coach, at first hadn’t selected him to be one of the Patriots’ team captains. At the team’s season-ending banquet in 1997, Colby had sat stunned at his table when Greene announced the names of East’s senior captains for ’98 — Kreider, Phil Laing, and Bryan Scott — and he wasn’t among them. Greene, like everyone else on East’s team, didn’t question Colby’s work ethic, but he just wasn’t sure that Colby had the right personality to be a captain. Kreider? He was gregarious, the quarterback, a natural choice. Laing? He was the sort of kid, Greene thought, who looked like he’d started growing facial hair at age six. Laing was going to start at fullback and middle linebacker. Scott? He sang in the school choir, started for the varsity basketball team, was an all-district-caliber sprinter, was respected and well liked by most of East’s student body—and was perhaps the best high school football player in Pennsylvania. A tailback and safety, Scott seemed to have an NFL-ready body at age eighteen, a chiseled six feet two, 205 pounds. Penn State was the front-runner in the race to recruit him.

Eventually, Greene reconsidered his decision and named Colby a captain, too. But that initial disappointment was a lasting memory for Colby for years afterward, perhaps because he had looked forward to his senior season as his last, best chance to change the dynamic of a football rivalry that for nearly thirty years had defined his hometown of Doylestown. For most of those years, CB East had been the redheaded stepchild to its neighbor in the school district: Central Bucks West. It wasn’t that East didn’t have a respectable program. The Patriots had won a league championship in 1979; had reached the district playoffs in 1996, Colby’s sophomore year; and were perennially a better-than-average team in the Suburban One League National Conference, which comprised ten schools in the suburbs north of Philadelphia. It was that West was the premier high school football program not just in the National Conference, but arguably in all of Pennsylvania

Q. What drew you to the ‘Fading Echoes’ story?

A. There are just so many layers to it. Here were two guys – Colby Umbrell and Bryan Buckley – who were from the same small town in suburban Philadelphia – Doylestown – and were the same age. They knew each other but weren’t close friends. Each of them was part of a great high school football rivalry – Central Bucks West vs. Central Bucks East) – and each of them embodied his respective side of the rivalry.

Bryan grew up wanting nothing more than to play football for CB West, for the greatest program in the state. Colby grew up wanting nothing more than to play football for CB East — and to beat CB West. By 1998, Doylestown was not the stereotypical Pennsylvania high school football town, not a steel town or a coal town. It’s quite affluent, with boutiques and high-end restaurants and a Quaker tradition and an accent on the arts. Yet not only did the East-West rivalry flourish there and reach its peak in 1998 — Colby’s and Bryan’s senior season — but these two men, independent of each other, then followed parallel tracks over the next several years to the elite of the armed forces. Colby became an Army Ranger; Bryan, a Marine. They ended up serving in Iraq at the same time, and one of them didn’t come home.

It’s a story that touches on a lot of themes and topics: the connection between sports and the military – as much as there is one – small-town America, football, the war, parents’ feelings over their son’s decision to join the military, the impact that sports can have on someone’s life. It was important to me to find a story like this to explore in depth; I didn’t want this to be a stereotypical “sports book.” I know I’m not breaking new ground by saying this, but the best sports stories always get beyond the minutia of the games and the transaction ledger. If you read David Maraniss on the 1960 Rome Olympics or Adrian Wojnarowski on St. Anthony High’s basketball team, you’re not just reading about Rafer Johnson or Bob Hurley. You’re getting a sense of time and place, of sports’ context and importance, the way it fits into our history and our society. That was the sort of book I wanted to try to write, and Colby’s and Bryan’s stories allowed me to do it.

Q. How did you report ‘Fading Echoes’?

A. I had certain advantages and disadvantages throughout the reporting process. My first full-time job in sportswriting was as the Intelligencer’s beat writer for Central Bucks West and East in 1998. I covered most of Bryan’s and Colby’s games that season and had kept boxes of notes, articles, and interview transcripts from the five years I spent covering East and West. I watched game tapes, and I interviewed and re-interviewed many players, parents, and coaches to gain the fresh perspective of hindsight. Because of my familiarity with the schools, the teams, the players, and the coaches, and because of the resources at my disposal, I could reconstruct that ’98 season with relative ease.

Things were more challenging in reporting the non-football aspects of the book: Colby’s and Bryan’s college years, their military training, their tours in Iraq. I had seven months, from July ’08 to February ’09, to finish the manuscript, and unfortunately, I had neither the time nor the financial resources to travel to Iraq. Even though I had arranged to take three months of part-time leave from Calkins to work on the book – I was supposed to write two columns a week from Oct. 1 to Jan. 1 – the Phillies decided to complicate matters by winning the World Series. So for all of October, I was paid part-time wages for working full-time hours covering the Phils. Meanwhile, I was also teaching two writing classes at La Salle and researching and writing the book. It was exhilarating … and exhausting.

To make up for my inability to get to Iraq, I read everything I could about the country and the war just to have the requisite background and knowledge. I’m an Amazon addict anyway, so I bought and read what I hoped were the most authoritative books available on the subject. I tracked down as many members of Bryan’s and Colby’s units as I could, mining them for as much detail and perspective as they could give me. I drove to Washington, D.C., to meet with Colby’s commanding officer, a Seattle resident who happened to be visiting the East Coast for a few days with his wife. I spent a week in Jacksonville, N.C., near Camp Lejeune, talking with several Marines who had served with Bryan. On one memorable night, with my tape recorder running, I did my best to go beer-for-beer with a half dozen members of Bryan’s company, hoping that I wouldn’t pass out before the Marines finished telling stories about Fallujah.

And the Umbrell and Buckley families were as open and honest and accommodating as I could have hoped for them to be. I spent hours and hours speaking with and observing them, and they provided me with military documents and letters and e-mails from Colby and Bryan that added touch, texture, and detail to the narrative.

Q. Hollywood loves films about high school and teenagers – why is that?

A. I’m no expert, but I’ll take a shot at this. A teenager’s life can include much of the drama and many of the serious problems that an adult faces, but it’s also flavored with a sense of promise and potential. Plus, teenagers don’t have wrinkles. They’re young and fresh and handsome and beautiful, and mainstream Hollywood generally doesn’t fancy films about older people — unless Morgan Freeman is driving Jessica Tandy to the Piggly Wiggly.

By the way, if you’re suggesting that “Fading Echoes” would make a darned good Hollywood movie, I’m not going to argue with you. Any chance Steven Spielberg or David Fincher reads Sports Media Guide?

Q. They do. What does it feel like to write a column under deadline?

A. It’s a rush. Usually, I’m chewing my fingernails and slurping down a cup of cold, bad, press-box coffee while I’m typing. But the sense of accomplishment you get from writing something halfway decent under the gun often exceeds the satisfaction that accompanies reporting and writing an in-depth takeout. The hard part is that you have to remind yourself that, when a reader clicks on your column link or picks up the paper the next day, he or she doesn’t know how much time you had to write — and doesn’t care.

Q. Best and worst columns you’ve written?

A. I guess it depends on how you define “best” and “worst.” I’ll start with “worst.” If I file a column with a typo or a factual error that somehow sneaks past the copy desk, I’ll beat myself up for a good long while. That’s happened more than once, and that’s one kind of “worst.” The other kind is when I offer an analysis or opinion that turns out to be flat-out wrong. For instance, when the Sixers hired Jim O’Brien as their head coach in 2004, I wrote that the hire could mean that the Allen Iverson era would end soon. After all, O’Brien had left Boston after Danny Ainge had traded away a couple of defensive-minded players and brought in a shoot-first guy in Ricky Davis. It seemed logical, then, that O’Brien and Iverson would clash. Instead, by the time Billy King fired O’Brien a year later, Allen was one of the few people in the organization that O’Brien hadn’t totally alienated.

As for the “best” columns, again, it depends on how you define “best.” As Rich Hofmann mentioned in an earlier Q&A here, we have a group of terrific columnists in the Philadelphia market, and it’s a challenge to distinguish oneself among them. I try to base my columns around my reporting. These days, anyone can spout off on a blog, on a message board, on talk-radio. Hell, lots of columnists do it. And there’s a place for it. But not everyone has the access that professional media are afforded, and in this age of unlimited opinion, it’s vital that we take advantage of that access, that we report thoroughly and write eloquently.

I want to be the guy who makes the extra call, reveals the new angle or fresh take, or gets the athlete/coach to open up about a sensitive topic. Over the last few years, the columns I’m most proud of are the ones where I’ve done that: following Jeremy Rose into the jockeys’ room after he and Afleet Alex won the 2005 Preakness, a race in which Rose could have been trampled to death; getting Brian Dawkins to explain how dealing with the premature births of his twin daughters affected him, his family, and his play; listening to the Philadelphia Flyers complain about biased officiating in the playoffs, then calling them out for their baseless whining, then showing up the next day to take the heat. Yes, showing your face after you criticize someone still matters. It should, anyway.

Q. What sports media do you consume – and avoid – and why?

A. Ah, the name-dropping question. Just kidding…

I consume as much as I can of the local sports media because Philadelphia is such a parochial market: phillyburbs.com , which is the site for the Calkins papers, philly.com , i.e. the Inquirer and the Daily News, delcotimes.com, delawareonline.com, csnphilly.com, nj.com. I click on Deadspin and The Big Lead each day, but that’s as far as my blog reading goes.

Honestly, I’d rather read a 6,000-word narrative or personality profile — something with depth and style and with a beginning, a middle, and an end — than a Twitter update about whether the Red Sox might include Clay Buchholtz in a trade for Roy Halladay, who might not be traded at all.

I still look forward to Sports Illustrated every week, especially if the issue includes a big back-of-the-mag piece by Gary Smith or S.L. Price. I read Yahoo! Sports and ESPN.com often, and there are several columnists whom I read regularly; they know who they are. I pester them with e-mails and phone calls and Facebook “likes.”

I avoid anything having to do with Brett Favre or soccer.

Q. Career influences?

A. There’s none bigger than Bill Lyon, the former sports columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He took me under his wing when I was in college and remains a friend and mentor to this day. Great writer, better human being.

Q. Next project?

A. I’m trying to come up with another book topic or subject. I’m open to suggestions.

Mike Sielski, from the Bucks County Courier Times, August 16, 2009:

PHILADELPHIA – For the last three days, Jeffrey Lurie and Andy Reid have been selling themselves as the second coming of Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers, as the leaders of a sports franchise bent on effecting social change.

They have signed convicted puppy killer Michael Vick to a one-year contract, taking a chance on the man who, before his two-year jail sentence, was the NFL’s most dynamic athlete. And there was Reid once more Saturday at the NovaCare Complex, trying to answer a simple question: What criterion will he use to judge whether the signing was a success? Is it more important to rehabilitate Michael Vick the person, or Michael Vick the football player?

“I think,” Reid said, “it’s a combination of both.”

No, it isn’t. It can’t be. From their board room to their coaches’ room to their locker room, the Eagles are behaving and speaking as if the skills that Vick could supply were a secondary consideration, as if saving Vick’s soul were the franchise’s primary mission. It isn’t. Winning football games is. Winning Super Bowls is. Winning is.

It’s supposed to be, anyway, and there are only two conclusions to be drawn from the way the Eagles have handled Vick’s signing: Either they turned the NovaCare Complex into Boys Town and put one man’s shot at redemption above their pursuit of a Super Bowl, or they are too scared to admit that they decided to sustain some severe public-relations damage for the sake of trying to improve their football team.

?

First things first: Arguing the Eagles shouldn’t have signed Vick is to argue, by implication, that no NFL team should have signed him. Sorry, that doesn’t wash. Vick committed heinous crimes, and they suggest a darkness in his soul that might never be cleansed. But he served his time in jail. He paid his societal debt. He ought to be able to earn a living if someone is willing to allow him.

The Eagles are willing, and that’s fine, because they are just another professional football team (despite Lurie’s claims that the Eagles’ accent on “character” sets them apart), and in the warped world of pro sports, a franchise’s first responsibility is to do all it can within the rules of its league to win a championship. So Reid can stop playing the role of Sister Helen Prejean any time now. If he wanted to be altruistic, he could have helped Vick get a job anywhere – in coaching, in community service, in a pet shelter.

Instead, Reid cut a player from the Eagles’ roster – the player who lost his job, by the way, was defensive back Byron Parker – so that he could line up Vick in the “Wildcat” formation and hope that Vick’s legs and arm improve the Eagles’ efficiency in the red zone. This is nothing more than professional sports at its purest.

When Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to break baseball’s color barrier, a large part of his motivation was to win baseball games, so he found the toughest, most talented black athlete he could. Even in that historic decision, Rickey was guided by more than just virtue; he wanted to tap into a dormant talent pool so he could build a dynasty.

It goes without saying that Vick is no Jackie Robinson – no matter what idiotic comparisons Jesse Jackson might make. What Vick can be, though, is an offensive threat to help the Eagles – and their quarterback, in particular.

Understood at the most basic elements, here’s what happened Thursday: Donovan McNabb asked for a weapon, and the Eagles gave it to him. He wanted Vick here, and Vick is here. And no one has said anything more accurate about Vick’s arrival than what McNabb said Thursday night:

“I’m going to tell you right now: If he gets back to where he (was when he) played in Atlanta, and for him to even have five or eight plays and he gets out of the pocket and picks up 20, 30 yards, nobody even thinks about what happened two years ago. Everybody will be talking about what we can do in order for this team to win the Super Bowl.”

You bet they will. They got over Brett Myers’ alleged assault of his wife, and if Vick plays well, they’ll get over this, too.

Lurie appeared to be completely sincere on Friday when, Hamlet-like, he laid out his inner conflict over signing a player who spent six years torturing and killing dogs and then lying about it. But the only reason Lurie was so torn was his misguided belief that a sports franchise, beyond winning games and selling tickets, must be an agent of social progress, and his genuine hemming and hawing doesn’t change anything now.

For Michael Vick is here, and he’s here to help the Eagles win, and they should start admitting that more often. It would be unsettling. It would be unseemly. But at least it would be honest.

(SMG thanks Mike Sielski for his cooperation)

An Interview with Frank H. Shorr

“Future opportunities for employment in the sports media field lay on the local fronts…Community newspapers and small market television stations… Though they won’t pay on the same scale, the chances of working should be greater and if a journalist can bring multimedia skills to the table, he or she should be able to find employment.”

“Knowing how to cover the story is only half the battle, presenting and marketing the story are just as important. Can you shoot your own video? Can you edit on your laptop? Do you have your own website? Are people following you on Twitter? A no answer to any of those questions can be disastrous if you’re starting out.”

“On-air types get the money, the credit and most of the publicity but a good producer is muchharder to find. You’re part assignment editor, writer, editor, shooter, reporter and all too often, baby sitter.”

