An Interview with Adam Lazarus

Adam Lazarus: Interviewed on September 20, 2011

Position: Author, Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report

Born: 1982, Cleveland

Education: Kenyon College, 2004 BA in English; Carnegie Mellon, 2006, Masters in Professional Writing

Career: “After finishing my first book, Chasing Greatness
, I freelanced for Atlanta Journal Constitution in 2009 then moved on to Bleacher Report in 2010.”

Personal: “Husband to my lovely wife Sarah and father to our boxer Hannah.”

Favorite restaurant (home): Greenwoods, Roswell, GA. “They specialize in Southern cooking so it was a different type of food than I wasn’t used to when we moved here in 2009. But my wife and in-laws have been going there for years and when they took me I realized what they were always raving about. It’s delicious: I love their meatloaf. Best of all, the portions are ridiculously huge.”

Favorite restaurant (away): Abay, Pittsburgh, PA. “Abay is an Ethiopian restaurant in Shadyside that my wife and I went to for many of our early dates, so there is naturally a sentimental place in my heart for it. I am usually very picky about any food that doesn’t come via the Drive-Thru, but Abay has so many different flavors and such a unique feel that I love it. Plus you are actually encouraged to eat everything with your hands so that was an added bonus.”

Favorite hotel: Renaissance Waverly, Atlanta, GA. “I don’t stay in many hotels, but since my wife and I were married at the Waverly and all of our family and friends shared the day with us there, it’s my favorite.”

Author of: Super Bowl Monday: The New York Giants, The Buffalo Bills, and Super Bowl XXV, (2011): Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont, (2010).

Q. Why “Super Bowl Monday
” – what drew you to the subject?

A. Super Bowl Monday: That was arguably the greatest Super Bowl ever played—closest final score, four lead-changes, came down to the last second—but the cloud of the first Persian Gulf War hanging over the game made it such a poignant moment for Americans as well as the soldiers and sailors carrying out Operation Desert Storm.

And considering how many NFL legends were competing that day in front of the “Silver Anniversary team”—an All-Time Super Bowl lineup featuring Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Mean Joe Greene, Mike Singletary, etc was voted on by the fans and honored on the field before the game—it was a great way to celebrate 25 years of the Super Bowl.

I also wanted to retell the story of that entire Super Bowl. Most casual fans remember Scott Norwood’s “Wide Right,” but to boil that game and those to teams down to the outcome of a single play really does neither one justice. It belittles the Giants victory to think that Norwood’s miss “gave them” the game, it ruins the Bills magical season to paint him solely as responsible for the loss, and it diminishes an incredible contest that was so hard fought and so competitive from the first play to the last. But more than anything it’s an unfair burden for Norwood and the Bills franchise to carry. Perhaps the noblest moment in the book isn’t the Giants win or Thurman Thomas’ fourth quarter touchdown: it’s how Norwood and his teammates responded to the missed kick immediately after the game.

Q. How did you research it?

A. I did interviews with the game’s stars and key personnel like Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick, Jim Kelly, Marv Levy, Bruce Smith, Jeff Hostetler, and many more, but I also relied heavily on newspaper archives from that era. I read hundreds of New York Times, Newsday, Buffalo News, Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, etc. articles. That was a great way to pinpoint specifics that occasionally fade over the years: two decades is a long time.

In some cases, the 1991 version of Jeff Hostetler or Bruce Smith had a better perspective on something than the 2010 version. By using their quotes from that time period instead of today, I was able to tell the story of a play or a game more thoroughly. I also collected tons of resources from the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the NFL Films offices. Both of those trips to Canton and Mt. Laurel unearthed great treasures that I would not have found in the newspapers or even with interviews.

Q. What is the narrative structure you chose and why?

A. I wanted to do a great deal of background work on the game’s key people (Hostetler, Kelly, Ottis Anderson, Parcells, etc) so there are many places where I pull back and include biography. That means the book isn’t completely chronological from page 1 to page 300. But I thought this was the best way to build up the characters so that by the time the reader does get to Super Bowl XXV in the middle chapters, they know what got the players there and how – ironically – many of their paths had crossed before.

Along the same lines, there are some places where I do “Super Bowl Flashbacks.” Not only was that the 25^th anniversary Super Bowl and many of the game’s past heroes were honored, but in the Giants-Bills game, there are three very unique moments of Super Bowl déjà vu and I point those out at key moments in the book. The best example is Scott Norwood’s kick at the end of Super Bowl XXV paralleling Jim O’Brien’s kick at the end of Super Bowl V. Obviously those two field goal attempts had different outcomes, but they made for a nice juxtaposition. The other two “flashbacks” are much more subtle but no less intriguing and I did more than simply point out the parallel. In the case of the O’Brien/Norwood parallel, I went back and spoke to O’Brien and some of his teammates in Super Bowl V to recreate the moment and how that one kick changed his life.

Q. Biggest challenge on a reporting/writing level?

A. Collecting the interviews with the key people was challenging and in some cases a long struggle. But it was certainly worth it in terms of adding “behind the scenes” material. Bill Parcells was probably the best example of this. I chased after him for a long time but when I finally spoke with him, he shared so much detail that it really made the book richer. As important as the newspaper research was—collecting quotes from the moment or specific details that have been lost in memory over time—the only way I learned what Parcells or Jeff Hostetler or Darryl Talley was thinking that day was by talking directly with them.

Q. Biggest challenge on a personal level?

A. The Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm is one of the key elements of the book and where the book’s title is derived from: to the soldiers and sailors watching the game in the Gulf, it was already Monday morning, not Sunday night when the Bills and Giants kicked off. So I wanted to tell that part of the story. Not only because of the patriotism on display that day in Tampa – Whitney Houston’s national anthem – but because there were a few players with family members serving and there was a great deal of uneasiness in the nation at that time.

So I chose to give a timeline of the war and told a few stories about soldiers and sailors watching the game – there’s a great picture in the book of a handful of soldiers watching the television, one with a machine gun strapped across his back – and included their feelings about whether or not the game should be played and what it meant to them.

But I struggled with not going too far down that road. For one, this is intended to be a sports book and Jim Kelly, Jeff Hostetler, Thurman Thomas, etc, are the book’s stars. Furthermore, I didn’t want to trivialize the situation and suggest that the Super Bowl was some sort of cure-all for the painful time that so many American were going through—for some it was not a “welcomed distraction”.

And finally I am not a military historian nor am I a veteran so I didn’t want to write a “War Book” when I don’t have that type of expertise. Finding the right balance was difficult, but I believe I achieved it.

Q. How do you envision your career going forward?

A. My agent just sold my next book—another 1980s/1990s NFL story—to Da Capo and it will come out in September 2012, so that’s the next step. I’d ultimately like to get to the point where I can churn out a new sports biography or narrative every few years, while also writing thoughtful in-depth profiles on today’s sporting landscape. I tend to think of myself more as a sports – true – storyteller rather than a reporter or columnist or writer. There’s always drama and intrigue and suspense in the sports world and I try to go out and find it.

Q. Tell us about your work with Bleacher Report and its role in your career.

A. Bleacher Report is a wonderful platform and not just because it helps develop new writers, something that the more conventional outlets don’t really do. Mostly, it has really helped me hone more opinions on the world or sports. Sometimes it’s great to “report” on events or issues in the NFL or Major League Baseball, but to actually voice an opinion about what your seeing was something I didn’t have many opportunities to do prior to Bleacher Report. People who have been watching sports all their lives, like the people at Bleacher Report, are not only entitled to opinions about what they see, but they are justified in expressing them: they/we know a lot about the games and usually offer unique and enlightened views.

Q. Why do mainstream sports media dump on Bleacher Report and why shouldn’t it?

A. Well, I think there is much less criticism now than there used to be–Bleacher Report has been great at adapting and improving constantly. And the best example of that is that they no longer have an “open door policy.” Not just anyone can write for Bleacher Report anymore and that’s helped really increase the quality across the board. But I think part of the criticism was the fact that Bleacher Report writers don’t have the same level of access as mainstream outlets so the viewpoint was seen as a bit distant and therefore less valued. In some cases I understood that, but just because you aren’t in the press box or the locker room doesn’t mean your viewpoint is worthless. I think Bleacher Report’s main goal is to speak more as a voice for the fans (hence the name) and that can be achieved by watching the games on TV or keeping in line with the newspapers/internet/TV.

Q. How does your Bleacher Report work dovetail with your authorship of books, if at all?

A. You know to be honest, they don’t really dove tail at all, and that’s a good thing in my opinion. When I’m writing for Bleacher Report it’s almost always about today’s NFL. My books–this Super Bowl XXV one and my next one, which centers on the 49ers dynasty–are about the past. I love both today’s NFL and the “historical” NFL equally so I get to work in both on a weekly basis. And my books are always about storytelling and building up a story, developing the characters–even though they are non-fiction that’s essential.

Bleacher Report is a different type of style, more about informing the reader about what’s going on in the sports world and offering commentary on that.

(SMG thanks Adam Lazarus for his cooperation)

An Interview with Tim Layden (Part 2)

“I was reading my own clips – a lot of them had long opening anecdotes. Now I wonder if I needed those. A lot of my profiles involved long intros with detail about the time and place and person. I think it’s good to check that and see if it feels right. The short answer is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But if you’re under time pressure, sitting on a 6000-word story with five days to write it, that’s a different kind of pressure. Sometimes you just have to write what you have to get started.”

“If you hit everything you get linked to and let that cascade it’s just too much if you try and read everything. I can’t imagine being a national columnist and trying to be on top of every piece of news every day. It would just wear me out.”

“Nobody at SI has addressed the tug-of-war between the website and the magazine. Institutionally, as a group what do we do about this? If we write a story for the web at midweek, because that’s the growth part of the organization, but then it becomes a part of the story on the weekend, nobody has told us what to do. Or what exactly do you do for the web if you think your story will hold for three days?”

Tim Layden: Interviewed on July 16, 2007

Position: senior writer, general assignment, Sports Illustrated

Born: 1956, Whitehall, NY

Education: Williams, 1978, English

Career: Schenectady Gazette 1978-86, Albany Times Union 86-88, Newsday 88-94, Sports Illustrated 94 –

Personal: married (Janet), two children (Kristin, Kevin)

Favorite restaurant (home): Harvest Cafe, Simsbury, Ct. “Fresh, innovative lunches. My wife and I have been going since

we moved to CT in 1995. Friendly, unpretentious, relaxing”

Favorite restaurant (road): Sapporo, Louisville, Ky, ‘sushi – go through at debry with mark beech, writer/repoerter at SI – we love to gather people for sushi in Louisivile – noeses turne dup at us – grat spot”

Favorite hotel: “I hate all of them – being in hotel means you’re on road and away from family – every time I check in I just want to get my work done and get home”

Tim Layden excerpted from Sports Illustrated, November 9, 1998:

Mother and son lived alone in a tiny three-room apartment at Fifth and Robidoux in the northwest Missouri city of St. Joseph. They had moved there from Salina, Kans., in 1945, after Marionetta Snyder divorced her husband, Tom, a traveling salesman. The son, Bill, was six years old at the time of the move. For the next 12 years he slept on a Murphy bed in the living room next to his mother, who slept on a rollaway cot.

Bill learned to swim at the YMCA pool six blocks away, and he played five sports at Lafayette High. His mother worked tirelessly. She would leave the apartment before Bill awakened and walk to the Townsend and Wall department store, where she was a sales clerk and buyer. Often she wouldn’t return until after Bill went to sleep at night. She never owned a car, never even got a driver’s license. She just worked. “We didn’t have much, but she provided me with all that she could. She literally gave up her life for me,” says Bill. Marionetta died in 1996 at age 78. “She taught me that what the Lord gives you is time,” he says, “and 24 hours a day is all you get.”

This workday ends at midnight, when Bill Snyder, 59, walks down the narrow carpeted hallway from his office into the foyer of the Vanier Football Complex at Kansas State, where he has been coach for 10 seasons. His only concession to the lateness of the hour is a slight loosening of his yellow necktie, which complements his gray wool suit. He pushes open a glass door and walks into the cool prairie night, pausing to lock the building because he’s the last to leave. His dark green Cadillac sits at the curb. “You could drive by the complex after leaving a party at 2 o’clock in the morning, and his car would be there,” says Kansas City Chiefs wideout Kevin Lockett, who played for Snyder from 1993 to ’96.

