An Interview with Bob Ryan (Part One)

“If you die you should want me to be working the day you die. I do tributes well…”

“I still like the games. I see people crafting columns in the fifth inning or the third quarter and I say, “You’re not watching the game”. And people say, “I’m writing about the people and the color”. Well, guess what? It starts with the game… I don’t think enough people actually like the games.”

“I am very much a fan. That’s my DNA – it’s why I have an advantage over most other people. I can convey that to my readers…that is simply not the case with the vast majority of my colleagues. How can they function – I don’t get it.”

“My pet peeve is a continual stream of one-sentence paragraphs. That is not writing in my book – I would reject it if I were an editor…One-line paragraphs are not writing – it’s an easy device – it’s just illogical.”

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

Bob Ryan excerpted from the Boston Globe, September 13, 2006:

Pro sports are all grown-up enterprises, but there’s none tougher or more hard-hearted than football. It brings to mind the Sausage Factory Syndrome.

You know what I’m talking about. They say that if you enjoy eating sausages, don’t bother inquiring about how they make them. It will make you into an instant vegan.

I say that if you’re a big fan of pro football, just plop yourself into your seat at the stadium or in front of your set when the game starts and don’t think about what it took for those players to get on the field. This is the worst combination in sport: a brutal body-sacrifice game run by people who have become desensitized to the weekly carnage.

Q. How did you come up with the sausage analogy for football?

A. Because it was perfectly logical to me. There are untold millions of my fellow Americans who sit down on Sunday or Monday night and enjoy what I call a thinly-disguised barbaric exercise – who don’t care to think about what it takes to get these people on the field – players sacrificing their bodies and routinely doing things other athletes would question and the judgments coaches make. Many times I’ve met football coaches I like at the high school or college level and I ask them “Why do you choose to do this for a living – this game is so demeaning and you have to suspend so much humanity to do this – there are better games than this – why would a person of intellect and humanity choose to make a life in football?” Most people don’t think about this. So when I call pro football a sausage factory I’m calling attention to a truly barbaric exercise.

Q. How do you personally justify covering football?

A. I’ve said many times that for me baseball and basketball are fun and I love them – and football is a business. Even though I grew up with it and can enjoy a good game based on my accumulated knowledge of history and as a lover of sports drama, which it has to some degree though not to the degree of other sports, and it produces a wonderful atmosphere with large numbers of people in these stadiums and I can enjoy that and I am looking forward to the Ohio State-Michigan game which I can’t deny – but if football were declared illegal in the next five minutes it wouldn’t bother me.

I can be a hypocrite in that regard. Invariably we have to be hypocrites in this business. Look at big-time college sports – you know what a farce it is but we still embrace the pageantry and competition – but if you look at it closely it has nothing to do with higher education.

Q. Can you reconcile this?

A. You have to – if you’re too troubled by it you can’t work. I can deal with it. I go through this exercise at the Final Four – and I’ve written this – the time to complain about the folly and illogical nature of college sports is over – once you get to the Final Four. I love it – I love the competition – college basketball and baseball are in my DNA. We’re covering sports – no sense getting high and mighty about it – how self-righteous should we get? We’re just talking about sports.

If I were drawing a line I would rather draw it at the barbaric nature of football – that would be my choice. We’re forced to compromise in sports. Now if you can find a sport relatively untainted – great – but in my world I deal with sports that have these complications.

Q. How do you pick your topics?

A. That’s one of the most difficult parts of the job and I’ve been writing a column since 1989. Certain things take care of themselves – at the Globe there are a certain amount of givens. If the Red Sox are playing somebody usually will go x times a week. During playoffs all hands are on deck. We do a great deal of game coverage of the four major sports plus college – more than some papers. Then you have follow-ups – you almost always do a column on the Patriots for Tuesday after a Sunday home game. Big events have to be covered – the Olympics seem like they never go away – I’ve done every one since 92 and I was thinking about Beijing yesterday.

With the days left over you generate story ideas, people profiles, general national issues or fantasy columns – there are all kinds of categories. Some are better than others – I have strengths. If you die you should want me to be working the day you die. I do tributes well – I know how to pay tribute – and I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I know I’m good at this – not that I enjoy it if somebody dies – but I’m good at it and I’ve done many of those. Why am I good at it? I have the best sense of history on the staff and I’m a pretty good writer and I like people – I’m good on people things. Jackie (MacMullen, Boston Globe) is good with people too but she doesn’t have my knowledge of history.

As far as history – I’m far and away the best here – nobody would dispute that. If there’s some reason to tie together historical events I’m the guy. The only one close to me for sheer empirical knowledge is (John) Powers (Boston Globe) – nobody knows more things about more things than John Powers – for sheer breadth on esoteric and empirical stuff – he’s your four-wheel drive guy. And as a pure purveyor of prose I’m not sure anybody is better than Powers.

Q. What do you try to accomplish with a column?

A. You always try to make it readable. I’d like to think there’s no recognizable “Bob Ryan column”. I like to think I can shift gears – my tone is breezy – kind of loose and conversational – people compliment me for writing the way people talk – which is not a skill everybody possesses. Sometimes you try to inform, sometimes to entertain. That was (Leigh) Montville – he entertained – he could write more entertainingly about nothing. I never knew what he did but he did it entertainingly. I try to inform. Even if you aren’t interested in the topic and you come away uninformed I’d like to think you found the writing good – the phraseology. I pride myself on being a writer – I always want to entertain.

Q. How would you describe your electronic persona?

A. I’ve got what you need except I don’t have a great voice – I don’t like my own voice – in fact I hate it. But I have a lot of information and can marshal thoughts quickly and can understand the rhythm and flow of the on-air team. There must be a reason people keep asking me to do this stuff. If only I had (Mitch) Albom’s voice – oh my God.

Q. How do you prepare for a big event – like the Olympics?

A. The way we’ve operated – with the exception of Barcelona, where I covered the Dream Team from the first bounce of the ball to the end – from that point on I’ve been a generalist. There are certain big things you have to go to – figure skating, alpine skiing and maybe a little hockey and in summer track and field and swimming. You know you’re getting involved in those and you try to familiarize yourself with story lines that could develop. I start by reading preview material but not so much that I’m bogged down. (Former Globe sports editor) Don Skwar always was hyper organized and had a game plan but that doesn’t mean you can’t deviate. At the Olympics at least half the time you’re doing something that was planned and mandated – maybe two-thirds of the time. But there’s always a story nobody was counting on. Going back to ’94 the sport that attracted my attention was cross-country skiing – Norway and Italy have this astonishing rivalry. People kid me about this, but it’s amazing – over three races totaling 120 kilometers the margin of victory was the length of a ski.

Q. Comparison to the Red Sox-Yankees?

A. When you’re out there you don’t feel any different. I’ll never forget the sight of 100,000 people in Norway – it’s the same thing to those people. The Olympics are a wonderfully broadening experience – I value it. It gets you out of this parochial box we’re in. People here make fun of soccer – but that’s what most of the world cares about.

Q. You’re known for your passionate opinions – how do you maintain your passion?

A. It’s interesting how that has evolved and separated me from the pack. I just turned 60. When I started I saw guys get jaded at 40 and then they got really jaded and terminally unhappy. The late Ray Fitzgerald was an example, but that’s another story. That’s not me.

The answer is: I still like the games. That’s why so many sports editors are missing the boat as they try to re-invent the newspaper. I still like the games. I see people crafting columns in the fifth inning or the third quarter and I say, “You’re not watching the game”. And people say, “I’m writing about the people and the color”. Well, guess what? It starts with the game. If I’m flipping the dial as I was a week ago in my hotel room in New York – Brown and Yale were tied with six minutes to go – I’m hanging around to see what happens. I couldn’t name a player on either team, but I was curious to see how it came out. I like the games. I don’t think enough people actually like the games.

Which brings us to the next question, which I am anticipating, and which I feel very passionately about.

I don’t relate to people who are not fans. Some writers insist they can’t be fans – I read your interview with Dave Hooker – (Dan) Shaughnessy (Boston Globe) will tell you that – but I am very much a fan. That’s my DNA – it’s why I have an advantage over most other people. I can convey that to my readers – they know that if they hang in with me over a period of time there’s no doubt I am one of them. That is simply not the case with the vast majority of my colleagues. How can they function – I don’t get it. I can’t be clinical. Even though I don’t like football it doesn’t mean I can’t go to a game and get into it – and I’m more into football now than ever because of what the Patriots have done the last six years.

Q. Don’t fans buy tickets?

A. I’ve owned four Red Sox season tickets since ‘91. Why did I pay for two Celtics season tickets for 22 years? When I wasn’t working and I could get there I enjoyed sitting there and watching those games. I love sitting in my seats at Fenway even when I’m not working. In 2001 I was in my seat when Mike Mussina came within one pitch of a perfect game. I wanted to write that so badly, but I wasn’t working. I did write it the next day.

There aren’t many columnists who bring more unbridled passion and knowledge – and tie them together to demonstrate love and respect for a well-played game – in basketball and baseball – than me. The letters and e-mails I get show that my readers appreciate that.

Q. Okay, you buy tickets – but aren’t you still there as a professional?

A. I’m a fan. I pay for tickets. I read your interview with Shaun Powell (Newsday) and his viewpoint about going about business without getting close to the people you cover. I respect that – but I’m not like that. I can’t help becoming friendly with people in the business. I don’t see anything wrong with it. You should be able to figure out parameters – I’m not going on vacation with these guys. I don’t understand what he was talking about. I can’t understand how you can be a columnist and not have somebody you can pick up the phone and talk to – somebody who you have a cordial relationship with and can shoot the breeze with.

What is this job all about? If you’re a beat person, how can you have a source if it’s not a friendly source? I don’t get it – what’s wrong with being friendly and compatible with them? You’re selling yourself to these people. You’re selling yourself to make them comfortable with you so they tell you things.

Q. How would you describe the tenor of discourse on sports talk radio?

A. A combination of frat-boy humor, misplaced anger, and a-little-knowledge-is-dangerous approach to things, fueled by hosts who often are very skilled at what they do but are not interested in promoting any serious discourse. They are interested in promoting their programming to get ratings. If they do engage in serious discourse it’s almost by accident – they might spice up a dubious program with a good interview of somebody serious – but in the end that’s not what they’re all about.

That’s the case with the Big Show (WEEI, 850 AM, Boston), and with (John) Dennis and (Gerry) Callahan. They might dress up the show by interviewing Larry Lucchino but in the end that’s not what people remember about the show. At least that’s how it was when I stopped listening, cold turkey, in 2004 when I got satellite radio installed. I probably haven’t listened to four or five hours of talk radio since I got it. I listen to music from the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s.

Q. Your perspective on the New Media?

A. You’ve got the shift in readership to the likes of Bill Simmons and all of the people on the Internet, who are a little less accountable than newspaper writers. But they’re all out there forcing us to re-evaluate where we fit in. It’s not the same and it won’t be the same – our influence is waning and eroding. Simmons is not doing what mainstream columnists do – he has no desire to speak to anyone in power – he observes and does what he does. There’s room for everybody – the access to information is staggering, imposing and intimidating. You’ve got Baseball Prospectus and all that number crunching by genius people dissecting baseball in ways mainstream writers never could – it’s very intimidating.

All you can do is use your access to bring thoughts to the public and to write as well as you can and hope that someone cares and that it matters. And how you say things is almost as important as what you’re saying. When that stops being the case we’ll be in trouble. Our business is under siege. Somebody starting out today should get to a dot.com immediately if not sooner – why spend your time in a dying industry? I’m grateful I’m much closer to the end of my career than the beginning. I’m grateful for the times I’ve lived through. I doubt the dot.comers will ever have the fun we had – because of the access and respect we got from the leagues – theirs will never be what ours was. They’ll never have the fun and the relationships we were lucky enough to have had. I can’t imagine starting out today. Whoever is the NBA guru today – if you will, the ‘me’ of 1986 or 1988 when I was at my peak – no way will he have as much fun as the guys I did it with. The world was so much simpler and the games were so much better – but that’s another story.

Ask me if I have a pet peeve.

Q. What’s your pet peeve?

A. I’m sorry if this offends people I know. My pet peeve is a continual stream of one-sentence paragraphs. That is not writing in my book – I would reject it if I were an editor. My hero is Jay Greenberg (NY Post) because he’s the only guy who writes longer paragraphs than me. We stand alone in the lengths of our paragraphs. One-line paragraphs are not writing – it’s an easy device – it’s just illogical. Anything is okay on an occasional basis – I will lay one down at times but not 27 or 35 of them and you know there are people who do that.

(SMG thanks Bob Ryan for his cooperation)

BOB RYAN

Situation winners are in? You just can’t beat it

By Bob Ryan, Globe Columnist | November 6, 2006

FOXBOROUGH — Now we know for sure exactly how high the bar has been raised in the NFL, and in case you’re wondering, yes, the Colts could do it. They could run the table. They could become the first team since the 1972 Miami Dolphins to go undefeated in the regular season.

In the last two weeks, they have come, they have seen, and they have conquered their two chief AFC competitors. Even better, they have beaten the Broncos and the Patriots on the road. If the question is, “Who’s the best team in the league?” we can hold all calls. We have a winner.

Patriots coach Bill Belichick was predictably glum. “We just didn’t do a good job tonight,” he said. “I didn’t do a good job coaching and they didn’t do a good job playing . . . You’re not going to win with five turnovers . . . There’s not a lot to make of it. They did a better job than we did. We’ve got to go back to work and get ready for the Jets.”

And, uh, this might not be the day to raise the Manning-Brady issue.

Tom Brady was 20 for 35 and Peyton Manning was 20 for 36, but that’s where last night’s comparison ended. Manning’s completions were good for 326 yards and two touchdowns, one of which, admittedly, was far more a virtuoso act from a brilliant wide receiver than the product of a great throw, but, really, does it matter? Manning was picked off once.

Brady’s 20 completions were only good for 201 yards. He did not throw a TD pass and he was intercepted four times. If you had never seen him before, you would have been asking, “What’s the fuss?” (You might keep your eye on him next week, however. He is notoriously brilliant in response to a subpar outing.)

“It was a tough night all the way around,” said Brady. “The defense kept us in the game with the turnovers the way they were.”

And what did Brady think of his counterpart?

“He made some real good throws,” Brady acknowledged. “We had a lot of pressure on him, and he stood in there and made the throws.”

And it was all about Manning and his passing game. Brady had a complementary running game (148 yards); Manning didn’t (53). But Manning made up the difference with great throw after great throw after great throw when a great throw was needed. And on the occasions when it wasn’t, on those numerous times when his receivers were 5 yards or more from a New England defender, he delivered the ball with ease.

The man does have great receivers. Marvin Harrison demonstrated once again why he someday will be making a speech in Canton, Ohio. His spectacular touchdown grab of a pass thrown to the right corner of the end zone in the third period will be on the short list of great receptions made in the entire 2006 season; you can be sure of that. Harrison stopped the ball with his left hand, gathered it into his body after latching onto it as it hung in the air, and then somehow kept both feet inbounds as he fell out of bounds.

Reggie Wayne and Dallas Clark aren’t too bad, either.

The Colts’ defense did what it had to do, utilizing its quickness and good hands to force those turnovers. Look, we all know they’re not going to put up gaudy defensive stats. The Colts are about outscoring teams, and they have done it eight times in eight attempts in the 2006 campaign.

Does all this translate into winning a Super Bowl? No, it does not. In fact, an undefeated Indianapolis Colts team would be under enormous pressure entering the postseason. This is not the world as it was in 1972. There was pressure and there was media coverage in those days, but it was nothing like it is today. That was pre-ESPN, pre-Internet, pre-talk shows, at least as we know them. The landscape is entirely different. In sports today there is no escape from your accomplishments or your expectations. It is far, far harder to do historic things in this smothering communications climate. But that’s a story for the new year. The current story is this: Can anyone defeat the Colts in the here and now?

In the last two weeks, the Colts marched into Denver and knocked off the Broncos, running up 34 points on a superb defensive team, and have now marched into Foxborough and defeated the Patriots, 27-20, while intercepting Brady four times and making the Patriots’ secondary look very, very bad. Are you perhaps familiar with the term “separation” as it pertains to pass receivers and defensive backs? Good. Are you also familiar with a geological phenomenon known as the “Grand Canyon”? Good. Now use your imagination.