Frank H. Shorr: Interviewed on July 27, 2009

Position: Lecturer, Boston University; Director, Sports Institute at BU

Born: 1948, Bay Shore, New York

Education: Boston University, B.S. in Business Administration, 1970; BU, Masters of Science, Broadcasting and Film, 1973

Career: Warner Cable, 1973-1980; WCVB-TV, Boston 1979-80; WNAC/WHDH Channel 7, Boston, 1980-2001

Personal: Married, 3 children, 30, 16 & 11; two dogs: Weezer and Rufus

Favorite restaurant (home): Giancarlo’s, Marblehead, Ma. “took my wife there on our first date…we still laugh about the strolling minstrels!”

Favorite restaurant (away): Chevy’s, Orlando “raised all my kids there and we love the flautas!”

Favorite hotel: Grand Cypress Hyatt, Orlando “great food, great pool, links style golf…a luxury in the middle of the theme parks.”

Excerpted from the course prospectus at The Sports Institute, 2009:

http://www.bu.edu/com/sports_institute/courses.html

Sports Journalism: Punch your own ticket. Write your way to The Show. Sports Journalism as a practical writing course covering the major formats of game stories, features, columns and player profiles. Learn reporting and interviewing skills, story structure and ways to put color in your copy. The course also offers a look at the job market and the freelance writing business.

Broadcast Sports Journalism: Train to be a Sports Anchor. During each class, we will produce a half-hour episode of “Sports Summer”, a program combining hard news, feature stories, commentary and live guests. We will format, write, edit and produce the show within the three-hour class time. Students will get hands on experience on the Anchor desk and in reporting sports stories from the field. Your resume tape starts here!

Multimedia Sports: Today’s audience wants more than can be delivered through the straight broadcast or print story. In order to stay competitive, today’s outlets are leaning heavily on young journalists with fresh ideas to get the rest of the story out. Learn how to take the time-honored techniques of good storytelling and new techniques in multimedia – video, audio, photos and text – to the web with tools like Final Cut Pro, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, WordPress and other content management systems. At the end of four weeks, you will have a state-of-the-art web presence that will impress and entice future employers.

Sports Seminar: A panel of working journalists will join students in a discussion of a topical sports issue. The panel will be interviewed by the Director of the Institute, followed by a Q and A period by students.

Seminars will cover: Sports in the Television Newsroom; Women in Sports; Agents and Jobs; Sports Journalism; Radio/Internet Sports

Q. Size up future opportunities for employment in sports media?

A. Future opportunities for employment in the sports media field lay on the local fronts. Community newspapers and small market television stations provide the only coverage of those areas,

While major markets concentrate on national sports news, no one but the local newspapers and local TV stations are covering high school and hometown college sports. Though they won’t pay on the same scale, the chances of working should be greater and if a journalist can bring multimedia skills to the table, he or she should be able to find employment.

Interesting enough, however, is that these jobs, long the starting spot for graduating students and first timers, are also being coveted by the people being laid off in larger markets. Their desire to stay in the field is causing more competition at the lower levels.

Q. If you were starting out today how would you prepare for and go after a career in sports media?

A. First and foremost, I’d make sure I was as technologically savvy as I could be. Knowing how to cover the story is only half the battle, presenting and marketing the story are just as important. Can you shoot your own video? Can you edit on your laptop? Do you have your own website? Are people following you on Twitter? A no answer to any of those questions can be disastrous if you’re starting out.

Q. Describe your program at Sports Institute at BU?

A. The Sports Institute is an education-based program combining four sports journalism courses regularly taught at Boston University. Packed into a month, the students get to enjoy Boston and take with them life skills and hopefully the tools for a successful career.

Give us four weeks, we’ll give you a lifetime!

Q. What sports media do you consume and why, and what do you avoid and why?

A. I still read the daily newspapers – old habits die hard – but ESPN.com keeps me up-to-date nationally. I love Boston Media Sports Watch to keep track of the local market. WEEI sports talk radio and Comcast SportsNet are good sources of opinion. NESN, for all its promise, still hasn’t figured out what it wants to be and its insistence on Red Sox, Bruins coverage all the time, is disheartening.

Q. Tell us about your career and your history with John Dennis (WEEI radio, Boston).

A. John and I started working together in 1980 when local television was coming into its own. We saw the birth of live coverage and spent a lot of hours figuring it all out. But it was also the most sustained time in Boston local sports history for non stop high caliber action. For 18 years we worked shoulder to shoulder through an amazing time. John was, and still is, the best interviewer in Boston and I always knew when he was covering a story, we’d have the best material on air. That’s all a producer can ask for.

Q. The good, bad, and ugly of sports talk radio?

A. I guess I expected more journalism from sports talk radio but perhaps that’s my own bias. As Glenn Ordway (WEEI) points out, it really is “narrowcasting”. It’s entertainment. There’s too much yelling from time to time but that’s what happens in a good sports argument, right? It’s an interesting debate.

Q. You were a producer – what makes a good producer?

A. On-air types get the money, the credit and most of the publicity but a good producer is muchharder to find. You’re part assignment editor, writer, editor, shooter, reporter and all too often, baby sitter.

A good producer is truly the person who has to act as intermediary between theforces of evil that stand in the way. While many in the newsroom have very specific jobs to perform, a good producer has to know how to do them all. It helps to be prepared to take the heat and like a good fight.

I’m reminded of a scene in the movie Broadcast News when Holly Hunter’s character, Jane Craig, is cornered by an Executive Producer. He says, “It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room.” And she says, “No. It’s awful.”

She was totally serious and I understood exactly how she felt. The end result is still the same, did the job get done, butit’s the producer who improves on the recipe, a pinch of this, a pinch of that – dessert is served.

Q. Your thoughts on ESPN’s size and influence over sports coverage?

A. ESPN has fulfilled everything it started out to be and I think right now they are trying to stay current. They are stretching and sometimes not always in the right direction. Their first two ombudsmen, for example, had virtually no television sports background – was that by design? It will be very interesting to see if Don Ohlmeyer sinks his teeth into them. Their penchant for only covering sports they have rights to raises the eyebrows. World Wide Leader, for sure, but not without faults.

(SMG thanks Frank H. Shorr for his cooperation)

An Interview with Bud Shaw

“I noticed as the confrontation was developing that lots of players and media were moving away from where Albert (Belle) and I were standing. I could see one guy sidling toward me out of the corner of my eye. Finally Sandy Alomar Jr. rushed in and saved me from possibly being pile driven or hit with the roll of quarters Albert no doubt kept in his waistband for just such occasions.”

“It was then I turned to find Plain Dealer baseball writer Paul Hoynes at my side. Hoynsie is one of the greats. He also happened to play rugby at Marquette. I told him I appreciated him not moving away like everybody else and asked him what he was going to do if Belle started getting physical. He said, “Go for his legs.” He’s been my hero ever since.”

Position: Columnist, The Plain Dealer

Born: Aug. 23, 1954, Philadelphia

Education: Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1976, B.S. Journalism

Career: Kittanning (Pa.) Leader Times, 1976-77; Johnstown (Pa.) Tribune Democrat, 77-78; Trenton (N.J.) Times, 78-80; Philadelphia Daily News 80-82; San Diego Tribune 1982-84; Atlanta Journal-Constitution 1984-89; The National Sports Daily 1989-91; The Plain Dealer 1991 –

Personal: Married, two children

Favorite Restaurant (home): Momocho, Ohio City – “mod Mex with any kind of guacomole you can imagine.”

Favorite Restaurant (away): P.F. Chang’s – “Hear me out. Yes I know it’s a chain but I’m vegetarian and they know their way around tofu”

Favorite Hotel: The Hotel del Coronado, San Diego

Bud Shaw’s ‘Sports Spin’, excerpted from The Plain Dealer, August 14, 2008:

Braylon Edwards will likely miss two exhibition games.

Edwards, needing stitches after teammate Donte Stallworth spiked him, might be a blessing for the Browns.

The NFL preseason is already too long. Whatever small setback Edwards might experience in either conditioning or in chemistry with quarterback Derek Anderson is offset by the fact that this injury reduces the chances of him suffering a more serious one – like having Shaun Rogers fall on him.

Part of growing up

Edwards Part II: Romeo Crennel gives new meaning to the phrase, “What, me worry?”

Crennel’s explanation for why Edwards was running in his socks along with teammates wearing spikes showed a lack of concern among other things.

“Kids are kids,” Crennel said. “You look at kids. They take their shoes off and run around all the time. . . We’ll educate him a little bit more and tell him about keeping his shoes on until he gets inside.”

Just for clarification, Edwards is 25.

Educational class topics over the next three weeks could include: “Running With Scissors – Why It’s a Bad Idea” and “You Can Put Somebody’s Eye Out With That”

Got an ID?

Legendary gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi believes some gymnasts on the gold-medal Chinese team are underage.

As long as the International Gymnastics Federation insists on a minimum age and only requires a government issued passport as proof, there will be questions about the “youth movement” in some countries.

China’s Deng Linlin (4-6, 68 pounds) and Jiang Yuyuan (4-7, 70 pounds) have raised suspicions, basically because they could fit on your dashboard.

“They are using half-people,” Karolyi told the Associated Press. “One of the biggest frustrations is, ‘what arrogance.’ These people think we are stupid.”

The two high chairs set up at China’s team meals did seem a dead giveaway.

What, no motoball?

The Beijing Games are draw-ing good ratings for NBC.

You know the reasons. Michael Phelps. The beauty of gymnastics and diving. Ratings should improve even more when track and field starts.

But there’s also a lot of unwatchable events, too.

Here’s my list of the worst Olympic sports, Summer and Winter, after covering three of each (Calgary, Seoul, Atlanta, Nagano, Sydney and Salt Lake City).

1. Shooting: Spectators sit in auditorium-like seating. The target is projected overhead for viewing. Think of the worst audio-visual class you’ve ever sat through.

2. Doubles luge: Really, get a room.

3. Greco-Roman wrestling: Apologies to Matt Ghaffari, but 30 seconds into heavyweight matches both big men are too slippery to grab. Sumo without the diapers.

4. Modern Pentathlon: The roots trace to 708 B.C. Now that’s modern.

5. Biathlon: Paint-ball guns aimed at each other would be an improvement.

Note: It’s not an Olympic sport, but the strangest international sport I’ve ever witnessed came during the inaugural Goodwill Games in Moscow in 1986 – motoball. Teams of motorcycle riders would advance an oversized soccer ball down the field and attempt to kick it in a goal. For some reason, no one ever shows up at goalie tryouts.

Say cheesy

The Spanish men’s basketball team is defending a team picture that is running as a full-page ad in Spain.

The photo shows all 15 players using their fingers to make their eyes look slanted while posing on a basketball court adorned with a Chinese dragon.

“We felt. . . it would be interpreted as an affectionate gesture,” Spain point guard Jose Manuel Calderon wrote on his ElMundo.es blog.

How warm and fuzzy. Calderon said the team took a cue from the photographer.

Who was the photog? Don Imus?

Q. Your ‘Sports Spin’ column reads like stand-up comedy. Does that come naturally? Do you have to be a smart aleck to be a sports columnist?

A. When I was asked to contribute a Page 2 column, I remember wishing I could print out the work of some guys I really admire in the business — Dave Kindred, Bob Verdi, Scott Ostler, Steve Hummer, Norman Chad, Ray Ratto, Mark Whicker – put it all under my pillow and wake up wittier by osmosis. Writing funny is difficult, a fact I prove twice a week. And in a newspaper that runs Chad, who makes it look easy, that may not be the smartest approach. I once followed Gary Smith on the Eagles beat at the Philadelphia Daily News. I have those same feelings of inadequacy now when I read the humor that other columnists, not to mention writers like David Sedaris, bring to the job

I don’t know if it’s a requirement to be a smart aleck but deep down I guess I’ve never been able to take sports all that seriously. So much about the oversized stage sports enjoys in our culture – thank goodness for that — and the egos involved invites you to look at it a little sideways. When I was at The National as the Chicago Bureau Chief I got to read Verdi and Bernie Lincicome regularly. Two approaches but the same bright, funny result.

Q. Did you write off the Indians prematurely? Will the real Indians please stand up?

A. I broke a 17-year streak and picked a local team to win a world championship in the pre-season. Of course, it hasn’t been difficult to avoid looking like a front runner in a town where the last title was 1964. But I thought the Indians could return to the World Series this season. So I wrote them in before I wrote them off. Injuries were a part of the reason for their collapse but as they proved in August when they not only were missing Travis Hafner, Victor Martinez and Jake Westbrook but had already traded away C.C. Sabathia, Casey Blake and Paul Byrd, they could’ve played competitive baseball much sooner. We should know by now that the real Indians do stand up, but only every other year or so.

Q. Is it touchy to ask why you didn’t go to Beijing? Did you wish you were there?

A. The Plain Dealer had three Olympic credentials but turned them back in to the U.S. Olympic Committee because of budget considerations. I was not scheduled to go. My Olympic flame isn’t quite extinguished but I covered my sixth Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002 and haven’t felt a great desire to do another since. I think it’s a great event.

But I’ve long felt it was a tremendous TV show first and foremost, a TV show that hasn’t always translated to print. Of course, the Internet offers much more immediacy than we had as writers covering the Olympics in the 1980s and early 1990s. I was lucky enough to be in Calgary, Seoul, Atlanta, Nagano, Sydney and Salt Lake. I covered the Atlanta bid for the 1996 Games before leaving Atlanta for The National. It was a great experience. If I don’t go to another, well, three Winters and three Summers feels like a pretty good career sampler.

Q. You’re known for being a good interviewer. How do you get people to open up? Who was your toughest interview?

A. There’s a basic curiosity we all have or we wouldn’t have elected to go into sports writing. I think being a good interviewer – not that I’m sure I belong in that category – is a product of the jobs you’ve held. I was a beat writer first, then a takeout writer, then a columnist. I think beat work makes you comfortable with approaching players, coaches and other interview subjects because you have to do it daily. The takeout work I did in San Diego and Atlanta helped me look a little deeper into subjects,. Just the nature of that job allows you much more time to get to know people.

I found it a little unnerving in Atlanta where I worked for the late Van McKenzie who was willing to give you a lot of time to interview and write if he felt he’d see the benefits in the finished product. I’d go a few weeks or more without being in the paper and when I came into the office I knew people were thinking, “What a slacker, this better be good when he finally writes it.” It made you go back and make sure you got what you needed from the people you were talking to for the story.

Probably the toughest interview I ever did was with Bob Knight. A mutual friend – Dave Kindred – had smoothed the way for me with Knight. I knew that going in. But I wasn’t quite prepared for what that meant to Knight. Every time I asked a question he didn’t like, he’d lean in and say, “You know, don’t you, that there’s only one reason I’m even talking to you.” He was alternately charismatic and nasty. I felt I was talking to the smartest guy I’d ever met. But the bullying was always there and when the interview ended, he asked me if wanted to go do dinner with him and one of his coaches. I didn’t go. I’d already had enough of the Good Cop-Bad Cop treatment, all from the same guy.

Q. What do you look for in choosing your columns? Do website hits influence your choices?

A. Website hits haven’t really changed my approach. It has always been true in Cleveland that if you write about the Browns the response is often overwhelming. If you dropped the names “Kosar” Or “Modell” into a column on synchronized diving I’d bet you’d lead that day’s count in letters and phone calls.. And now if you update the references and can work in Brady Quinn’s name and the term “quarterback controversy” somewhere along the way, there’s no limit to the website hits you’d get.