…He’s home now. The suit jacket is laid neatly across the cooking island in the kitchen of his house in an upscale development three minutes from the stadium. In six hours he will be back in the office, chasing perfection again. Snyder is at the top of his profession and in the race for a national title. Yet, like any perfectionist, he despises finite goals. “If we’re fortunate enough to win a national championship, I don’t believe it would be a culminating experience,” he says. “There’s no finality in any of this for me, other than death.”

Is he happy? “I’m not unhappy,” he says.

Soon the only sound in the kitchen is the rhythmic clacking of dress shoes on the hardwood floor, followed by the opening of a refrigerator door and the whisper of cool air flowing into the room.

Q. How important is the opening anecdote?

A. I had this argument sitting in an airport in Italy with Michael Farber – I love to talk the craft of writing with him. He lectured me on his opinion that the anecdote is over-used and passé. All of us lean on it when it’s not meaningful. I don’t know how to start a story so I’m going to run off four grafs with description, clouds and cars and when I’m done I’ll start the story. He said ‘sometimes a story just starts. Write a declarative sentence and just go. If you’ve got great access and scenes you can get to that eventually’. I said ‘sometimes an anecdote can set up what a story is’.

Over the years at SI people have used the opening anecdote as a way of showing off. Look at me, I’m in Michael Jordan’s living room and I’m going to make you read about it for 500 words so you know I’m there.

I was reading my own clips – a lot of them had long opening anecdotes. Now I wonder if I needed those. A lot of my profiles involved long intros with detail about the time and place and person. I think it’s good to check that and see if it feels right. The short answer is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But if you’re under time pressure, sitting on a 6000-word story with five days to write it, that’s a different kind of pressure. Sometimes you just have to write what you have to get started.

I once wrote a piece on Bill Snyder, the football coach at Kansas State. Snyder was a strange inaccessible guy, a megalomaniac who ran an obsessive program and took K-State from nothing to being a contender. The only time he talked to media was on Wednesdays from 12 to 1. I went there three straight Wednesdays from Connecticut. One time I asked if I could follow him home and shake hands in his driveway. He asked why. I said ‘that’s who you are and it will help me better’. He said sure. I followed him at midnight to his house – he got a cold dinner out of the refrigerator and sat down and ate.

The anecdote at the beginning was a story he told about his mother raising him in a small apartment and sleeping on a cot, which I could recreate. Then I used his best quotes – the ones that best summarized the story I was about to tell, which is a common device good writers and bad writers use. I used the scene where I followed him to his house as the kicker.

In a way I felt I was tricking the reader because I only spent three minutes at his house that night, and I asked to go. But I didn’t create the circumstances of him going home late and getting the cold plate of food and picking at it. By following him I was able to bring closure to the story in an accurate and representative way that validated the way the story started.

When you use those anecdotes you always wonder if they work or not, if they enhance the piece of just show that you can write. Nobody bats a thousand on it. We all need a way to make a story move along and connect good material. That’s one of the hardest things to figure out.

Q. How much travel is involved in your job?

A. About 100 days a year, though it fluctuates. In Olympic years it goes up. In the last 20 years my low is 75 days and my high would be 200, but I haven’t been near 200 in a few years. You make concessions. Baseball guys don’t have control over their travel. I don’t cut corners on material – I cut corners on comfort. I’ll take the 6 a.m. flight out and the 7 p.m. flight home. It’s exhausting. But it enables you to stay home and watch your son play hockey or your daughter row in a race. As a result you’re kind of tired all the time.

Q. Is it hard on your health?

A. I’m pretty healthy. I exercise diligently. I was a runner for a long time and now I’m a biker. I don’t drink much and I don’t smoke. It does affect sleep. You get a few more colds. For stories connected to events SI has morning deadlines on Sunday and Monday and you have to stay up and file in the morning at least 15 times a year.

It’s something you accept. If you have discipline and speed you don’t have to stay up all night. When I first came to SI to cover college football I would get to my hotel room by 8 and be done by midnight. I had that newspaper edge, but I lost it over time and got slower. Long features are different. You file those on Thursday on your own time.

There’s a great emphasis today on being a specialist. I never enjoyed staying on the same thing, or talking to the same G.M. every day. I’m thankful SI lets me do different things. Even when I covered college football I did the Winter Olympics and when Bill Nack left in 2001 I got into horse racing, which is a great storytelling beat.

Q. Where do you find information?

A. Depends on the topic I’m researching. I’ll go to a whole new realm of websites if I’m not working on a particular story. With some restraint I’ll go to the New York Times, USA Today, ESPN, and SI.com and shut it down after that – because you can eat up a day reading. If you hit everything you get linked to and let that cascade it’s just too much if you try and read everything. I can’t imagine being a national columnist and trying to be on top of every piece of news every day. It would just wear me out.

NBC Sports links to us so I go there. I try to go to Deadspin and thebiglead.com., which is similar but not quite as snarky. It’s pretty clever for what it is – an alternative universe sports website. And there are many more than that now.

Q. Do you worry about breaking news?

A. I don’t. If I can break news that’s great, but nobody at SI expects me to. The news I break might be about somebody doing something fresh and different. It won’t be about an offer sheet – Peter King and Mike Silver will get those stories – they have 40 years between them on the NFL. Nobody expects me to get that stuff. Covering a Triple Crown horse race or the Olympics I will break news here and there but not of the earthshaking variety. I don’t like to get beat on things.

It’s tricky at SI. With the website you’re trying to hold your own but you’re also trying to develop weekly stories. Even though it may seem antiquated you have to have a story four days after the race – it still has to have pictures and fresh information. Which is hard to do in this day and age. It’s hard to do that and to write daily news every day. My weekly stories now contain information I’ve already written on the web.

It’s always been difficult, even for (Dan) Jenkins 25 years ago when he sat down on a Sunday night. A lot of what he wrote wouldn’t have appeared anywhere else, but now there’s a lot more media.

During the last Olympics I spent 22 days in Italy and wrote 21 stories for the web. I also wrote three weekly pieces, which I filed on each of three Sundays. In many cases the subject matter of my magazine stories would overlap the subject matter of my web stories.

I broke a couple of stories. One was a long piece on a skier’s family that hadn’t gone public, Julia Mancuso, an up-and-coming skier, whose father’s name was Ciro. He had been an epic marijuana dealer in the 70s and 80s and had spent a number of years in prison. Julia had been a little girl when the ATF and FBI arrested him – he had got very rich doing it – but he had never talked about it and no one had drawn a connection between his pot dealing and her skiing – his money had enabled her career. I talked with him and wrote a long piece and they put it on the website on Thursday. Nine days later she won a gold medal at the end of the Games, and I’m still the only one who had talked with this guy. I talked it over with Craig Neff, our editor, about how to do this for the magazine. I got some access to her and some more information, and I worked in the father angle as one of the hurdles she had overcome – the old adversity angle – and I used about 500 words that had appeared on the website 10 days earlier.

Q. How do you balance the needs of the magazine and website?

A. Nobody at SI has addressed the tug-of-war between the website and the magazine. Institutionally, as a group what do we do about this? If we write a story for the web at midweek, because that’s the growth part of the organization, but then it becomes a part of the story on the weekend, nobody has told us what to do. Or what exactly do you do for the web if you think your story will hold for three days?

It’s an unspoken battle – how much to give to the web. Every writer makes the decision on his or her own. There’s been talk of creating a position as a liaison to help make that decision.

Four days before the Kentucky Derby in 2004 I got some details on the lives of the owners of Smarty Jones, who almost won the Triple Crown. They had met through Alcoholics Anonymous and there were some other things about their life together that would make an interesting story. It would have made a nice web story for sure. I called the managing editor of the web and said I’ve got a good back story on Smarty Jones – I didn’t know he was going to win the Derby of course – but I said it would make a great magazine story next week or a great web story now and I can bang it out in an hour and a half. He said ‘do what you think is best’, which wasn’t a real answer. So I sat on it. And it held for the magazine.

No place in the American sports journalism landscape puts out 80 to 120 pages of solid stuff every week like SI. Even if there are parts of SI you don’t like there are usually darn good quality stories you don’t get anywhere else. Is it viewed as ponderous and slow – probably – maybe even within its own building. But there’s nobody at the web demanding that they get everything first. They tell us ‘everything you give us is a bonus’.

The pressure is all self-driven. I don’t have to write 20 web stories at the Olympics – I just do. It’s probably better for my survival in the business and it’s fun.

The tug-of-war between the web and the magazine is still subtle. The credo is still that the magazine comes first. There would be no website without the magazine. Or it would be a lesser entity. The brand name of SI still carries a lot of weight. Circulation is still 3.1 million, and it made $125 million last year. It’s still a powerful force regardless of where it is in history, even if it’s closer to its end than beginning. It’s still a force to be reckoned with.

(SMG thanks Tim Layden for his cooperation)

An Interview with Tim Layden (Part 1)

“This story I was emotionally immersed. I felt the story. It was acting upon me. It was such an emotional time you couldn’t help but feel it…My emotionalism carried me through – somehow I got in my car and got to the office. I couldn’t screw up. I just couldn’t let myself screw it up. I sat down to write at 7 p.m. and finished at 10.”

“I’ve been doing this 31 years if you count college and what it always comes down to is if the people or the subjects of the story are engaged in what you’re doing. If you’re not doing an investigative or adversarial story, if the people connect with you – whether it’s a profile or an enterprise piece that involves something broader – then you have a chance to do something good and enjoy it.”

“To do your job, whether it’s a technical story or a profile, if you are a good listener and a diligent student I think you can do the job. You’re a bridge between the subject and reader. I’ve told athletes and coaches, ‘I’m the translator here, you say what you have to, but I have to explain and go one step further. I have to explain to people who know less than I do’. “

Tim Layden: Interviewed on July 16, 2007

Position: senior writer, general assignment, Sports Illustrated

Born: 1956, Whitehall, NY

Education: Williams, 1978, English

Career: Schenectady Gazette 1978-86, Albany Times Union 86-88, Newsday 88-94, Sports Illustrated 94 –

Personal: married (Janet), two children (Kristin, Kevin)

Favorite restaurant (home): Harvest Cafe, Simsbury, Ct. “Fresh, innovative lunches. My wife and I have been going since

we moved to CT in 1995. Friendly, unpretentious, relaxing”

Favorite restaurant (road): Sapporo, Louisville, Ky, ‘sushi – go through at debry with mark beech, writer/repoerter at SI – we love to gather people for sushi in Louisivile – noeses turne dup at us – grat spot”

Favorite hotel: “I hate all of them – being in hotel means you’re on road and away from family – every time I check in I just want to get my work done and get home”

Tim Layden excerpted from Sports Illustrated, July 24, 2007:

Reggie Bush had never been drilled like this in his life. In high school and college he had always been the best athlete on the field, too fast and too elusive to leave himself open to a clean shot. But here, in an NFC divisional playoff game against the Philadelphia Eagles, his initiation came suddenly. A swing pass floated into the right flat, a flash of green helmet and white jersey, and now Bush was on his hands and knees on the turf of the Louisiana Superdome, crawling in his black New Orleans Saints uniform like a small child, sent back to his infancy after getting blown up by Eagles cornerback Sheldon Brown. The play resonated throughout the league: Watching it on TV a thousand miles away in Chicago, Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher rose in appreciation. “Those are the ones you dream about,” he’d say later. The New Orleans crowd, frenzied only seconds before, fell silent.

…Bush rose quickly to his hands and knees, then to one knee and then to a standing position. And then back down to all fours, pawing at the ground. “I popped right up,” says Bush, smiling at the memory. “Then I was like, Ooooo, I can’t breathe, my wind is gone. I better get back down. I never felt anything like that before.” Bush sat out one play before returning to the game.

Q. What is your Big Hits story about?

The whole culture of big hits, starting from square one – how does a big hit occur? I talked to guys involved in them last year. Jeremy Shockey was laid out. How did it happen to him, what does it feel like – generally and specifically – and how did it affect him psychologically? Was he ever knocked out? I take it to the realm of equipment they wear, which isn’t much, although the average fan doesn’t know that.

By and large guys were happy to sit down and talk about it. They warmed up to it, I think, because I wasn’t asking how they would beat the Bengals this week, or what it was like to grow up in grandma’s trailer. Sportswriting 101 – you can do better with a subject if you take them where they haven’t been. If you ask Reggie Bush what the pressure of being a No. 1 pick is like his eyes are likely to glaze. Probably half the guys who received big hits were willing to talk about it, and he was one of them. He jumped right into the topic. You could tell it was something he hadn’t been asked before.