The Patriots had a chance. They were tied at 14-14, and this was after Brady threw a drive-ending interception the first time he had the ball that would have had Bill Walton screaming “Horrrrrrrible!” They were down only 24-17 entering the fourth quarter and had some excellent chances to get back in it, right down to the final minute and change when Brady’s pass intended for Kevin Faulk on a first and 10 at the Indianapolis 39 bounced off the little guy’s hands and was picked off by Indianapolis linebacker Cato June. It was a wee bit high, but it was catchable, so there was shared blame, if that really matters. What mattered was that the game was over.

“We had an opportunity to tie the game at the end,” said Brady. “What more could we ask than that? We’ve got to execute better.”

It was an odd game in that while there was a definite Patriots shoulda-woulda-coulda element to it, there was also a sense that Peyton Manning and friends were essentially unstoppable. Hunter Smith was called upon to punt only once. If you’re looking for something to nitpick, you can point to missed Adam Vinatieri field goals of 37 and 46 yards.

So here’s the deal. The Colts are halfway home, and a look at the schedule tells you they have a serious chance to go undefeated. Their remaining road games are at Dallas, Tennessee, Jacksonville, and Houston. Yes, they could lose at Dallas and Jacksonville, but I dare you to put your money on it.

The remaining home games are against Buffalo, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Miami.

As we learned yesterday in that Dolphins-Bears game, the NFL can still be an “any-given-Sunday” league. But let’s see . . . Peyton Manning or Rex Grossman? Hmmm.

We’ll deal with January dynamics when we get to January. It looks as if November and December will belong to the Colts.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com
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© Copyright
2006 The New York Times Company

An Interview with Michael Rosenberg

“People who never write humor think it’s an art; those who try it on a regular basis understand it’s a craft. You have to choose every word carefully, set up your jokes, and basically manipulate the reader while making it seem effortless. Comedy is timing, and with printed comedy, you can’t control how the reader’s voice delivers the joke. So you have to have every word exactly right. … it’s easier to get a laugh in a sports column, anyway, because expectations are lower. … In a sports column, readers expect sports commentary, so the humor can catch them by surprise.”

Michael Rosenberg: Interviewed on July 22, 2008

Position: columnist, Detroit Free Press

Born: 1974, New York

Education: University of Michigan, 1996, B.A. in English

Career: Philadelphia Inquirer, 1996-97 (correspondent); Chicago Tribune, 1998 (one-year intern); Washington Post, 1999 (high schools reporter); Detroit Free Press, 1999-present (University of Michigan beat writer ’99-’04, Columnist ’04-present)

Personal: Married, one child

Favorite restaurant (home):Pacific Rim by Kana, Ann Arbor “Everything I’ve had there was excellent. Especially the sablefish. I don’t even know what sablefish is, but if you’re in the neighborhood, go to Pacific Rim and order it. Also, they have a warm chocolate cake that takes 20 minutes to prepare and three months to forget.”

Favorite restaurant (away): Shapiro’s, Indianapolis. “I’m not saying it’s the best restaurant, but it’s a wonderful Jewish deli where you would not otherwise expect one. I love that place.”

Favorite hotel: “Anywhere I can earn Marriott points. I counted a few years ago, and I had stayed in 20-something Marriott properties in Florida alone. The two greatest people ever are whoever created the hotel point and the guy who decided to try wings sauce with blue cheese.”

Author of: War As They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler and America in a Time of Unrest

Michael Rosenberg, excerpted from the Detroit Free Press, Dec. 21, 2004:

Last month, the Tigers offered Dominican pitcher Carlos Perez a contract. He did not accept. The Tigers then withdrew their proposal. Just another athlete-team negotiation.

Except that on three occasions, women have told authorities that Perez raped them.

“I know that he’s had some problems,” said Tigers president Dave Dombrowski. “We didn’t even get to that point to where we had to check.”

The incidents were separate. The women have never met. Perez has never been convicted; in fact, he has never gone to trial. He has maintained his innocence in all three incidents, saying the accusations are “lies.”

But to at least two of the alleged victims, these cases show something else: the difficulty of a rape victim going up against a sports organization, an athlete and the criminal-justice system.

Seemingly every week, another athlete is accused of sexual assault. In our 24/7 media environment, these stories are like the sun bursting through the clouds: both blinding and fleeting.

This is the story of one athlete, the women who accused him, and the repercussions for all of them. Two of the women will speak on the record. The other will be quoted from police transcripts. Perez declined an interview request through his attorney, but one of the women filed a civil suit, and he gave a deposition for that. He will be quoted from that deposition.

This is also the story of how the system reacts. And it is a story to think about the next time an athlete is accused of sexual assault, and it flashes on our TVs.

We hear the accusation. We question the motives of the alleged victim, which we don’t do with other crimes. We question the accuser more than we question the accused.

Team officials instinctively defend the player. Expensive attorneys disparage the accuser, saying the allegations are false. Sometimes the allegations are indeed false.

We decide, almost instantly, whom we believe.

Teammates and many fans defend the player, pointing out that consensual sex is readily available for pro athletes, so why would an athlete rape somebody? We don’t give much thought to the counter-argument: because sex is so readily available, some athletes feel entitled to it, regardless of the woman’s wishes.

The woman has only her story. The police might believe her, as they did in all three cases with Carlos Perez. But oftentimes, that is not enough for a conviction or even a trial.

And then the player, media and culture move along to the next sunburst, often leaving the alleged victim behind.

“I wanted to just crawl under a bed and hide,” said Amy McQuillin, one of Perez’s alleged victims. “My father really wanted me to report it immediately. I had people that I knew, that I had worked with in the media. … It was just an absolute nightmare, the thought of it.

“You can’t imagine someone is out there doing this on a regular basis and they’re getting away with it continually. I really feel it’s a systemic problem.”

In the case of Carlos Perez, the women’s accusations are similar, and their stories follow a familiar downward spiral.

Q. The Carlos Perez piece was a tough investigative piece – what was the background? Why did you go after it, and how did you work it?

A. I had written about athletes and sexual assault before. One day I got an e-mail from a sexual-assault survivors’ advocate (somebody I knew) that the Tigers were close to signing somebody who had committed multiple rapes. Obviously that got my attention, so I went to work.

I could tell early on that this was a unique and important story: the guy had been accused of rape by three women in three separate but similar incidents and never even went to trial. I was lucky that one of the women, Amy McQuillin, was working like crazy to get some form of justice – I really admire her, and we’ve stayed in touch. I was able to track down another woman, Mandy Bernard, who went on the record for the first time. I could not get the third woman to talk but there were police transcripts so I could tell her story.

I worked on it for about a month, talking to Amy, Mandy and assorted cops and attorneys, among others. I also had hundreds of pages of legal files. And I really have to give my bosses credit on this one: They ran a 110-inch story in one shot on a guy the Tigers didn’t even end up signing. They realized this was about something bigger. It was about the legal system and society and how this could happen.

As a postscript: after the story ran, Amy McQuillin’s civil suit regained momentum, Perez’s lawyers dropped off the case and Perez basically dropped out of sight. Officially, she won $15 million. Actually collecting that money has not been easy, but at least somebody told her they believed her. That’s probably the best thing you can do for a survivor of sexual assault.

Q. As a columnist, can you and should you do investigative reporting?

A. I wish I could do more. It’s tough to stay on top of the day-to-day sports scene and still have time to dive into this stuff, and I’ll admit that I didn’t do as much investigative reporting as I would like the last three years while I was working on a book. But I think columnists need to report, even if it’s not “investigative reporting” in the classic sense. I’m always baffled by columnists who don’t report. I just wonder: Don’t you want to be right?

For a columnist, that’s what reporting is – it increases your chances of being right. I know I won’t be right all the time, and when I’m wrong it literally keeps me up at night. But if I talk to enough people who know what’s going on, ask enough questions and – if the story calls for it – look at enough files, I have a better chance of being right. I don’t write blind, especially when I’m being critical. Even if there are no quotes in my column, you can be pretty sure I talked to people who informed my opinion. I also seek out people who disagree with me so I can challenge my own beliefs.

We have to report. If you’re covering a baseball game, be there when the clubhouse opens. Go to practices, make phone calls – this is basic stuff, but sadly there are some people who don’t do it. It’s frustrating, because when we face so much competition in so many forms, reporting should be what distinguishes our work. Anybody can have an opinion, but we’re lucky that we get to have informed opinions. Newspapers should have more information, and higher standards, than blogs or message boards or sports-radio stations – that is supposed to be our role here.

This is only tangentially related, but sometimes I see standards being lowered in an effort to get web hits. I guess web hits are the only way to measure success online at the moment, but I think they are the modern bane of great journalism. Think about it: Web hits don’t measure whether somebody liked a piece, or whether they even read it. All they measure is whether we could get them to click on a headline. I just don’t see how we can complain about “uninformed” or “reckless” bloggers if we don’t hold ourselves to a higher standard. So yes, I do think columnists should report. I think we must.

Q. Why were you so tough on Comcast regarding its Big Ten Network deal? Doesn’t its contract with BTN guarantee that 80 to 90 percent of games will be shown on the basic digital level for 7 to 10 years?

A. I just found Comcast’s whole approach distasteful and hypocritical. This is a multi-billion-dollar company pretending it’s an advocate for the little guy – funding a sham website called “Putting Fans First” and acting like this wasn’t about profits. Of course it was. It always is, and that’s fine on some level, but spare me the sanctimonious garbage.

The deal should ultimately work out fine for most Big Ten fans. My point with my latest column was not that the final deal was so awful. It was that Comcast a) went against its own screeds about what was right and wrong, and b) was just using Big Ten fans to fry bigger fish.

Q. Was it fair to say Rich Rodriguez dragged Michigan into a lawsuit? Didn’t Michigan know when it hired Rodriguez that it might be sued by WVU?

A. Michigan deserves as much heat as Rich – maybe even more. That was part of the problem – he was bullheaded in his determination to fight the buyout and nobody at Michigan stopped him. The athletic director, Bill Martin, was never going to stand up to his hand-picked coach; Martin bungled the search last winter, infuriating a lot of people at the school, and Rodriguez bailed him out. Michigan and Rodriguez could have saved themselves a huge headache and lots of bad publicity by negotiating the same deal in December. And they would have saved money, too, because the legal fees are probably into six figures.

Q. What is your gut feeling on how the Rich Rodriguez era will unfold at Michigan?

A. The conventional wisdom is that Rodriguez is a great coach and Michigan is a premier job. I don’t dispute either point. But that alone is not going to make this work. College football is not like the NFL, where you just answer to an owner. You have to understand the institution where you work – the alumni, the faculty, the administration, the traditions, everything. You have to fit where you are. Michigan has its own culture, just like Notre Dame does and Alabama does and Nebraska does.

I haven’t seen enough signs yet that Rodriguez understands that. The die-hards and message-board posters mostly don’t care – they are wrapped up in how the team performs on the field, which I totally understand. That’s the fun part of being a fan. But the difference between college and the NFL is that NFL teams just have to worry about football fans. In college football, you answer to a community. A lot of people at the University of Michigan are not big football fans, but they know that the team is a reflection of the university, at least in perception. Quite a few of those folks have already soured on Rodriguez. He can win them back, but he can’t ignore them.

Q. What is Henrik Zetterberg’s reaction when he sees you approaching his locker? What’s your favorite Henrik quote?

A. For a guy who might be the best player in the world right now, Zetterberg is extremely approachable. That’s a big difference between this year’s Wings and the 2002 champions. In 2002 they had a bunch of Hall of Famers and a coach, Scotty Bowman, who played mind games with people for his own amusement. This year’s Wings are younger and much more media-friendly.

I can’t think of a favorite Zetterberg quote, but I’ll go with this: in Dallas during the playoffs this year, he and Pavel Datsyuk basically won a game by themselves. They were just awesome. They were in the post-game press conference together. Datsyuk, who is very nice, still struggles with English and hates talking about himself, and Zetterberg answered almost every question, including anything about Datsyuk. As a deadline writer, you love a guy like that.

Q. As a general columnist, which local team guarantees you the largest audience? Which team generates your best columns?

A. People outside Detroit might not believe this, but the team that generates the most interest is the Lions. The NFL just dwarfs everything else in this country. Since Matt Millen arrived, the Lions have been the worst franchise in the league, maybe the worst in all of sports, yet interest has only gone up.

Sometimes I step back and shake my head. It’s like if GM produced a line of cars with square wheels, and then produced a line of “fuel-efficient” trucks that you have to push, and then produced a line of cars that explode when you look at them, and after all that, people lined up outside the factory to see what they came up with next.

The Lions certainly generate the easiest columns, at least in the beginning of the year, especially if I’m trying to be funny. Charles Schulz observed that “happiness is not very funny” and the Lions are rarely happy. But I get tired of writing Lions columns after a while – if you shoot fish in a barrel for several months in a row, eventually you start to feel bad for the fish. After one recent season I told myself I wouldn’t write a Lions column until April, and I think I stuck to it. I needed a break.

As for the best columns, my personal all-time favorite column was about the Slovenian handball team, but that’s probably not the right answer. I’d say the Tigers provide the most consistent column fodder, because each game is so different, so many guys can be the story, and baseball players are usually pretty accessible.

Q. What about the Tigers this season – comedy or tragedy?

A. Right now, neither. As of this writing they are one game over .500, which is obviously a disappointment, but I’m not sure they are bad enough to be a comedy or a tragedy. They are only a few games out of a playoff spot in a mediocre division.

Then again, I’m not the guy who spent $130 million to build this team.

Q. You’ve been writing a non-sports column called The Break Room. What’s it like to have a non-sports vehicle? Do you think a lot of sports columnists would like to write about non-sports topics?

A. I think if you write sports columns or sports features, you end up writing about non-sports topics. As long as sports are played by humans, sportswriters will have plenty of chances to write about racism, sexism, love, gambling, homophobia, sexual assault, childbirth, corporate fraud, charity work, death or anything else in society. I have not found sportswriting to be limiting in that sense.

The Break Room is a weekly humor column I share with one of our talented feature writers, Jeff Seidel. When I write it, the Break Room is basically a 600-word riff. Hopefully a little truth gets revealed in there somewhere, but the main goal is humor. Sometimes the column works and sometimes it doesn’t. I can’t tell you I make it work all the time. I wish I did.

People who never write humor think it’s an art; those who try it on a regular basis understand it’s a craft. You have to choose every word carefully, set up your jokes, and basically manipulate the reader while making it seem effortless. Comedy is timing, and with printed comedy, you can’t control how the reader’s voice delivers the joke. So you have to have every word exactly right. I screwed up a line recently with an extraneous word; it could have been a good line but I ruined it. A reader e-mailed me about it and I wrote back to tell him he was right. I screwed up.

Frankly, I’m not sure the Break Room columns fill any need for me as writer. I have plenty of chances to try to write humor in my sports columns, and it’s easier to get a laugh in a sports column, anyway, because expectations are lower. With a humor column, readers know a line is coming – it has to be really good to work. In a sports column, readers expect sports commentary, so the humor can catch them by surprise.

But the editors wanted a humor column – which I understand – and they asked me to do it. As Dan Jenkins once wrote, I’m a firm believer in staying employed.

Q. As a writer you wield a deft quip – sort of in the tradition of Jim Murray. Who were your writing influences? What do you try to accomplish in a column?

A. First of all, thank you. There is no higher compliment for a sportswriter than to be compared to Jim Murray.

My biggest influences were Dan Jenkins, Frank Deford and pretty much anybody who wrote for Sports Illustrated in the 1980’s. When I was a kid, SI would come in the mail Thursdays and I’d read the whole thing in an hour. A lot of sports fans can say that, but the difference with me is that I actually covered up the bylines to see how long it would take me to guess who wrote it. I was always a better student of journalism than of anything else.

I also read The New York Times sports section at home and Newsday when I was at a friend’s house. I learned about the craft of language from those papers, but I can’t say they were a direct influence, because I often inject humor into my columns and as a general rule, New York sports sections are not very funny. I’ve never understood that. It’s the most sophisticated and vibrant city in the country – I think the populace can take a joke about the Yankees.

When I got to college, I started reading the Detroit papers for the first time and I realized why Mitch Albom was so popular. It’s almost impossible to stop reading him halfway through, and in a mainstream medium, that’s a heck of a talent. Dave Barry and Tony Kornheiser were also influences, and I’m sad to see them both out of newspapers. I remember reading one Kornheiser column about Les Boulez when I visited my brother in Washington while I was in college; I can still recite at least a half dozen lines from that column alone, and I often think of it when I’m trying to write a funny column on a local team.