Really, other than being aware of people’s passions – Browns, LeBron, anything anti-Steelers – I don’t purposely write things just to get a reaction. Maybe I should but it’s always felt contrived to me to be that columnist who screams for the sake of screaming – not to mention that you end up contradicting yourself before too long.

Q. Your most controversial column? Any columns you wish you hadn’t written?

A. I have a different answer to this than some of the PD readers might have. I still get mail from a guy who reminds me that I wrote that Manny Ramirez was such a disaster fundamentally as a rookie that he should be sent back to the minors even if it meant playing Wayne Kirby in his place. I don’t remember suggesting that Manny be banished to Triple A for a period no shorter than the rest of his life until he could learn to lay down a good squeeze bunt but I’ll take the hit on that one. That was shortsighted. Of course, when Wayne Kirby goes into Cooperstown, who will have the last laugh then? Huh? Right. Me.

A column I always consider “controversial” was one I wrote on Albert Belle during his 50-homer, 50-double season. I thought it was controversial because it led directly to a debate in Albert’s mind as to whether I should be body slammed or simply thrown off the mezzanine level. I spent part of the column writing about how this guy had made himself into such a student of hitting by keeping index cards in his locker and adding to his card catalog after every game. What pitches he saw. The count. The ump. The situation. He’d make notes on all of it. I found out he did that from interviewing manager Mike Hargrove and one of his coaches, Davey Nelson. When I approached Albert to talk to him about it, he cursed me and told me to go away. That was par for the course with him.

I mentioned in the column that if he even tried just a little not to be the world’s biggest jerk, he’d own the city. It led to an ugly scene in the clubhouse the next day. Albert accused me of going into his locker and reading his index cards. Uh, right. Nobody, including other players, went anywhere near Albert’s locker. I’d be more likely to willingly visit a hell mouth.

I noticed as the confrontation was developing that lots of players and media were moving away from where Albert and I were standing. I could see one guy sidling toward me out of the corner of my eye. Finally Sandy Alomar Jr. rushed in and saved me from possibly being pile driven or hit with the roll of quarters Albert no doubt kept in his waistband for just such occasions.

It was then I turned to find Plain Dealer baseball writer Paul Hoynes at my side. Hoynsie is one of the greats. He also happened to play rugby at Marquette. I told him I appreciated him not moving away like everybody else and asked him what he was going to do if Belle started getting physical. He said, “Go for his legs.” He’s been my hero ever since.

Q. Who and what do you read and watch to keep up with sports – both mainstream and non-mainstream media? How much time do you put into it?

A. I like the Sportspages.com site. Not just the Top Ten but I go through individual papers to read how different columnists handled a big event, or a developing story. I mentioned some of the people I seek out on a consistent basis but there are a bunch more that are so good they make me feel like going into another business.

I do that at least three or four times a week along with checking ESPN several times a day. Since it’s a topics show, I try to watch Pardon the Interruption as much as possible. There might be something Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon throw out for discussion that leads me to an item for the notes column. Those guys are great together so I watch simply to be entertained, too.

Q. Is LeBron destined to leave the Cavs? Say it ain’t so.

A. That’s a question that strikes at the heart of the Cleveland sports fan because it ratchets an already deep-set inferiority complex. LeBron is a local guy AND HE STILL MIGHT LEAVE? Not just leave but go to New York?

I believe James will leave and when he goes it should be with no feelings of guilt associated with abandonment. He’ll have given the Cavaliers seven years. That’s enough of a commitment even if they don’t win a title before he goes. And if they do win a title, he’ll have delivered something the city hasn’t seen in almost a half century. When you’re 23 and grilling Warren Buffett for his keys to success, and when the talk is of becoming a “global icon,” it tells me he’s thinking a little beyond the 330 he’s got tattooed on his body. That’s the Akron area code. Me? When I was 23 I was only drinking shots with Warren Buffett. And now I forget everything he told me.

Q. Can the Browns make the playoffs with those awful brown pants? Do they need a logo on their helmets? Have you ever incurred the wrath of the Dawg Pound?

A. A reader recently lamented that the Browns, barring “divine intervention,” looked on track to become even a bigger disappointment than the Indians were in 2008. I happen to think they’ll make the playoffs because their offense is that good. I think it’s a far better place to put your trust than in The Man Upstairs. Not that I’m an atheist. But it should be obvious to everyone that if God cared even a little about Romeo Crennel’s team he wouldn’t have let them take the field in those all-brown pants during the exhibition season. Those things needed a stripe or a Tinker Bell buckle or something,

I like the helmets without any logo. I hope they stay that way. I do a “PD Roundtable” TV show once a week and occasionally someone will call in and wonder if it’s time to bring back the elf. Seems back in the day an elf logo showed up on the parkas the team would sometimes wear on the sideline. I ask you. Does it sound like a good idea for a city trying to get beyond inferiority issues to rally around an elf?

Bud Shaw, The Plain Dealer, August 3, 2008:

The odds of Manny Ramirez wearing a Cleveland hat when he goes into the Hall of Fame just got better by default.

Of course, they are still outweighed by the odds he will forget to wear any hat, shirt, pants or shoes and will be inducted in his fright wig and nothing else.

“When people ask about Boston, I put my brain on pause,” Ramirez said in his first press conference with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He meant he didn’t want to revisit the acrimony that followed him to L.A. at the trade deadline.

In truth, though, Ramirez’s brain needs no prompting to go on pause. It spends chunks of every day idling there.

“Pause” is a natural default function when his head gets too filled with the nettlesome details of baseball – number of outs, hitting the cutoff man, even stuff like remembering that as the left fielder he’s really not the cutoff man for the center fielder.

Manny played and talked his way out of Boston, saying the Red Sox didn’t deserve him.

Some teammates who tolerated his quirky behavior over the years didn’t find the humor in Ramirez taking himself out of the lineup against the Yankees and not running hard with a chance to break up a no-hitter in another game.

Ramirez doesn’t believe that his teammates turned on him, preferring to think the front office is spreading stories like that to discredit him in the eyes of Boston’s fans.

Let’s just say that makes La-La Land the perfect place for him.

Boston newspapers reported Ramirez tried to lobby to stay with the Red Sox at the deadline, which wouldn’t be surprising since his career is dotted with instances where he didn’t know whether he was coming or going.

Agent Scott Boras told reporters that Ramirez “preferred another city along the lines of the lifestyle he had in Cleveland.”

Yessir. Cleveland and L.A. Peas in a pod.

I was just making that point to Martin Scorsese over skewers of braised tofu at lunch in the shadow of Progressive Field the other day. “Marty,” I said . . .

So Boston is more intense than L.A. Tell me something I didn’t know.

Lifestyle wasn’t Ramirez’s problem. He didn’t really have a problem until he crossed the line from quirky free spirit to the half-dog, half-diva he became in his final season there.

“The Red Sox don’t deserve a player like me,” Ramirez told ESPNdeportes.com Wednesday. “During my years here, I’ve seen how they [the Red Sox] have mistreated other great players when they didn’t want them to try to turn the fans against them.

“The Red Sox did the same with guys like Nomar Garciaparra and Pedro Martinez, and now they do the same with me. Their goal is to paint me as the bad guy. I love Boston fans, but the Red Sox don’t deserve me. I’m not talking about money. Mental peace has no price, and I don’t have peace here.”

He’s right about one thing. The Red Sox didn’t deserve him. They deserved a grown-up.

(SMG thanks Bud Shaw for his cooperation)

An Interview with Tom Shatel

“I hate to say it, but the voices of sports columnists get a little bit lost these days, with cable, talk radio, and Internet.”

“It’s almost like fans want to be sportswriters, through the blogs.”

Tom Shatel. Interviewed August 23, 2006.

Position: Columnist, Omaha World-Herald.

Born: 1958, Tulsa, Okla.

Education: University of Missouri, BJ, 1980.

Career: KC Star 1980-90, Dallas Morning News 90-91, Omaha World-Herald 1991-

Personal: Married, two children.

Favorite Sports Movies: Caddyshack, Tin Cup, Hoosiers, Paper Lion.

Hobby: Golf.

Tom Shatel excerpted from the Omaha World-Herald, October, 25, 1995:

In his illustrious 23-year career as Nebraska’s head coach, Tom Osborne has made more than his share of good calls. This is not one of them.

I have always respected Osborne as a man and, secondly, as a football coach. But some of that respect was lost Tuesday when Osborne announced that Lawrence Phillips, who assaulted his ex-girlfriend on Sept. 10, was reinstated to the team and would be allowed to play Nov. 4 against Iowa State.

But I’ve lost even more respect for University of Nebraska-Lincoln officials, including Athletic Director Bill Byrne, who allowed Phillips to return this season. The University of Nebraska is less a quality institution today than it was yesterday. And Byrne less an athletic administrator today than yesterday.

One of the school’s students, a female, was beaten up by a fellow male student. One of Byrne’s female student-athletes was beaten up by one of his male student-athletes. And now we’re supposed to all return to the field and pretend this never happened.

….One thing is for sure: The rest of the country will see Osborne in a different light. Just months ago, the entire nation seemingly embraced him for a stately career of service to young people and the game of football. When the cleanest coach finally won the “Big One,” it gave America hope.

But today there is a spot on Osborne’s image. America is in no mood to tolerate domestic violence, especially this month, National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Now Osborne has taken a young man who committed physical violence on a woman and returned him to the field in two months. Osborne says, “I can take the heat.” The heat will come, like never before.

Q. Which of your columns created the strongest response?

A. October, 1995, when (Nebraska football coach) Tom Osborne brought (running back) Lawrence Phillips back to the team (after a domestic violence incident). I said as gently as possible that it was a big mistake, that playing college football is a privilege, not a right, that you could accomplish the same thing by letting him practice if he needs structure, and by being around the team and going to study hall, that playing him sent the wrong message. I basically questioned the authority above him. That got some nice play. The majority of readers basically told me to shut up and sit down and leave town or whatever. One letter I got from a grandmother in Grand Island blamed it on the girl for getting Phillips in trouble.

I’ve talked with Tom about it since and totally believe he had the right motives – he did it for the right reasons. But I totally disagreed with him. The bottom line was Tom was trying to play him so he could get drafted and get the hell out of there.

Q. Did it change your approach to the job?

A. Not really. I was never told what to write here. I felt like I could say what I wanted. I think surviving that gave me a little more strength. I don’t flaunt that. I try to go the other way. I try to be less loud and offer more perspective. I don’t think we get enough perspective in journalism. Everything is way too loud – too much style and not enough substance. Does that make sense?

Q. Do columnists have to be moral and ethical judges?

A. That’s your job if you are a columnist. You’re not a reporter. You do it with less credibility than a priest or a judge. There’s so much out there now, I hate to say it, but the voices of sports columnists get a little bit lost these days, with cable, talk radio, and internet. It has changed the landscape of what we’re trying to do. It’s a lot different than 20 years ago.

Q. But isn’t the World-Herald still dominant?

A. This is one of the last bastions where a newspaper still is big. Everybody still reads it. Obviously small towns have Internet, but I think my voice is still bigger here than in other places. There isn’t much competition; we’re the only paper that circulates in the whole state. I think I’m the only full-time columnist in the state. There is talk radio in Omaha and blogs.

Q. How much impact do the blogs have?

A. A lot of fans put more stock in blogs than newspapers. It’s interesting to me. I read a lot of blogs and message boards. Some of these blogs are obsessed with getting things first. They want to break stories and they do. It happens. Their members know somebody and they get something. It’s almost like fans want to be sportswriters, through the blogs.

Q. Do you keep up with the blogs and message boards?

A. I like to see what the average fan is saying. Not that it affects what I write. I like to see what they’re saying. It’s like a giant sports bar. Or a bunch of small sports bars where people hang out and talk about football or sports. It’s fascinating. I hate to say it but in some cases our credibility is not what it used to be. It’s eroded.

A couple of years ago we had a story breaking here. Our sports editor said we’d hold off until the last edition, until after the TV news is over, and we’ll have a scoop. I said it will be on a website in an hour – don’t wait. We waited, and consequently we were last when we went up an hour later.

A lot of readers are going to rivals.com sites. Huskersillustrated.com is part of rivals. They do features and break news. Some of these guys help the coaches recruit, so they get scoops. They’re full-time staffers, but some of these guys are in bed with the schools and coaches.

Q. But their credibility will suffer in the long run, won’t it?

A. The public doesn’t care. People out there think huskersillustrated.com is the place to go if you want Nebraska news. It had a story today – an Arizona State quarterback is transferring to Nebraska. That’s reality. But it’s unfair if they’re in bed with the coaching staff and get special access. So it’s a different world. I think that’s where we’re going. Newspapers will exist for columns and perspective.

The other thing is if you go to J-school, be aware of this, franchises, pro sports franchises, are hiring writers who cover the teams for the websites. Jonathan Rand, who wrote a column for the KC Star, is covering the Chiefs for kcchiefs.com. What kind of access does he get? I’m wondering how long before the colleges start doing this. Before they say “we’re going to control all the information and you’re going to get what we want you to have.” Some coaches have websites – you have to monitor them to see when they break some news.

My question is “Who is the journalist?” The newspaper or the pro sports franchise? And these are guys who used to be on newspapers. The line is going to get very blurry. If you’re a fan are you going to the Boston Globe or to the Red Sox website? Hopefully you go to the Globe. It’s got one of the best sports sections around. I love to read Dan Shaughnessy and Bob Ryan.

There always will be a need for a columnist – that’s why I have a great job. But if you’re a beat writer you’re going up against rivals.com, mlb.com, kcchiefs.com, and a lot of different forces. How is the information being released in the future?

Q. But isn’t being first over-rated? What’s the difference if you post news 20 minutes earlier if your credibility is compromised?

A. I hope so. Would you rather be first or would you rather be the outlet that tells you why it happened and have the good in-depth interviews and great writing, plus the integrity and credibility? If I were the sports editor my tack would be to be best rather than first.

It’s a wacky world now if you want to be a sportswriter. And it’s changing by the year. I’m not trying to paint a scary picture.

Q. What do you read?

A. I dropped my subscription to SI because I wasn’t reading it anymore. Lots of stuff was old. I think they lost their fastball. I read espn.com. They have good writing and it’s right now. I love Rick Reilly and Gary Smith. But some stuff in SI, by the time it comes out, I’m on to the next deal.

Q. What about SI.com?

A. I read SI.com, sure. But the magazine is obsolete.

Q. Do you read ESPN the Magazine?

A. It has very good writing, too. But I always thought it was hard to read. I don’t know if it’s an ad or a story half the time. I do like the writing. But I’m not going to read Stuart Scott’s column, for god’s sake. They just hired Wright Thompson. They’re hiring very good writers.

Q. How do you stay abreast of the news?

A. Sportspages.com. If I want a column or a takeout on something that happened it’s right there. And espn.com. SI.com, CBS sportsline.com and foxsports.com all have the same stuff – basically they’re all doing the same quality. I go to espn.com out of a personal choice. I know a lot of their guys who cover colleges.