One of the things I tried to ask players was if they thought fans understand the level of violence in the game. NFL is the most popular game in America, but the majority watch at home on TV. They’re attracted to the hitting and violence, but they don’t understand it to a significant degree. We asked players, “Explain what they’re missing.” A lot had to think about how to put it into words. Most of these guys are tormented in their own little world. Except for the superstars, their jobs are on the line every week and month. They’re as insecure as the next guy. Delivering hits is all part of what they go through. It’s a fascinating culture.

I was assigned a story last September – the NFL editor, Mark Mravic, thought it would be interesting to do a story on the Cover 2 defense. He was in a conference call with the reporters, and we all tended to mention profiles, which can be the richest and easiest story. Let’s be honest, you need access to one guy and then you paint the edges. Mark said ‘let’s do the Cover 2, we hear it every week and no one knows what it is’. There was silence on the phone. After 15 seconds I said ‘okay, put me down for that one’. I pecked away at it for three months – it was long and complicated. But I got a tremendous response, in letters and e-mails, and from peers and players telling me it was tremendous. A book agent called and suggested expanding it into a book on other defenses and offenses. It just blindsided me.

As journalists sometimes we miss what readers want to read. Usually you want to do a story that makes readers cry or gets turned into a movie or a miniseries – a Gary Smith type of piece. That causes you to miss a more obvious thing that serves the reader well. A month later I did a Super Bowl preview with Manning and Urlacher, about what each of them sees on the field. Urlacher gave me a long chunk of time, about what he sees 30 seconds before the snap, 15 seconds, 10 seconds, and five seconds. That story got another huge response. I guess there’s a message there somewhere.

Q. How much technical expertise do you need to cover football?

A. To do your job, whether it’s a technical story or a profile, if you are a good listener and a diligent student I think you can do the job. You’re a bridge between the subject and reader. I’ve told athletes and coaches, ‘I’m the translator here, you say what you have to, but I have to explain and go one step further. I have to explain to people who know less than I do’.

I don’t know that football is the most complex game but it’s presented that way. We can’t understand most of what’s going on, but we can try to explain most of what’s going on to readers, at least on a certain level. I sat in a lockerroom with a Ravens player who spent 45 minutes explaining one play to me. Obviously that’s too much – I can’t go that far with it. You don’t need too much technical expertise, but you do need a willingness to listen and learn.

For the Cover 2 story I got on the phone with Pete Carroll, who was its architect way back. I would say this and he would say ‘no, you’re getting close but there’s more to it than that’. I would say ‘Give me more’.

Q. What are your favorite stories to write?

A. Hard question. A story can present itself and turn out to be lousy. Other occasions you dread a story you’ve been given to do and it turns out to be good. I’ve been doing this 31 years if you count college and what it always comes down to is if the people or the subjects of the story are engaged in what you’re doing. If you’re not doing an investigative or adversarial story, if the people connect with you – whether it’s a profile or an enterprise piece that involves something broader – then you have a chance to do something good and enjoy it. Investigations – you’re always going to be fighting uphill.

So much of what you get with the big-time sports, NFL, MLB or NBA, is rote. The athletes, coaches and front offices are so programmed by watching ESPN, they’re so familiar with what media interviews are supposed to sound like that they only say those things. Whenever they can get a step beyond that, to answering questions thoughtfully, you can have a story that works.

A year ago, the first fall I was on the NFL fulltime for SI, one of my early stories was on Rex Grossman before he became a poster boy for disaster. I went out to dinner with him and went to his family’s condo in Chicago after he played well. I’m not saying he was insightful because insight doesn’t come naturally to him, but throughout the interview he was telling stories in response to my questions. I got honest answers and narrative from a human being saying what he felt. With big-time athletes that was kind of rare.

Q. The Grossman story – why did it happen?

A. In that case, it was another mechanical function of our profession – I caught him at the right time. He had been a big star in college, came in as a high draft pick and was injured and dropped off the radar. Then he did well again and was news. I got to him just as it was happening. He wasn’t talked out or jaded and things were going well. It was a confluence of things where he was willing to tell stories and talk about himself and be loose about it. He even gave me the cell phone numbers of his wife and dad. A month later that story couldn’t have been done – he hit the skids. He began to mistrust the media and felt we had an agenda and the window closed. With a guy like him it closes for good. With a lot of athletes it does. They develop a media persona, which is different from the way a human being would be conversant if you were talking while having lunch together. A media persona talks in vanilla speak.

ESPN is a good example. If you look at a typical week of SportsCenters and the best pieces ESPN does, say by Tom Rinaldi or Chris Connolly, those are three to four minute pieces usually with athletes who are under or next to or off the radar, who haven’t been talked to death. When they do a Reggie Bush or a Matt Leinart or a Barry Bonds it has to be tricked up, with music and quick sound bites. It’s almost a music video because the substance provided by the athlete is minimal. We do the same thing in print journalism. You trick it up, interview around the person and hope to get substance from some other source.

There’s just so much media now. The average pro athletes feels like he has a microphone in his face 18 hours a day.

Part of it is timing and part of it is being who you are. The larger media outlets can still take a crack at the big names. Scott Price (SI) did a terrific piece on Tony La Russa. Maybe the timing was right in the sense that there was news – new things to look at – La Russa’s DUI in the spring and a player who died shortly after that. In a way that was almost a timing thing, too. My point was that athletes who are overexposed can open up with the right media, SI or ESPN or the New York Times. Sometimes you get a guy who has talked too much to talk a bit more.

Q. What was your favorite story?

A. People ask that all the time. I didn’t used to have an answer but now I do. It was the Joe Andruzzi story after 9/11. SI put out an issue that was devoted to the events of the week that followed 9/11 – it was one of the magazine’s finest moments. My story was about a guy in sports but it went way beyond sports. Joe’s brother Jimmy had made it out of the south tower seconds before it collapsed. He walked into the house and told me that story. That’s something a sportswriter gets to do maybe three times in a career – a story with that kind of national gravitas. I got so much response on this story.

The politics of 9/11 have changed so much since then but at the time no politics were involved. That was a story on a journalistic level. The athlete and family let me into their home and the story had meaning and value and power.

Q. How did it come about?

A. 9/11 was on a Tuesday. I got the call on Thursday – an editor said this would be a good story. As a reporter you think, ‘how do I make this happen? Who do I call first? Will all these people talk to me?’ You’re being told to do something and you’re not sure it can be done. I called his agent and it went back and forth, no, no, maybe, and then late Saturday afternoon the agent called and said the Andruzzis will talk to you tomorrow on Staten Island. Selfishly, that’s where I wanted it to be.

I drove down the Jersey turnpike, where you could still see the smoldering smoke from the towers and I drove by the site of the attacks. And then I drove to Staten Island where the Staten Island Advance had page after page of head shots of dead firemen and police. Joe’s mom knew all these men who had been killed.

So many stories we do are mechanical. You’re not so much concerned about getting a great story as with getting a story. It’s a series of gets – you’re not engaging with people as much as checking off a list. This story I was emotionally immersed. I felt the story. It was acting upon me. It was such an emotional time you couldn’t help but feel it. Then to be in their house – your cynicism and professional mechanics go out the window.

Then I drove in to Manhattan to the magazine’s offices. My emotionalism carried me through – somehow I got in my car and got to the office. I couldn’t screw up. I just couldn’t let myself screw it up. I sat down to write at 7 p.m. and finished at 10.

Tim Layden, excerpted from Sports Illustrated, September 24, 2001:

On the day after the disaster, Joe sleepwalked through meetings and practice in preparation for a game at Carolina that he hoped would not take place. “I was there, but not really there,” he says. When the NFL announced the next day that its games were canceled, Joe drove to Staten Island. Late last Friday afternoon he was sitting in the living room of his parents’ modest split-level house when Jimmy walked through the door and stopped at the entrance to the room. He raised his right hand and held his thumb and index finger less than an inch apart, wordlessly demonstrating the margin of his survival as his lip trembled and his eyes watered. Both men began to cry, and they embraced in the center of the room, sobbing for longer than either could ever remember.

….At the core of this immeasurable disaster, the missing firefighters were at once heroes and victims, symbols of bravery and tragedy. It will be years before their ranks fully recover the experience and skill that was lost. Two days after the towers fell, Jimmy joined the thousands of firemen and other volunteers searching through the rubble for survivors and bodies. Standing atop a pile of twisted steel and compacted concrete, he felt another rumble, similar to what he had felt 48 hours earlier. He ran from the pile in terror and promised not to return soon.

His brothers Billy and Marc have done multiple shifts on what rescue and recovery workers have come to call “the mountain,” their name for the pile of rubble that had been the tallest buildings in the city. “I hate to say that it’s hard to appreciate what it’s like down there,” said Billy on Sunday, “but television does not do justice to how terrible it is.”

The previous evening he had held a fellow firefighter’s ankles as the man reached deep into the wreckage and scooped intestines out of a detached torso for DNA identification. In another place he picked up a single tooth. “By the end of my shift down there, I smelled like death,” he said, and then he too began to cry.

On a cool, crystal-clear Sunday morning, Joe went with Jimmy to the Engine 5 station house, a three-story building that is one of the oldest firehouses in the city. He found tough men, scarred but battling for their sanity. “There were guys there who said they’d been crying for three days and it was time to stop,” Joe said later. They were also worried about Jimmy, who had taken things harder than most. “They said he’s not back yet,” said Joe. “They said he needs more time. I hope it helps him to talk about it.”

Joe sat on the steps of his mom and dad’s home. A soft breeze ruffled the American flag on the front of the house. Inside, the table was set for dinner. Soon Joe would return to Massachusetts to begin preparing for this Sunday’s game against the New York Jets in Foxboro. Football business. “Regular game week,” said Joe.

Normalcy beckons, but reaching it will take longest for those survivors who were closest to the flame.

(SMG thanks Tim Layden for his cooperation)

An Interview with Dave Krieger

“Unbelievably I saw Tim Kurkjian last night on ESPN arguing that he would vote for Mark McGwire for the Hall of Fame because there are not enough facts available to prove he had done steroids. This is coming from a person who didn’t want an investigation.”

“If you take the position that not enough facts are available, after you opposed an investigation, clearly you are not acting as a journalist. Maybe you’ve gone over to the other side – you’re acting as a promoter.”

“I view myself as a letter writer to my readers, who can’t go where I can go. I’m in here and this is what I see and hear and can figure out.”

“Fans want what the team wants – positive publicity – all the great stories you’re not seeing, all the wonderful human beings you’re not recognizing – and they want you to write about it…if you did it as a columnist you would suck and probably lose your column. Beat guys could get away with it because a lot of beat writers at the highest levels are homers.”

Dave Krieger: Interviewed on November 28, 2006

Position: Columnist, Rocky Mountain News

Born: 1954, New Haven, Connecticut

Education: Columbia, Amherst

Career: Claremont NH Eagle-Times, Burlington Free Press, Press Secretary for Sen. Patrick Leahy 1977-78; Cincinnati Enquirer 78-81, Rocky Mountain News 81 –

Personal: divorced, one son

Favorite restaurant (home): Sabor Latino, Denver “neighborhood Mexican-Caribbean-South American joint”

Favorite restaurant (away): Greens, SF “a veggie place – unbelievable what they do and I’m not a vegetarian”

Favorite hotel: Hotel Chelsea, NY, “former home to Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller and other writers – on the National Register of Historic Places – the clerk once asked me if I was a writer and I said yeah and he said we have writers here. I said I know because I saw the plaques. He said, “We still have some who are alive.”

Dave Krieger excerpted from the Rocky Mountain News, April 11, 2006:

Baseball’s steroid crisis has spilled over into the sports media in much the way the Iraq crisis spilled over into the news media, or at least onto Judith Miller’s desk.

In its wake, there’s been an uncommon amount of navel-gazing about the state of “sports journalism.”

Let me do what I can to clear this up:

Sports journalism is an oxymoron.

You might already be aware of this, but the outcome of a sporting event has precious little effect on anything, assuming there’s no riot. If we judged it by the usual journalistic standard – significance – we would run it in the back with the horoscope.

However, fans love sports and they want to read about their favorite teams. We satisfy this demand in the role of entertainment reporters.

We operate in a hazy neutral zone between journalism and promotion…

Q. Why is sports journalism an oxymoron?

A. I should say first that the use of that statement was a device at the top of the column to get a laugh. Clearly it was an exaggeration – sports journalism is not an oxymoron.