Q. Who do you read in sports journalism? What do you read to keep up – mainstream media and non-mainstream?

A. I have to read a lot just to keep up. I start with the Free Press and our competitors in Michigan. I also read The New York Times every day – not just sports; The New Yorker, which is proof that there is a benevolent God; Foxsports.com, where I also work, and which has assembled an impressive stable of writers; Sports Illustrated; Yahoo Sports, which also has a great staff; the Chicago Tribune and ESPN.com. I know that ESPN gets a lot of heat from sportswriters who don’t work there, and some of it is deserved. But a lot of people there do great work.

Looking at that list, I realize it’s pretty conventional. I don’t read many blogs, unless they are journalists’ blogs. I have nothing against them – I think it’s great that fans have an outlet for their thoughts and emotions. But if I’m going to read about sports, I prefer an element of reporting, and most bloggers don’t report. Sometimes I’ll stumble across something on a blog and find it hilarious or poignant – I don’t dismiss the whole medium. I just have so many reading hours in a day and I use most of them on mainstream media.

I appreciate all sorts of columnists, unless they are boring or are participating in a contest to see who can be the world’s loudest idiot. Joe Posnanski (KC Star) always seems to get mentioned in these things, and for good reason – he’s outstanding, maybe the best pure columnist working today. Dan Wetzel (Yahoo) and John Canzano (Oregonian) are great reporters-turned-columnists who keep working hard. Harvey Araton (NY Times) is as thoughtful as anybody in the country; Mike Vaccaro (NY Post) is the best read the New York Post has had in years, and Rick Morrissey (Chicago Tribune) and Bob Kravitz (Indy Star) both bring a sensibility and wit that I admire. So does Mike Wise of the Washington Post.

I’ve also come to appreciate experts on specific sports – people who tell me stuff I don’t know. On baseball, I read Tim Brown of Yahoo and Ken Davidoff of Newsday; on the NBA, Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo; on college sports, Ivan Maisel and Pat Forde (ESPN.com). I’m sure I left a bunch of people out. There is no shortage of journalism talent today – what we’re missing is a business plan that works for newspapers.

Q. In “War As They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler and America in a Time of Unrest”, your soon-to-be-published book, you reconstruct the era andlegendary rivalry of Michigan’s Bo Schembechler and Ohio State’s Woody Hayes.What did you discover about Bo and Woody that surprised you?If Schembechler were alive, what would he say about the Rich Rodriguez mess? If Woody were alive, what player would he be most likely to slug?

A. Woody died 18 years before I began my research, yet he is the most fascinating coach I have ever covered – by a wide margin. He was an absolutist in a time of uncertainty; a friend of President Nixon before, during and after Watergate; and a supporter of the Vietnam War effort long after America pulled out. He was also so manic about academics that he sometimes tutored players himself, and worried desperately, almost frantically, about where the United States was headed. Just one example: He read that Americans could reduce their reliance on foreign oil, so he walked nearly three miles to and from work every day. This was in 1970! It’s 2008, and now everybody knows we rely on foreign oil too much, but can you imagine Bob Stoops or Urban Meyer walking to work?

The book covers the era from 1969 to 1978, and until I did my research and interviews, I didn’t really understand Woody’s story arc in that timespan. You talk about the game passing a coach by – that happened with Woody, but more than that, the world was passing him by. In 1968 he won the national championship and was set up for the most dominant run in college football history, and his buddy Nixon had just been elected. By 1978 Hayes was considered a national embarrassment, even before his famous punch in the Gator Bowl. But if I’ve done my job, readers will have more empathy for him on the last page than on the first.

As for Bo, I was surprised at how narrow his interests were when he was a young coach. He was all football. He was thrown into this counterculture haven in Ann Arbor, and I think that’s why he survived – he just wanted to coach his team. Woody would not have lasted 10 minutes in Ann Arbor; Bo lived there for 38 years. Eventually Schembechler became more comfortable with the media, got interested in politics and grew into a beloved symbol of all that was right in college athletics to a lot of people. He became a more likeable, palatable version of Woody Hayes – and I know Bo would take that as a compliment. Nobody admired Woody more than he did.

I think Bo would like Rich’s running game and toughness, but he would go nuts at some of the changes, like eliminating the team vote of captains. Woody would probably walk into one meeting, hear a cell phone go off and knock himself out. It’s hard for me to separate them from the era in which they coached, because the times defined them as much as they defined the times.

Michael Rosenberg’s “The Break Room”, Detroit Free Press, June 30, 2008:

Friday is the Fourth of July, giving Americans a chance to honor their country by setting stuff on fire. This is our passion throughout the year, of course. People risk an early death so that they can put flaming sticks of tobacco in their mouth, and many summer movies feature a car exploding for no apparent reason. But we really take fire-setting seriously on Independence Day.

PARENT, ON JULY 3: “Timmy! Put. That. Down. NOW! Goshdarnit, Timmy, I told you twice already not to reach for that butter knife.”

SAME PARENT, ON JULY 4:”Timmy! What did I tell you? Make sure that cherry bomb is DEFINITELY on fire before you run away!”

This is idiotic, of course, but it happens across America. The parent instructs his or her kid on how to use fireworks or firecrackers “properly,” then turns around to tend to his own fire: on the grill.

I don’t mean to generalize here, but if there is one absolute truth in life, it’s that everybody generalizes. So here I go: 99% of all outdoor grilling is done by men. The other 1% is done when men are in the restroom.

There are a few reasons for this, but most of them date to the period when men were Neanderthals, an era that paleontologists refer to as “right now.”

Modern man likes him some fire. He likes him some beef. He likes to throw the beef on the fire, stand back and admire his work, as though he has just written “Ulysses.” In reality, the man usually has allowed somebody else to raise the animal, slaughter it, butcher it and place it in small, neat packages that give no hint the animal was actually alive at some point, thus keeping modern man’s guilty conscience in check.

The man’s big achievement was to unwrap the meat and place it on a grill his wife bought for him. The grill is often filled with charcoal briquets that have been presoaked in lighter fluid, because this guy can’t even set a fire properly if he has to squirt the charcoal with lighter fluid himself.

Grilling is perfect for men with a limited attention span, which is almost all of us. It’s perfectly acceptable to stare at a grill all day long, and when you do that, you can’t mess up.

Contrast this with a high-tech cooking instrument like the toaster. You can’t just stare at the toaster until your bagel is light brown. There is simply no joy in that. Aww, yeahhh! Those two light-saber thingies on the bottom are getting ORANGE! That’s no fun at all.

You’re supposed to walk away, do something productive, then come back at the precise moment when the bagel is ready. Unfortunately, most men are just as likely to walk away and decide to play golf. They then come back six hours later and need three days of forensic testing to identify that black circular thingy in the toaster as a bagel.

Fortunately, once they figure out how to turn the toaster off, they can then fish the burned bagel out of the toaster and toss it on the charcoal without anybody noticing. Raisin-bagel-smoked burgers, comin’ right up.

(SMG thanks Michael Rosenberg for his cooperation)

An Interview with Charles Robinson

“What attracted me to Yahoo was a hunger to do enterprising journalism and very little cynicism…Things are so lucrative – all the ad dollars are shifting to the Internet – so the big attraction was they had a plan for growth and they wanted to do it right away.”

“People equated Yahoo with an Internet search engine…They would think, “That’s weird – why would a search engine be covering sports?” It was a significant hurdle.”

“My second year on the beat we broke the Reggie Bush story…That to me was the moon landing – our seminal moment – all of a sudden everyone looked at us and said “Wow, they can do impact journalism”.”

“Eric Mangini probably is the most boring coach I’ve ever encountered in my life, which is funny, because he’s the youngest. I don’t know if he’s reserved because he’s young, but have you ever heard the expression ‘watching paint dry’?”

Charles Robinson: Interviewed on September 1, 2006

Position: NFL reporter, Yahoo.com

Born: 1977, Grand Rapids, Mi.

Education: Michigan State, BJ, 2000

Career: Detroit Free Press 2000, Oakland (Mi.) Press, 2000-2003, Orlando Sentinel 2003-2004, Yahoo Sports 2004 –

Personal: single

Hobbies: reading, music, “anything not sports-related”

Favorite Sports Movie: The Natural

Q. Who gets better pressbox seating? Newspapers or Yahoo?

A. Dan Wetzel, our national columnist, said I think Yahoo translated into
English means ‘auxiliary pressbox’. Great line. Dan said, “I’ve gotten to know the Asian press corps better than anybody”. The first year it was always the auxiliary pressbox. We always were sitting with the Japanese stringers or NFL China. I was covering the NFC championship game this year in the auxiliary box. The guy from the Oakland Press, where I used to work, had a front row seat. He passed me and said, “You’re moving up in the world but back in the pressbox.”

Q. Why are you covering the NFL instead of another sport?

A. I don’t think I’ve ever chosen how I wanted my career to go. I’ve allowed things to happen more than I drove myself to any one place. I envisioned myself more as a long-form enterprise writer. That’s what I was doing at the Orlando Sentinel – also covering NFL regional stories – but then this opened up to me. I really didn’t realize how much I missed beat writing when I left Oakland – I covered the Lions for Oakland – and how much I missed the competitive day-to-day situation. Ultimately I will be more of a long form writer – I like the investigative side of long form writing – but at this point I relish the competition in beat writing – the daily grind thing.

This job opened up and the NFL was my area of expertise and I couldn’t pass it up. I really liked the company too – at that point it was a budding entity that had never done this before. The atmosphere was very different than any newspapers I worked for. If I was going to take a risk and be a senior writer I had better do it now rather than later – to see if I was cut out for it.

Q. Is Yahoo Sports a real sports department?

A. I wouldn’t say it’s complete yet. It’s grown exponentially. When I got arrived there was one national columnist, two Nascar writers and myself. And then a band of former pro athletes who were analysts for us – I wouldn’t call them journalists – more pseudo-journalists – more for entertainment value and analysis than journalistic work. Since then the writing staff has gone from four to eight to ten and they’re hiring every day – plus there are freelance guys who work for us. The editing staff has grown quite a bit but we’re still in our infancy.

What attracted me to Yahoo was a hunger to do enterprising journalism and very little cynicism. I thought this is what fledgling newsrooms must have been like years ago before things got so cynical and budget-driven and everything was about the size of the news hole and the cost to travel to a source. It felt to me like budget journalism – it hasn’t been like that at Yahoo. Things are so lucrative – all the ad dollars are shifting to the Internet – so the big attraction was they had a plan for growth and they wanted to do it right away. They were careful with the hires they made – people who could work together – forward thinking journalists. I never thought I would leave newspapers but Yahoo has grown so much now and it’s still developing. It doesn’t have a seasoned feel to it yet but as we’ve added people – such as Jason Cole, the NFL writer from the Miami Herald – he’s probably 15 years older than me and clearly more knowledgeable – it’s a good mix to have. It turns out we’ve worked well together.

Q. What’s the reaction when you say you write for Yahoo sports?

A. I knew it would be a hurdle. Early on it was disbelief maybe. People equated Yahoo with an Internet search engine. It was very hard for this journalistic enterprise to eclipse what has been burned into the brains of everyone. They would think, “That’s weird – why would a search engine be covering sports?” It was a significant hurdle. I had to go on relationships a lot and explain a heckuva lot. And I had to prove things – telling people they would see me a lot, at the same functions as national writers from Espn.com, Sportsline or the Dallas Morning News, as any normal journalist. Probably there was skepticism initially. But as the year went on I was at the owner’s meetings, I was there for the draft, the combine, everything that happened that year in the NFL. We probably crossed the threshold when they had the off-season meeting in Maui – one of those trips where only the hard-core organizations would go due to finances – we showed up and that opened up some eyes. It showed we were serious. It also showed we had the chops to cover the league.

My second year on the beat we broke the Reggie Bush story – last April. That to me was the moon landing – our seminal moment – all of a sudden everyone looked at us and said “Wow, they can do impact journalism. They’re not just covering games and providing little nuggets. They can investigate something and produce good hard-edged well-sourced journalism and breaking news.” After that story I noticed there were a lot of general managers and coaches and other journalists who said that really was eye-opening. When we walked in to cover a team or meet with an athlete there was a new level of respect – of recognition. It’s something that will diminish if we don’t follow up in a correct way – we have to push for high journalistic standards. It’s crazy to think we went two years building our credibility in short steps and this story took us the rest of the way. Previously I worked for organizations that had credibility that got you in the door. Now I’m thinking, “Wow, we’re building credibility from scratch.”

Q. How did you work the Bush story? (Bush’s parents lived in a California house owned by a man who had sought to handle Bush’s professional marketing while he still was playing for USC)

A. During the combine in February I got a tip from a source – it was ambiguous – we were talking about the changing nature of the NFL draft and how guys don’t go with full-service agents – and the source said cryptically “What do you know about the Reggie Bush situation – I hear he’s really screwed up.” He said Bush was involved with some kind of Indian tribe dispute about representation. I pushed for some more and he backed off. A month later I was in Austin for Vince Young’s pro day workout and I ran into a scouting source who was wired into all the West Coast guys. I mentioned it and he flipped out – he was shocked that anybody knew about it. He was the source that broke it open – spelled out the details – he had a wealth of information. Now I had facts and names to work with. It took us until the week before the draft before I could go to San Diego and work it with parts and pieces of Reggie’s family and friends that were involved.

When I confirmed it a month after first hearing of it I went to my bosses and said we have to be very patient with this. One thing about the Internet – the news cycle has sped up to the point where so many stories aren’t fleshed out – it’s a minute to minute situation rather than day to day – and we break pieces of stories rather than entire stories. I didn’t want that to happen with this story. To their credit my bosses said to come back when I was ready – don’t feel like I needed to rush. We took an approach that could easily have gotten us beat. In the final days other reporters were on it – Jason Cole was on it for the Miami Herald, Liz Mullen from Sports Business Journal, Jim Trotter of the San Diego Union Tribune. We were fortunate to get our facts in place and get it first – literally six hours after we posted it, at noon, on a Sunday, the Miami Herald had it. And then things became a daily scramble to break new details. It became the epitome of what journalism is nowadays. I can remember breaking things at a print outlet and you had a day to think about the next story. Now it’s literally hours.

Q. Then why are scoops still important, if they are?

A. Depends on what kind of scoop you’re talking about. There are a lot of inane detail type scoops – it’s inane what we force people to credit us with. Yahoo has learned that an offensive tackle for such-and-such team is contemplating retirement – small pieces of information yet it’s so competitive everyone considers information proprietary. Unfortunately it’s manipulated what journalism is about – we have to be part o the story and we have to be credited with breaking this little bit of news. To me a genuine scoop is enterprise – bringing to light something that has broader impact on sports in some way that would not have been presented if you hadn’t brought it to light.

Q. Did other news organizations credit Yahoo with the Bush story?

A. Yes. ESPN, that same night, credited Yahoo with having broken the story. Quite a few actually did. Eventually you get to see where the line was drawn. Some news agencies credited the Miami Herald. Associated Press initially credited the Miami Herald. I think we got our fair share of credit. Nobody in the office was complaining. My bosses aren’t driven by credit. They were just happy we produced something we hadn’t done before. It was gratifying to see these other news entities coming with everything they had – we want to attain that level of respect.

When we think of who we’re competing with we would like to aspire to compete with Espn.com. They were very good about crediting us. I would like to think we would do the same.

Q. Do you compete with Google? Is there a Google sports staff?

A. There isn’t but that question is always raised. Other print journalists ask if Yahoo is a sign more Internet giants are going to get into the business. Because ad revenue has shifted so drastically I would not be surprised if someday there is a Google Sports. AOL has a sports staff. For a long time all Yahoo did was carry other people’s content.

Q. So tell us: is Charles Woodson washed-up or not?

A. (laughing) Well, with the Packers probably. It’s a situation where he’s probably at that point in his career – it’s such an isolated position – he can’t do it on his own. He needs help. Unfortunately he’s not in that situation with Green Bay. He’s going to have a lot of pressure on him, and people who know more than I do say his skills have eroded to the point where he’s no longer the elite player he was coming out of Michigan. I’m not sure he’s worth $10 million in the first season – they pay him like he’s an elite cornerback – and I’m not sure what the Packers are getting.