Q. Why doesn’t sportspages.com pick up World-Herald stories?

A. I don’t know. I e-mailed the guy who does that – Rich Johnson – and said I’d love to be on there occasionally. He said we needed to archive my columns but our website won’t do that.

Q. Does it have a regional bias?

A. Maybe the things we write about aren’t interesting to national people. They don’t do a lot of college stuff anyway. You don’t see a lot of Austin American-Statesman stuff.

Q. How powerful is sportspages.com in the industry?

A. It’s just a bookmark. I glance at the Top 10. I’m not interested in half the stuff. I read every sports section in the Big 12 every day. Topeka, Wichita, Boulder, Denver, Lawrence, Des Moines, St. Louis, KC. Some in the morning – some at night.

Q. Keeping up is a major task?

A. With two kids, yes. But look, in the old days I went to a bookstore in downtown Kansas City and bought week-old papers.

Q. It’s easier to be smarter today?

A. No excuse not to be.

(SMG thanks Tom Shatel for his cooperation)

TOM SHATEL

‘Osborne’s Decision Bad’

25 October 1995

The Omaha World-Herald

(Copyright 1995 Omaha World-Herald Company)

In his illustrious 23-year career as Nebraska’s head coach, Tom Osborne has made more than his share of good calls. This is not one of them.

I have always respected Osborne as a man and, secondly, as a football coach. But some of that respect was lost Tuesday when Osborne announced that Lawrence Phillips, who assaulted his ex-girlfriend on Sept. 10, was reinstated to the team and would be allowed to play Nov. 4 against Iowa State.

But I’ve lost even more respect for University of Nebraska-Lincoln officials, including Athletic Director Bill Byrne, who allowed Phillips to return this season. The University of Nebraska is less a quality institution today than it was yesterday. And Byrne less an athletic administrator today than yesterday.

Pretending One of the school’s students, a female, was beaten up by a fellow male student. One of Byrne’s female student-athletes was beaten up by one of his male student-athletes. And now we’re supposed to all return to the field and pretend this never happened.

There was plenty of time to deliberate this decision, plenty of time to mull the consequences. This was no knee-jerk reaction. But as soon as Phillips was reinstated as a student by the university on Monday, Interim Chancellor Joan Leitzel and Byrne stepped aside and let Osborne handle the tough decision, which was made in his mind long ago.

It’s not surprising Ms. Leitzel wouldn’t intervene; as an interim chancellor, this was one hot potato. But I thought Byrne would step in and hold up a stop sign. I thought wrong. As a UNL spokesperson said Monday, “Coach Osborne has the ability to suspend somebody from the team or bring somebody back.”

True. After all, Osborne is the football coach.

And maybe he’s a lot more, too.

‘Good Judgment’ “What I saw was 35 years of good judgment,” said Byrne, referring to Osborne, “and I had more access to information than the general public did. After I had access to that information, I was in complete agreement with Tom.

“This action doesn’t say what happened was right. This action says that if this had happened to Joe Q. Student, he would not be banned from extracurricular activities as long as he was a student.

“Lawrence has had sanctions and is continuing to have sanctions. Now the question will be, are those sanctions severe enough? That is a debatable point. Everyone who looks at the case will look at it a different way.”

What it looks like is carte blanche for future male students at Nebraska to harass or abuse females and get similar treatment. Byrne disagreed.

“This action does not condone what happened,” Byrne said. “This action says if you commit acts of violence, there will be sanctions. I believe the previous and ongoing sanctions justify his return.”

Restitution What we know is that Phillips must pay restitution for damage done at the apartment complex he broke into and medical or counseling fees for Kate McEwen. Those won’t be inexpensive. He also must participate in regular meetings with his counselor and psychiatrist and perform two hours of community service a week. And any further sanctions of the Student Code of Conduct “will result in significantly more severe sanctions.”

In other words, next time he may have to play on the scout team for two weeks.

If these are the university rules and sanctions, then they need to be updated. An action like this, whether premeditated or under “out-of-control” circumstances, should include a ban of all extracurricular activities – particularly for someone like Phillips, who was supposedly out of second chances. Expulsion may be a bit harsh. But maybe we should ask the victims of physical abuse and date rape about that.

So why would Osborne allow Phillips back? The image around the country will be that this is all about victories and championships, but that’s not even close.

This is all about Osborne, as college football’s Father Flanagan, looking at all the evidence and circumstances and trying to save a young life. This part of the job isn’t in his contract – Osborne offers it strictly out of his heart.

As Spencer Tracy said in the movie “Boys Town,”: “There is no bad boy.”

“Tom firmly believes in the inherent worth of young people and everyone has to have the opportunity to correct mistakes,” Byrne said. “This isn’t the Ayatollah regime around here. We don’t cut off hands, legs and feet.”

But Osborne said Phillips had been warned about staying away from McEwen and was out of chances when the incident occurred. Osborne‘s biggest mistake was initially dismissing Phillips, then reversing field and opening the door in order to give Phillips a carrot to shoot for.

Phillips‘ is a poignant story. He spent much of his childhood without parents, getting beaten down by life, without much female love to speak of. McEwen was apparently his first love, and he snapped. It’s a sad story. But, again, none of that excuses what he did.

And when Osborne says football is a “major organizing strength” in Phillips‘ life, it should be remembered that Phillips had football in his life the night he scaled a wall and dragged McEwen down the stairs.

Osborne is gambling that that won’t happen again, that weeks of counseling have changed a young man. He says, “I think we’ll see a little different person.”

We better see a lot different person.

One thing is for sure: The rest of the country will see Osborne in a different light. Just months ago, the entire nation seemingly embraced him for a stately career of service to young people and the game of football. When the cleanest coach finally won the “Big One,” it gave America hope.

But today there is a spot on Osborne‘s image. America is in no mood to tolerate domestic violence, especially this month, National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Now Osborne has taken a young man who committed physical violence on a woman and returned him to the field in two months. Osborne says, “I can take the heat.” The heat will come, like never before.

Why bother? Because Osborne doesn’t care about the public outcry and won’t be swayed by the “popular thing.” Osborne has always marched to his own drummer, always been stubborn about his ways and morals. He listens to his conscience and it must be filled with emotion. On Tuesday, his voice quivered and nearly cracked when he talked about Phillips.

“I really, really tried to do the right thing,” Osborne said. “I’m prepared to live with it.”

He will have plenty of support in his home state, mostly from people who say “I trust Tom. Whatever he says is good enough for me.”

But from what I have heard and read in letters the past week, I also know that many other Nebraskans have lost some respect for Osborne today. That’s too bad. It just adds to the saddest story.

Perhaps the saddest part is that a young woman was violated here, then got lost in the debate.

Through it all, several people have wondered why Minnesota Vikings quarterback Warren Moon could beat his wife, apologize and play again without question, while Phillips is being held to another, higher standard. The best answer to that is that Phillips is still a college student and, hopefully, colleges are in the business of preparing America’s youth to become better people.

Today, the University of Nebraska has to ask itself if that is what happened here.

An Interview with Alan Schwarz

“…my job would be to gather information on — in this case — the causes and effects of brain injuries among football players, not to assess any marketing hit the league might sustain as a result. That being said, to steal from P.T. Barnum, it seems to me that few if any industries have ever gone broke by overestimating Americans’ zest for violence.”

“I have decided that given the fractured state of American media, and the impending demands that journalists create stories for delivery across a spectrum of platforms, I am better served not thinking of myself as a writer — though of course I am committed to that first — but as a content developer/provider, primarily print but audio and video as well. Journalists who fight that probably won’t be journalists for long.”

Alan Schwarz: Interviewed on April 27, 2007

Position: reporter, New York Times

Born: 1968, White Plains, N.Y.

Education: University of Pennsylvania, B.A., mathematics, 1990

Career: The National (Editorial Assistant, 1990); Baseball America (Senior Writer, 1991-2007), Inside Sports (Media Columnist, 1997-98), New York Times (contributor, 1998-2007, staff reporter, March 2007 –

Personal: married, one son.

Favorite restaurant (home): Ruth’s Chris Steak House, NY “I know it’s a chain, but it’s sinfully good every single doggone time”; Ivy’s Bistro, TriBeCa “I ate there right after 9/11 with a restaurant-reviewer friend, the review helped save the place, and I’ve been friends with the owner ever since”

Favorite restaurant (away): Wild Ginger, Seattle “incredible Asian/fusion food, great atmosphere, referred there by ESPN’s Jim Caple”

Favorite hotel: Renaissance Madison, Seattle “mostly because I love Seattle in the summer”

Author of: “Once Upon a Game”, 2007; “The Numbers Game”, 2004

Alan Schwarz excerpted from the New York Times, January 18, 2007:

Since the former National Football League player Andre Waters killed himself in November, an explanation for his suicide
has remained a mystery. But after examining remains of Mr. Waters’s brain, a neuropathologist in Pittsburgh is claiming that Mr. Waters had sustained brain damage from playing football and he says that led to his depression
and ultimate death.

The neuropathologist, Dr. Bennet Omalu of the University of Pittsburgh
, a leading expert in forensic pathology, determined that Mr. Waters’s brain tissue had degenerated into that of an 85-year-old man with similar characteristics as those of early-stage Alzheimer’s
victims. Dr. Omalu said he believed that the damage was either caused or drastically expedited by successive concussions Mr. Waters, 44, had sustained playing football.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Omalu said that brain trauma “is the significant contributory factor” to Mr. Waters’s brain damage, “no matter how you look at it, distort it, bend it. It’s the significant forensic factor given the global scenario.”

He added that although he planned further investigation, the depression that family members recalled Mr. Waters exhibiting in his final years was almost certainly exacerbated, if not caused, by the state of his brain — and that if he had lived, within 10 or 15 years “Andre Waters would have been fully incapacitated.”

Dr. Omalu’s claims of Mr. Waters’s brain deterioration — which have not been corroborated or reviewed — add to the mounting scientific debate over whether victims of multiple concussions, and specifically longtime N.F.L. players who may or may not know their full history of brain trauma, are at heightened risk of depression, dementia and suicide as early as midlife.

The N.F.L. declined to comment on Mr. Waters’s case specifically. A member of the league’s mild traumatic brain injury committee, Dr. Andrew Tucker, said that the N.F.L. was beginning a study of retired players later this year to examine the more general issue of football concussions and subsequent depression.

Q. Where is the NFL concussion/brain damage story headed?

A. By putting three stories on the front page this year, the Times clearly has evinced itself as committed to examining the risks, both understood and not, of playing football with respect to brain injuries. I’m afraid I can’t go into further details because your site is undoubtedly read by my competition.

Q. How has your coverage of NFL concussions/brain damage affected your perception of the game?

A. I really didn’t have any perception of football per se before I began my work. While I know my share about football through watching games over the years, my professional background has been almost exclusively covering baseball. I think it is a positive — for readers, the Times and the NFL — that my work on this topic began and continues with as clean a slate as could reasonably be expected.

Q. Could football lose audience if fans draw a causal relationship to brain damage – similar to boxing?

A. You are assuming that fan interest in boxing has declined because of the pugilistica dementia suffered by some of its participants. I don’t know that to be true. Beyond that, my job would be to gather information on — in this case — the causes and effects of brain injuries among football players, not to assess any marketing hit the league might sustain as a result. That being said, to steal from P.T. Barnum, it seems to me that few if any industries have ever gone broke by overestimating Americans’ zest for violence.

Q. Explain your use of video to complement your stories – what restrictions and gray areas exist? What multi-platform strategy would you recommend to a young journalist starting out today?

A. This is a fascinating new area that I have tried to learn quickly — basically to stave off my own professional obsolescence. As we all know, newspapers have had to adapt to demands of the market (particularly among youth) for multimedia content. Also, they don’t want to just listen to some Jewish guy from New York who couldn’t play sports to save his life prattle on about the games and personalities — they want to see and hear the players themselves.

So I decided about a year ago to learn how to cut and produce my own audio and video stories on my laptop, using software like Audacity and Adobe Premier. When I did an interview with Si Simmons, a 110-year-old former Negro Leaguer, for a print story in the New York Times, I brought along a video camera — and produced a 10-minute highlight reel for my website, alanschwarz.com. When I conducted interviews for my book of player memories (“Once Upon a Game”), I also produced audio clips so people could go to my site and hear the players talking rather than just reading their words on a page.

I have decided that given the fractured state of American media, and the impending demands that journalists create stories for delivery across a spectrum of platforms, I am better served not thinking of myself as a writer — though of course I am committed to that first — but as a content developer/provider, primarily print but audio and video as well. Journalists who fight that probably won’t be journalists for long.

Q. Who and what do you read in sports? Who were your writing influences?

A. The best baseball writer working today, bar none, has for years been Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated. No one else mixes such precise reporting, grace, structure, humor and understanding of the game than him, and it’s not even close. Less known to most folks is the wonderful work done for 20 years by Jerry Crasnick (ESPN.com) and Jim Caple (ESPN.com). I have no formal journalism training at all – I was a mathematics major, for heaven’s sake – but in many respects those three guys taught me how to do this.

Other primary influences include the lyrics of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Paul Simon, and the long and wonderful sentences of Scott Fitzgerald.

(SMG thanks Alan Schwarz for his cooperation)

An Interview with Peter Schmuck

“I’m pretty sure the distinctiveness of the name has helped me throughout my career. It also has given me a thicker skin – in a ‘Boy Named Sue’ kind of way – in a business where that isn’t a bad thing to have.”

“I was always into humor, so I’d say my biggest influence from a sports and column perspective was Jim Murray, though I certainly don’t write like he did. It was just great to work in the same press box with him for a few years and get to know him. “

Peter Schmuck: Interviewed on December 2, 2008

Position: columnist, Baltimore Sun; talk show host, WBAL radio

Born: 1955, Southern California

Education: Cal State Fullerton, English

Career: Orange County Register 1978-1990; Baltimore Sun 1990 – ; WBAL radio 2003-

Personal: Married, two children.

Favorite restaurant (home): P.F. Chang’s, Baltimore

Favorite restaurant (away): Captain Jack’s, Sunset Beach, Calif.

Favorite hotel: Marriott Eastside, New York, “Great location – classic Manhattan charm.”

Peter Schmuck, excerpted from the Baltimore Sun, November 2, 2008:

News item: The Orioles will hold a rally this month to introduce the team’s new uniforms for the 2009 season. The road uniform is expected to have “Baltimore” on the front of the jersey.

My take: That’s great, but when it’s all said and done, I think fans are going to care more whether “Roberts” and “Teixeira” are on the back of a couple of them.

News item: The Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series on Wednesday night after waiting 46hours between the top of the sixth inning and the bottom.

My take: Honestly, it was a very entertaining 3 1/2 -inning game, and it ended early enough for school kids to actually watch the Phillies’ celebration. That’s important because most of those kids will probably be collecting Social Security the next time a team in Philadelphia wins a world title.