I was annoyed at the time. I had just seen Tim Kurkjian (ESPN), who is a former sportswriter and I assume he still calls himself a journalist, arguing on TV that there should be no investigation into the steroid mess. He said, “What’s the point – if you found out what would you do with it?”

My jaw dropped – I cannot imagine a journalist who would not want to know. Unbelievably I saw Tim Kurkjian last night on ESPN arguing that he would vote for Mark McGwire for the Hall of Fame because there are not enough facts available to prove he had done steroids. This is coming from a person who didn’t want an investigation.

Q. You find Kurkjian’s position ironic?

A. More than ironic. It is what an apologist or a p.r. person for Major League Baseball would do – block the investigation and then say there are no facts to prove anything. It’s what government p.r. people would do when they’re covering something up.

I came up as a news reporter. It’s inconceivable to me that a journalist wouldn’t want to know before passing judgment. I’m not picking on Kurkjian – I don’t know him – and I understand he was a fine baseball writer. I’ve run into a lot of baseball writers with that view. They’re so invested in that view that whether or not they’re acting as a journalist is an open question.

If you take the position that not enough facts are available, after you opposed an investigation, clearly you are not acting as a journalist. Maybe you’ve gone over to the other side – you’re acting as a promoter.

Q. Does sports journalism tend to be promotional?

A. Yes. It’s very different than being a city side reporter – it’s more akin to entertainment, rock, and movies. From a traditional journalism standpoint in which one judges the value of news based on its significance to society at large – who wins these games couldn’t matter less. Yes, the ancillary economic factors are important – who wins doesn’t matter. It’s entertainment and we give it more space and attention than it should get because people are so into it. We’re serving a market function but it’s not a traditional function of journalism. It’s the same thing as people writing endlessly about Jennifer Aniston – it’s nonsense from a news point of view.

When you get guys approaching sports from a hard news point of view that’s revolutionary. It’s not coincidental that the two (SF) Chronicle reporters (Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada) were not sports beat guys. It takes an outsider’s perspective. If you talk to the beat guys you’ll find they’re much closer to the teams they cover than to their newsrooms. As an NBA writer I was never in my newsroom but I was around the coaches and players constantly. You have a tendency to identify more with your sport than with your paper.

Q. How do you approach it?

A. I understand it’s entertainment. I’m writing a column today about the Broncos that has very little journalistic value but huge entertainment value – the Broncos get huge attention in this marketplace. If I see myself that way – as an entertainer – then what I write doesn’t have to have significance. That’s fine – that’s what I’m being paid to produce because there’s a market for it. But when big issues like steroids come in, then we have trouble finding our footing because we’re in a different role than the traditional journalist.

Q. You wrote a column recently about a Colorado solider stationed in Iraq finding comfort in watching the Broncos game on TV. Wasn’t that a case where sport was significant in a broader sense?

A. It is a consolation to me that sports has a role greater than the purely self-indulgent entertainment that most of us get out of it. You get those heart-warming stories about soldiers overseas or sick kids in the U.S. to whom sports means a great deal – people for whom everything else is pretty bleak and for whom it’s great to have something exciting and fun to focus attention on. Sport has that role in the real world.

In that case it’s news – you are acting as a journalist. You’re writing about how sport affects fans in the real world – not just for fans looking to escape – but for people who need it. The more of those stories we do the more in touch we will be with our basic roles.

I don’t have an objection to sports being escapist, and I don’t dispute that most of our work is done in that escapist realm. But as journalists it would be nice if we touched base with reality just often enough so that when a hard news story came along we recognized it. So that when a steroid story comes along we don’t view it as an attack on our turf. A lot of sportswriters objected to a steroids investigation as though outsiders were coming in and messing up their sport. We have to keep in mind that we are the outsiders – or are supposed to be.

Q. What do you write most often?

A. I’ve been here 25 years – I’m the local guy. Our other columnist – Bernie Lincicome – came in 2000 and he gives us more of a national perspective. I tend to focus on local teams – I do a ton of Broncos columns because they’re the state religion here. Later on I’ll focus on Avs hockey and Nuggets basketball. I do as much baseball as I can but with the Rockies it’s not easy to do. Occasionally I’ll do the national stuff.

Q. Which recent Broncos column got the most public reaction?

A. Plummer-Cutler columns are all the rage here – we have a quarterback controversy. It’s a classic sports controversy that doesn’t matter to anybody but football fans. The quarterback of the Broncos is probably the leading public figure in Colorado – more than the governor or mayor. I wrote a column a week ago today in which I said – predicted might be too strong a word – that if Plummer didn’t play well in Kansas City he would be replaced by Cutler. It was an educated guess and I laid out my reasons. That was last Tuesday. On Thursday NFL Network breaks a story attributed to sources that Cutler will replace Plummer. NFL.com wrote it and claimed they broke it. Then ESPN’s Chris Mortensen said he broke it. Every news outlet outside of Al Jazeera claimed to have broken it.

Q. What did you make of the breast beating?

A. It was a modern statement about our business. It’s more important for each outlet to claim they had it first than it was to deliver the information. I’ve never seen a story broken that many times. Finally the Broncos had a press conference, with the usual media cluster fuck, and announced it yesterday.

Q. Do outlets benefit from being first?

A. No. I don’t think anybody cares. It’s all inside baseball and one-upmanship among ourselves. It’s a feather in our cap as a reporter to break a story – everybody wants credit for that whether or not they actually broke it. My column did not claim to be based on sources. Once the NFL Network did it everybody after that had the story in front of them and just had to confirm it – that’s not the same thing as breaking it. It makes us look bad in the eyes of viewers. I don’t think anybody cares who broke it – they just want to know what the information is.

Q. As a columnist do you do much reporting?

A. Quite a bit in my column, in contrast to Bernie, who is more of a craftsman. He’s a great writer – and since Bill Lyons retired – maybe the best in our business. He tends to take the big picture.

I was a beat reporter for years. I tend to get more quotes in my columns and pursue people more. I approach it analytically – why is this happening – and I try to find someone to explain. I view myself as a letter writer to my readers, who can’t go where I can go. I’m in here and this is what I see and hear and can figure out.

Q. Is access an advantage?

A. Less and less. When I covered the Nuggets in the late 80s they flew on commercial flights and stayed in hotels that didn’t charge $400. I was around them all the time – sitting in airports and coffee shops. Doug Moe would hold court in coffee shops – the media and hangers on would come down and sit for hours and hours. All of that is gone now. The teams are on charters and they stay in places we can’t afford. I sat next to Dikembe Mutombo when he was a rookie – we were on a 747 and he didn’t get one of the eight first-class seats – and this 7-1 guy was assigned a middle seat in coach. I was next to him – his knees were almost in his mouth – and he was good-natured about it. There’s nothing like that to get to know somebody. Now I can go in a lockerroom after a game all season long and never develop that kind of rapport.

The reality is that access means less and less. They moved us off the floor this year – all over the country. They really don’t care anymore. I asked an NBA official, “Don’t you want us to communicate the sights and sounds?” He said, “We can do that ourselves now.” Access is limited and formulaic. There’s so much on TV – there will come a point where we won’t have any more access than the fans. The business model of NBA TV and nba.com and NFL TV and nfl.com is to eliminate the middle man – we are the middle man – and to provide access directly to fans.

Q. Is traditional print media going the way of the blacksmith?

A. I think that’s right. NBA TV came in last fall to cover the Nuggets training camp – it was going live on-air from camp. Nuggets practices have been closed to reporters for nine years – if I went to practice as a reporter I would sit outside the door until 15 minutes remained and they would let us in. If I stayed home and watched on NBA TV I could watch the whole thing – fans had more access than reporters – that’s the way it’s going. We will eventually be in the role of a blogger. We’ll do analysis and commentary but in terms of information we won’t have more.

Q. Who will get credentialed in the future?

A. Great question. It will be up to them – already they are credentialing themselves. Mlb.com is in every pressbox, mlb.com writers are covering every team for the mlb.com website. They’re covering themselves. It seems clear to me that over the last 10 or 15 years it dawned on them that they need us less and less. The owner of the basketball and hockey teams in Denver – Stan Kronke – also has started his own TV sports network which carries the games of both teams. As you can imagine, the coverage is pretty positive. That’s where you have to go to watch the games – announced by announcers his company approves. How long they’ll tolerate outside media – that is critical and not only positive – is not clear to me.

Q. Don’t teams owe the public more? Aren’t teams quasi-public entitites?

A. Probably, but that’s a qualitative judgment. Does one require another? Do tax breaks for arenas or donation of land or a public subsidy mean you will do this and this – is anything written down? No. It’s really up to the organization. Some teams are better about it than others. (Nuggets and Avs owner) Stan Kroenke doesn’t talk to the press – he doesn’t feel he has to.

I’ve made that argument – that the teams are quasi-public institutions – that this is not like owning a Wal-Mart shopping center. People care and want to know. My arguments have been unpersuasive to date.

Q. Do fans – like voters – get what they deserve?

A. Most fans just care about the team – they would choose the owner over the media. We’re not in a strong position in regard to fans – most fans want a fan magazine instead of a traditional journalism. They want as much information as possible about the players they cheer for. The more positive it is the more they like it. If it comes down the way it’s looking like – with the middle man being forced out – I don’t think we’ll have a lot of allies protesting on our behalf.

Q. What do the hard-core fans want?

A. Fans want what the team wants – positive publicity – all the great stories you’re not seeing, all the wonderful human beings you’re not recognizing – and they want you to write about it.

My job is not to be a fan magazine – but they want more fan magazine stuff. They do not want the people they admire and cheer for and love to be criticized. They don’t want criticism – they don’t much care if it’s well-founded or not. If the team is really bad the fans will turn on them because they want change – that’s when they’ll read what’s wrong with them.

When I criticized University of Colorado for its sex-recruiting scandal I never got hate mail like that. Let’s face it – the program is not Nebraska or Oklahoma – and yet there’s a core there that absolutely takes its personally if you criticize the team.

Q. If you wrote uncritically how boring would your job be?

A. You’d be a bad beat writer and if you did it as a columnist you would suck and probably lose your column. Beat guys could get away with it because a lot of beat writers at the highest levels are homers. I’m not going to generalize and say all beat writers are homers – a lot of them maintain independence and develop respect from both sides. Some editors believe beat reporters should be switched off after a certain amount of time – that’s a tough one for me because certain people who have been on the beat forever are legendary – and wouldn’t have been if they hadn’t stayed on it.

Tracy Ringolsby (Rocky Mountain News) just went into the baseball Hall of Fame based on 30 years plus of terrific baseball coverage. If he had been transferred to football after seven years he wouldn’t have had the opportunity. I’m not with that, but if I was a sports editor I would watch out for that phenomenon. The culture of the team has a tendency to overwhelm the culture of journalism you initially brought to the beat – I would be watchful for that if I was an editor.

Q. How often do you write?

A. Four a week. That’s a bit of a stretch but most columnists have to. We look up to columnists who write only three times a week. Some write two – that would be wonderful – you would have more time to research and interview.

Q. Your newspaper background?

A. I came to the News as a City Hall reporter in 1981 and I moved over to sports in 84. I covered the Broncos in 84-85, special projects in 86-87, and the Nuggets from 88 to 2000. I started the column in 2000.

Q. Why did you leave news?

After I covered the mayoral race in 83 I had run out of things to do – there was no place to go on news side.

Funny thing. Mike Littwin came here a sports columnist hoping to get back to news, which he had done at the Baltimore Sun. He had grown up in sports and gotten tired of it – he wanted to write more significant things. My journey was the opposite – I started in news and got frustrated with that. I got bored – sitting through meetings was harder than sitting through ball games. I was also thinking, “What difference does any of this make?” – which is what sportswriters think. I came over to sports knowing it was fantasyland and that was okay with me. I am able to compartmentalize – once I’m at a ballgame it doesn’t matter if its meaningless – I can still enjoy the game.

Q. Did your news reporting skills transfer?

A. I felt they did – but I’m not sure the people I covered felt that way. They felt I was too hard and too aggressive. Half the coaches in American believe it’s your obligation to support the team – particularly college coaches. It’s a completely different mindset if you bring a hard news attitude. I’ve had very difficult relationships in this business with people I’ve covered. People who grow up as sportswriters tend to be more friendly than I was. If you bring a traditional city-side adversarial “I’ve got questions” attitude you’re going to alienate people. I certainly did.