Q. What’s more exciting: an NFL exhibition game or a MLB spring training game?

A. Chinese water torture. It’s funny because the first week of the exhibition season is exciting. I’m a Midwest guy – I compare it to the first week of snow – it looks great and beautiful and then you’ve seen it and you say to yourself “I’m done with this.”

.

Q. As a general rule, which position players give the best interviews?

A. It’s so hit-and-miss. I think offensive linemen give good interviews. Part of it is they’re not groomed. Quarterbacks on the NFL level are so handled by the p.r. department and the agents and they’ve been in the spotlight for so long that you tend to get a lot of clichés. Offensive linemen tend to know what everybody is supposed to do on the field and most don’t fit into the mold of dumb jocks. Offensive linemen are more blue-collar, more raw, and far easier to have a real conversation with. And a lot of them are eager to talk – typically they don’t get a lot of interview requests.

Q. Which coaches are the best interviews?

A. Information-wise in terms of football knowledge, Bill Belichick is amazing. If you want specifics about his team you won’t get a lot but if you want general information about the game he’s very smart. Jeff Fisher is very personable and a fun guy to talk to with a vast knowledge of the league. Some guys are good for entertainment value – Bill Parcells – listening to him is more of a jousting match than a press conference. Almost all head coaches if you have them one-on-one are good. It’s the press conference situation that sets them apart and you see how they go about the job – it really is theater.

I haven’t been in a Belichick press conference when I haven’t been entertained – like a Bobby Knight press conference. Eric Mangini probably is the most boring coach I’ve ever encountered in my life, which is funny, because he’s the youngest. I don’t know if he’s reserved because he’s young, but have you ever heard the expression ‘watching paint dry’? Eric Mangini is where Nick Saban was when he was at Michigan State before he developed style and confidence. When Nick was at Michigan State every press conference was nervous – you never knew how he would react to even mundane questions. I didn’t encounter him again until he was with the Dolphins and you could see he mellowed out a bit – it was easier to interact with him as a reporter. Maybe that will happen to Eric. The funny thing is, he’s in New York. I don’t think I’ve seen more characters in a press corps than in New York. The back-and-forth is amazing. I remember at a mini camp people in the press corps were taking shots at each other during a press conference. Even Mangini was laughing. It was almost like the press conference was reversed.

Q. Do you like your work?

A. I’m the envy of my friends who are doctors and lawyers and engineers. My job is their dream job – sometimes we lose sight of that. I try to think in terms of when I was in college what I would have thought of myself if I knew in ten years this is where I would be. There are always periods when we’re grinding and thinking “My god, this has less than glamorous points to it.” I try to remind myself of how lucky I am.”

(SMG thanks Charles Robinson for his cooperation)

(do not use the following notes)

wheni started joe fall wa wiwth detnews, he told stories about his life – I thought if I can liast as long in thisbusienss I will hav elived a full life – so often wer’e stiting rpessbox sitting shoulder to shoulder aattached to laptops – no often we get chanceee to know – on beat in Detroit I got chanceto know people – so manypeple have such colorful lives

jack saylor in detoit, free press almost 40 years – in b ar or hotel jack stis down at piano and playing – like a piano bar atmpshers then evyerone was singing – lot of vivid things in lives of sports writers – sadly enough I’m approaching 8 years in business and I have none

I’m the envy of freindsnad, doctors and engineers, my job is their dream job, sometimes we lsoes sight of that – I try to think of in terms of when I was in college what would I think of myself if I knew in 10 yars this is wherr ei was going to be – always peioeds where we’e gridnign and thingk omy god this has less than glamours points- I try to remind myself how lucky I am I have friends even in industry bouncing around staff shrinkgng and looking

(dan Wetzel is very funny- embodiemtn of hardest working njorunalist I’ve ver met – worked for bkb times – grinding at col bkb level – he livedin detoirt – bkb times was out of troy – was the pro fb weekly of its day – scramblighn to make ends meet – tons of free lance – even at pt he ended up going to cbs.sprotsline – he trained to be a blackjack dealer –it ws atthat point where he didntknow if it was going to happen to him – I readim at sprotsline I thought he was the bst col bkb guy in country – most unassuming we3llconnected gguy I ever met – never drops a name – at dinenr once cllphoen ran it wass was bobby kniht – I heard stream of f-en this and that – he hung up and didn’t say anything – he wrote glory road with don Haskins – wrote tarks biography – “sole influence’ abouthow sneaker comapneis polluting bkb – mid to late 30s –

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An Interview with Tracy Ringolsby (Part 2)

“It’s unnerving. You spend 40 years in an industry and suddenly it starts to disappear. Funny thing is I was reluctant to accept overtures from Internets in recent years because at my age I wanted something that might be a little more stable. Now look at me.”

“As soon as the announcement was made in December I began touching base with as many people as possible, looking to set up contingency plans… I discussed what was going on with others, and fortunately most people understood so when the decision came down I had several free-lance gigs in place to help me remain visible through the season in hopes of finding something more solid next season.”

Tracy Ringolsby: Interviewed on April 14, 2009

Position: pre-game and post-game analyst, FSN Rocky Mountain telecasts of Colorado Rockies, columnist foxsports.com and Baseball America, consultant MLB Network, and created insidetherockies.com.

Born: 1951, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Education: enrolled at University of Wyoming, social sciences. Received honorary PhD in Letters from University of Wyoming in May of 2009

Career: UPI, 1971-77; Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, 77-80; Seattle Press-Intelligencer 80-83; KC Star 83-86; Dallas Morning News 86-92; Rocky Mountain News 92 – 09; currently pre-game, post-game analyst FSN Rocky Mountain telecasts of Colorado Rockies, columnist foxsports.com and Baseball America, consultant MLB Network, and created insidetherockies.com.

Personal: married, one daughter (Laramie)

Favorite restaurant (road): Waffle House “hash browns scattered smothered chunked and diced”

Favorite restaurant (home): Little Bear Inn, Cheyenne “old steak house”

Favorite hotel: Stanford Court, SF “quiet and comfortable”

Honors: J.G. Taylor Spink Award, 2005; Colorado Sports Writer of the Year 2005 and 2008; Colorado Press Association Shining Star 2000; Wyoming Sports Hall of Fame 2009.

Q. What does it feel like to have your newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, shut down? What were the final weeks and days like?

A. It’s unnerving. You spend 40 years in an industry and suddenly it starts to disappear. Funny thing is I was reluctant to accept overtures from Internets in recent years because at my age I wanted something that might be a little more stable. Now look at me.

Once the announcement came in early December that Scripps was seeking an owner and would give buyers until mid-January to respond I understood that the paper was going to close. Three months later, when they made it formal, it was a relief in that we had been in limbo for so long. At least there was a finality when the decision was announced.

Q. Was it inevitable? Why or why not?

A. It was inevitable because the owner was a corporation with no local ties or emotions. Corporations look at bottom lines. They don’t have a reason to feel any loyalty to a region or its residents or the employees because their decisions are purely financial. What Scripps showed is it did not have the guts or desire to win a battle. It preferred to tuck its tail and run away even though a win seemed very likely if Scripps had stayed in the battle.

Q. How did you transition? What kind of planning was involved? What is your advice to writers and editors at struggling newspapers?

A. As soon as the announcement was made in December I began touching base with as many people as possible, looking to set up contingency plans. I wasn’t about to sit around and wait for Scripps to formally make an announcement. I discussed what was going on with others, and fortunately most people understood so when the decision came down I had several free-lance gigs in place to help me remain visible through the season in hopes of finding something more solid next season.

Q. What are your career objectives going forward? What would you like to do?

A. That’s a decision that will be made over the summer. I have my hand in a lot of different areas so I can get a feel for what each offers, and then I will see if there is an offer from anybody. At this stage of my life, I am looking for some control over my security. I no longer have long-term sights.

Q. What is your advice to students who want a career in sports media?

A. There is a definite future. It’s a matter of finding the proper model for the internet. Once that happens the demand for writers will increase. There is going to be plenty of demand for copy and the biggest expenses — publishing and distribution — will be eliminated.

Q. Your picks for MLB division champions, league champions, and World Series champion? Best-case and worst-case scenarios for the Rockies?

A. I like the Phillies, Cubs and Dodgers with the Mets as wild-cards in the NL, and the Red Sox, White Sox and Angels in the AL with Tampa Bay the wild card. I say Angels win it all. Best-case scenario for the Rockies is the arms develop in the rotation and they win the division. Worst-case is the arms don’t develop and they finish fourth.

An Interview with Tracy Ringolsby

“One of the most important things is to learn to talk to people with the notebook closed. Deal with people like they’re people. You can’t make them feel like every time they talk to you they have to be on guard.

“A lot of guys get in trouble because they think of themselves as athletes and coaches. Most guys are frustrated athletes – I realized in the second grade I wasn’t an athlete. I’ve seen guys trying to give tips in batting practice about mechanics. Stay out of that. Players know we’re not coaches.”

“You’re around the individuals so much in baseball that they know you. I think it’s why the beat guys in baseball like it better and the columnists and TV guys don’t. It’s the one sport where the beat guys really have an advantage.”

Tracy Ringolsby: Interviewed on June 12, 2007

Position: Colorado Rockies beat reporter, Rocky Mountain News

Born: 1951, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Education: enrolled at University of Wyoming, social sciences

Career: UPI, 1971-77; Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, 77-80; Seattle Press-Intelligencer 80-83; KC Star 83-86; Dallas Morning News 86-92; Rocky Mountain News 92 –

Personal: married, one daughter (Laramie)

Favorite restaurant (road): Waffle House “hash browns scattered smothered chunked and diced”

Favorite restaurant (home): Little Bear Inn, Cheyenne “old steak house”

Favorite hotel: Stanford Court, SF “quiet and comfortable”

Honors: J.G. Taylor Spink Award, 2005

Tracy Ringolsby, excerpted from his notes column, Rocky Mountain News, June 7, 2007:

ARIZONA had a solid opening day, including taking a fifth-round gamble with North Carolina High School OF Tyrell Worthington, a raw baseball talent who has a scholarship to play football and baseball and East Carolina.

ATLANTA followed a familiar path, taking Georgia prep in the first round, OF Jason Heyward. With the 33rd pick in the draft the Braves selected Jon Gilmore of Iowa City High School, the highest an Iowa prep player has ever been selected. The previous high was when the Dodgers took Zach Hammes with the 51st selection in 2002. Atlanta used its fifth round pick on Dennis Dixon, projected starting quarterback at the University of Oregon, who hasn’t played baseball since high school.

CHICAGO scouting director Tim Wilken got an up-close look at No. 1 pick Josh Vitters as a hitter when Wilken threw Vitters batting practice two weeks ago. Vitters’ father, an auto mechanic, the only hitting coach he has ever had.

CINCINNATI No. 1 pick Devin Mesoraco of Punxsutawney Area (Pa) High School underwent reconstructive elbow surgery as a junior, but did not have any problems throwing this spring.

COLORADO took potential relievers with three of its first five selections, including No. 1 Casey Weathers, a senior from Vanderbilt.

FLORIDA selected 3B Matthew Dominguez of Chatsworth, Ca., with the 12th pick overall, 10 behind his high school teammate, SS Michael Moustakas, who went to Kansas City. It was the highest two high school teams have been chosen in the same draft.

HOUSTON paid the price for signing free agents Carlos Lee and Woody Williams. The Astros did not have a selection until No. 111, losing the first rounder choice to Texas for Lee, and second-round choice to San Diego for Williams.

Q. What are the ABCs of the baseball beat?

A. Buy a gun, put it in your mouth and pull the trigger.

Seriously, one of the most important things is to learn to talk to people with the notebook closed. Deal with people like they’re people. You can’t make them feel like every time they talk to you they have to be on guard. The Rockies picked up Jason Hirsch – he went to Cal Lutheran. The Cowboys trained at Cal Lutheran when I covered them. We could talk about that. You look for something to have a thread to a conversation. You have to understand that they’re human beings, too. You’re going to be around these individuals for a long time and you need to get it to that level. Let them understand you’re a person, too.

Second thing. A lot of guys get in trouble because they think of themselves as athletes and coaches. Most guys are frustrated athletes – I realized in the second grade I wasn’t an athlete. I’ve seen guys trying to give tips in batting practice about mechanics. Stay out of that. Players know we’re not coaches. They want to show the people involved they have insight into the game. I don’t think the people involved give a shit. Guys will start talking about arm slots and throwing terminology around. The players know we’re writers – that’s what we are.

Q. What happens if you try to strike up a conversation with Barry Bonds?

A. Nothing. I’ve known him since 1977 – whatever his age was then. I covered the Angels and his Dad was on the Angels. He has no idea who I am.

Q. Why?

A. I don’t know. He would have a better explanation than I have. He’s never been someone, from my standpoint, that you could get to know. I’ve talked to him off and on over the years. He has his world he lives in and I have mine. There’s no real acknowledgment.

Q. What will you write when he breaks Aaron’s record?

A. That he broke it. He’s been a great player on the field. Even before his steroids issues he was a great player. As a player he was a better player – more agile and quicker. I don’t think you can take away from what he was as a ballplayer.

Q. Should Bud Selig show up?

A. Yeah. It’s part of the game. Bud’s in a situation where it doesn’t matter what he does – it’s going to be wrong. For the game’s sake he needs to be there. Public opinion will be strong both ways. This a time where the game has to be the number one concern.

Q. How do you develop sources?

A. Treat people how you want to be treated. You want people to talk to you as a human. Not just athletes, but with different people in the game – you try to develop a rapport. You develop sources if they like you and trust you and realize you’re not just in the game to try to create a name for yourself. I learned this the hard way.

It’s a lot more important to be factual than first. I had a player get upset at me. He said, “When you have it people believe it.” You want to be first – you want to break the news – but when you break it you want people who read it to feel this must be true. I’m not saying it always happens that way. I’m not saying I’ve never been wrong on anything. But you have to strive for that.

Sometimes if you’re not sure you have to take a step back and suffer the short-term consequences. That’s your credibility. In the long run that helps you deal with people. You get to the point where if you wrote something somebody doesn’t care for, and your reputation is you don’t write stuff off the cuff, they have a little more faith in what you wrote.

You can be critical of people. If they want to come back and be upset they have a right to express displeasure. You’re one person. You just wrote for 500,000 people. They have a right to say something in return if I have a right to criticize.

I didn’t have a good relationship with the Rockies’ original General Manager, Bob Gebhard. We barely spoke. When he got fired, a TV guy said to me, “You have to be disappointed to lose a guy like Geb.” This TV guy didn’t even know we didn’t get along, which was good. If you’re a beat guy and you become too much of a crusader your credibility can disappear.

Q. You’re saying a beat reporter should walk a middle line?

A. You have to keep your emotions out of it. As a beat guy you can present the information and trust the public for being intelligent enough to digest it. I can present information that makes a reader think that guy’s not a very good manager. I don’t have to go on a crusade. We’ve all seen that.

Q. Leave the crusades to the columnists?

A. That’s what columnists do. You’re trying to cover the team day in and day out and if it looks like you have a vendetta your objectivity disappears. It’s like the one guy (David Gregory) who covers the White House for NBC – you know he hates Bush. He’s always in confrontations during press conferences. I’m thinking, ‘how balanced is he going to be?’ And I’m not saying that to make a political statement. My grandfather was John L. Lewis’ vice-president.

Q. Do columnists make your job more difficult?

A. They can create uneasiness. I’ve had a pretty good relationship with most columnists. I’m not going to tell them what to think. One thing I’ve always said to them, if you call me up with an idea you want to write about the Rockies, I will bring up the opposite points for you. I will bring up the counter-arguments, so they might understand what the other side is if they’re going to write it. I’ve had a pretty good rapport with (Mike) Littwin or (Dave) Krieger or (Randy) Galloway. They put a good effort into what they’re doing.

Every now and then they create a stir, but it doesn’t affect my job that much, particularly in baseball. You’re around the individuals so much in baseball that they know you. I think it’s why the beat guys in baseball like it better and the columnists and TV guys don’t. It’s the one sport where the beat guys really have an advantage. A TV guy in Denver once told me the baseball players don’t even know who he is. Think of it. Baseball players usually don’t stay in the winter – they go to a warmer climate. And when the TV guy is on at 5 and 10 o’clock they’re not at home watching. They don’t have the lifestyles football players do.

Q. Will the Stray-Rod story affect players’ trust of writers?

A. I think a lot of that is based on individuals. I’m talking as an old guy now. It used to be that you started out with trust and you had to lose it. You were welcome when you got there and you could wear out the welcome. Now it’s a situation where you have to earn it. It’s more like ‘who are these guys (writers) and what are they here for?’ It takes longer to earn it, but you can.