News item: The Orioles still have not firmed up their plans for a permanent spring training site. They’re expected to be in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., next spring but have made no commitment to train anywhere in 2010. The most likely location still appears to be the Dodgertown complex in Vero Beach, Fla.

My take: In the most likely scenario, however, the Orioles will try to play Vero Beach off the soon-to-be-vacant complex in Sarasota, Fla., and end up without a permanent resolution to a situation that has been unsettled since – believe it or not – 1990.

Bonus my take: Based on conversations with several people who have attempted it, negotiating with Peter and John Angelos is like trying to eat soup with a fork.

News item: Hundreds of thousands of Phillies fans lined the streets Friday for the city’s first world championship parade in 25 years.

My take: Now, let me get this straight. It was Halloween and everyone in Philadelphia was dressed up like a winner? I’m confused.

News item: New San Francisco 49ers coach Mike Singletary took some heat last week after dropping his pants as part of a halftime rant during his head coaching debut last Sunday.

My take: I’ve got no problem with that, and I bet the great halftime motivator Knute Rockne wouldn’t have a problem with it, either. If the players don’t want to see it happen again, they need to get out there and win one for the zipper.

News item: The Green Bay Packers have signed quarterback Aaron Rodgers to a contract extension that calls for him to make more than $11 million per year through the 2014 season.

My take: The Pack would have locked Rodgers up for longer, but they’re pretty sure they can persuade Brett Favre to come back in 2015 if there’s a problem.

News item: Agent Leigh Steinberg, who was the inspiration for the movie Jerry Maguire, was arrested in Southern California last week on charges of being drunk in public.

My take: I heard he had the occifer at “Hello.”

Q. On your Facebook page you write: “I‘m the only person in the world who thinks it was a big advantage to grow up with the last name Schmuck.” Can you explain this, as well as the bit of history with the California Department of Motor Vehicles?

A. Well, I’m pretty sure the distinctiveness of the name has helped me throughout my career. It also has given me a thicker skin – in a ‘Boy Named Sue’ kind of way – in a business where that isn’t a bad thing to have.

In 1980, my girlfriend at the time applied for a vanity license plate with my last name on it. The California Department of Motor Vehicles rejected the request and sent me a letter saying that the plate I had chosen was in bad taste and offensive to public decency. The story made the wires and I spent the day doing a few dozen talk radio interviews. The DMV, faced with the embarrassing publicity, relented and sent me the license plate, which I displayed proudly for years in California.

Q. Your career started in print but now you’re a multi-platform performer? How did you make the leap? How would you characterize your radio voice and your screen presence?

A. I got asked to do some radio and TV after I came to Baltimore. I had never done more than an occasional guest shot in California. I was pretty raw at first, but you eventually get more comfortable. I don’t think I have a very good radio voice, but the station manager keeps asking me to do more shows, so I guess it doesn’t grate as bad on everybody else as it does when I hear a recording of it.

Don’t really know what kind of TV presence I have, but I usually know my stuff when I’m on and am fairly articulate. My favorite TV appearance was on “Hardball” with Chris Matthews when I debated Jose Canseco and his lawyer during the steroid fiasco. The lawyer tried to cast Jose as a whistleblower, and I said ‘The guy supplied steroids to other players and bragged about it in his book. The neighborhood I grew up in, we didn’t call that a whistleblower. We called that guy a drug pusher.’ The lawyer sputtered that I couldn’t call his client a drug pusher on TV. I said, ‘I’m sorry counselor, I just did.’

Q. You were pretty tough on a congressional panel last January for failing to call MLB players to testify about steroids. Looking back, how do you grade your own reporting and writing on steroids?

A. I think I did a pretty good job on the explanatory part of it, though I wasn’t involved in a lot of investigative work. I had more to do with the ephedra controversy after the death of Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler. But the week of the infamous Mark McGwire congressional hearings, I ripped the committee for making a backroom deal not to make McGwire answer any direct questions about his steroid usage. I thought it was going to be a grandstanding dog and pony show. I had to admit afterward – well afterward – that the congressional meddling did lead to a much tougher steroid testing program in baseball.

Q. How did you learn to write? Who were your influences? What do you try to accomplish with a column and how do you know if it works?

A. I guess it came sort of natural to me. My mother gave me a portable typewriter when I was a kid and I liked to simulate news stories and write phony TV scripts. I had a high school English teacher take an interest in me and help me refine my writing style, then ended up on my college newspaper.

I was always into humor, so I’d say my biggest influence from a sports and column perspective was Jim Murray, though I certainly don’t write like he did. It was just great to work in the same press box with him for a few years and get to know him.

Q. Who and what do you read to keep up with sports?

A. I’m really not a guy who faithfully reads certain writers and columnists and not others. I read through several of the sports internet sites pretty much every day and, obviously, pay attention to what writers like Buster Olney (espn.com) and Ken Rosenthal (foxsports.com) are doing, since they dig stuff up. I’ll pop into some of the fan message boards once in awhile to see what the pulse of the internet is on a certain subject. My guilty pleasure is T.J. Simers (LA Times), who is the columnist I would be if I had the guts.

These days, when I read something on paper, it’s usually a novel – either contemporary or classic.”

Q. The Orioles have been lousy for years, while the Ravens have been generally good. Which inspires better columns?

A. My philosophy has always been, I don’t care if a team is very good or very bad, as long as it is either very good or very bad. The worst thing for a columnist is to get stuck in the middle.”

Q. Your blog is called “The Schmuck Stops Here”. What exactly does that mean?

A. It’s a play on my name and the old Harry Truman line, “The buck stops here.” Taken literally, it’s the site on the internet where I stop several times a day to interact with readers. So far, it has been fairly successful, but I’m still pretty new to the whole blogging thing. The future is on the internet and I want to have a future, so it seemed like a good idea.

Q. Fantasy byline: JJ Putz as told to Peter Schmuck. What kind of story would it be?

A. I don’t have to speculate on this. I interviewed J.J. for a column that I hoped would be a funny account of two guys talking about the pitfalls of having funny surnames. He was no help, however, claiming that he never got ribbed about his name because it was pronounced Pootz. If I recall, in the column I wrote that I didn’t know which bothered me more – the fact that he wouldn’t own up to the correct pronunciation of his name or that I never thought to tell everyone my last name was Schmook.

Peter Schmuck, Baltimore Sun, August 5, 2008:

Mariners reliever J.J. Putz pronounces his surname with a long “U” sound; why didn’t the author think of that earlier?

Seldom does a Seattle series go by that I don’t get several e-mails or personal entreaties to interview reliever J.J. Putz. And, of course, this is understandable because of the similar ridiculousness of our respective surnames.

Some of you probably remember that I did just that a couple of years ago for a column in The Sun. I approached J.J. in the Mariners clubhouse and introduced myself and expected some kind of reaction when he heard my last name, but he just stared at me as if I had just surfed back from Gilligan’s Island.

No problem. I explained to him that because I was a semi-respected journalist with a very silly name and he was an up-and-coming baseball star with a silly name, we should be having a bonding moment of mutual understanding after mutual lifetimes of middle school taunts and rebuffed marriage proposals.

When he finally figured out what I was talking about, he politely informed me that no natural kinship existed between us because his last name is not pronounced the way it would seem by the spelling. It is pronounced with a longer “U” sound (Pootz) and he was never the object of junior high or any other kind of name-related ridicule.

I suppose I should be happy for him, but if I recall the column I wrote at the time, I just felt stupid that it never occurred to me to tell everyone my last name is Schmook.

Peter Schmuck, Baltimore Sun, April 6, 2008:

News item: Seattle Mariners closer J.J. Putz has been placed on the 15-day disabled list with a rib cage injury.

My take: As you know, J.J. would be one of my favorite players if he would embrace his funny name and stop insisting that it isn’t pronounced the way we all know it should be. If I can be a sanctimonious Schmuck, he can be an unapologetic Putz.

Peter Schmuck, Baltimore Sun, May 28, 2005:

I also got several e-mails asking if I was going to interview J.J. Putz while the Mariners were in town, but that ship has sailed. I tried to bond with Putz when the M’s passed through Baltimore last year, but he wouldn’t play along.

The guy continues to insist that his name is pronounced with a longer “U” sound, rendering moot the semantic connection between Putz and Schmuck. This is a big disappointment for those of us who are defiantly proud of our ridiculous names.

Peter Schmuck, Baltimore Sun, September 27, 2004

It’s always fun to watch politicians stumble over sports, and both John Kerry and George Bush delivered Page 2 moments earlier this month.

Kerry may have lost some of the Green Bay Packers vote when he referred to their home stadium as Lambert Field, while President Bush was in nearby St. Cloud, Minn., making a speech at Dick Putz Stadium.

That’s right, the stadium that houses the St. Cloud Riverbats is named after someone named Dick Putz (definitely no relation).

Peter Schmuck, Baltimore Sun, August 4, 2004:

IT HASN’T BEEN easy going through life with a built-in nickname, but when the Seattle Mariners arrived in town, I thought I finally had found someone else who could feel my pain.

The Mariners have a relief pitcher named J.J. Putz, a young right-hander who I was sure would be able to identify with my lifelong struggle to order a pizza over the phone.

No such luck. J.J. claims his surname is pronounced with a slightly longer “u” – so that it sounds more like “puts” than “putts.” That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.

“He’s in denial,” said Orioles play-by-play man Joe Angel.

I don’t know what bothers me more – the fact that he won’t admit to the real pronunciation or that I never thought of telling people that my last name is Schmook.

(SMG thanks Peter Schmuck for his cooperation)

An Interview with Aaron Schatz

“People ask me how to get into what I do. The biggest thing is that nobody will pay attention to you unless you do something they can’t get in 100 different places. Another sports commentary blog is boring. I did something nobody else did. We differentiated ourselves.”

“If you listen to conventional TV analysts, they constantly talk about how it doesn’t matter that you’re getting only 2 or 3 yards per carry because you’re establishing the run. That’s nonsense. Winning causes runs – not the other way around.”

“Conventional reporters give you a sense of who the coaches will use. One of the variables is player usage – you can’t really guess…hopefully the reporter can give you a sense of that. But I don’t trust most reporters to talk about how you win games. Honestly, when they say “To win you have to do x” usually it’s just wrong.”

Aaron Schatz: Interviewed on September 22, 2006

Position: Editor-in-Chief, FootballOutsiders.com

Born: 1974, Princeton, NJ

Education: Brown, 1996, Economics

Career: WBRU Radio, Providence 1992-96; WKRO Radio, Daytona Beach, 1996-97; International Data Corp. (storage systems analyst) 1998-99; Venture Development Corp. (market research analyst studying car stereo systems) 1999-2000; Lycos (writer of Lycos 50) 2000-2004; FootballOutsiders.com 2003 –

Personal: Married, one daughter

Favorite Restaurant (home): Apsara’s, Providence. “Vietnamese restaurant in crack neighborhood, where Brown and Providence College students eat cheaply.”

Favorite restaurant (road): any sushi place

Favorite hotel: Hotel Monaco, Seattle.

Author of: “Pro Football Prospectus 2006”

Q. What is Football Outsiders?

A. An intelligent football analysis site – mostly about the NFL. In general the basis is advanced statistics we created that go far beyond anything else available. Also we have columns that are not advanced stats – one is film watching, another is NFL history.

Our writers combine stats with personal observations and jokes. I’m big on humor – it makes it more fun to read rather than dry numbers.

Q. What does Football Outsiders do that newspapers don’t?

A. Research and use of stats based on intensive research. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent on the DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average) formula that is the main stat on our site. We question conventional wisdom and do research projects that go past what is happening this week. And we have discussions for our readers.

Q. Whose conventional wisdom?

A. Mainstream newspaper journalists. Mainstream web analysts. TV commentators. I started my analysis in 2002 because I disagreed with something someone in Boston wrote.

Q. Who did you disagree with?

A. Ron Borges (Boston Globe). He wrote that the Patriots did not return to the playoffs in 2002 because they could not establish the run. He was promoting the Raiders as a team that succeeded because it established the run. But the Raiders ran less in the first half than any other team that year – so how could he talk about them establishing the run? I knew Bill James used to go to box scores when he had questions about baseball – I decided to do the same thing. That’s how we got started.

Q. Name a conventional nostrum you challenge?

A. Establishing the run is nonsense – that’s the first one. Running does not win games. It’s running well that wins games. If you listen to conventional TV analysts, they constantly talk about how it doesn’t matter that you’re getting only 2 or 3 yards per carry because you’re establishing the run. That’s nonsense. Winning causes runs – not the other way around. Ron Jaworski, who is the most intelligent NFL analyst, says you score with the pass and you win with the run. The pass gives you the lead and the run solidifies it.

Q. Football Outsiders’ audience?

A. We get 12,000 visitors per day. We also sell copies of Pro Football Prospectus. This year the book peaked at 74 on the Amazon sales list. In 2005 it peaked at 182.

Q. Staff?

A. Counting the people who write regularly plus our cartoonist – about a dozen. I’m the only full time employee. Everyone else has another job or is in law school.

Q. What’s the profile of your typical reader?

A. People who love football and don’t accept the conventional wisdom that’s constantly recycled by standard football journalists, and who are looking for a place to the discuss the NFL that isn’t about gambling and without saying “My team rules” with five z’s at the end of the word.

Mostly professionals. Mostly men. Probably mostly white but who knows. For a while the joke was we had more black writers than readers because of Ryan Wilson. But I’ve seen blogs of our readers and they aren’t all white. A lot are fans of sports in general. A lot came to us because of their relationship with Baseball Prospectus and were looking for something similar in football. I would say we have a higher percentage of non-US football fans than newspaper websites, or ESPN. They find us looking for football info they can’t get in their countries. We have people from Mexico, Israel, England and Germany who are actively in our discussions.

Q. What about gamblers?

A. I’m sure they are. People ask me about it a lot. We have ads from sports books. I know people gamble. I don’t think it’s great but I don’t think it should be illegal. When I started this I said to myself “Hundreds of sites are devoted to gambling and fantasy football, but none to intelligently discussing how teams win games and build contenders.” So while I’m sure our stats are useful in gambling – and we have a column that picks against the spread – in general I don’t try to talk about it because I’m more interested in why teams are winning.

Q. What do newspapers do that you don’t?

A. I don’t go into the locker room to talk to coaches and players. Does that diminish our ability to analyze? When something occurs that I can’t solve with stats I say so. I said last year I couldn’t tell you the effect of the Terrell Owens thing on the Eagles because I’m not in the locker room and I don’t know the personalities.

The nice thing about the blossoming of the Internet is that someone with an interest in football can read the conventional reporters – the good ones like Mike Reiss (Boston Globe) and Mike Sando (Tacoma News Tribune) – and get that angle and then read us for the stats angle. No point in limiting yourself – you can read it all. I wouldn’t want people to only read us and not read conventional reporters.

Q. What do you get from conventional reporters?

A. Conventional reporters give you a sense of who the coaches will use. One of the variables is player usage – you can’t really guess – only Gary Kubiak will tell you which of those terrible running backs he will use this week. Hopefully the reporter can give you a sense of that. But I don’t trust most reporters to talk about how you win games. Honestly, when they say “To win you have to do x” usually it’s just wrong.