Q. Who?

A. Dan Issel – the coach and GM of the Nuggets. Our relationship was not great. What happens on competitive beats – at that time the Post and the News were owned by separate companies and were very competitive – is that one side will become the confidante of the coach and the other side will be the opposite. The Denver Post was on Issel’s side – he would share information with them – and because I had chosen an adversarial stance I was on the outside. I had to get information from agents and G.M.s around the league.

There’s a great advantage being on the outside – you can write anything you know. The guys on the inside can’t because they get their information from the inside. I prefer that guerilla role.

We more than held our own. We kicked ass on trade stories – the team would never want that out but if I could get it from other G.M.s or agents and we could run it. Stuff within the organization we would get our ass kicked because we were the last people they would tell. On balance we held our own.

Q. Who do you read?

A. Bill Lyon (Philadelphia Inquirer) is retired but still writing – he was the most under-rated writer of our time – close to a poet. TJ Simers (LA Times) is very funny. Ray Ratto (SF Chronicle). Both guys in Kansas City (Jason Whitlock and Joe Posnanski) are terrific. Rick Morrissey (Chicago Tribune). Richard Justice (Houston Chronicle). Shaun Powell (Newsday). Mike Bianchi (Orlando). The whole Washington Post crew: Tom Boswell, Mike Wilbon, Sally Jenkins, Mike Wise. Years ago when I worked on the Hill I loved to read Dave Kindred and Ken Denlinger.

Q. What New Media do you read?

A. I read Deadspin. Occasionally I look at blogs by local bloggers – like the bulletin boards for the college teams – but generally they’re so partisan I don’t find them helpful – they tend you toward writing things that ardent fans like, which is not your job.

(SMG thanks Dave Krieger for his cooperation)

Sure. Home is 303-458-7288. Cell is 303-619-4283. You’ll probably have to leave a message. Let me know when it would be convenient for me to get back to you and I will.

Krieger: It’s not our job to help cover up scandals

April 11, 2006

Baseball’s steroid crisis has spilled over into the sports media in much the way the Iraq crisis spilled over into the news media, or at least onto Judith Miller’s desk.

In its wake, there’s been an uncommon amount of navel-gazing about the state of “sports journalism.”

Let me do what I can to clear this up:

Sports journalism is an oxymoron.

You might already be aware of this, but the outcome of a sporting event has precious little effect on anything, assuming there’s no riot. If we judged it by the usual journalistic standard – significance – we would run it in the back with the horoscope.

However, fans love sports and they want to read about their favorite teams. We satisfy this demand in the role of entertainment reporters.

We operate in a hazy neutral zone between journalism and promotion, and it’s not just us. Do you notice the change in tone on 60 Minutes when the subject switches to sports?

Suddenly, Ed Bradley is fawning over Tiger Woods. Michelle Wie is charming Steve Kroft.

If this is how TV’s most distinguished news program covers sports, what do you expect out of the wretches who do it every day?

Nevertheless, there’s been a lot of concern about “sports journalism” lately, most of it in relation to steroids. (Not that we’re on them. No one’s saying that.)

This is a pretty adept PR job by Major League Baseball, which has managed to make the question, “If the press didn’t know, how were we supposed to know?” Too bad Enron didn’t think of that.

In fact, two reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle forced baseball to act, but critics point out these were not sportswriters but news-side guys.

As Mark Jurkowitz of The Phoenix in Boston wrote last week, sports have become a big seller for newspapers and other media, which are looking for sales drivers in a big way.

According to Jurkowitz, Buster Olney, formerly of The New York Times and now of ESPN, wrote this in The Times 10 days ago: “I had a role in baseball’s institutional failure during what will be forever known as the Steroid Era.”

This self-flagellation is more evidence of baseball’s extraordinary influence over the people who cover it. Players, trainers and “nutritional gurus” were making the case throughout baseball’s Steroid Era that you could bulk up the way Mark McGwire did, the way Sammy Sosa did, the way Barry Bonds did, by a combination of protein shakes, South American herbs and serious weightlifting.

Sportswriters, as you may have observed, do not tend to be weightlifters. By and large, we bought it. Now, Turk Wendell says no one can put on 30 pounds of muscle in a single off-season without pharmaceutical assistance. In all honesty, most of us had no idea if you could or not.

So call us naive, but that is not the same as sharing the blame with baseball for baseball’s internal dysfunction. Jose Canseco wrote in his book Juiced that he taught team trainers to administer steroids. Those are club employees. That’s baseball’s problem.

But some media types went above and beyond the role of oblivious spectator. Some actively argued against an investigation of the Steroid Era, a probe baseball launched only after the two Chronicle reporters published their book. One prominent example was Tim Kurkjian, also of ESPN.

Kurkjian argued there was no point to an investigation. This is a television analyst and former sportswriter who does not want to know.

Nor was he alone. Any number of commentators fretted at how difficult such an investigation would be. How could it ever succeed? How broad should it be? What could possibly come of it? Better to let it drop.

The underlying rationale, of course, is it would be better for baseball to let it drop. A commentator who takes this position has crossed the line from journalist to baseball guy. A journalist always wants to know as much as possible. He certainly doesn’t throw up his hands in despair before an investigation even starts.

Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that ESPN is in business with baseball to present and promote its games. It has built a stable of experts – some of them former journalists – to support this enterprise with studio shows, analysis and the like.

But “analysis” to a business partner is not the same as “analysis” to an outsider. A business partner wants to know as much as possible about tonight’s starters but would rather avoid the unpleasantness of the steroid scandal. It is no coincidence that ESPN also airs Bonds’ reality show, Bonds on Bonds, over which Bonds has editorial control.

It’s not our job in the sports media to run baseball, and it’s a good thing because the evidence suggests we wouldn’t do it much better than baseball does.

It’s also not our job to help baseball cover up its scandals. Even if there’s just a small slice of journalism left in what we do, it should be enough to tell us that.

rts

Broncos games serve as a link to home

Dave Krieger, Rocky Mountain News

939 words

17 October 2006

Rocky Mountain News

FINAL

2C

English

© 2006 Denver Publishing Company, Rocky Mountain News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights reserved.

So you think Broncos games are a nice break for you?

Imagine for a moment you’re Senior Airman James Demoney of the Air Force in your second deployment to the Middle East.

By Middle East, I do not mean Ohio.

“Big picture: We are responsible for ensuring our C-130s are mission ready in order to ferry troops and supplies in/out of Iraq,” Demoney wrote to me recently by e-mail.

“We also have a lot of aero-medical evac that comes in and out of here, along with human remains missions, but I shall opt not to get into detail about that at all. I’m sure you understand.”

Whatever you think about the mission in Iraq, the American servicemen and women in the desert are doing what their country asked in circumstances most of us cannot imagine. Sports on television serve the same function they serve for us, times 10.

Demoney, who was born in Aurora, is an avid Broncos and Avs fan, which is how our correspondence got started.

“Football for us is more or less time for us to take our minds off the mission for a while and have a piece of home for a little bit,” he explained.

“I know that when I watch football, it’s all I think about, aside from being at home with a beer or 10 while I watch. It’s fun to sit with a group of people who you’ve seen around base but don’t really know and just talk smack back and forth and watch a game.

“No one gets violent or anything like they would at a sports bar. It’s all good fun. Though it seems every time I go to the recreation center (the “Flex”) to watch the Broncos, it’s always just Bronco fans. I’ve made friends with this guy from Pope AFB, N.C., who is always up there watching the games. I don’t even know his name, but we always watch the games together. He’s from Wyoming, though. I do know that.”

Apparently, the Broncos fan experience is universal no matter where you are. Demoney offered this account of the Sunday night game in New England a couple of weeks back:

“I work from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., which is 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern time. The game came on here at the scheduled kickoff time, but I missed the first four minutes because I was training the new guy and the TV was on the wrong channel.

“I don’t remember the first half much, except I do remember thinking to myself how good Denver’s run defense looked, and immediately after I thought that (Laurence) Maroney had a good run. At least, I think it was a run. I saw him running.

“I am finding it hard to have confidence in Plummer after watching the first two games and after watching him throw a couple of passes into double and triple coverage and have a couple of passes go right through the hands of New England defenders. In the first half, I thought for sure this was another ‘bad Jake’ game, but that pass to Walker on third-and-1 into the end zone was PERFECT – great throw, awesome catch, fantasy football points.”

From 7,000 miles away, Demoney’s wish list sounds like my mail from Arvada:

“I would like to see Tatum keep getting 20 carries or more, would like to see Javon keep getting the balls when it counts, and would definitely like to see Shanny let Jake open it up more.”

Last week, Demoney was back in front of the TV for the Monday night game against the Ravens.

“For me, the biggest highlight of the game was Tater Bell carrying Ray Lewis on his back across the first-down line. I cannot stand Ray Lewis. And, of course, the icing on the cake, that was the TD pass. Jake still makes me angry, though.”

I’m no military expert, so I’ll let Demoney describe what he does the rest of the time.

“Our unit (386th Air Expeditionary Wing) is the most tasked C- 130 unit in the AOR (area of responsibility). We generate more sorties (missions) out of here than any other C-130 unit in the AOR, which includes the C-130 unit in Qatar (Guard and Reserve) and the C- 130 unit in Balad, Iraq (active duty from Little Rock, Ark.).

“Our mission motto here, so to speak, is, ‘Boots on the ground.’ The base attached to this one where the Army and Marines are is one of two staging areas for them going up country (to Iraq), so we are constantly flying Army and Marines personnel in and out of this base, as well as their support equipment. Hence, the motto.”

Airman Demoney turned 22 last month. He lives in Abilene, Texas, with his wife, Nicole, who is expecting their first child in January. He hopes to be home by then.

He was headed for Qatar during the weekend, so I don’t know if he caught the Raiders game. Before he left, I asked him to name the hardest and best things about being where he is.

“Hardest part – being away from my wife and being away from everything that is familiar to me,” he wrote.

“Best part – taking pride in what I do, taking pride in being here and contributing to something greater than myself.”

kriegerd@RockyMountainNews.com COLUMN

kriegerd@RockyMountainNews.com

MORE KRIEGER COLUMNS »

Copyright 2006, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.

ports

Giving thanks for things great and small

Dave Krieger, Rocky Mountain News

920 words

23 November 2006

Rocky Mountain News

FINAL

2C

English

© 2006 Denver Publishing Company, Rocky Mountain News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights reserved.

So many things to be thankful for and so little space. As always, The Dude’s thanks follow mine in a cynical ploy to attract a younger audience. I will also be inserting the expression “I’m down” at random intervals. If any of The Dude’s thanks puzzle you, keep in mind he is playing fantasy football this year.

Without further Adu (who is the same age as The Dude and has only 11 more career MLS goals) . . .

I am thankful for Terrell Owens’ new children’s book, Little T Learns To Share. A heartwarming tale just in time for Christmas.

Also available on TerrellOwens.com – an adjustable locker room towel.

I am thankful for the global NFL, which keeps moving Broncos games from day to night so Broncomaniacs in Shanghai can watch them over breakfast.

I am thankful for Bob Knight, who is about to become the winningest coach in college basketball history and whose little slap of a player last week was totally overblown by the mainstream media. He chokes guys harder than that.

I am thankful for Barry Bonds, who is about to become baseball’s career home run champion, possibly as a designated hitter for the A’s.

Coincidentally, Oakland pharmacies report they are out of human growth hormone until further notice.

I am thankful for former NFL lineman Kevin Gogan, who made an instructional video on how to deliver a cheap shot without getting caught to help out players like Tennessee’s Albert Haynesworth and Oakland’s Tyler Brayton, who were a little too obvious. Gogan recommends three soft-tissue targets: the groin, solar plexus and throat.

“Hard to talk and breathe when your Adam’s apple is coming out of your ear,” he points out.

Hey, this is football. A delightful stocking stuffer.

I am thankful for Larry Coyer, even if he has a few things to correctify.

I am thankful for Nick Ferguson and sorry to see him out for the season. The Broncos locker room has no more engaging personality. And when he pipes his iPod through the sound system, it’s 1970 all over again.

I am thankful for the University of Colorado, Colorado State University and the Air Force Academy for reminding us that bad college football does not keep the sun from shining 300 days a year.

I am thankful for collegiate athletic teams that make you proud, like the CU ski and cross country teams, both national champs this year. Of the school’s 23 national championships, 22 are in these quintessentially Colorado sports. Unfortunately, these are not the teams that get noticed.