Q. How do you do a weekly notes column?

A. It’s a collecting thing all week. I’ve changed the approach a bit, because of the Internet and notes networks where so much stuff got passed around. I do one page of opinion stuff. For the notes I pick a single subject and try to touch on that with every team. Last week I took a look at the first five rounds of every team’s draft. I did a paragraph on each team. One week I might do something on what minor league player is closest to coming up to help out. One week it was on money paid to players not playing for the team.

You’re always collecting – sometimes you ask other reporters for help. Or you go through rosters. It’s kind of an amalgamation – an ongoing thing. You talk to front office people or scouts or other players. I’m always having three or four different ideas and slowly putting them together. Without a Sunday paper our notes go on Friday. I’m in by noon on Thursday.

The Internet has changed the whole business. I think to survive papers have to improve local coverage. The national type stuff slowly gets eaten away. The Chicago papers cover the Cubs every day – what can I write about the Cubs that a Cubs fan would want? What can I write about Barry Bonds that you haven’t found in the Contra Costa Times or the San Francisco Chronicle or the Oakland Tribune? I think what we have to do is go back to our roots. Two springs ago there was a lot of Bonds stuff going on in Scottsdale. We had Jack (Etkin) in Florida doing Shawn Chacon. The wires gave us all the Bonds stuff we could use. But Chacon was from Greeley, Colo., so we had a double reason to do him. That’s what we need to do to make readers read us. I guess you get more provincial.

I could come in and write the Red Sox for a day, but the real Red Sox fan is going to know what I’m writing. Fifteen years ago you could write something on the Red Sox a guy in Denver hadn’t read, but the Internet changed that.

Q. What effect did “Moneyball” have on baseball?

A. It was a bit of a fad. The owners got caught up in it and thought it was something new. It was such a simplistic view. What I couldn’t get over was the man who invented OBP was Branch Rickey – the same guy who invented the farm system – and suddenly we’re acting like it’s a new tool for baseball people to use. It’s just one of many tools you use. (Oakland GM) Billy (Beane) liked it because it was undervalued – it was like buying a stock you feel has an upside. Once Moneyball became the big thing Billy got away from that.

What upset me was that it was a surface look at things and that it made strong value judgments and demeaned people who put their lives into the game.

I don’t think it’s much of a factor anymore. I thought it was an oversimplification and I wrote a column on it. I didn’t think there would be that big of a reaction. Work-wise it never really affected anything. I’ve always been involved in different scouting groups as far as trying to help those guys – they’re probably the lowest paid guys in the game. It wasn’t like suddenly I became a defender of scouts. It didn’t change my relations with those people – I really don’t think it changed much of anything. It didn’t change anything with Billy, who I’ve known since he was a player and always got along well with. The whole thing got blown out of proportion.

Q. Are you a voice for the old guard?

A. I got characterized as the keeper of the pressbox or something. I’ve been in SABR for the last 25 years. I’m a statistical guy, that’s the irony of it. I can analyze things statistically – that’s why I know there’s a lot of weakness in it. I was in the 99^th percentile in math on the college boards. I can’t tell you if a guy is throwing a fastball or a slider, but I can do a statistical breakdown. I know you can make stats come up with what you want them to come up with.

Because of the rotisserie leagues people came up with the idea of putting statistical things together. That’s fine, if you’re not working with personalities. Having covered the ‘85 Royals, not the most talented team in baseball, and understanding the thought process of those guys, and what it took to win, I realized this is a people business like any other business. Dealing with people just can’t be done statistically. Any business you can do statistical analysis but if that’s all you do you’re in trouble. People have to fit together.

(SMG thanks Tracy Ringolsby for his cooperation)

A Hall of Fame Chat with Tracy Ringolsby

By Rich Lederer

My Dad’s and Tracy Ringolsby’s careers overlapped in 1977 and 1978. My father was Director of Public Relations/Promotions for the California Angels from 1969-1978, and Tracy covered the Angels for the Long Beach Independent, Press-Telegram from March 1977-July 1980.

Ringolsby subsequently covered the Mariners for the Seattle Post-Intelligence from July 1980 – July 1983, the Royals for the Kansas City Star-Times from August 1983 – February 1986, and the Rangers for the Dallas Morning News from March 1986 through the 1989 season. He was the national baseball writer for the Dallas Morning News during the 1990-91 seasons and has been covering the Rockies for the Rocky Mountain News since April of 1992. Tracy has also written a syndicated weekly column since March of 1986.

A co-founder of Baseball America, Ringolsby was the President of the Baseball Writers Association of America in 1986. He was the Master of Ceremonies at Cooperstown in 1986 and 1992. Tracy has been a member of the Society of American Baseball Research for 25 years. Ringolsby holds the distinction of being the only sportswriter ever nominated for the Shining Star Award for journalistic excellence by the Colorado Press Association (which he won in 2001).

Ringolsby, 53, lives on 80 acres northwest of Cheyenne, Wyoming with his wife, Jane, two thoroughbreds and a quarter horse. His daughter Laramie also lives in Cheyenne and works for the State Department of Transportation. He is also a member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association, the University of Wyoming Cowboy Joe Club, the National Western Stockshow, the Scout of the Year Foundation, and the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation.

Tracy and I met in person for the first time in over 25 years at the Winter Meetings in Anaheim earlier this month. He agreed to discuss his Hall of Fame ballot
with me in a series of emails and instant messages.

RL: I saw your ballot and was curious as to why you voted for Dave Concepcion over Wade Boggs?

TR: I didn’t vote Dave Concepcion over Wade Boggs. That’s not a fair statement. I had three open spots on my ballot so it wasn’t a matter of choosing any individual over the other.

RL: OK. Let me rephrase the question. Why did you vote for Concepcion?

TR: I feel Concepcion was a dominant player at his position in his time, very underrated for intangibles, and things he — along with Tony Perez
— did to keep the egos on those Reds teams from tearing the team apart. Concepcion and Perez were the settling influences. Concepcion also was a marvelous shortstop and handled the bat extremely well.

RL: I would rank Boggs as the fourth-best third baseman ever and am not convinced that Concepcion is even one of the game’s top 15 shortstops.

TR: I am sure there is a statistical comparison that allows you to say you feel Boggs is the fourth-best third baseman ever, and I respect your opinion. I, however, see major fallacies in the comparsion of stats over generations because the emphasis of the game changes dramatically. Guys can benefit statistically or be hurt in terms of stats based off their park. A left-handed hitter at Fenway Park probably has as much a stat edge as any hitter at Coors Field. I don’t think of Boggs among the dominant players at his position during his era, much less all time. This comes from personal observations and feelings from having covered the American League during the bulk of Boggs’ career. I never felt Boggs was a threat in game situations, much like Rod Carew, and I’m sure this will be another black mark against me, but I didn’t vote for Carew either.

RL: At least you’re consistent. Boggs and Carew are very comparable offensively. I even pointed this out in an article I wrote
earlier this month in support of Boggs. However, I believe Boggs was a superior player overall because he was a better than average third baseman most of his career whereas Carew split time between first and second base and was no better than average defensively.

TR: While Boggs did win two Gold Gloves, I don’t know that you’d say he was exceptional as a third baseman. He worked to become a decent third baseman.

RL: Do you look at factors besides statistics and awards?

TR: Despite how easy it is for those who don’t know me to pass off everything I write as being anti-stats, I have been a member of SABR for roughly 25 years. Stats are the tool I can use to feel I have a handle on a player. I do not pretend to be able to visually break down a player like a scout.

I see intangibles as counting along with tangibles in determining a player’s greatness. I look for players who their teammates felt would make them better in a tough situation. I look for players who played the game to win and didn’t care about the personal aspects, realizing that if they succeeded the personal accolades and stats would be there. Boggs was a corner infielder. For him to be dominant, in my opinion — and it’s just my opinion — he had to be a power guy.

RL: I don’t know why you have to be a power guy to be considered a “dominant” third baseman. I love power, but I value players who make a habit of getting approximately 200 hits and 100 walks every year very highly, too.

TR: Well, third basemen, first basemen need to be power guys or else they get a lineup out of whack. You can afford to carry a non-power guy at one of the corners if you have an A-Rod
at shortstop or a Carlton Fisk behind the plate or Fred Lynn in center field, but that’s a situation where you have to adjust for the lack of what you normally want from a position.

RL: I also noticed that you voted for Jack Morris and not Bert Blyleven.

TR: Jack Morris has always been an easy choice for me. He was the pitcher that you wanted on the mound in a big game throughout his career. He had that extra sense of how to win. He didn’t let big games get away from him.

RL: Have you ever voted for Blyleven? If not, why not?

TR: I felt Blyleven was a pretty darn good pitcher but never felt he was dominating or intimidating or the best in the game. He was able to build up quality numbers because he was good for a long period of time — which is an excellent accomplishment — but I don’t see him as great at his position in his era.

RL: Are you comfortable denying Hall of Fame honors from a pitcher who is 5th on the all-time list in strikeouts
, 9th in shutouts
, and 24th in wins
?

TR: The fact that I don’t vote for a Boggs or Blyleven doesn’t mean they were bad players. Let’s remember, in voting on the Hall of Fame we are talking about the elite of the elite. So I do get a bit uncomfortable in trying to explain why I didn’t vote for somebody because then it makes it look like I am belittling the player’s accomplishment. I’m much more comfortable explaning why I did vote for a player.

RL: What do you make of the fact that, other than Blyleven, every pitcher who is eligible for the HOF in the top 14 in strikeouts and top 20 in shutouts has already been enshrined?

TR: There are players in the Hall of Fame I didn’t vote for or, if I had been voting at the time, wouldn’t have voted for — and I don’t feel compelled to use their comparisons in assessing a candidate’s worth. Also the fact I don’t vote for someone does not mean I didn’t respect their accomplishments or credentials.

RL: Some people have accused you of voting for or against players based on your relationships with them.

TR: That’s off base. When I covered the Seattle Mariners, Maury Wills was the manager and we rarely spoke — I think eight times in six months. In his book, there is a debate over whether he hated me or Don Baylor more. Regardless, I voted for Wills every year he was on the ballot because I felt he changed the way the game was played.

RL: Maury was a special player. I had the privilege of watching him play for the Dodgers from 1959-1966. His stolen bases were much more valuable during the lower-scoring 1960s than they would be today.

TR: I don’t think the value of stolen bases has really declined. It’s a matter of the quality of the stolen base and the disruption it can create. What happened, particularly with Rickey Henderson and Vince Coleman, is that stolen bases were overexposed, and their value decreased but Rickey wannabes were not able to have the success ratio to make the stolen bases an effective tool.

RL: Well, we may disagree on Boggs, Blyleven, Concepcion, and Morris (and perhaps the value of stolen bases) but reasonable people can disagree, right?

TR: Exactly. That’s why it takes 75 percent (not 100 percent or 50 percent) to get a player elected. What’s important in baseball is the arguments are more strongly about people who aren’t in than with other sports where you always wonder why certain people are actually in.

RL: Your Hall of Fame selections generated a lot of controversy at Baseball Primer
.

TR: As I’m sure you know from having met me many years ago when I played cards with your Dad at your house, I don’t really care if people agree with me. But I do care if they question my integrity. My method of making decisions or drawing a conclusion may be different from somebody else, but nobody who has ever known me has ever been able to accuse me of being lazy or not putting effort into trying to determine my decisions.

RL: You have certainly made the rounds over the past three decades.

TR: To have people like Michael Lewis write that I have never talked to Billy Beane — even though Billy and I actually have a good relationship — and then to say I’m a writer who sits at home, without going to the ballpark and issues decrees eats at me. If anything, maybe I’ve gone to too many ballparks. I’ve covered baseball for 29 years and I am still a beat writer by choice. The day to day presence at the park is what I enjoy. Sadly, I must assume that guys who want to be baseball writers and aren’t, for whatever reason, find it easy to cling to misstatements of someone like Michael Lewis and give legs to the lies. Funny thing is, it makes me question the validity of anything those people claim to be true because from my own experience I have seen that they don’t put much effort into drawing conclusions — at least they didn’t in regards to me.

RL: Thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

TR: It’s been a pleasure. It’s always nice to exchange ideas with people who realize you can disagree with dignity and respect.

[Additional reader comments and retorts at Baseball Primer
.]

Comments

Well, we now understand why Tracy Ringolsby should stick to reporting.

Why keep stats? In fact, why even keep score? Or which team won? Or standings? We could decide the game based on “the intangibles”, or the players “that handled the bat extremely well”. Or, the pitchers that “didn’t let the big game get away from [them]. As for the Hall of Fame, we should just elect the players that “played the game to win and didn’t care about the personal aspects”. I guess that means David Esckstein should get in when he is eligible. And by the way, I don’t mean this to be disrespectful or undignified-just based on common sense, or as some (perhaps Tracy) might say, horse sense.

Posted by: Big E at December 31, 2004 9:14 AM

An Interview with Justin Rice

Justin Rice: Interviewed on June 14, 2011

Position: Freelance writer and founder of BPSsports.com, a website designed to cover rarely covered Boston Public School athletes and teams.

Born: 1980, Detroit, Mich.

Education: Michigan State University, 2003, Bachelor of Arts in Social Relations; Northeastern University, 2011, Master’s in Journalism

Career: April 2008 – Boston Globe, Boston, Mass. (cir. 219,214)

present Correspondent , Cover MBTA for Your Town websites. Have also contributed to sports page, Globe South and City Weekly; April 2011 – present: AOL Patch, Correspondent , Contribute stories to South End and West Roxbury Patch sites ; Feb. 2010 – present, TeamUSA.org, Correspondent, Nov. 2009 – present, BPSsports.com, Founder and publisher, Built and run website to highlight rarely covered inner-city athletes in Boston Public Schools; manage and edit correspondents; create multimedia content, including video and photos ; March 2010 – April 2010, Metro Boston, Staff reporter, Covered all aspects of Boston news, including the MBTA, MassChallenge and several startups; March 2010 – Dec 2010, ESPNBoston, Correspondent, Covered Boston Marathon and Boston College athletics ; May 2007 – April 2008, BostonNOW, Correspondent, Covered local sports, including Boston College, New England Patriots and Boston Celtics; Sept. 2007 – Feb. 2008, South End News, Staff writer, Covered city government and all aspects of Boston’s historic South End ; July 2006 – Aug. 2007, Bulletin Newspapers, Inc., Staff writer , Covered Boston’s Hyde Park and Roslindale neighborhoods; Sept. 2003- July 2004, The Oklahoman, Oklahoma City, Okla. , Staff writer and intern, Covered high school sports and led coverage of 2004 Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon

Personal: Married with no kids and a West Highland terrier named Arlo

Favorite restaurants: La Verdad
, Boston, “It’s an authentic Mexican taqueria that is a stone’s throw from Fenway Park. It has a great bar but also a walkup counter. The tortas and tacos are amazing. Also, Lafayette Coney Island in Downtown Detroit. You have not had a chilidog until you’ve had a Detroit Coney!”

Q. The genesis and history of BPSsports?

A. For a long time before the Boston Globe’s seven-part series Failing Our Athletes
came out in 2009 I kicked around the idea to start a website to cover Boston Public School athletes. The series documented the sad state of BPS athletics, in which athletes share uniforms and change behind storage sheds. The district budgets much less money to athletics than abutting cities similarly sized cities.

I wrote my Master’s thesis about the basketball team at Boston English High, the nation’s first public high school, and knew far too well all the woes of BPS athletics. A J-School prof suggested that I just start the site and put up as much content as I could manage. I started it in the fall of 2009. I focused on football and by the time basketball season rolled around it was clear I was filling a small but important niche. One thing I often heard was that Boston athletes didn’t get recruited because college coaches couldn’t read about their exploits online.

Q. What gets covered by whom?

A. The idea of the site is to not only give the BPS teams the coverage they deserve but also have students cover the teams at their own schools. I got my start by working for my school newspaper and most BPS schools don’t have their own newspapers.

The Boston Globe and Boston Herald cover all of Eastern Mass high school sports and don’t have space or resources to give Boston’s inner-city schools a lot of coverage. When they do cover BPS they mostly cover the city championships and teams that make the state tournament. BPSsports focuses on the regular season games played with hardly any parents or students watching and would otherwise be played in a vacuum.