We do the power rankings for Foxsports.com based on our DVOA rankings. I have problems with subjective rankings – they’re so subject to the whims of the writers they’re useless. Dr. Z ranked St. Louis third in power rankings when they had won a single game at home by 8 points, completely throwing out everything we knew about the Rams, which was proven the next week when they lost to San Francisco. They had a lucky upset. I’m very big on not over-analyzing upsets. Many of our stats drain the effect of luck out of the performance of the team. In the future you have to figure luck will even out.

Q. How much football do you watch?

A. A lot more than I used to before I started doing this – all day Sunday and Monday night. Sometimes I re-watch one I taped it as part of a game-charting project. I’ll watch the AFC South because I’m writing about it next year for our book. During the week I watch things the NFL replays on the NFL network. I try to combine our stats with a visual.

Saturday is family day for me – I don’t watch much college football.

Q. How do you generate revenue?

A. We have advertisers. Sports books, ticket sales people, fantasy football sites. And also through blog ads, the new Johnny Unitas book, and ‘Catholic Match’ – a singles site.

Q. Are you credentialed by the NFL?

A. No. Some of my guys have talked about it. The NFL doesn’t credential websites – it’s really hard-core. But we’re not totally a website anymore. We write for the New York Sun and Foxsports.com, which is a major website. We went to the Combine in Indy this year – it was the first thing I ever reported in person. I didn’t meet as many coaches as I wanted to but I did meet a lot of national reporters.

Q. Who did you meet at the Combine?

A. I introduced myself to Peter King (Sports Illustrated) – he knew about us and liked us – he’s a reader of Baseball Prospectus. John Clayton (ESPN) was open to what we do. I disagree with a lot of analytical things Peter writes but I get so much from his column I find it very valuable. I like Clayton’s blog but now that I write for Fox I keep forgetting to check it.

Q. Who did you avoid?

A. I didn’t introduce myself to the writers we constantly criticize on the site. I didn’t introduce myself to Don Banks. He does a lot of articles for SI.com I don’t consider too good.

Q. Do you see Football Outsiders covering more events live?

A. I don’t think we would ever become a reporting site – it’s just not our thing. I do what I’m good at.

Q. Who do you read?

A. Gregg Easterbrook (NFL.com) – he was a major part of our becoming popular. He mentioned us in his last ESPN column in 2003 – before he got dumped. I came up with the idea of our readers writing his column for him – as a contest. Gregg found out about it and contacted me – so he wrote for us for two weeks before he went to NFL.com. He links to us and sends people to us.

Like others in my generation I like Bill Simmons – I throw a lot of pop culture into our site but I’m not trying to be Bill Simmons – I was a radio DJ before I was a writer. I read the weblogs of Mike Sando and Mike Reiss. I also have so much respect for Len Pasquarelli (espn.com) – his ability to put out non-fluff useful NFL reporting in the middle of March is astonishing. I’m talking about his reporting – not analysis – we often disagree with his analysis – but as a reporter he is amazing. He finds things when the league is at its slowest point.

Q. How did you build an audience?

A. The first person I e-mailed was Bruce Allen (Boston Sports Media Watch). I had written some things for him – I had to start somewhere. The

second was King Kaufman of salon.com. Next was Easterbrook, who mentioned us in his last column on espn.com before the mishigas.

People ask me how to get into what I do. The biggest thing is that nobody will pay attention to you unless you do something they can’t get in 100 different places. Another sports commentary blog is boring. I did something nobody else did. We differentiated ourselves. Give people a reason to read you when they could be reading a hundred thousand other things. That’s the thing about the Internet: There’s a lot to write about, but unless you’re as funny as Bill Simmons you better have a hook.

Q. What does it feel like to be quoted in a Frank Rich column?

(Frank Rich, NY Times, February 15, 2004: “That a single breast received as much attention as the first attack on United States soil in 60 years is beyond belief,” wrote Aaron Schatz, the columnist on the Lycos Top 50 site.)

A. That was my old life. You’ve got to understand the irony of that. The Lycos 50 had a dual purpose – internal market research and publicity. I was a publicity spokesman-type person – I did a lot of interviews on the most-searched topics of the week, which put Lycos’ name in the papers.

Janet Jackson was the biggest thing to promote the Lycos 50 in my time there. I had started Football Outsiders by that point and here I was reporting on a football-related thing for Lycos. A week later Lycos laid me off. I tried to get a job in market research or in the Internet industry but nothing came up. That’s when Football Outsiders became my whole thing.

(SMG thanks Aaron Schatz for his cooperation)

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Compared to Bill James by the New York Times Magazine, AARON SCHATZ is the creator of Football Outsiders and most of the original statistical methods presented on this website, as well as lead writer on the book Pro Football Prospectus 2006. He also writes the Monday Quick Reads column and Tuesday Power Ratings found on FOXSports.com
, and regular NFL analysis for the New York Sun
. Before Football Outsiders, Aaron spent five years on the radio at WBRU Providence and WKRO Daytona Beach, and three years as the writer and producer of the Lycos 50, the Internet’s foremost authority on the people, places, and things that are searched online. He has appeared on a number of TV and radio stations including ESPN, CNN, and NPR, and written for a number of publications including The New Republic
, The New York Times
, The Boston Globe
, Slate
, The American Prospect
, and the Boston Phoenix
. He lives in Framingham, Massachusetts with his wife and daughter and proudly sports a #93 Richard Seymour jersey on Sundays when he is often told “they can’t hear you in Foxboro through the television.”

February 15, 2004

My Hero, Janet Jackson

By FRANK RICH

IT may be a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. Two weeks after the bustier bust, almost no one has come to the defense of Janet Jackson. I do so with a full heart. By baring a single breast in a slam-dunk publicity stunt of two seconds’ duration, this singer also exposed just how many boobs we have in this country. We owe her thanks for a genuine public service.

You can argue that Ms. Jackson is the only honest figure in this Super Bowl of hypocrisy. She was out to accomplish a naked agenda — the resuscitation of her fading career on the eve of her new album’s release — and so she did. She’s not faking much remorse, either. Last Sunday she refused to appear on the Grammys rather than accede to CBS’s demand that she perform a disingenuous, misty-eyed ritual ”apology” to the nation for her crime of a week earlier. By contrast, Justin Timberlake, the wimp who gave the English language the lasting gift of ”wardrobe malfunction,” did as he was told, a would-be pop rebel in a jacket and a tie, looking like a schoolboy reporting to the principal’s office. Ms. Jackson, one suspects, is laughing all the way to the bank.

There are plenty of Americans to laugh at, starting with the public itself. If we are to believe the general outcry, the nation’s families were utterly blindsided by the Janet-Justin pas de deux while watching an entertainment akin to ”Little Women.” As Laura Bush put it, ”Parents wouldn’t know to turn their television off before that happened.” They wouldn’t? In the two-plus hours ”before that happened,” parents saw not only the commercials featuring a crotch-biting dog, a flatulent horse and a potty-mouthed child but also the number in which the crotch-grabbing Nelly successfully commanded a gaggle of cheerleaders to rip off their skirts. What signal were these poor, helpless adults waiting for before pulling their children away from the set? Apparently nothing short of a simulated rape would do.

Once the deed was done, the audience couldn’t stop watching it. TV viewers with TiVo set an instant-replay record as they slowed down the offending imagery with a clinical alacrity heretofore reserved for the Zapruder film. Lycos, the Internet search engine, reported that the number of searches for Janet Jackson tied the record set by 9/11-related searches on and just after 9/11.

”That a single breast received as much attention as the first attack on United States soil in 60 years is beyond belief,” wrote Aaron Schatz, the columnist on the Lycos Top 50 site. (Though not, perhaps, to the fundamentalist zealots who attacked us.)

For those who still couldn’t get enough, the cable news channels giddily played the video over and over to remind us of just how deplorable it was. Even though by this point the networks were blurring the breast with electronic pasties, there was still an erotic kick to be milked: the act of a man tearing off a woman’s clothes was as thrilling to the audience as whatever flesh was revealed therein, perhaps more so. But to say that aloud is to travel down a road that our moral watchdogs do not want to take. It’s the unwritten rule of our culture that the public is always right. The ”folks,” as Bill O’Reilly is fond of condescending to them, are always the innocent victims of the big, bad cultural villains. They’re never complicit in the crime. The idea that the folks might have the free will to tune out tasteless TV programming or do without TV altogether — or that they might eat up the sleaze, with or without young ‘uns in the room — is almost never stated on television, for obvious reasons of fiscal self-interest. You don’t insult your customers.

Since the public is blameless for its role in creating a market for displays like the Super Bowl’s, who should be the scapegoat instead? If you peruse Mr. O’Reilly’s admonitions in his first three programs dealing with the topic, or the tirades of The Wall Street Journal editorial page and right-wing direct-mail mills like the Parents Television Council and Concerned Women for America, you’ll find a revealing pattern: MTV, CBS and their parent corporation, Viacom, are the exclusive targets of the invective. The National Football League is barely mentioned, if at all. To blame the country’s highest-rated sports operation, after all, might risk insulting the football-watching folks to whom these moral watchdogs pander for fun and profit.

But the N.F.L. is in the sex business as assiduously as CBS and MTV, and for the same reason: it wants those prurient eyeballs. It’s now been more than a quarter-century since Super Bowl X, when the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders first caught the attention of the nation. ”The audience deserves a little sex with its violence,” Chuck Milton, a CBS sports producer, said back then.

The N.F.L. has since worked tirelessly to fill that need. This year was not the first MTV halftime show that the league has ordered to try to expand its aging audience beyond the Levitra demographic. The first such collaboration, Super Bowl XXXV three years ago, featured Britney Spears all but falling out of a halter top and numbers in which both Mr. Timberlake (then appearing with ‘NSync) and Nelly grabbed their crotches. There was, to my eye, twice as much crotch-grabbing then as there was this year, but that show generated no outrage whatsoever.

It did, however, attract two million more viewers than the game itself. The N.F.L. wanted more of the same for 2004, which is why the league’s commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, released a statement saying, ”We’re pleased to work again with MTV” when announcing the encore. Or pleased up to a point. When MTV proposed that part of the show be devoted to a performance of the song ”An American Prayer” by Bono to increase awareness of the horrific AIDS epidemic in Africa, the N.F.L. said no — even though Bono had done the league the favor of giving the 2002 Super Bowl halftime show a dignified musical tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

The mention of a sexually transmitted disease might dampen the libido of the salacious MTV show that the N.F.L. wanted this year and wanted so badly that the league remained silent even when MTV’s pregame publicity promised that the performance would contain ”some shocking moments.” As one participant in the production told me, the N.F.L. saw ”every camera angle” at the show’s rehearsals and thus was no less aware of its general tone than CBS and MTV were. You don’t hire Ms. Jackson, who’s been steadily exposing more of her breasts for over a decade on magazine covers, to sing ”Rock Your Body” if you have a G-rated game plan. Nonetheless, Joe Browne, the league’s flak, pleaded total innocence after the event, releasing a hilarious statement that the N.F.L., like the public, was the unwitting victim of a show that it had both commissioned and helped supervise: ”We applaud the F.C.C.’s investigation into the MTV-produced halftime. We and our fans were embarrassed by the entire show.”

That investigation, piggybacked by last week’s Congressional hearings, is an election-year stunt as full of hot air as the Bud Light horse flatulence ad. ”Like millions of Americans, my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration,” declared Michael Powell, the F.C.C. chairman, upon announcing that the entire halftime would be examined. A celebration of what, exactly? Didn’t Mr. Powell, the nation’s chief television regulator, watch the previous MTV halftime show?

He promises to conduct the investigation himself — a meaningless gesture, though it may gain him an audience and perhaps a photo op with Ms. Jackson. Mr. Powell’s real agenda here is to conduct a show trial that might counter his well-earned reputation as a wholly owned subsidiary of our media giants. Viacom has been a particularly happy beneficiary of the deregulatory push of his reign, buying up every slice of the media pie that’s not nailed down. Should CBS be found guilty of ”indecency” by the feds, the total penalty would amount to some $5 million, roughly the price of two 30-second Super Bowl commercials. Congress’s new push to increase those fines tenfold is just as laughable. Viacom took in $26.6 billion last year.

Not for nothing did the company’s stock actually go up the day after the Super Bowl. The halftime show was great merchandising for both MTV and CBS, the go-to network for ”Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.” Not to be left without a piece of the action, even NBC got into the act. Citing the Jackson flap, it decreed that two split-second shots of an 80-year-old woman’s breast in an emergency room sequence in ”E.R.” be excised. But the ”E.R.” star Noah Wyle then went on NBC’s ”Today” show the morning of the broadcast to joke about the decision, and the network-owned NBC affiliate in New York used the banned breast as a promo for its post-”E.R.” news broadcast: ”What you won’t see on tonight’s episode of ‘E.R.’ — at 11!” Thus did NBC successfully transform its decision not to bare geriatric flesh into a sexual tease to hype ratings. This is true marketing genius, American-style.

What’s next? Some are predicting that all the tape delays being injected into TV events to pre-empt future wardrobe malfunctions will be the death of spontaneous, live TV. But the moment an awards show takes a ratings hit, this new electronic prophylactic will be quietly abandoned by the networks even faster than the N.F.L.’s vague threat not to collaborate with MTV next year.

Ms. Jackson, the biggest winner in this whole escapade, is already back on the air. Her official rehabilitation began right after the Super Bowl, when BET started broadcasting a 10-part series of ”special Black History Month” spots in which she profiles historical luminaries like Harriet Tubman, Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier.

”Her tone is serious and focused, with the air and diction of a seasoned lecturer,” says the network’s news release, which also notes that ”the spots feature Ms. Jackson clad in classic black.” Wasn’t her Super Bowl dominatrix costume classic black as well? Well, never underestimate the power of synergy. BET is another wholly owned subsidiary of Viacom.

The Search Engine as Crystal Ball

To take the pulse of popular culture, no search site analyzes the queries tapped into its search box as single-mindedly as Lycos, the portal owned by Terra Lycos. One employee, Aaron Schatz, writes a daily report that spots trends, called the Lycos 50, and also compiles regular lists of the most-searched-for terms. Those queries can offer a fascinating glimpse into the often mysterious rise and fall of consumer interests. [C10.]

KEEPING SCORE; When Flags Fly, the Referees’ Habits May Be the Reason

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By AARON SCHATZ

Published: August 13, 2006

When the Giants hired Tom Coughlin as coach in January 2004, one of his stated goals was to instill discipline in his players. The Giants had ranked third among all N.F.L. teams in total penalties the year before, and that was unacceptable to Coughlin and to Giants fans.

In Coughlin’s first year, it seemed as if his tough-minded approach to rules and practices might bear fruit. The Giants ranked 11th in total penalties, including those declined or offsetting.

But if Coughlin’s disciplinarian approach helped, it did not help for long. Last year, the Giants were penalized 167 times, tied with the Oakland Raiders for second most in the league behind the Arizona Cardinals. Left tackle Luke Petitgout earned 15 flags on his own, making him the second-most penalized player in the league.