I am thankful for the Tribune Company, which ordered spending cuts at the Los Angeles Times while guaranteeing Alfonso Soriano $136 million to play center field for the Cubs. I’m down. At least they have their priorities straight.

I am thankful for Heidi Fleiss, who denied she hired Mike Tyson to be a gigolo at Heidi’s Stud Farm, a brothel for women she plans in Nevada. I assume this means the position is still open.

I am thankful for the Rockies, winner of the fourth annual Tommy Sheppard Media Relations Award, a metaphorical statue I will present metaphorically to owner Charlie Monfort when he pays off on our annual bet next month. These guys are the most popular punching bag in town, but they haven’t pulled a Silent Stanley yet. If you have a question for Charlie, send it to me at the e-mail address below.

No promises, but I’m down.

I am thankful for Andre Miller, the Nuggets guard who offered fitness tips to elementary school students this week. Tip No. 24: Don’t show up fat to training camp.

I am thankful for David Stern, who wants to punish players for swaying during the national anthem and Mark Cuban for being Mark Cuban. In a related story, Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein have expressed interest in the job, should Stern retire.

I am thankful for Al Davis, whose meager legal judgment against Oakland in one of his many imaginative lawsuits was overturned by an appellate court. In between bites of Cream of Wheat, Davis vowed to make Pete Rozelle pay.

I am thankful for the Nuggets, who sold the wretches’ floor seats to high rollers this year but thoughtfully put us much closer to the concessions.

I am thankful for Jose Theodore, who is the next Patrick Roy in the sense that Brad May is the next Claude Lemieux.

And now, thanks from The Dude, 17:

“I’m thankful for Chad Johnson’s late but explosive emergence into his role as the best receiver in the NFL.

“I’m thankful for the NFL Network. Whenever I turn ’em on, it’s always something interesting.

“I’m thankful for the Cubs getting Alfonso Soriano. I’m definitely down with that.

“I’m thankful that Allen Iverson is still throwing himself around like a rag doll, playing his heart out. His team’s not as good as it should be, but it’s getting better.

“I’m thankful for Frank Gore. He’s just a beast. He’s the foundation of the new Niners. They might just win the division this year.”

I asked if he needed to sit down.

“They’re 5-5 and Seattle’s 6-4,” he said. “It could happen.”

I’m down.

kriegerd@RockyMountainNews.com COLUMN

Q. What’s between Ringolsby and Michael Lewis (author of “Moneyball”)?

A. Tracy didn’t think much of his book. They have a feud going – Tracy’s viewpoint is legitimate – they both have their right to an opinion. A lot of veteran baseball writers look at Michael Lewis as someone who understood what Billy Beane was doing but didn’t know much about the game other than that – Lewis is not a baseball specialist. He immersed himself in the A’s and Beane and took Beane’s word for how revolutionary his approach was. The baseball writers thought it went overboard, and that Lewis over-simplified and over-dramatized.

I’m sort of in-between. I can see the arguments on both sides. I thought it was a useful contribution to the conversation but I can see where the baseball writers thought it was overblown.

An Interview with Bob Kravitz

“On the Dungy column, I felt that Tony’s personal choices were fair game because he had spent so much of his life guiding others on the personal choices they make..Just because Tony is a man of faith doesn’t mean he’s above criticism.”

“I think listening is a highly underrated skill in our business. Listen to your sources. Listen to your inner voice. Don’t do interviews; have conversations.”

Position: Columnist, Indianapolis Star.

Born: New York, 1960.

Education: Indiana, 1982, journalism

Career: Bergen Record, San Diego Union, Pittsburgh Press, Sports Illustrated, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Rocky Mountain News, Indianapolis Star 2000 –

Personal: Married, two daughters

Favorite restaurant (home): Sullivan’s Steakhouse. “Nothing fancy – just steak and potatoes and great martinis.”

Favorite restaurant (road): any Legal Seafoods, Boston.

Favorite hotel: Marriott Riverwalk, San Antonio. “You’re 15 steps from all the madness.”

Bob Kravitz, excerpted from the Indianapolis Star, January 22, 2008.

I am uncomfortable.

I am uncomfortable because I simply can’t talk myself out of writing the following words, words that will incur the near-universal wrath of a city that has come to revere Tony Dungy, not only as a coach but as a man: I think that by returning to the Colts, and doing so after his entire family moved out of Indianapolis and back to Tampa, Fla., for reasons he prefers remain private, Dungy has revealed himself as something of a hypocrite.

As one of the chief spokesmen for All Pro Dad, an organization dedicated to strengthening the bonds of fathers with their children, he has spoken passionately about the importance of men putting their faith and family first, before football and all else.

So I don’t understand:

What came first here?

If family is really first, doesn’t Dungy decide to live in the same city with his wife and children? Remember, Dungy not only has one adult daughter and a high school-age son. He and his wife also have three little ones, a first-grader, a kindergartener and an infant.

Dungy said Monday that he had the support of his family, but my guess is the three youngest ones didn’t have much input.

Again, I’m uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable about passing judgment on anybody or anything deeper than a decision to punt on fourth-and-2. I’m especially loath to pass judgment on the way another man handles his personal business.

But Dungy has used his pulpit as a head football coach to advise others in the art of fatherhood, and has left himself open to charges of hypocrisy.

Q. What was reader reaction to the ‘I am uncomfortable’ column – you predicted ‘near-universal wrath’?

A. Sometimes you write a column and you’re surprised the next day by reader reaction. Not this one. As I walked out of the Colts training facility, I told one my comrades with the Star, “The shit’s gonna hit the fan tomorrow.”

I probably spent more time tweaking that column than any other I’ve done. I try to be careful with everything I write, but I knew all hell was gonna break loose, so I tweaked it more than any other column. I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was hard to write. Tony Dungy is universally beloved not only here in Indy but everywhere. This wasn’t like ripping Mike Vanderjagt. This is Tony “Quiet Strength” Dungy. I might as well have taken a shot at Mother Theresa.

But I felt strongly about this issue, and I knew several other people – journalists and civilians – had the same nagging questions. But they weren’t in a position to communicate those concerns. If I was taken aback by anything, it was the fact I received a handful of e-mails from former college buddies who sent me really nasty missives.

Q. How difficult was it to write?

A. When I initially sat down to write it (after two hours of internal debate and some conversations with folks in the press room) it came pretty easily. I felt strongly about the issue. But after I got it down, it took hours to finish it off. I didn’t want to leave any small holes in the argument. I wanted people to understand that I felt uncomfortable broaching this subject. And I wanted to make sure it was written with such precision that there would be no issues of misinterpretation. Ultimately, the only column I wrote that was more difficult was the one the day after his son committed suicide.

Q. Dungy’s reaction?

A. Actually, I told Tony the day I wrote it that I was going to do this column. I told him I didn’t want to blindside him because I have too much respect for him. He was great about it, as you might expect. He said he understood how some people could reach the conclusion I reached, but he did what he had to do. Now, this was before the column. I haven’t seen him since because the Colts are all scattered around the country. But my guess is, when we see one another at mini-camp this summer, it will be business as usual.

Q. Other difficult columns you’ve written?

A. There have been a bunch, but not many come immediately to mind. In Denver, I accidentally discovered that Dante Bichette had quite a rap sheet of domestic violence. He had gotten his life together in recent years, but right after OJ, this was a column that had to be written. That was tough because Dante was one of the most popular guys on the team, plus he was popular with the media covering the team. We had to be separated a few times that next spring training.

Q. Any columns you wish you had a do-over?

A. There have been a number I wished I had back, but not because I wrote something harsh about somebody else. Mostly wrong-headed observations: In 1998, insisting the Broncos were cooked after a loss in SF. They went on to win the Super Bowl. In 2006, writing the Colts were done after they lost to Houston. They went on to win the Super Bowl. In 1996, writing the Broncos ought to think about trading John Elway. But, then, I think every columnist in America has a handful or two of those kinds of columns.

Q. Guidelines on sensitive issues?

A. Like almost everything in journalism, the rules aren’t specifically codified. Ultimately, it becomes a matter of personal judgment — not just the columnist’s judgment, but the editors’ judgment as well.

On the Dungy column, I felt that Tony’s personal choices were fair game because he had spent so much of his life guiding others on the personal choices they make. If this happened with Jeff Saturday or Marvin Harrison, I wouldn’t have uttered a word. But this was happening less than a year after the publication of a best-selling book in which he spoke quite eloquently about the primacy of family. Just because Tony is a man of faith doesn’t mean he’s above criticism.

Q. You’re known for being more judicious than confrontational – is that fair to say?

A. I think the Colts, Pacers and IU administration would argue I’m over-the-top confrontational and not at all judicious. I prefer the former, though. I like to think I take my shots when they’re warranted, but I don’t live on a diet of beanballs. I like to think I’ve got several different pitches in my arsenal.

I went to the US Swimming Nationals here in Indy and wrote a column on a lifeguard who was charged with watching over a pool of the world’s greatest swimmers. I thought that was funny, and the column worked out pretty well. I think if you dedicated every column to yelling, it becomes transparent and readers tune you out. That’s why I like Plaschke (LA Times), Posnanski (KC Star), Bianchi (Orlando Sentinel) and those guys so much. They can write anything.

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

A. I admit I call up sportpages.com, check out the top 10. If I have the time on a given day, I’ll check out Posnanski, Plaschke, Jay Mariotti (Chicago Sun-Times) just to see who he’s eviscerating that day, Michael Wilbon (Washington Post), Whitlock (KC Star), Sally Jenkins (Washington Post), Mike Bianchi and Michael Rosenberg (Detroit Free Press). I’ll also make it a point to check out any long feature written by Wright Thompson (espn.com), who I’ve followed since he was in college. Oh, and Albom (Detroit Free Press), whether he’s writing sports or something else. He’s still got an incredible touch. I’m also starting to check out deadspin.com and sites like that.

Q. How do you pick columns – are you influenced by web hits?

A. It’s usually a no-brainer, really. I just look for the hottest issue of the day. Sometimes that can be a little difficult in this market, with two major league teams and colleges. But I try to keep it local, while occasionally touching on national subjects. I try to think like a reader: When I pick up tomorrow’s paper, what do I want my columnist writing about?

As for web hits, I think you’re going to be influenced to some degree, but it’s dangerous to become a slave to those talkback items. This past Sunday, I wrote a rare feature column on a Bosnian player for Purdue. I got 80 talkbacks. I usually get 800. But it was a good, solid column, and sometimes you write pieces like those, and you’re not going to get much feedback.

Q. Advice for wannabe columnists?

A. Write a lot. Write for your junior high school paper. Your high school paper, and college, and get internships during the summer. And read. Read a lot. And I’m not talking about sports books, although there are several good ones out there. Read the classics. Read William Styron. Read Norman Mailer. Read Tom Wolfe. Read the great craftsmen (and women) of the English language.

Finally, learn how to listen. I think listening is a highly underrated skill in our business. Listen to your sources. Listen to your inner voice. Don’t do interviews; have conversations.

Bob Kravitz, excerpted from the Indianapolis Star, August 3, 2007:

For a couple of years now, I’ve been on a mission. I have looked the world over for someone who has a cushier gig than Indianapolis Colts punter Hunter Smith, who gets less work than a tailor in a nudist colony.

Well, this week at the ConocoPhillips
USA Swimming Championships at the Natatorium at IUPUI — our slogan, “If you can breathe here, you can breathe in Beijing” — I finally found her.

The owner of the world’s easiest job.

Her name is Allouri Stahley. She is a 22-year-old IUPUI student, born and raised in Greenwood.

Her job:

Lifeguard.

At the U.S. national swim meet, where the pools are filled with the country’s greatest swimmers, including Michael Phelps and Dara Torres.

Is there a less necessary job on the planet?

Outside of, I don’t know, being a Viagra rep at Lilith Fair?

It’s like being an auto mechanic in Amish country.

It’s like being Dick Cheney’s joke writer.

It’s like being Rosie O’Donnell’s personal trainer.

It’s like . . . oh, never mind.

At this meet, the only ones getting less action than the lifeguards are the docs at the liposuction concession.

This is Stahley’s third major meet in Indianapolis. She hasn’t had to save anybody. Yet.

“I think a girl slipped in the bathroom here the other day,” Stahley told me. “But I’m not a hundred percent sure.”…

(SMG thanks Bob Kravitz for his cooperation)

An Interview with Gwen Knapp

“The first big issue I avoided as “the woman’s voice in sports’’ was the Marv Albert firing. I was starting out as a columnist and Albert was being pilloried for seeing a dominatrix, a story that stemmed from a legal case about bite marks on a woman’s back. The paper’s higher-ups asked my editor to see if I would weigh in. I said: “What if I’m in favor of biting during sex?’’ They dropped the idea.”