A few college students also write for me and two of my contributors are now contributing stories about BPS athletes to AOL Patch sites so they can make a few bucks. One writer had no journalism experience when he started writing for me at the start of the spring and is now contributing to Patch.

Q. Challenges in running the site and what is its future?

A. Cultivating and maintaining high school contributors is always a challenge. A lot of BPS students have poor writing skills and wrapping their heads around journalism is tough. One promising student who wrote for me just fell off the map one day. His football coach reached out to me to see if I could help get the student back on track but I couldn’t. That was tough to take. I invested a lot of time and energy into him.

Balancing my time is tough too. I don’t make money off the site, save the occasional story I write for Patch, so I have to make sure my time working on the site doesn’t come at the expense of paying gigs.

Also, BPS only has one AD for about 17 high schools. And his staff is small. Getting information from them can be a challenge.

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

A. When I was getting ready to launch the site I knew I needed a strong feature story to kick things off and it couldn’t just be any story. When I met with the AD and told him I was looking for a story he told me about a female football player, Gaby Cruzado, playing strong safety on the South Boston JV team. Here’s the link
to the story.

She ended up getting pregnant and didn’t play varsity football. But I recently saw her at the city track championships, where she was competing in the javelin just weeks after having her baby. She gave me a big hug. That was pretty rewarding.

Q. Your career plan?

A. As far as BPSsports.com is concerned my goal is to put together a grant proposal and try to find some funding so I can pay contributors and invest in better multimedia equipment. Otherwise, I’m enjoying freelancing for now. I cover a wide range of topics from Olympic athletes for TeamUSA.org to the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority for the Boston Globe’s Your Town sites.

My goal is to score some magazine assignments.

Q. What sports media do you consume and why?

A. I like great stories that just happen to be about athletes. And my favorite sports stories are usually in non sporting mediums such as Esquire or the New Yorker. Reporters who don’t cover sports on a daily basis tend to write much more unpredictable and better reported stories. But I also subscribe to Sports Illustrated – I say subscribe and not read because it’s tough to keep up with on a weekly basis – and I try to DVR games so I don’t have to watch commercials.

I recently finished Laura Hillenbrand’s amazing book, Unbroken, about the man who would’ve broke the four-minute mile but ended up being tortured by the Japanese during World War II. Also Scoreboard Baby by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry was a shocking account of the University of Washington football program. I really didn’t think I could be shocked by what goes on inside a college football program. Boy was I wrong.

Q. Who were and are your influences?

A. Growing up in Detroit my first exposure to sportswriting was Mitch Albom’s column in the Detroit Free Press. But as I started to study the craft I discovered and fell in love with literary journalism (or narrative or whatever you want to call it). David Remnick, Gay Talese, Roger Angell and A.J. Liebling’s sports writing is thrilling to read but even more daunting; I only dream of reporting and writing that well.

My favorite contemporary magazine writer – not that David Remnick is not contemporary – is Esquire’s Tom Junod. His story about trying to track down the man in the famous photograph of the man falling upside down from the World Trade Center is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read. His profile of Mr. Rogers is pretty damn good too.

I’m trying to read more fiction too. I think too often journalists don’t have time for fiction or think it has nothing to offer us.

As for people I actually know, I still keep in touch with a former magazine writing prof at Michigan State who worked for Time Magazine back in the day. My wife and parents influence me everyday too.

(SMG thanks Justin Rice for his cooperation)

An Interview with Dave Reardon

“First I thought taking any assignment and not going away would work. Then I went to Gainesville and wrote a couple of sidebars at SEC games instead of WAC games and all of a sudden I was worldly.”

“UH football is the biggest news story going right now in the state, bar none, and even before this year it’s been the biggest deal in local sports by far for three decades. Two of the most persistent reporters in the state – sports or whatever – cover UH football for our main competitor. Some days I feel like a pinata, every now and then I’m the kid with the stick and I connect.”

“When we were at Alabama last year, I thought it was pretty funny during pre-game that the ‘Bama fans and players were getting pumped up by a song, Sweet Home Alabama, written by guys from Jacksonville, Fla., while the Hawaii contingent did the same with a dance from New Zealand. By the way, ‘Sweet Home’ is used in Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials, too. Go figure.”

Dave Reardon: Interviewed on December 5, 2007

Position: University of Hawaii football beat writer, Honolulu Star-Bulletin

Birth: 1961, Honolulu

Education: Northwestern University 1979-81, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1981-84. “Double-majored in journalism and slow-pitch softball knew Michael Wilbon when he had hair and covered intramurals.”

Career: Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 1976 paperboy); copyboy and stringer, Star-Bulletin, 81-87 (copyboy and stringer); Honolulu Advertiser, 87-89; magazine editor and freelance writer 90-97, Gainesville Sun, 98-2000; Star-Bulletin 2001- (preps, UH basketball, UH football)

Personal: single.

Favorite restaurant (home): Alan Wong’s Honolulu, “Hawaiian regional”; Antipasto’s Honolulu “good Italian”, “any Vietnamese noodle shop – great ice coffee”

Favorite restaurant (road): Denny’s, “because it’s like Jason Rivers – always open.”

Favorite hotel: Silver Legacy Casino and Resort, Reno, “until I realized the free upgrade to a suite was a ploy to make me think it was my ‘lucky day.’”

Dave Reardon, excerpted from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, September 16, 2007:

LAS VEGAS » After a week in which the haka got its fair share of publicity nationwide — due in part to an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty prior to the Louisiana Tech matchup — last night’s performance before the non-conference game with Nevada-Las Vegas went smoothly.

In fact, the Warriors unveiled their revision of the haka to the delight of the thousands of Hawaii fans jammed into Sam Boyd Stadium. The new chant/dance is Hawaiian as opposed to the original UH haka, which is Maori.

“For us, I think it’s a lot more fitting,” senior defensive end Karl Noa said. “There’s been a lot of controversy with the old one. This gives us an identity for this year. It’s special because it’s made by guys on the team”

Last week, UH received a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for doing the haka while LaTech was still on the field warming up. No penalty was assessed last night. Most of the UNLV players were off the field.

Head coach June Jones said last week that he wants the haka to be a positive for the program, not something controversial

Q. Are you working in paradise or does it just seem that way to mainland journalists?

A. The Warriors made me work hard this year: two overtime games and two victories in the final seconds of regulation. I need them to schedule six or seven I-AAs instead of just two so I can make deadline more often.

Q. How did you get your job?

First I thought taking any assignment and not going away would work. Then I went to Gainesville and wrote a couple of sidebars at SEC games instead of WAC games and all of a sudden I was worldly.

Actually, I got my current job because everyone thought the paper was going to shut down in 2000, severely thinning the applicant pool and I was crazy enough to jump on a sinking ship. Then the guy covering UH football became sports editor and I was given the beat by default.

Also, I bartended to make ends meet while freelancing, and served in an anti-tank gun platoon in the Army reserve while in college. Thank goodness the Cold War didn’t get hot.

Q. How would you describe football weather in Honolulu?

A. Make sure you bring rain gear. Really.

Q. How competitive is your beat?

A. UH football is the biggest news story going right now in the state, bar none, and even before this year it’s been the biggest deal in local sports by far for three decades. Two of the most persistent reporters in the state – sports or whatever – cover UH football for our main competitor. Some days I feel like a pinata, every now and then I’m the kid with the stick and I connect.

Q. Should Hawaii be in the BCS championship game?

A. No, unless it plays the only other undefeated team I can think of, the New England Patriots.

Q. How are you handicapping Hawaii-Georgia?

A. I’ll be handicapping myself on Bourbon Street. The game itself will come down to Moreno and Brennan and if either defense can stop them.

Q. Who and what do you read in sports journalism?

A. Does Krakauer count as sports? Lots of blogs, good columns, anything without a cliche in the lead. Scott Ostler (SF Chronicle) was my favorite before he got too serious. Now it’s homeboy Mike Wise (Washington Post) – I covered him when he was all-district high school hoopster on Oahu. I’ll be reading the AJC and the Athens paper a lot in the coming weeks.

Q. Your opinion of sword dancing and Haka war chants at Warriors games?

A. OK, stay with me here: When we were at Alabama last year, I thought it was pretty funny during pre-game that the ‘Bama fans and players were getting pumped up by a song, Sweet Home Alabama, written by guys from Jacksonville, Fla., while the Hawaii contingent did the same with a dance from New Zealand. By the way, ‘Sweet Home’ is used in Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials, too. Go figure.

Q. What would it take to get you to change places with the guy who covers University of Alaska football?

A. For starters, six months paid vacation … and a time-share here.

Aloha.

Dave Reardon, excerpted from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, August 29, 2006:

The haka is on hold for now.

The Hawaii football team has been practicing the Maori war dance every day after practice leading up to Saturday’s season-opening game at Alabama.

But senior center Sam Satele, who was named team captain yesterday, said the Warriors won’t perform the haka before the game at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, for practical reasons.

“Right now, we’re not going to do it in Alabama. It’s going to be very hot for us to do it,” Satele said. “The haka is only for home games. If we do it there everybody’s going to start yelling. And 93 thousand? Over our 60 guys that’s going to be there? They’re going to be louder.”

Not all haka are related to war, but Maori warriors did use the movements, chants and gestures to psyche up and try to intimidate enemies before battles.

The Warriors performed a team haka before their 2002 Hawaii Bowl game against Tulane at Aloha Stadium. Tulane won 36-28.

UH coach June Jones said it’s up to the players if they want to do the dance or not.

Senior safety Leonard Peters, also elected as a captain by his teammates, said it’s Jones’ decision.

“It’s up to Coach Jones. Whatever he wants us to do. We prepared it, it’s up to him,” Peters said. “I think it would be more appropriate for home games only because people over here understand it. Over there they might take it as a dis (disrespectful gesture) and not a cultural thing.”

Senior left tackle Tala Esera, who leads the haka practices, agreed it might be better for just home games.

Satele is anticipating a post-game haka at Bryant-Denny Stadium.

“Right now, if we win, we’ll do it on their field,” he said. “And we will win.”

(SMG thanks Dave Reardon for his cooperation)

An Interview with Ray Ratto

“They work the beat guys like rented mules and can’t figure out why they want something else after two or three years.”

“The Bonds story is a lot like the Republicans and Democrats – you know what side you’re on and you don’t’ care what you hear from the other side. If you like him you don’t care if they have film of him shooting up and if you don’t like him you don’t care if he’s supporting a charity for homeless children. I’ve tried to look at what today’s development means in my usual snooty hateful way – you try to move the ball a little bit – that’s the best you can do with this story because it’s going on and on and on.”

Ray Ratto. Interviewed August 21, 2006

Position: Columnist, San Francisco Chronicle, sportsline.com

Born: 1954, Oakland, Ca.

Personal: Married, two children

Education: St. Josephs High School, Alameda, Ca.; San Francisco State

Career: SF Examiner 1973-81, Peninsula Times-Tribune 1981-86, SF Chronicle 1986-90, The National 1990-91, SF Examiner 1991-2000, SF Chronicle 2000 –

Favorite Sports Movies: Eight Men Out, Slapshot

Awards: Named by Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix column as one of the ten “most valuable” columnists in the U.S., August 2006. The Daily Fix wrote of Ratto: “A reliable cynic (who) has been a welcome fixture on any sports page during the last five years of failed drug tests and boorish player behavior. The Bay Area has had more than its fair share of both types of badness, and Mr. Ratto has delighted in all the material. And man, can he write!”

Q. You are at ground zero of the Balco steroid scandal. How has the story affected your career and writing?

A. I don’t know if it has. Such a mountain of stuff has been written about it from all over the country. We’ve done a good job, but so has the New York Daily News. Maybe from the standpoint that people would come to our website to read Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams (the two lead reporters on Balco) and then read us for commentary. We drafted behind them.

The four of us (Chronicle sports columnists) come from different angles on it. Gwen (Knapp) is the outraged crusader. Scotty (Ostler) looks at it from a wry angle. I am a cynic who thinks everybody should be shooting the stuff into their eyes. Bruce (Jenkins) is the romantic who says if this is the price of doing business then it’s the price of doing business.” We might have benefited from proximity to the story in terms of readership but I don’t fool myself into thinking we shaped the debate. The debate was shaped by reportage.

Q. Does being in the Bay Area, close to Balco, give you more credibility than other columnists?

A. Maybe. If we have a question we can ask Mark or Lance and get an anwer. Our editor, Glenn Schwarz, has been in it upt o his eyelids. San Mateo actually broke the story (in 2003) but we’ve taken the lead since then. Because we have better access to people who know all the stuff maybe we’re more authoritative. There’s some silly stuff written around the country – knee jerk stuff. We’re so inundated with this stuff that if we write something stupid somebody will call us on it and say we’re missing the point. We’re given the freedom to write it as we see it, and we have plenty of resources to use.

Q. Are you tired of the steroid story?

A. I’m tired of the Bonds angle. That’s the part that’s been overwritten. The story is not moving fast enough for a lot of people. They want resolution, but now it’s in the courts and that’s where time stops. People are disappointed that it takes a year-and-a-half to get voir dire.

Q. Voir dire?

A. Jury selection. I got that from the tube. Law and Order, baby. The point is that whether you are anti-Bonds and you want his head on a pike or you are pro-Bonds and you want him vindicated neither of those things will happen for years. I don’t know if the American public has the appetite for waiting.

Q. How have you approached the Bonds story?

A. I’ve tried to do it with a half-cynical what-comes-next attitude. The Bonds story is a lot like the Republicans and Democrats – you know what side you’re on and you don’t’ care what you hear from the other side. If you like him you don’t care if they have film of him shooting up and if you don’t like him you don’t care if he’s supporting a charity for homeless children. I’ve tried to look at what today’s development means in my usual snooty hateful way – you try to move the ball a little bit – that’s the best you can do with this story because it’s going on and on and on.

Q. Is it an emotional flashpoint in the Bay Area?

A. Only when something happens – the rest is dull white noise in the background. Now the debate is whether Bonds should come back because his salary eats up so much. It’s a baseball issue. With the lack of an indictment he’s become a baseball player again.

Q. Which columnists do you admire?

A. The best columnist in the country is Mark Whicker at the Orange County Register. You won’t see him on TV often, but nobody writes better and more skillfully about more subjects than he does. He’s beyond ridiculous brilliant. When I’m in LA reading him for four days I just want to quit. Selena Roberts (NY Times) is interesting when she’s on a crusade, other times she falls flat. Lots of guys you won’t see on the screaming sportswriter shows really are top drawer. Also, who aren’t on the APSE we-love-you list. One of the most overlooked is Gary Peterson of the Contra Costa Times. He’s very good. Pat Reusse (Star-Tribune) in Minneapolis. If you want access Mike Wilbon (Washington Post) is as good as it gets. He’s good at using the hammer he has to get to people – I give him points for that. Rick Morrissey (Chicago Tribune) is underrated. He’s got big-time chops.

Q. Beat reporters you admire?

A. This sounds provincial, but our guy on the Giants, Henry Schulman, is as good as anybody. Paul Sullivan (Chicago Tribune) does a helluva job but the Tribune has a habit of changing beats every two or three years.

It’s harder to find great beat reporters because they find out how gruesome a task it is every day and be on call 11 months of the years – they move on to other realms, or get replaced by people in their 20s. I usually read more for subject matter than for beat reporters because they turn over so much. Guys don’t stay on the beat long enough to get really good at it. Newspapers don’t understand what it takes anymore. They work the beat guys like rented mules and can’t figure out why they want something else after two or three years. Columnists get paid more. The beat guys get a bag of tootsie rolls and the short end of the stick. The hours are longer. They’re literally required to shape the debate year in and year out. I call on my beat writers so much they’re sick to death of me. They are THE resource for the team they cover. It’s hard to imagine why they aren’t compensated better or given more time off. But it’s a shrinking business. People aren’t thinking Big Picture anymore.

Q. How do you maintain enthusiasm?

A. You can’t do this if you’re bored. Readers are smart. They know if you’ve mailed it in. One of our great failings is that we should be writing up to our audience instead of down. Sports is more Byzantine and fascinating than ever. There’s always something else. The beast is always there to be fed. When I start to get stale I try to figure out a different way to write the same old crap. With the Bonds story you can only write that he’s a good guy or a bad guy so many times before people get tired of it. They want something fresh that makes them think. When we don’t they know. Skate your wing and keep your head up. There’s always something amusing. As long as they’re doing something stupid I’m in business.