The problem came to a head in November, when the Giants lost to the Seattle Seahawks, 24-21, in overtime. Jay Feely missed a field-goal attempt to win in regulation, and two more in overtime, but it never should have been that close.

The Giants gained 413 yards in regulation, compared with 297 for the Seahawks. But they kept giving back that yardage with penalties: 19 in all, 16 of which were accepted for a total of 114 yards. Petitgout was called for five false starts, and his linemate David Diehl had three false starts and a flag for holding.

But were Petitgout, Diehl and the other Giants entirely to blame for their performance? There are a number of factors that determine how many penalties will be called in an N.F.L. game, and the discipline of the penalized team is just one. Analysis of all regular-season games from the past four years shows that the habits of the officials calling the game have as much impact as a team’s ability to avoid penalties.

The Giants’ loss to Seattle provides a good example. Larry Nemmers was the referee that day, and Nemmers and his crew doled out more penalties per game than any other crew in the National Football League last year: 20.6, significantly ahead of second-place Ed Hochuli’s 19.1 penalties a game. Nemmers called the Giants for 19 penalties, but he also flagged the Seahawks 13 times. That was a season high for Seattle, which ranked 29th in total penalties over 16 regular-season games.

On the other extreme was Bill Vinovich, whose crew called only 12.3 penalties a game. In one San Diego-Oakland contest, Vinovich called three total penalties between the two clubs. The Raiders committed at least seven penalties in every other game last year.

The Giants’ high number of penalties may be largely attributable to the officiating crews that were randomly assigned to their games. The Giants may have finished second in penalties, but they also ranked first in opponent penalties, and by a hefty margin. In fact, the Giants’ opponents had more penalties (170) than the Giants (167). This indicates that referees in Giants games were calling penalties on everyone.

Oakland and Arizona, on the other hand, were among the top three most penalized teams last season, but they ranked near the bottom in opponent penalties. That indicates that the Raiders and the Cardinals, not the referees, were the reason for all the flags.

The average N.F.L. team was penalized 8.5 times a game last year; the Giants drew at least 10 penalties in 10 games, and their opponents drew at least 10 penalties in 11 games. Seattle was one of four teams that marked its season high in penalties in a game against the Giants.

This tendency for highly penalized teams to also draw a lot of penalties was even stronger two years ago. Arizona led the league in both penalties and opponent penalties in 2004; the Jets and the Seahawks, ranked first and second in fewest penalties, were ranked the same way in fewest opponent penalties.

The habits of N.F.L. referees and their officiating crews, for the most part, stay consistent from year to year. Nemmers was third in penalties per game in 2004, and ranked first in penalty yards per game the past two seasons. Gerry Austin and Walt Anderson ranked first and second in fewest penalties in 2004, and tied for second behind Vinovich for fewest penalties in 2005.

Officiating crews also differ in their predilection to call certain penalties and not others. Over the past three years, Hochuli’s crew has called 193 false-start penalties, while Jeff Triplette’s crew has called only 95, despite the same number of games. On the other hand, Triplette led the league in calling defensive pass interference two of the past three seasons, and is annually among the leaders in calling offensive holding.

No matter which teams draw Nemmers as the referee for their opening-week game, they can count on a lot of penalties. The commentators will say the penalties show that the teams are showing early-season jitters. In reality, they may show that Nemmers and his crew are in midseason form.

Aaron Schatz is the lead author of ”Pro Football Prospectus 2006.”

An Interview with Eli Saslow

“People are flattered when you want to remember somebody who meant a lot to them. They’re relieved to talk about it – the interview can be cathartic for them. They want to talk a lot of times – it’s just a matter of being asked… One of the nice things in this job is the chance to make people feel better about something awful.”

“I guess mainly I try to target stories that can echo further than just in that one instance. That’s one reason I like writing enterprise stories about high schools so much – everything that happens in one high school, chances are, people can identify with that in thousands of high schools across the country.”

“The paradigm of the super successful sportswriter is that by the time you’re 30 or 40 years old you’re done with print and you have a radio show or TV show – you’re more of a personality than a writer. I really want to be a writer – this is what I want to do. Frankly, I don’t know enough about sports to get on a TV set and spew about the NHL one minute and MLS the next. I would be an embarrassment to myself – and the newspaper.”

Eli Saslow: Interviewed on December 20, 2006

Position: high school enterprise writer, Washington Post

Born: 1982, Denver

Education: Syracuse, 2004, communications

Career: Washington Post 2004 –

Personal: single

Favorite restaurant (home): Spices, Washington, DC “great sushi at a good price – impossible combination to find in DC”

Favorite restaurant (road): Jacquimo’s, New Orleans “everything is awesome, the fish is great – you have to get a bowl of the gumbo if you go there even if you think you’re going to hate gumbo – life-changing gumbo”

Favorite hotel: Marriott (anywhere) – “I hope I don’t travel enough to designate a favorite one”

Eli Saslow’s “Death of a Friend” excerpted from the Washington Post, November 3, 2006:

Greg Raymond had trouble gripping the telephone. His hands trembled. Shortly after 11 on a December night, Greg stood in front of the Baltimore City Detention Center with tear stains on his face and dried blood on his shirt. He felt dizzy. He gasped for breath. But he needed to make this call.

For the last 18 hours, Greg had paced in a cell and tried to comprehend the two facts that now defined him: His best friend was dead, and Greg was partly responsible.

So much about the previous night had felt ordinary, Greg thought. He and his alter ego, Matt Stoffel, former Johns Hopkins lacrosse teammates, both 23, went out for beers. They talked about college, about old memories and new careers. Then, a little past 1 a.m. on Dec. 11, 2005, Greg drove them to meet up with more friends, never considering how much he’d had to drink or whether his blood alcohol level was above the legal limit.

He crashed and watched Matt’s life seep away in the passenger seat. Minutes after his best friend left the scene of the accident in the back of an ambulance, Greg left in the back of a police car.

Almost immediately after Greg made bail and left lockup, he felt compelled to talk with Matt’s parents. He knew Glynn and Patricia Stoffel well, and he wanted to tell them that he loved Matt, that the accident had been his fault and that he was sorry. Greg didn’t expect their forgiveness. He could never even imagine forgiving himself.

Q. Is “Death of a Friend” a sports story?

A. It’s a sports story because they met through lacrosse – that’s about as deep as sports go in that story. The great thing about doing sportswriting is that sport is such a great window to look at other things. There’s so much drama inherent in sports – especially when you write about male friendships. For whatever reason they’re often so deep in sports, or have been built through sports and you can get at some relationships through sports you might not get otherwise. That made doing that story so much easier.

If I was a Style writer at the Post it easily could have run in the Style section. One thing the Post has made an effort to do is place stories on A1 – that one didn’t make it – but they’re trying to spread narrative stories throughout the paper. Which is cool, because it gives you a chance to write for different sections and work for other editors.

Q. What were your emotions in reporting “Death of a Friend?”

A. In my short career and short list of journalistic experiences that was definitely the hardest. It was the most involved I’ve felt in a story. The two guys are very close to my age and I could easily picture myself in the type of situation they had been in. I went down to Princeton where the kid who survived is coaching lacrosse and spent a couple of days with him. I really liked him and we became quick friends. I really liked the parents of the kid who passed away and I felt a tremendous burden to do them justice with the story.

Usually I’m worried about pleasing myself and editors and we’re taught not to care what the subject thinks because it could get in the way of doing a fair and objective job. But this time I did care. They had been through hell and some previous stories had caused agony for them. Those were the news stories after the incident, which came across to the family as callous – it was unfathomable that two lives could be reduced to blood alcohol level. But that’s the way it is sometimes and under a tight deadline circumstances might dictate that you can only report that much. I’m so lucky in my job in that I usually have time to go deeper, which is a luxury in newspapers now.

It took time to build trust for them to feel comfortable with me. I owed it to them to do a fair job portraying everybody

Q. How long did you work on it and how much supervision did you have?

A. I went to Princeton for two days and spent a day at the family’s house. I did about five or six days of reporting and two or three days of writing and editing.

I don’t have one editor who supervises me. Technically I’m a high school enterprise writer. What they want me to do is write longer stories about topics that are not Redskins or Wizards – stuff more on the margin. With that story, because of the college tie-in, I worked with the college editor and a little bit with the sports editor on line editing. I was so glad to have that story in the paper and just have it off my chest. Everybody involved was happy with the end product.

Q. What personality traits do those stories require of a reporter?

A. A blend of traits. Mainly empathy, I guess. In situations like that I cease being a reporter and try to make everything as informal as possible. I don’t record everything and I never script my questions – I try to go in and have regular conversations. Your success depends so much on the people you’re writing about – people grieve in so many different ways. I always think that if anything happened to me, or my family, and somebody came to write an in-depth story about it I would have a hard time dealing with it.

But I have been surprised in that rarely have I had somebody say, “No, I don’t want to talk about it”. People are flattered when you want to remember somebody who meant a lot to them. They’re relieved to talk about it – the interview can be cathartic for them. They want to talk a lot of times – it’s just a matter of being asked. Reporters shy away from those stories because it’s hard to ask somebody if they want to talk about a personal tragedy. It’s a difficult thing to do and a difficult first call to make. But if you can get over that hump and get over that first call and put yourself out there a bit, I’m always surprised by the results and how willing and relieved people are. One of the nice things in this job is the chance to make people feel better about something awful.

Eli Saslow excerpted from Washington Post Magazine, October 29, 2006:

DREW HIXON SOMETIMES STOOD IN FRONT OF HIS MIRROR in the morning and pretended to get dressed for a different job, the kind he’d expected to have after graduating from college. He imagined himself as an up-and-coming businessman, and that it was important to look nice. Everything he wore needed to coordinate, even his sunglasses. Drew removed his earrings and trimmed his thin mustache, lingering in front of the mirror until he looked completely professional. Then he went to work and took orders from teenagers.

Doctors called it miraculous that Drew, then 23, held any job. But every time he walked into the Nike store where he worked, he thought: Failure, plain and simple. Not long ago, Drew had played college football, and Nike had provided him with its best merchandise for free. Not long ago, he’d interned for the Washington Redskins, where his father, Stan, is the wide receivers coach. Now he swiped shoes and shirts across a scanner at the Leesburg outlet mall.

Drew longed to tell everyone he met that he didn’t belong at this store, that he had been on the verge of accomplishing great things before a crushing tackle in a Tennessee Tech football game knocked him first close to death, then back to infancy. He’d spent months recovering, but he still walked with a limp, slurred his speech and struggled to retrieve words from a brain so badly bruised that it once looked like a peach hurled against a brick wall. Drew worried people would think he was a dummy.

Q. How did you report the Hixon story?

A. The hard thing about it was I came into it so late. The drama was his injury and recovery from it, but by the time I was assigned the story it had happened 18 months ago. I really liked the kid I was writing about – I became close with him.

I got lucky in that he was getting ready to take these tests to become a certified banker – and that provided drama in itself. It was a big moment for Drew as a kid recovering from a brain injury. I was able to see that first-hand, otherwise I was just reconstructing scenes. I talked to 45-50 people over the phone, people who were at the game, just so I could feel confident in writing that as a scene and I knew what was happening from a lot of angles.

Q. Was that your first story for the magazine?

A. Yes. It was so long – writing was such a different process. I write a lot of stories, which is expected of me, and some are long stories of 1500 to 2000 or 2500 words. But this was supposed to be 7,000 to 8,000 words and when I first sat down to write it was such an overwhelming thing to put together. But it was good to try – I felt like I was stretching myself, it was kind of a fun experiment. The feedback was pretty good on it.

I worked with magazine editors trained in narrative stuff and building scenes and voices in writing – it was so different than writing for the sports section where you don’t have the luxury of six weeks to change and rewrite scenes. It involved a lot more talking about writing and structure – which was cool.

The editing was so great – it was the first time I worked hand-in-hand with an editor throughout a whole story. Usually you write a story and turn it in and then editing happens. With a magazine story the editing and reporting were simultaneous. We met two weeks into the reporting and talked about structure even before I sat down to type.

I did it on top of other stuff I was doing for the sports section. I worked on it over three months, and at the end I took off eight or nine days from sports to write it. The whole process was daunting at times, and stressful at times.

Q. What was the background to your ‘Nigerian Connection’ story?

A. That was a three-parter – it started when a 7-2 Nigerian kid came into our area. I started looking into his background – and as I learned more and more about him I found out how messed up his background was. The paper was good enough to send me to Lagos, which was a great experience I hope I never have to re-create. It was a wild place – I’d love to go to Africa and just have time to explore.

The first part was about this kid and it introduced the whole way these kids get over here. This kid was helped by an NBA agent who used his connections to prep schools and secured letters from Joe Leiberman asking for a visa – he was denied four times but finally got here. He still hasn’t played but he’s now in Connecticut where he may play. The next part was a straight narrative from this basketball camp in Nigeria where they haul fifty 6-10 guys into a gym in front of a small handful of junior college coaches. It’s incredibly depressing – they’re begging the coaches to bring them over – it’s grim. The third part was about a guy – Joe Smith – who traffics these kids.

Sometimes it’s shocking that people are willing to talk when you call them. Joe Smith is doing something slimy in bringing Nigerians over here and trying to profit off them if in fact they make it big. I expected him to hang up, but actually what happened when I called him was that we chatted for a half hour. He invited me to Philly and said he’d show me his business and that things were going great. People are so happy to have a reporter interested in what they do. If you can stroke their ego a bit they’re happy to talk about it.

Q. What do you look for in a good story?

A. I guess mainly I try to target stories that can echo further than just in that one instance. That’s one reason I like writing enterprise stories about high schools so much – everything that happens in one high school, chances are, people can identify with that in thousands of high schools across the country. You don’t get that anywhere else. If you write about being a starting NFL quarterback very few people can say I know that person or I can relate to that. But if you write about being a high school star quarterback everybody knows the star quarterback in high school and people can relate to social situations around that. The cool thing is that it’s so relate-able.

In November a kid in West Virginia ran for 660 yards in one game and broke a record and I did a story a few days later. On the surface it was about a kid who lives 150 miles from our paper who wasn’t going to play major college football. But on a deeper level it was about sportsmanship and rivalries – there was so much more there – it was a good story that echoed a lot further. They put it on the front page of the paper – the reaction was huge because everybody had an opinion on it. You identified with the losing coach who wanted to protect his team from humiliation. Or you identified with the other coach who wanted to do a nice thing for this kid to have a national record.

Q. Is it the connection to the community that makes high school sports so fertile for stories?

A. Yes. You couldn’t pull out stories like that as often about the Nationals or Redskins. With pro sports your pool of teams becomes a lot smaller. In high school sports there’s something interesting going on all the time – with so many thousands of high schools. There’s such a wealth of real estate.