“…I think referencing doping purely as cheating is grossly simplistic….I just can’t see the parallel between manipulating one’s hormones and applying Vaseline to a baseball. Actually, I can see it. I just think it’s ludicrous to give it any attention. To me, doping is like drunken driving, a public-health issue. I want to know whether Bonds and McGwire will develop cancers or strokes or heart problems.”

Gwen Knapp: Interviewed on October 6, 2008

Position: Columnist, San Francisco Chronicle

Hometown: Wilmington, De.

Education: Harvard, 1983

Career: Wilmington News-Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, SF Examiner, SF Chronicle

Personal: n/a

Favorite Restaurant (away): n/a

Favorite Restaurant (home): n/a

Favorite hotel: n/a

Gwen Knapp, San Francisco Chronicle, June 25, 2006:

A month before the start of the World Cup, Iran’s chief sports minister vowed to crack down on athletes who looked effeminate. Apparently, he likes losing.

Take the flamboyance out of futbol, and you have nothing. The game is all about artistry and passion and, dare we say it, unbridled eroticism. A culture that can’t reconcile those qualities with masculinity will always have a hard time at the World Cup.

I’m not sure what that says about the U.S. and its early departure, but I do know that watching the World Cup feels intoxicatingly different from following traditional American sports. I particularly love the operatic deathbed scenes that accompany even minor injuries, with none of the shame that boys here are taught to feel if they flinch when a fastball clips them viciously on the elbow. In futbol, stoicism hurts; it won’t elicit a yellow card of sympathy. Drama queens get all the breaks.

Dennis Rodman might have had an entirely different career if he had taken up the Beautiful Game. The enigma of Terrell Owens might be solved, too. Is he a wildly expressive man, routinely suffocating amid the uptight customs of American football? Or is he merely a narcissist who would wash out of the ultimate team sport?

We do know that T.O.’s attitude about gay men — “if it looks like and smells like a rat …” — either wouldn’t fly or wouldn’t exist. In futbol, lack of inhibition seems to inhibit homophobia.

An American friend in London reports that a televised pre-World Cup party at “Beckingham Palace” — tabloid code for the estate of England’s deified David Beckham and wife Victoria — featured talk-show host Graham Norton as the master of ceremonies. He happily introduced himself to the crowd as a “pouf,” which produced a few uncomfortable looks in the audience, but Beckham’s stamp of approval trumped everything else. Imagine a Super Bowl party like that.

Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo won a gay-themed Dutch magazine’s vote as the hottest player in the tournament. (Beckham made the first team.) This does not appear to have caused a panic, or even speculation about who is or isn’t gay. Admirers are admirers, and futbol players love attention.

Their sport has long blended cultures and nationalities, expanding, for example, the charming Latin custom of kissing teammates as if they were relatives. It’s an accepted practice on the pitch. When Pudge Rodriguez kissed his relievers after games in the 2003 World Series, he provoked such confusion that a “Law and Order” episode began with two women critiquing the catcher in the minutes before they discovered a corpse.

But this country is getting there. In the last few weeks, three straight men have said they noticed, admiringly and a bit enviously, the fashion-model looks of many World Cup players. I prompted all three of them by pointing out that I had been struck by how handsome the players were, and I usually notice such things only in passing. When I thought about it longer, I realized that the players weren’t necessarily better-looking than men in other sports; they were just a lot more comfortable with themselves.

When they celebrate, they seem to be truly exuberant, rather than in-your-face and disrespectful. If the same men played American football, their gestures and expressions might seem edgier, infused with defiance not against the other team, but against the game’s emotionally restrictive traditions. There’s a reason it’s called the No Fun League and not the Beautiful Game.

Recently, international soccer rules have banned the shirt-doffing celebrations that used to follow a goal. The practice seemed too contrived, and therefore offensive to opponents. Still, it’s interesting that futbol players chose a striptease, emulating a typically female ploy for attention, as their form of expression. Iran, which fell apart quickly at this year’s World Cup, should take note.

Four of the last five World Cup titles have gone to emotionally and sexually uninhibited nations — Brazil (won twice), France and Argentina. The fifth championship went to Germany, which was unusually exuberant at the tournament in 1990, the year after the Berlin Wall came down.

The Americans remained outsiders this year, easily eliminated in the first round. Now, we’re left with the other game of summer, which inspired the definitive movie line “There’s no crying in baseball.” Someday, we’ll get to the corollary. There’s no repression in football.

Q. Your 2006 column on ‘effeminate flamboyance’ in World Cup soccer – would it have played in Dallas, or was it conceived for your market?

A. I can’t say that it was conceived for a market. It’s just the way I think. I do ask myself sometimes if I would have the guts to write some of my columns in a more conservative town. But if you look around, there aren’t many conservative places with newspapers that have ever hired a female sports columnist.

Did I actually write the phrase “effeminate flamboyance’’?

Q. One day you write a sociological/cultural analysis, and the next day you analyze the 49ers offense. Is it important to throw several pitches, so to speak? Are you sensitive to web hits when you choose your column subject?

A. I think it’s vital to take on different topics and see sports from an array of angles. I tend to choose the issue columns because I have something I want to say. The meat-and-potatoes stuff is just that, a staple of the business. Understanding the 49ers, or trying to understand them, is obligatory.

There are cultural issues in sports that seem to cry out for commentary, but I will take a pass on them. The Duke lacrosse case, I avoided that for a long time because I had nothing to say. An editor prodded me a few times, but I said I didn’t know enough. I only wrote something when the school finished its investigation. The report revealed horrible behavior, yet the committee didn’t really care what its lacrosse players were up to unless they had committed clear felonies or broken NCAA rules.

The first big issue I avoided as “the woman’s voice in sports’’ was the Marv Albert firing. I was starting out as a columnist and Albert was being pilloried for seeing a dominatrix, a story that stemmed from a legal case about bite marks on a woman’s back. The paper’s higher-ups asked my editor to see if I would weigh in. I said: “What if I’m in favor of biting during sex?’’ They dropped the idea.

As for online traffic, I am conscious of it, for a number of reasons. First, I’m always pleased when a column that required intensive reporting does well. I did one on a Raider who volunteered an animal shelter during a steroid suspension, at precisely the time Michael Vick was being sent off to prison. It took some extra time and effort, to make sure the player was genuinely involved and not just spinning. It got a ton of traffic, and I was very proud of that.

It supported my theory that newspapers need to give readers the kind of stuff that most bloggers can’t. A lot of them do a very good job of expounding on information that is widely available, and in a competitive marketplace, we should try to avoid duplicating what largely unpaid writers can do just as well, and sometimes better. If we don’t do something different, why should we get paid?

Second, I have been happy to discover that my columns do as well online as my male colleagues. Obviously, the numbers ebb and flow, depending on what we’re covering. But I was told recently that for a six-month period last year, I had the highest traffic among the sports columnists. To be honest, I expected less.

All that said, I hate the idea of using web hits as a singular measure of success. If all we care about is attracting an audience, we can run porn.

I’ve been very lucky to have editors who respect my judgment and never push me to write something that makes me uncomfortable or try to dissuade me from writing something I really believe.Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised ifsome of the highest-ranking editors have wanted to push one way or another, and my sports editor, Glenn Schwarz, stood in the way. He was a writer for a long time, and he understands the importance of letting a columnist think independently.”

Q. How does someone with a Harvard degree end up writing sports? How does a Harvard education help you do what you do?

A. It’s fairly irrelevant. There are other Harvard sportswriters out there. In fact, my class produced two newspaper columnists, me and Geoff Calkins in Memphis.

I can’t really say whether the line on the resume helps. I got my job in San Francisco largely because a story I wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer won a national award and grabbed an editor’s attention. I think connections matter in this business, but it’s a buddy network that has little to do with college affiliations.

Q. Do you know if a column is good, ordinary or weak when you’ve finished? What is your writing process? How much do you rewrite, and when do you let it go?

A. I can tell sometimes. My favorite column ever was about Pat Tillman’s memorial service. I was completely absorbed in the topic when I wrote it, sort of in a zone. I didn’t necessarily know that the column would be great, but I knew the feeling I had while writing it was extraordinary. I was completely un-self-conscious, which is rare.

That feeling was entirely attributable to some of the people who spoke at the service and their commitment to explaining Pat in all his complexity. His younger brother swore, said that Pat didn’t believe in God and told people to stop saying that he had gone to heaven. A former college coach said that Pat had constantly challenged him, including asking him once if he could coach gay players. The coach said he told Pat: “I can and I have.’’

I think Pat Tillman defied all sorts of stereotypes, the ones that certain liberals have about military people, the ones that some conservatives have about atheists, and the ones that all sorts of people have about football. I was so grateful that his service revealed that.

As for the process, it all depends on the deadline. I have developed a little ritual for when I write a really strong opinion. I ask myself if I can live with what I’ve said the next day, or if it will haunt me because I went too far, beyond what I really believe. If I’m OK with it, I hit the send button. There are always things I’d like to have back, and points I’d love to clarify. But that little process has really helped me overcome the stage fright that can come with writing a column.

Q. You wrote recently: “But whenever Bonds played the game, when he just went up to the plate with his bat, things became very simple. He was great. He was feared. He was respected. Period.”

Can someone be great if they cheat? How can you assess Bonds’ greatness given the circumstances?

A. Context is everything. I’ve probably been tougher on doping, and on Bonds’ role in the BALCO scandal, than any other columnist in the Bay Area.

In the big picture, his legacy is terrible tainted. But in the moment, yes, Bonds was great. I wrote that paragraph in a column pointing out why he should return to the park for a reunion, despite his bitterness about the Giants’ decision to release him, his frustration over not being signed anywhere and the fact that the appearance would reinforce the idea that he is retired.

My main point was that in the ballpark, he could relive the happy moments of his career. If he hadn’t shown up – which he did, to the amazement of the media and the Giants themselves – his next public appearance would have been in a courtroom.

With all due respect, I think referencing doping purely as cheating is grossly simplistic. As the BALCO story unfolded, I hated that whenever a new revelation about doping came out, one of the first questions would be about his Hall of Fame credentials. It’s so “how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?’’

That attitude puts doping in the same realm as throwing a spitball. I just can’t see the parallel between manipulating one’s hormones and applying Vaseline to a baseball. Actually, I can see it. I just think it’s ludicrous to give it any attention.

To me, doping is like drunken driving, a public-health issue. I want to know whether Bonds and McGwire will develop cancers or strokes or heart problems. I want to know what they took, how much and for how long. I want to know what changes they saw in their bodies as they progressed in their regimens. If either of them stepped up and provided what I believed to be the truth, without getting a book deal or a plea bargain out of it, I’d consider that a form of greatness.

I voted for Ken Caminiti three years ago, because he told the truth. I took a lot of flak because people thought I was rewarding a doper. I admired the fact that he told the truth just because it was the truth. In that respect, he made baseball history. No one else has done it.

Q. As a columnist, do you miss Bonds being a part of the daily scene? Did you ever get tired of writing about him?

A. No. It was a challenge to write about him, usually in a good way. There will always be other challenges.

The one thing I disliked about covering him was the fact that people would accuse journalists of hating him if they wrote anything negative. I don’t understand how people can despise or adore an athlete, or anyone they don’t know personally.

Was he a pain in the rear? Sometimes. But he never annoyed me as much as people who weave in and out of traffic or crack gum in public.

Q. Why are you attracted to stories like Chris Antley and Marco Pantani?

A. I’m not sure I ever wrote about Pantani alone. I think he was just part of a story about Tour de France winners who had died young. I never met him. I did meet Antley, who struck me as utterly endearing and impulsive to the point of self-destruction. The first time I saw him, he was eating a Snickers bar after sweating weight off in the jockey sauna at Hollywood Park.

Sports are about extremes. These guys were both reflections of that, in the best and worst senses. Their stories followed the arc of Greek tragedy, which is classic for a reason.

Q. How do you keep up with sports? Who and what do you reach and watch – mainstream and non-mainstream?

A. Internet, TV, friends who coach high school or youth teams. There’s no pattern to what I follow, except that I have to keep track of the NFL, which I also enjoy immensely. I respect football players as much as anyone. They are smarter and more disciplined than we generally acknowledge.