Q. How do you stay abreast of the news?

A. This sounds anal, but I read seven papers a day. All the locals, plus New York, LA and USA Today. Then I’ll look around espn.com and CBS Sportsline to see what the news is. Deadspin is the one-stop shopping of the blogosphere – I look there for the weirder stuff. By noon I pretty much know what happened the night before. Then I’ll make quickie checks at ESPN News to find out what wide receiver shot up a liquor store.

If I see a story out of Miami then I’ll go to sportspages.com and get the detail that only the locals can deliver. The assumption is that the local paper will have a handle on it better than anybody else. One, they’re usually breaking the story. The thing they can’t get the pointless idiot reaction from the high muckety-muck in New York. But the heavy lifting is typically better done by locals cause they’re the ones on the ground.

I don’t tool around at random. Nobody has that much time in the day – that’s the point at which your cat starves to death because you haven’t fed him in nine days. Usually the big wires will give me the overview.

Probably my only ridiculous thing is all the newspapers. I like the idea of having something in hand. I keep notebooks on different sports. I find I remember it better when I write it down – the Catholic school training never leaves you.

(SMG thanks Ray Ratto for his cooperation)

Ray Ratto excerpted from the San Francisco Chronicle, February 23, 2005:

Scottsdale, Ariz. – Barry Bonds had weeks to practice for Tuesday’s State of the Great address, in part because he does one every year. He had extra time because his two surgically tweaked knees have given him a lot more couch time to consider his performance.

So, with all that extra time to consider his options, he chose to attack his news conference rather than try to dance with it. He fielded an even 50 questions, nearly all of them dancing about the performance-enhancement drug scandal, and he was even more of himself than he usually is. He was more combative, more dismissive, more rambling, more defiant and yet stingingly accurate on some points.

What he was not, was compliant. He admitted to nothing related to his grand-jury testimony. He did not allow the 50 or so questioners in the room any pathway inside the Bondsian shield, and he did not try to ease the blows. He decided the problem with baseball’s drug scandal was the media, and he was in full scold.

“Let the (new drug-testing program) work,” he kept saying. “Allow it to work. Let’s go forward. I truly believe we need to go forward.”

It was half plea and half command, based on the fact that “backward” would lead everyone back to the scandal. Even then, however, the answer seemed most like resignation based on the knowledge that he was not going to be given any slack by his critics — for being overly guarded about his life, for his race, for his personality, for his connections (real and imagined) to the drug scandal, for any of it.

So he decided not to try. No attempts at conciliation. No half measures. No apologies. He called the media liars en masse, a description designed to let that media know he was done making what little nice he had to make. He knew he would be judged harshly by contemporary historians and decided to judge back.

…It wasn’t a declaration of war with Doubting America, because Bonds’ moods run hot, cold and lukewarm, just as everyone else’s do. But it was a fairly clear indication that he would never admit, apologize or announce anything he didn’t feel like admitting to, apologizing for or announcing. Anyone in the room who thought otherwise was, is and will be thoroughly delusional.

What we learned, in short, was that there will be no Barry Bonds charm offensive as he attacks the remaining home-run records of Ruth and Hank Aaron. He messed with the messengers, is all, and it made for a fairly electric half-hour of mutual spite and contempt. Entertainment, after all, is what and where you find it.

An Interview with Eric Raskin

Eric Raskin: Interviewed on October 26, 2011

Position: Freelance writer/editor (most notably: Grantland.com, ESPN.com, ESPN The Magazine)

Born: 1975, Philadelphia

Education: Brown University, 1997, AB in Mathematical Economics

Career: Full-time jobs: Managing Editor of The Ring magazine, 1997-2005; Editor-in-Chief of ALL IN magazine, 2005-2008 & 2009-2011; Senior Content Producer for Full Tilt Poker Academy, 2008-2009. Freelance jobs at various times 2005-present: The Ring contributing editor, ESPN.com boxing columnist, Grantland.com boxing writer, HBO.com boxing writer, ESPN The Magazine boxing writer, Boxing Monthly writer, TheSweetScience.com columnist, Maxboxing.com columnist.

Personal: “Married since 2005 to my beautiful wife Robin, with two amazing kids, Olivia (4) and Eli (2)—and I must give a shout-out as well to our mystery mutt Rodney (6).”

Favorite restaurant (home): “I think my wife would be embarrassed if I stated publicly that Arby’s is my favorite restaurant, so instead I’ll go with Isaac Newton’s, a neighborhood joint in Newtown, Pennsylvania that’s both kid-friendly and good for a low-key ‘date night’ meal.”

Favorite restaurant (away): “I don’t travel terribly often, and when I do, I don’t necessarily eat fancy. Give me a decent coffee shop, and I’ll manage. Still, to answer the question: My older brother took me to a sushi place in L.A. about eight years ago that absolutely blew me away. It’s called Sushi Nozawa, and the chef is affectionately known as “The Sushi Nazi.” Fortunately, I followed the rules and never had to be lectured, “You are pushing your luck, little man.”

Favorite hotel: “The great majority of my traveling over the years has been to Vegas, and I stayed at the Wynn in 2005, just a few months after it opened. With all due respect to Mandalay Bay, Bellagio, etc., the Wynn was the only one where I checked into my room and thought, This is really swanky … I’m not sure I’m worthy of staying here.”

Q. Nice piece in Grantland
. How did you get that assignment?

A. Thank you. There’s still a small element of mystery to the story of how I got the assignment for the Leonard-Hagler oral history, one detail that I haven’t been able to fill in. But here’s the story from my perspective:

On March 31 of this year, I got an email informing me that “SportsGuy33” was following me on Twitter. I’ve been a huge Bill Simmons fan since about 2002, probably read every word he wrote in that time span, I listen to all of his podcasts, etc. So my first thought was, Someone who’s tech savvy is playing an early April Fool’s Day joke on me. Then I got a direct message from him, simply giving me his email address and asking me to email him. Moments later, I noticed he’d un-followed me on Twitter; he just followed me long enough to send me a direct message.

Anyway, we traded a couple of quick emails, in which he said he wanted to assign a boxing feature and he thought I might be the right guy, then he CC’d the deputy editor of the site, Dan Fierman, and Dan finally told me what the assignment was—not really a writing assignment, but more a test of interviewing, reporting, and editing, the oral history of the Leonard-Hagler fight.

Once the assignment had begun to move forward, I asked Dan out of curiosity, “How did you guys land on my name as the guy for this?” Dan said there had been a big editorial meeting involving numerous people, and Bill was a fan of the oral history format and wanted to roll out a few of them around the time of the site’s launch. The Leonard-Hagler fight was on his list. He asked the room if anybody knew of a good boxing writer, someone gave him my name, and he jotted it down and said he’d contact me. Dan doesn’t remember who that someone was, so I’m still not sure whom to thank for getting me on Grantland’s radar.

Q. Why boxing, and how did you come to be a free-lance journalist?

A. This is going to sound corny, but I feel like boxing found me more than I found it. I watched very little boxing as a kid—we didn’t have cable TV until I was almost out of high school, and by the late ’80s, it was nearly impossible to be a boxing fan without cable. When I graduated college in ’97, I knew I wanted to go into sports journalism, I moved back home to the Philly suburbs for the summer, and I responded to an ad in the newspaper looking for a sports editor in another suburban town not far away. It turned out the job was with The Ring magazine, which had a staff of three editors, and two of them were suddenly departing at the same time. That meant they were fairly desperate to hire someone, and a knowledge of boxing was secondary to being able to write and edit. They offered me the job, and the money was god-awful, but I figured I had to start somewhere.

After about a month on the job, I went to my first live fight card, and in the co-featured bout, Arturo Gatti knocked out Gabe Ruelas in what turned out to be the Fight of the Year. I was hooked. What I thought might be a one-year job on the road to covering a more mainstream sport for a more mainstream publication stretched into seven years full-time and seven more since as a freelance boxing writer.

I left The Ring’s editorial staff in ’05 because I was about to get married and needed to earn a better living, and I took a job in New York as the sole editor of a startup poker magazine called ALL IN. I’ll skip various gory details and just say that ALL IN went out of business in February of 2011, and the pursuit of a full-time editorial job that will pay me what I need to feed my family has been a real struggle. So while looking for jobs, I’ve soldiered along as the busiest quote-unquote unemployed man you’ve ever seen, chasing down as much freelance work as I can get and taking on various project gigs—most notably, a two-month stretch in New York editing ESPN’s annual fantasy football guide, which unfortunately never saw the light of day because the NFL lockout wasn’t resolved in time.

Q. What are your main gigs – tell us about your typical schedule?

A. My schedule really varies from day to day and week to week, but I have a few gigs that are on a regular schedule, such as my weekly column on TheSweetScience.com, the subscription-based boxing podcast that I co-host twice a month called Ring Theory, and a poker column that runs twice every month. I also have quite a few gigs that just involve me pitching topics and angles as frequently as I can, such as Grantland.com, ESPN.com, ESPN The Magazine, and HBO.com.

Back when I was full-time with ALL IN and freelancing on the side, I was working a lot of 60-hour weeks. As a full-time freelancer, I’ve probably been working more in the range of 30-40 hours a week. But the brutal part is all the time you spend hustling but not getting paid. On top of those 30-40 hours I spend writing, interviewing, etc., I probably spend 20 or 25 hours a week just thinking about boxing, watching boxing, formulating ideas, reading articles, and ultimately crafting and emailing pitches. Sometimes that work leads to paying assignments, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Q. What is the financial reality of life as a free-lance journalist in your field – tell us about your struggle?

A. I’m not going to reveal exactly what I make, of course … but since I took a lot of econ classes in college, let’s use “widgets” and do some rounding. When I was working for The Ring in my 20s, I was earning about one widget per year. From 2005-2007, between my job at ALL IN and my freelance work, I was earning about three widgets. From 2008-2010, as I got a few higher-paying freelance gigs, I was making about four widgets.

Now, as a full-time freelancer, I’m back down to about two widgets, and I just can’t figure out how to get it much higher than that. If I was still just a single guy, no wife, no kids, no mortgage, just individual health insurance to pay for, I’d be doing just fine financially.

But in the situation I’m in, two widgets simply isn’t cutting it. I haven’t been able to find a full-time job in writing or editing that pays adequately—I’m obviously not going to go back to an entry-level position—and I’ve learned the hard way this year that I can’t make ends meet without a full-time job. At times I feel like a success, when I look at where my byline is running, the work I’m doing, and how much more money I’m making now than I was throughout my 20s. But for the most part, this year has not been successful—at least not financially. So I’m planning to go into another field very soon. I have a job lined up that I won’t go into details about here. Once that job starts, I’ll continue writing on the side, but far less prolifically than I am now. You know, unless someone reads this and offers me a great full-time editing/writing/broadcasting job …

Q. What is your family situation and how do you maintain work/life balance?

A. I’ll say this: It would all be a lot easier if my son would learn how to sleep. Of course, my kids are the greatest thing in the world, nothing makes me happier than they do, but the reality is that my son recently turned two and still gets up before the sun almost every morning, and my ability to function optimally in my work life suffers as a result.

Anyway, my wife works from home also, and both sets of grandparents live nearby, so there’s constantly free babysitting available. I just have to be flexible. If I have deadlines to hit, my wife is on kid duty and I’m more or less able to focus on my work. But I know that from about 5-9 in the morning and 5-8 at night, I’m feeding the kids, getting them dressed, giving them baths, walking the dog, playing with the kids, etc., so unless I have work that needs to get done urgently, my windows for doing work are between 9-5 and after 8:00 at night.

It’s chaotic, but I’m thankful to be able to spend so much time with my family. I know a lot of guys who leave for work before their kids are up and come home after their kids have gone to bed, so I’ll take this over that.

Q. Who and what are your influences as a journalist?

A. I’m not just kissing butt when I say that Simmons has been a strong influence. Also, Nigel Collins and Stu Saks, my mentors at The Ring, were huge influences in shaping my editing skills. I think by doing so much editing throughout my career, I’ve managed to borrow writing techniques from many of the better writers I’ve worked with, and I’ve come away with a versatile style that allows me to take on all different types of assignments. I pride myself on not being just a “game story” guy or a “personality profile” guy or an “OpEd” guy.

Unfortunately, as a guy who reads, writes, and edits all day, I don’t end up doing a whole lot of leisure reading. I make it through about one or two books a year. And I wasn’t big into reading in high school or college. So I think in terms of outside influences, besides Simmons, I don’t have many.

Q. What sports media do you consume and why?

A. For the most part, my sports media comes in two forms: online articles and podcasts. I don’t really read printed newspapers anymore, only subscribe to a couple of magazines, and as I just noted, don’t read many books. I watch SportsCenter and my local Comcast SportsNet sports news show when I can, and same goes for PTI and Real Sports and E:60, but I wouldn’t say I watch any of those shows consistently. For me, it’s mostly web articles and podcasts.

Twitter has made my online reading much easier. I follow the boxing writers I enjoy, click links to their articles, and don’t have to check out every single site every single day. Not to sound like a corporate shill, but I click on almost everything that goes up on Grantland – and probably read about half of the articles in their entirety. I’ll read news articles to stay informed, naturally, but I’m much more drawn to writing that entertains me. Straight reporting bores me for the most part, and this constant competition among reporters to “break” a story that everyone will have posted 15 minutes later seems a bit silly, though I understand why reporting and breaking news is important. Ultimately, though, my preference is toward creative angles and compelling writing.

The biggest way in which my sports media consumption has changed in the past couple of years is with my obsession with podcasts. It was Simmons’ BS Report that drew me in, and now I probably listen to about 10 hours’ worth of podcasts a week. If I’m walking my dog, going for a jog, or driving in my car by myself, the iPod is plugged in and I’m listening to podcasts. I’ve lost all touch with music as a result, but that’s okay; I’m reaching that crusty old age where I think the music of my youth, and long before my youth, is all far superior to anything that’s out there now anyway.

Q. Ideal work situation?

A. That’s a tough question to answer. I’ve grown used to working from home, and I’d love to be able to edit from home or be a staff writer somewhere, while also pursuing side projects. But I’m also open to commuting to New York – as I did for about two years while working for ALL IN, and I’ve found that I can be extremely productive on the train. Hey, in a perfect world, I’d find a single job that pays me so well I can give up the freelance work and dedicate myself fully to that job without chasing down extra income. But I think most people would agree that, nowadays, it’s near impossible to make a comfortable living working 40 hours a week, in any industry.

Q. Goals as a writer/journalist?

A. I guess, in light of my current situation, goal number one is to find a way to feed my family again as a writer/journalist. But approaching the question from a creativity perspective, I feel I’ve achieved a fair amount as a boxing writer. I’d say there are three major ambitions that I have yet to make any headway on.

The first is writing about other sports—I was hoping Grantland might give me an opportunity to branch out and write about the Phillies or the Eagles or pop culture, but so far, those pitches haven’t gained any traction. The second is broadcasting. I’ve made some talking-head appearances on TV here and there, but haven’t really been able to get my foot in the door beyond that. And the third is writing a book. I actually spoke with a couple of literary agents earlier this year about a boxing book idea I had, but boxing is a tough sell and my idea—which everyone I spoke to agreed was highly compelling but a bit too negative to instill confidence that a publisher would latch on—didn’t quite get off the ground.

Someday, though, I’d love to face the challenge of writing a book. My oral history of the Leonard-Hagler fight, which started with some 75,000 words of raw quotes and ultimately ran 13,000 words, was like a four-week test run on writing a book, and I have to say, it enhanced my desire to work on massive projects like that.

Q. What piece of work are you especially proud of?

A. This is obvious and a bit redundant to discuss again, but the Leonard-Hagler oral history stands out. The feedback I got on that was overwhelming. And it took a lot of determination to get it off the ground, because for two months, Hagler’s people turned me away. I finally had to drive from Philly to upstate New York on less than 12 hours’ notice to interview him in person in order for the article to become a reality. Then I conducted about 30 more interviews over the phone in a span of three weeks. It was a major time commitment, and when I had all the quotes, the process of patching them together to tell the story was oddly thrilling.