Q. Doesn’t the traditional career path lead to covering pro sports?

A. It’s not a hierarchy I’m interested in following. Even though I have no doubts I would get so much better at a lot of different things if I stepped into a pro beat and covered the Wizards or the Nationals or Redskins, it’s not something I want to pursue, because in part I just know the strains of that lifestyle and I don’t think I would find it fun. Also because I just think I have a pretty clear idea I want to write longer narrative stories and do some magazine stuff and write for other sections of the paper. I don’t think I need to do a beat to do those things.

Q. You work on a star-studded staff. How has it influenced you?

A. It is definitely star-studded. The great thing about the Post is that every day you not only get an awesome sports section but also a great National section and Style section – there is such a wide variety of writers beneficial to read every day. I’m also lucky to have a group of friends whose stuff I always read and whose work is good – we help each other a lot.

Q. Who?

A. Chico Harlan at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – he does news takeouts. Jeff Passan at Yahoo. Greg Bishop, a feature writer at the Seattle Times. Wright Thompson at espn.com. Darrel Slater at Newport News. My network is just so helpful. That was the best thing about Syracuse. The J-School was fine, it was good enough, but the school paper and the other people who worked there were tremendously helpful.

Having a community to talk journalism with is crucial. My Syracuse friends are spread out, but every week Chico Harlan solicits links from everybody – about 45 people connected with Syracuse. It’s a fun thing – we look forward to reading what other people are doing. We get some Daily Orange links – it’s a good hodgepodge of stuff. Chris Snow is on the list – I followed Chris as sports editor of the Daily Orange – he’s GM of hockey operations for the Minnesota Wild now. Apparently he’s enjoying things in the hockey world.

Q. Do you have any contact with your fellow Post staffers?

A. Mike Wise the most, when he’s in town he’s in the office. The situation with our columnists is unique. Sally (Jenkins) lives in New York and is on book leave. (Mike) Wilbon and (Tony) Kornheiser aren’t guys you are going to bump into in the cafeteria at lunch. (Tom) Boswell lives in Annapolis and doesn’t come into the office much. I see those guys when I fill in on the Nationals sometimes, or do sidebars on the Redskins. But they’re not in the office all that often.

I would say that many days I will be the only one in the office – other times there might be two or three or four reporters. That’s out of about 25 or 30 staff writers in sports. It’s so different than the Metro section where everybody is in the office every day. In sports people travel so much. I go in every day because I have a one-bedroom apartment I share with my girlfriend and I would go crazy if I was in that every day. I need room to pace and I like having structure in my day. I like to get up and go to work and then come back from work. Otherwise if work is continuous and you do it all the time – I don’t think I would focus as well.

Q. Are you doing multi-media in your work?

The Post is embracing multi-media – it bought a radio station and it hired a slew of videographers. On longer stories I’m accompanied by a camera and/or a sound technician. It’s cool to see your story with a five-minute documentary accompanying it, but it also changes the dynamics of reporting, I did a story about a football team in a city detention facility – and when I was sitting there interviewing the kids the sound technician was there and had me miked up – it was hard to get the same sense of intimacy. Obviously the best reporting comes when you just hang out with these kids informally – a notebook is pretty non-threatening. But when they see a camera and a mike on your collar their demeanor changes. It’s a pretty new thing – I’m trying to work with it and blend it more effectively with my reporting.

17. Is an on-air presence necessary for your career?

A. It probably would be helpful, but it’s just not something I want to do. It’s just another thing that makes me think sportswriting isn’t the thing I want to do long-term. The paradigm of the super successful sportswriter is that by the time you’re 30 or 40 years old you’re done with print and you have a radio show or TV show – you’re more of a personality than a writer. I really want to be a writer – this is what I want to do. Frankly, I don’t know enough about sports to get on a TV set and spew about the NHL one minute and MLS the next. I would be an embarrassment to myself – and the newspaper. Fortunately, my editors realize that and wouldn’t ask me to do it. If I could babble and filibuster with enough personality it might make me a tremendous success but it’s not something I want to do.

I’ll try to keep writing. With the way newspapers are going I don’t know about the future of narrative journalism. I think people always will be interested in reading those types of stories – they can grab you and read like a movie and have the same kind of drama – but I’m not sure people are willing to flip through 15 online pages to read it.

Q. As a member of the ADD generation, aren’t you paddling upstream?

A. It’s terrifying. Even for myself I find I like reading more online than spreading the paper out in front of me on the breakfast table – which is scary because I don’t want anybody to feel that way. But I’m hopeful that if stories are good enough people will want to read them. If that isn’t the case I’ll just keep trying to write longer stories and hope people get to the end.

Q. How did you get your job?

A. I got an internship after my senior year. I interned for the Star Ledger after my junior year and did well enough that they were willing to keep me on. I was potentially going to work for the Star Ledger when the Post kept me on.

I thought it would take years to get to a place like the Post, but I stumbled into the situation. I made the most of my internship but it’s a lot of luck. Sending out internship applications for three years teaches you that pretty thoroughly. I do a pretty good job but a lot of people at smaller papers would do just as well – it’s not a perfect hierarchy by any stretch. There are so many good people out there – a lot of it is luck.

Q. What do your parents do?

A. They’re both teachers. My Mom teaches Special Ed and my Dad teaches English in middle school. You can imagine how two teachers corrected my grammar from a very young age. I’m the oldest of three boys. One brother is doing Teach for America – he’s teaching 6^th graders in Compton. The fact that he’s getting his ass kicked by his job makes me feel my job is so easy.

(SMG thanks Eli Saslow for his cooperation)

An Interview with Bob Ryan (Part Two)

“Whitlock has decided to position himself as the world’s last honest man and he’s wearing a giant boulder on his shoulder.”

“Joe Theismann is…a humorless guy and a mike hog who can’t compete with Tony intellectually and Tony can’t begin to use his best stuff with him. Tony knew it wasn’t going to work – in his heart he knew.”

“Nobody in America is writing as well – anybody would be deluding himself to say he’s writing better than Selena Roberts the last three years.”

“And I have to mention – because he’s such a punching bag – Lupica. People are so insanely jealous of him they don’t realize that to get where he is he’s done the work.”

Bob Ryan: Interviewed on November 14, 2006

Position: Columnist, Boston Globe; panelist, The Sports Reporters, ESPN

Born: 1946, Trenton, NJ

Education: The Lawrenceville School, 1964; Boston College, history, 1968

Career: Boston Globe 1968 -, WCVB (Channel 5, Boston) 82-84

Personal: married, 37 years (Elaine), two children, three grandchildren (triplets)

Favorite restaurant (home): Santarpio’s, East Boston “the quintessential neighborhood pizza joint – earthy – where Mike Eruzione’s father worked for years – this place speaks to Boston, with Lefty at the grill in front laboring over sausage and peppers”

Favorite restaurant (road): The Original Pantry Cafe, LA (9^th and Figueroa) “world’s greatest breakfast 24 hours a day”; Chicago Chop House, Chicago “a classic guy place that does not intimidate women”

Favorite hotel: Marriott (anywhere), Arizona Biltmore, Phoenix, “never will forget a blissful three days during the 1984 Western Conference Finals”

Honors: Basketball Hall of Fame, Curt Gowdy Award, 1997

Al Campanis Moment: In May 2003 the Globe suspended Ryan for four weeks after he said on-air that Joumana Kidd, wife of Nets guard Jason Kidd, needed someone to “smack” her for taking her 4-year-old son to night playoff games where they could be taunted. Joumana Kidd had been the victim of domestic abuse by her husband in 2001.

Q. Your reflections on the Joumana Kidd incident?

A. My reflections are that I’m angry with myself forgetting in the heat of battle that the woman had been hit. I like to think that if I had remembered – or if it had been pointed out to me by the host (Bob Lobel), who could have said, “Whoa, don’t you think that kind of hyperbole is a little out of line here” – I would have reigned myself in. But it didn’t occur to me. So off I went and I wasn’t going to back down. It sounds hard to believe now but I didn’t perceive the potential damage of the word “smack” because it was purely a hyperbolic usage in the lexicon. I offer as proof, just a few days later, Doris Roberts of “Everybody Loves Raymond”, who was at the South Shore Plaza to pump up her autobiography. She was asked about the show, apropos of Ray Romano coming back for another season, and she said, “He doesn’t want to come back but I’m going to have to smack him.” That was a woman talking about a man obviously. At the time I couldn’t extrapolate. Do I feel remorse about criticizing this woman – not at all. It was just a dumb, costly – extremely costly – mistake. Out of the twelve months in the calendar year that one was the most costly to be suspended – I couldn’t do any outside stuff – it cost me $20,000. In my bracket that’s a lot of money. That’s what I forfeited by my indiscretion.

Q. What was your take on the Jason Whitlock-Mike Lupica feud?

A. I wasn’t there for the blowup show. Whitlock has decided to position himself as the world’s last honest man and he’s wearing a giant boulder on his shoulder. He picked a fight with ESPN.com and alluded to the fact that he didn’t like the new pecking order. I always enjoyed doing the show with him – he’s smart and he really knows football – but it seems like this thing was puffing him up to a degree I try to avoid myself. In all the years I’ve done I’ve never once mentioned it in a column. Why am I on that show? In 1989 Joe Valerio took over the show – he was an acquaintance from the 1970s when he was with the New York Post – before he went into TV producing. He called me and asked me to get involved – if somebody else had taken it a different set of characters would have been on. Jason is picking a fight you’re not going to win – Joe is going to protect Mike. Jason didn’t need to pick a fight about ganging up on Barry Bonds. Come in and have a nice discussion and walk off in Tip O’Neill fashion – that’s the way we’ve always done things on that show – until this. Let’s see where he goes with his career because he’s very talented.

Q. How is Tony Kornheiser doing on Monday Night Football?

A. He’s sui generis – there’s no one else like him – a unique force. He’s a truly great writer going way back – unlike anybody else – and he did a radio show unlike anyone else’s. PTI was created for his unique talents. The Monday Night Football thing is going to be something that happened. When it’s over – a couple years from now it will be regarded as “he gave it a shot”. It didn’t work out. He pocketed a lot of money and didn’t hurt anybody. He’ll survive the hits on it and go back to what he does. He’s a good friend. How can you compare him to anybody?

Q. Why isn’t he clicking?

A. He’s not clicking because what Tony does best is make fun of things and crack wise about things before or after and that insight has nothing to do with working a game. I’ve done color locally and it’s just different.

Then you throw in the third-party factor and if it was going to work it would be with somebody he could develop a shtick of friendly banter and the guy could compete with him to some degree intellectually – and you could get that going without being too cartoonish. Joe Theismann is not that guy. He’s a humorless guy and a mike hog who can’t compete with Tony intellectually and Tony can’t begin to use his best stuff with him. Tony knew it wasn’t going to work – in his heart he knew. But it was an honor to be picked and he had to take the money – which would have turned the heads of all of us in his position.

Q. Writers you admire?

A. Mark Whicker (Orange County Register). He wins no awards – but that speaks more to the people who give them out. He’s the guy who writes what I wish I had written – I used to say that about Frank Deford in SI. My new favorite is Selena Roberts (NY Times). Nobody in America is writing as well – anybody would be deluding himself to say he’s writing better than Selena Roberts the last three years. She is a combination of an eternally entertaining writer who picks interesting topics and has proven herself to be versatile in types of column and sports. I followed her through the Knicks job and tennis.

Some people are born columnists and some aren’t. Some are fluid essayists and feature writers but don’t have the slightest clue how to write a column. Some people are pedestrian writers but know what a column is and how to sell it.

And I have to mention – because he’s such a punching bag – Lupica (NY Daily News). People are so insanely jealous of him they don’t realize that to get where he is he’s done the work. He can be very good when he puts his mind to it – he’s a big event guy. You can make an argument that he’s got a lot on his plate and that some of his routine stuff can be better, but he can be very good at big events. Another writer I’ve come to appreciate in a short time because he understands what a column is Mike Vaccaro (NY Post). Harvey Araton (NY Times) is another one. Dan LeBatard (Miami Herald) is a fabulous writer. Jon Saraceno (USA Today) – I know first-hand what it means to be viewed as a specialist – me in basketball and him in boxing – who must prove himself to be conversant in a broader range, so I feel professionally proprietary about him. He totally understands what a column is all about, and he can really turn a phrase.

Q. Electronic media you admire?

A. I’ve always been a (Bob) Costas guy. The problem with broadcast people is that familiarity inevitably breeds contempt. I don’t know of anyone who has survived a long period of time in the public eye with being hit by a backlash. You are deemed to be too old, too repetitive, and too preachy in people’s minds. If you’re onstage long enough you’re deemed to have lost it. It can happen to writers too. (Chris) Berman is another huge punching bag but he’s still good – he’s got a real breadth of knowledge.

Q. What kind of personality do you need for sports media?

A. Everybody is different. Peter May (Boston Globe) is an erudite detached intellectual guy. But he has friends in the business – people he gets information from. He’s not a wide-eyed fan – he watches games on TV but doesn’t bring the same kind of intensity I do.

We’ve never had anybody like Mike Reiss covering the Patriots. Even Willie (McDonough) was a little cynical. Reiss is the ‘me’ and Peter (Gammons) of 2006. He loves football and can’t get enough of it. I haven’t met anybody remotely like that. He can’t write the way Peter and I do – he’s not as funny – but he’s as intellectually curious.

Q. You and Gammons started at the Globe at the same time. How would your careers have developed if Gammons had been assigned to the Celtics and you to the Red Sox?

A. In 1969 Peter and I split the first six home games of the Celtics. Peter would never have been Peter in basketball. He could write it and understand it – he went to North Carolina after all – but he was raised in Groton on hockey and baseball. He would have done a good job but his passion would have had a limit. I could have become a big baseball guy but not on the level of Peter. I love baseball more than anything – I have more empirical knowledge about the game than any other topic – and love it more than most people but not as much as Peter. I would have come closer to Peter in baseball than he would have come to me in basketball. He wouldn’t deny that.

Q. Our younger readers may not know that hilarious GQ food writer Alan Richman was a sportswriter – what can you tell them?

A. Alan is a brilliant writer who translated into sports wonderfully. He could write with humor and sports needs people who can write with humor. I always enjoyed his stories. He had the right temperment – he enjoyed covering a 9-73 team (the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers) and will tell you so. I wouldn’t have, but he did, and he found great stories on that team. He wrote for an afternoon paper – the Bulletin – and one time the Sixers were playing the Celtics in Providence and I was supposed to meet him after the game for a beer at the Holiday Inn. I waited and waited – he wound up in a deep conversation with Roy Rubin, the Sixers coach, who poured out his soul to him – just totally unleashed it. Alan got a really great story out of it. He was a terrific sportswriter – he could write food and politics just as well. Some people are just good writers no matter what it is – I like to think that if I wrote anything else it would be the same thing.

The greatest NBA writer of all time was George Kiseda – the “Silver Quill” – my favorite writer. If only I could have written like him – although in terms of game stories nobody could write like yours truly – but writing for the PM (Philadelphia Evening Bulletin) was an art form George had mastered. He moved to LA and worked the desk for the Times – for years we could always tell the headlines he wrote. George was a huge Wilt fan – he claims he once saw Wilt palm a bowling ball.

(SMG thanks Bob Ryan for his cooperation)