But if I had to name something else I’m particularly proud of, I would say it’s ALL IN magazine. For most of the mag’s run, I was an editorial staff of one – along with an art director, we had a limited budget, and we put out a magazine that I feel blew away the competition. In 2010, I interviewed Norman Chad—the longtime sports columnist and ESPN poker commentator—and he told me the same thing, that he’d been meaning to get a hold of me for a while to tell me how much he enjoyed the magazine and that he felt it was the best in the genre by far. I’m not trying to knock our competition. A couple of the other poker magazines, which had larger staffs and were better run from a business perspective, are still operating, which means they got the last laugh. But from an editorial perspective, I feel enormous pride over ALL IN. Throughout my time there, when people found out how bare-bones the operation was, they were usually astounded by it.

(SMG thanks Eric Raskin for his cooperation)

An Interview with Shaun Powell

“I spend most of my waking hours thinking whether I’m writing or not, not necessarily on topics of sports, but about everything, about the world. I just think that the more you think the better you think and the more you think the more things come to you when its time to write. It’s not like a switch and you’re turning on your mind. Your mind has been on, and it’s going, and there’s a flow. I’m in a constant state of thought.”

“People in our business, the celebrity columnists – you know who they are – are filled with conflicts of interest. Amazing conflicts – and their bosses let them get away with it…Trust me – a lot of big names in the business are buddy-buddy with coaches and G.M.s and it sickens me because they rip off their readers. Their readers are not getting the straight scoop.”

. “Columnists have to call it down the middle – they can’t have agendas…Once you bring an agenda your judgment is clouded. Once it’s clouded you can’t do the job.”

Shaun Powell: Interviewed on October 23, 2006

Position: Columnist, Newsday

Born: 1960, Pittsburgh

Personal: married, daughter

Education: Howard University, journalism, 1983

Career: St. Louis Globe Democrat 1983, Dallas Times Herald 84-88; Miami Herald 88-93, Newsday 93 –

Favorite restaurant (home): Tao, Manhattan “discovered the place when Don King did a press conference for an Evander Holyfield fight that never came off, but the food was good and I went back there. The next thing I knew it was the in place in New York – now I can’t even get in – you have to book weeks in advance – all star athletes and actors have it on their must-stop list”

Favorite restaurant (road): Jacquimo’s, New Orleans, “where the locals eat, they have alligator which I never tried, everything on the menu is great, and everything not on the menu is great, like the rolls, even little things like the butter, which has cinnamon almond spice in it”

Favorite hotel: Mayfair House, Coconut Grove, Miami

Shaun Powell excerpted from Newsday, October 19, 2006:

“What’s unfair is when a group of renegades are lumped with everyone else. So please, make the distinction. Too many black football players at Miami for two decades have engaged in taunting, fighting, finger-pointing, stomping and all-around nonsense, but in no way do they represent all black players. Every race has its idiots; ours just seem to get recruited by Miami.”

Q. “Every race has its idiots; ours just seem to get recruited by Miami.” That is a great line. How do you come up with lines like that?

A. I wish I could say that I keep them in a bottle by my desk and in emergency situation I just pull them out and put them in the computer. But things just come to me basically. I spend most of my waking hours thinking whether I’m writing or not, not necessarily on topics of sports, but about everything, about the world. I just think that the more you think the better you think and the more you think the more things come to you when its time to write. It’s not like a switch and you’re turning on your mind. Your mind has been on, and it’s going, and there’s a flow. I’m in a constant state of thought. I like to read a lot. I try to be as observant as possible. I try to be constantly aware of and thinking of the sports in my coverage area – just wondering about things. When it comes time to write your thoughts have been warm.

Q. Do you have to be a smart-ass to be a columnist?

A. I think it’s a pre-requisite for the job. I think the readers like a little bit of cynic in their local columnist. Not a lot of it. I do think they want that. By and large they want to be informed, also entertained to an extent.

Now how we entertain them is different – some people are very funny, some are very witty, some can tell a story, and some roust anger in people. Then there are the talented people who can do it all – I’m envious of them. I try my best – some days I have it – some days just for a couple of paragraphs or sentences. The truly talented have it every day – not that many people are like that.

Q. Who are the talented sports columnists?

A. Rick Reilly (SI) is right there. One thing about him – and this is no slap against him – he writes once a week. Not only once a week – he writes for a very prestigious publication, so people in New Mexico who have an outstanding story drop him a line. He still has to pull it off. But the rest of us have to write three, four and five times a week, often on deadline. There’s not much time to think and come up with clever phrases.

Q. Who do you read?

A. For a variety of reasons, Paul Daugherty (Cincinnati Enquirer). I don’t give a crap what goes on in Cincinnati, but I find him to be very good. TJ Simers (LA Times) – I couldn’t do what he does. A lot of people don’t like him because he interjects himself into every column but what he does is incredibly unique – to get in the face of athletes. He knocks them all down to size, takes the abuse, writes it and goes back the next day. I’m just curious about how he does it. Dan Shaughnessy (Boston Globe) has been doing it for a long time – he’s very good on deadline. I’m amazed at how he churns out Red Sox playoff columns – I’m sure his deadlines are no easier than the rest of ours. Sally Jenkins (Washington Post) – she’s very informative and her arguments are well presented. Having said that, she writes once or twice a week – she has the same luxury as Reilly. I don’t even think she covers games – she has the luxury of picking her spots.

The rest of us have to pay attention to local teams, and write on deadline. We have competition and a lot of built-in challenges that some columnists just don’t.

Q. Do you read the New York papers?

A. Yes. I have to. I need to know what’s going on and I’m always curious what my colleagues are writing. I try not to read to the extent that I’m letting other writers influence what I write. People fall into that trap – writing for Joe Blow at the other paper. There is such a thing as reading too much – I don’t want my judgment to be influenced by somebody else’s story. I want to write what I feel.

Q. How do you pick your topics – is it usually obvious?

A. It varies. Some topics are obvious – if the Yankees or Mets are in the playoffs, the Giants are in the Super Bowl, or if the Knicks are going down the tubes – I have to go do those, and I don’t mind because it’s news. I don’t have to search – the column is there somewhere. Otherwise I pick based on emotion – if you’re emotional about something you write it better. If you don’t give a damn you don’t tend to write as well. My best columns I can churn out in about 45 minutes – I’m talking about 45 minutes in the middle of the day. Why? I know what I want to say and how I want to write it – I even have the first three grafs ready to go before I open the computer. The worst ones take me 3 1/2 hours to get done – that’s when I have a passing interest, it’s a slow news day, and I couldn’t come up with anything else. I’m just trying to make it presentable. So that’s the way it is – we’re at the mercy of the sports calendar – some days you have your pick of topics, others are extremely slow and you have to generate a column because it’s your day to write – you’re at the plate and you have to make something happen.

Q. Do you ever second-guess a prior column?

A. I just did it a couple of weeks ago. A year-and-a-half ago I said that the owners of the Mets, Fred Wilpon and his son, needed to sell the team because they were doing a lousy job, didn’t know how to pick the right people to run the team, and that it would be a joke as long as George Steinbrenner was on the other side of town. What happens? They hire Omar Minaya and he hires Willie Randolph and Fred Wilpon begins to spend his money the right way. They get Delgado and Beltran and everything falls into place and they win 96 games.

I said I was wrong – that Fred Wilpon was the right guy to run the team. I don’t do that a lot because I don’t do crystal ball columnizing. Suppose you draft a guy and my column the next day says this guy is crap and it was the wrong move. I get a kick out of people who write that – how the hell do they know? Or if they write he’s a great pick and will be All-Pro for ten years – how the hell do they know? For whatever reason a lot of columnists fall into that trap. The come to a decision on a player or a coach before that player or coach has a chance to prove his self. I think that’s a mistake.

Q. Do you have ethical and moral axes you grind?

A. Yes. I find it a complete joke that a lot of columnists have a conflict of interest. By that, some of us become friends with people we write about – have a buddy list – I like this coach, or G.M. or this player. And then we have an enemy list – I can’t stand this coach or this player. We have Buddy and Enemy lists – you gotta be kidding me. We’re paid to be objective – we can’t afford to have lists. We can’t write something nasty about somebody we hate, or protect somebody we like, or conveniently not write that day if they screw up. People in our business, the celebrity columnists – you know who they are – are filled with conflicts of interest. Amazing conflicts – and their bosses let them get away with it. They play golf with the G.M. of the local team – you got to be kidding me. Suppose this guy screws up – can your reader trust you to be objective and tell the truth? No – because you’re torn.

I don’t have any friends among my subjects – I don’t cross that line. I don’t look at them as anything more than subjects and I don’t care if they like me or dislike me. A lot of columnists have social calendars that revolve around certain players – you wouldn’t believe how rampant that it is in the business. Well, if I criticize this guy he won’t invite me to his golf outing. Trust me – a lot of big names in the business are buddy-buddy with coaches and G.M.s and it sickens me because they rip off their readers. Their readers are not getting the straight scoop. I have no conflicts even though it would be very easy for me to. A lot of times we come from the same background and listen to the same music and I see them around, but I never cross the line. Do we have to be cordial to them – absolutely.

Q. ‘Conflict of interest’ to one person might be ‘cultivating a source’ to someone else, no?

A. Okay, you have this source telling you things, and you’re using it. Suppose this source screws up – then what do you do? You’ve basically said that in exchange for establishing a relationship I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

We’re columnists. We have to think with a clear head. Why can’t we look straight down the middle and if they deserve a smack – smack ‘em. If they deserve a slap on the back – slap ‘em. Treat them fair. When we’re handed these prestigious jobs, the best and highest paid job at the paper, they expect us to be objective. We owe it to the readers. If a guy wants to give me a scoop and be a source – fine – but I ain’t gonna protect him. If he treats me like crap – fine – he’s not a member of my family. I don’t take anything personally because none of these people are members of my family. If they treat me well it’s because of what I do for a living. If I stop working for Newsday and was Joe Blow in the street they wouldn’t give me the time of day.

Q. Is it different for beat reporters?

A. Nobody should cross the line – that’s a hard and fast rule for everybody in the business. A beat writer doesn’t have to have an opinion in the paper – he’s there to gather and break stories. The conflict, if there is one, isn’t as relevant as in column writing. Columnists have to call it down the middle – they can’t have agendas.

When I wrote my Miami column people said, “he’s a black columnist and he’s going to protect black players.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m going to call it the way I see it. Some people bring an agenda to the column – a female columnist may protect female athletes. Once you bring an agenda your judgment is clouded. Once it’s clouded you can’t do the job.

Q. But isn’t objectivity subjective?

A. That may be too deep for what I’m trying to say. As a columnist you’re supposed to look at things without a conflict of interest. You don’t make friends in this business. You can’t protect people because you rip off the reader.

Q. Isn’t there a built-in corrective mechanism? Wouldn’t a columnist lose readership? How long would editors stand for that?

A. Some of the biggest names in the business are guilty of it and editors are scared of them. They have large followings – editors have to look the other way because he’s Joe Blow. There’s one columnist who is in tight with an agent who has a fair number of athletes. The columnist writes glowing things about all his athletes. A couple of the athletes are major screw-ups and the columnist protects them. That’s a conflict of interest.

Q. Technically, doesn’t a conflict involve financial profit?

A. No. Let’s say an agent gives you a little extra access to his players in exchange for writing great things about them all the time. I’m saying no columnist should make a deal like that. I call them as I see them – athletes respect you if you do that. If you walk into a locker room and some athletes know you’re tight with some of their teammates they won’t trust you anymore – they’ll make you an outcast. They won’t believe anything you write – nor should they.

Q. Is it harder being an African-American columnist?

A. I wouldn’t say it’s more difficult. In some ways it’s easier. I can see things better – I probably have more of a license to write things. I can delve into certain issues without fear of someone saying, “How would he know – he didn’t grow up black.” I feel I’m more qualified based on who I am and what I am and where I came from to identify with certain issues. But to be honest we don’t see those issues much. Sport is one of the meritocracies in our society. If you’re good you play. You don’t find that much elsewhere where people are hired because of their skin color or where they went to school or because they’re the son or buddy of somebody. You see it a little in coaching and the G.M. ranks, but on the field you don’t. The end of the bench used to be reserved for white guys but you don’t see that anymore. Color just doesn’t come into play as much as with the rest of society.

Q. Let me read something: “Clearly, the Yankees will go about the business of reaching the World Series in a most unconventional manner. They will hit their way through October. They will defy conventional playoff thinking and go on the offensive. It’s not as if they have much choice. They don’t have any superstars in the rotation or in middle relief. Conversely, they have the Milky Way in the batting order.” Did you write that?

A. I wrote it. I don’t run from what I’ve written. The Yankees should have won. They have an amazing lineup. What Detroit did was totally unexpected – holding the Yankees to 20 innings without a run.

Q. Is column writing hard work?

A. This job isn’t heavy labor – but it’s heavy labor mentally. I never have had a period when I was unemployed – I never had to do anything outside of journalism. I’ve been lucky to work continuously for 20-some years. At the same time I like to think I try hard and I’m dedicated to the profession and that counts for something. I’m very much an old-school journalism guy. I still believe in the principles I was taught in college. If you get something run it past two sources. Do research – basic old school things you don’t see too much in the New Age media world. Maybe I’m behind the times but I wish more people were old school. We wouldn’t see as many mistakes and the public would have a better image of us. I see things that make me want to cringe.

(SMG thanks Shaun Powell for his cooperation)

It’s not about race; it’s Miami

October 19, 2006

We missed the white fight. You know, the brawl between football players at Holy Cross and Dartmouth last weekend where, interestingly, no TV cameras were around to capture the fists and the anger, to replay the lowlights constantly so a country would come away with an impression about “those people.” The phone rang a few times the other day, and the callers wanted my take on what they saw as an obvious and possibly racist double standard. That’s because, while the preppy and privileged were slugging it out, a large group of mostly black players from Miami and Florida International stomped each other in a violent interlude that received major air time on your tube and YouTube.

Therefore: Where’s the outrage for the prep boys gone wild? What about equal time? Why the difference? Well, one reason is rather obvious. We’re a nation of rubberneckers, and when given something shocking that we can actually see, we’re straining for a closer look. There was graphic video of Miami and Florida International players kicking and swinging helmets and in the case of one injured player, even crutches. In a morbid and grotesque way, it was entertainment for the networks, who exploited it to the hilt, satisfying an audience that craved it. There was none of Holy Cross vs. Dartmouth, a game nobody demanded to see. Therefore, no round-the-clock replays.

As for the punishment phase, hopefully justice is blind. Thirteen Miami players received suspensions and were ordered to perform community service for their part in the fight, while school officials at Dartmouth and Holy Cross were still sifting through the rubble yesterday, searching for the guilty. In every which way, their behavior was just as repugnant, just as unforgivable, and therefore the punishment should be just as firm. The scales must be balanced, because fighting can’t be justified or tolerated in any high school or college event.

Now let’s get to the real issue here. The fight in Florida weighed heavier because the program at Miami has an ugly history of football players acting like fools.

But the aftermath and the reaction is racist only if that’s the way you choose to see it.

A good many schools around the country play according to the rules, adopt an acceptable code of conduct, keep the trash-talking where it belongs – in the trash – and subscribe to the guidelines of sportsmanship. Oh, and a good many of these schools have a good number of black players. That should be pointed out.

What’s unfair is when a group of renegades are lumped with everyone else. So please, make the distinction. Too many black football players at Miami for two decades have engaged in taunting, fighting, finger-pointing, stomping and all-around nonsense, but in no way do they represent all black players. Every race has its idiots; ours just seem to get recruited by Miami.

This is the same school that ran up 202 yards in penalties at the 1991 Cotton Bowl, most for unsportsmanlike conduct, and the nine players flagged were black. This is the school that once famously dressed in military fatigues, that had multiple players run afoul of the law in the Jimmy Johnson/Dennis Erickson eras, and that was tagged as “convicts” when it played the “Catholics” from Notre Dame. Sure, there are notable exceptions of former standout athletes and students at Miami: Russell Maryland, Jonathan Vilma, to name a few. But still.

As Tim Brown, the Heisman Trophy winner from Notre Dame, once told me: “They bring your momma into every conversation.”

As a race of people, there are forces against us that we can’t control: racism, decaying city school systems and hiring practices. As for our image, that’s well within our control. When members of a group insist on embracing all the negative stereotypes and giving society more reasons to dislike or fear us, then those wounds are self-inflicted. Too often, these people find their way into pop culture and sports, where the influences are heavy and the spotlight is hot.

Their actions are seen across the country and suddenly, beliefs and biases are formed. The football program at Miami, of all places, should know that by now.

Next time Miami players fight, they really should swing a helmet at the right opponent: their reputation