Q. You’re one of the few columnists who claim to like synchronized swimming. Okay, name the 5 greatest moments in synchronized swimming.

A. 1-US women win first Olympic gold for eight-woman routine in ’96.

2-The Canadians’ Chariots of Fire routine in Sydney, where they acted out different Olympic sports. The cycling segment was amazing. And no sequins on their costumes!

3-Bill May competing at nationals, with full support of the women.

4-The 90-year-old who performed to “Little Old Lady from Pasadena’’ at the World Masters in Palo Alto two years ago.

5-Solo synchro gets booted from Olympics.

Gwen Knapp, San Francisco Chronicle, May 4, 2004:

Just when we thought we had a pure and simple hero, a millionaire athlete who gave up wealth and fame to become the ideal patriot, to make the ultimate sacrifice, his friends and family complicated everything. They turned Pat Tillman into a human being Monday, showing us what was really lost during that ambush in Afghanistan, insisting that we question every assumption we’ve made since he died an icon on April 22.

Yes, there were uplifting tales, moments when tears and pride swelled in everyone watching Tillman’s memorial service at the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden. There were jarring moments, too, and they carried the message of the afternoon — “challenge yourself” — more powerfully than those laden with conventional inspiration.

Tillman’s youngest brother, Rich, wore a rumpled white T-shirt, no jacket, no tie, no collar, and immediately swore into the microphone. He hadn’t written anything, he said, and with the starkest honesty, he asked mourners to hold their spiritual bromides.

“Pat isn’t with God,” he said. “He’s f — ing dead. He wasn’t religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he’s f — ing dead.”

What? This didn’t happen for God, as well as country? A professional athlete turned soldier, and we’re supposed to believe that he’d have no use for piety? Robbed of a cliche, where does that leave us?

Challenge yourself.

His brother-in-law and close friend, Alex Garwood, described how Tillman handled his duties when he became godfather to Garwood’s son. He came to the ceremony dressed as a woman. Not as a religious commentary. He was doing a balancing act.

“We had two godfathers, no godmother,” Garwood explained. And what NFL player turned Army Ranger wouldn’t don drag to make that math work?

Who on earth was this guy?

He was the same person who often talked late into the night with his linebackers coach at ASU, prying apart stereotypes about college football players and future soldiers.

“He talked about gays,” Lyle Setencich, the former ASU assistant said. “He asked me, ‘Could you coach gays?’ ” Setencich told Tillman yes. He could, and he had. He repeated that at the memorial service, televised on ESPN, in front of the sports world, showing another side of a coach, another side of an American hero.

Challenge yourself.

Tillman talked about everything, with everyone. According to the speakers, he had read the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and he underlined passages constantly. Garwood recalled how he’d mail articles to friends, highlighting certain parts and writing in the margins: “Let’s discuss.” A quotation from Emerson, found underlined in Tillman’s readings, adorned the program.

It concluded with this: “But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Yet he was a team player. When the Arizona Cardinals lost their kicker early in a game, Tillman cut into a conversation between the team trainer and head coach Dave McGinnis. “You know who’s kicking off for us now, don’t you?” McGinnis said, quoting Tillman, a safety who had no real credentials for the kicking job. Most pro athletes wouldn’t risk humiliating themselves that way.

“Pat didn’t want to be the focal point, but he liked being out front,” McGinnis said, “if that makes any sense.”

Tillman’s roommate in the pros, Zack Walz, took a newspaper clipping to the podium and read about how he and some Cardinals teammates had made up faux dog tags for themselves, declaring their unit a band of warriors. “Soldiers, battlers, lay it on the line,” Walz said, sniffling as he scanned the clip. “What the hell did we know? Listen to the words. Listen to the metaphors. … How hollow they ring.”

When Tillman came home late last year from his first tour of duty, Walz said that he understood the difference now, what genuine war and real dog tags meant. A couple of weeks later, he received a gift in the mail, Tillman’s dog tags.

“I’m holding them in my hand now,” Walz said, “but they will never be this far from my heart again.”

Tillman’s respect for his former teammate holds another lesson. Since he died, it has been fashionable to contrast his sense of duty with the petulance and inflated sense of importance in modern athletes. Still, Tillman was an athlete as much as he was a soldier.

It has been said over and over that he wouldn’t want to be revered while we ignore the other soldiers lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. Would he want his former friends in football belittled, their values bashed as a way to measure his sacrifice? That’s too easy.

Challenge yourself.

By the time the ceremony ended, after his brother and brother-in- law sipped the Guinness that Garwood poured in Tillman’s honor, the funny, thinking, wild, crazy man had come to life. The family’s loss, the loss of every soldier’s family, seemed more real.

Tillman wasn’t an icon anymore. He was a man you wanted to know, to spend time with, to lift a Guinness alongside. But that had become impossible, the price of war, because his brother was right. Pat is dead. He’s f — ing dead.

(SMG thanks Gwen Knapp for her cooperation)

An Interview with Peter Kerasotis

Part of the problem is that there is so much turnover on a newspaper the new people don’t understand the history of the community…Everybody is from somewhere. As a newspaper we should be plugged into where people go and what they do with their lives…You need to have people with institutional knowledge and strong connections with these people, so they feel comfortable returning phone calls.

Everybody considers themselves an underdog inherently as a human being.

If you had a job where every day your picture was put on the quantity and quality of work you do – not only for the community, for the whole world – you would understand pressure. It doesn’t matter if you have a headache or home problems or whatever it is that divides your attention. My father died this year and I’m doing a lot for my mother who is still grieving. We have lives away from our work. But if you have one off day everybody can see it and respond to it. How would they like it if everyday their picture was on everything they did?

Peter Kerasotis: Interviewed on October 16, 2007

Position: columnist, Florida Today

Born: 1958, Brooklyn

Education: University of Florida, 1983, journalism.

Career: Dallas Times Herald 1983, Today Newspaper 83-85, LA Daily News 85-89; Florida Today 1989-

Personal: married

Favorite restaurant (home): Carrabba’s Italian Grille, Merritt Island “Italian the way Italian ought to be – my wife and I went I went to Italy and kept saying ‘this isn’t as good as Carrabba’s’”

Favorite restaurant (road): “Wherever with fellow sportswriters – it’s who you’re with”

Favorite hotel: Marriott “for the points”

Peter Kerasotis excerpted from Florida Today, October 6, 2007:

When my family moved to Merritt Island in 1966, one of the first places my dad took me was the Little League field, and the first kid I became aware of was Clint Hurdle.

Clint had a presence. Always did, growing up.

As kids, you wonder what you’re going to be one day. None of us ever wondered about Clint. He was going to be a major league baseball player. Given the odds, that seems silly now, that we thought that back then. But that’s just the way it was, and not only in our minds.

When we were talking the other day, Clint’s dad, Big Clint, pulled out a school paper his son wrote when he was a third-grader at Mila Elementary School. The sentences were declarative, the message straightforward. Clint didn’t just want to be a baseball player, he was also specific.

He wrote about wanting to be like Babe Ruth, because then he would be a great baseball player. He wrote about wanting to hit 62 home runs, because then he would have one more than Roger Maris. He wrote about wanting to steal more bases than the record 104 Maury Wills stole in 1962. He wanted to win the triple crown five times, so he could be better than Mickey Mantle.

It was all spelled out. He didn’t want to just make it, he wanted to make it big. And it wasn’t all talk, either.

During his teen years, when other kids were heading to the beach, it was a common sight to see Clint on a baseball field, hitting pitches delivered from Big Clint, with mom Louise and sisters Bobbi Jo and Robin shagging balls, the family French poodle running around and loving it all.

“One thing that set him apart for me,” said his high school coach, Chuck Goldfarb, now the Cocoa High athletic director, “is that not only was Clint by far the most talented player I ever had, but also the most dedicated and hard-working. Sometimes you have one or the other. Clint was both.”

He was one other thing, too. Smart.

“He was as smart as I was when it came to knowing baseball,” Goldfarb said. “Now that might not be saying much, but he was only 16.”

So when Clint was 17, just finishing his senior year at Merritt Island High, and the Kansas City Royals made him the highest-drafted player ever out of Brevard County, none of us was surprised.

When he made the major leagues only two years later . . . or the cover of Sports Illustrated, touted as baseball’s next phenom . . . or hit .294 on the 1980 Royals’ American League championship team . . . or hit .417 in the World Series that same year . . . again, no surprise.

We saw it coming, all of it.

What we didn’t see is this. What we didn’t see is that maybe Clint’s real baseball calling wasn’t as a player, but as a manager…

Q. Does Clint Hurdle still have a presence in your area?

A. His family is still here – his dad and mom and sisters and nieces and nephews. He does a charity here – his daughter has a rare form of mental retardation. He hasn’t lived here since he left as a rookie, though he’s always had a local presence since he left. He comes back and speaks to the high school baseball team. For years he and a local community college coach ran a baseball academy.

Q. Is there interest in him?

A. Lots of guys who played with him or against him live here. Lots of guys who went to his baseball school are still living in the community.

Q. So you’ve got a local angle to the Rockies’ story?

A. That column was buried. Part of the problem is that there is so much turnover on a newspaper the new people don’t understand the history of the community.

Everybody is from somewhere. As a newspaper we should be plugged into where people go and what they do with their lives. I try to maintain contact with lots of players from here. Wilbur Marshall for example – I’ve know him since high school and we were at Florida together. When he didn’t make it onto the Wall of Fame at Florida I wrote a column ripping them for overlooking this guy. They wound up righting the wrong and putting him on the Wall – the Ring of Honor. Wilbur invited me to be on the field at the ceremony.

Tim Wakefield is from this area and has a huge local presence. He funds a school for challenged kids and has donated to a local college.

You need to have people with institutional knowledge and strong connections with these people, so they feel comfortable returning phone calls. Bruce Bochy is from this area. I talked with him about Barry Bonds and got some insights that I don’t think any of the beat writers in San Francisco got. Bruce and I went to the same junior college.

Q. Personal connections are important to the job you do?

A. Yes – and being able to nurture those connections. When Wakefield gave up that home run to Aaron Boone in 2003 I think I was the one guy in the media he felt comfortable talking to. You have relationships with people. They trust you with highs and lows and that was a low. The following year, if not for him, they wouldn’t have won the World Series.

Wakefield’s career started as a power hitting first baseman. He was about to be released in the minors when a coach saw him goofing around with the knuckler and asked him to try it. Here’s a guy who knows how to overcome adversity and to not stay down.

Q. What’s your circulation area?

A. It’s called the Space Coast. We’re where the Space Center is. It reaches north to Daytona Beach and south to Vero Beach. Brevard County – the 321 area code, where they launch rockets. Our circulation is near 100,000, but it bounces up in the winter months.

Q. What is the meat of your sports coverage?

A. We’re in a unique position – equal distance from Miami, Tampa and Jacksonville. NFL-wise, we have leaned toward Miami because of the history – there are a lot more Dolphins fans than Bucs fans and Jags fans. We do try to cover those three, as well as Florida and Florida State college-wise. We have a lot of alumni from UCF, which started as Florida Tech University. It’s on the east side of Orlando, close to us because of the Space Center. Most UCF fans grew up as Gator fans or Seminole fans and maintained allegiance to Florida or Florida State or Miami. Now with USF rising it has its own stadium and wants more coverage. We’re in a unique position – centrally located. We’ve got to be a jack of all trades. We have a beat writer in Gainseville covering the Gators and we have a beat writer in Orlando covering the Magic.

I’m a columnist who tries to merge all three – national, state and local columns, being that I’m from here. I like the local stuff – I grew up here. But I don’t like it to the exclusion of what we need to maintain statewide and national coverage.

I know there’s a movement and editors are drinking from the same Kool-Aid. It’s the Internet mindset. What I hear from local fans, they don’t want just local coverage – they like colleges and the Magic and Devil Rays and Marlins.

Q. Are your editors pushing for more local coverage?

A. That’s the impression I get. The budget is being cut. I’m not to travel as much this year to NFL and college games. This Saturday will be the first Florida State-Miami game I won’t be sent to as a columnist. Which I disagree with.

Q. How do you maintain an authoritative voice without going to the games?

A. That’s what readers are wondering. We had an AP story on Florida State-Alabama. Readers complained. Our editor’s response was that AP coverage was perfectly acceptable for a game 2 1/2 hours away. I disagree. I think we’re better than that.

Q. Is it strictly a budget issue?

A. They claim it’s budgetary. I think it’s a lack of attention to those areas. You don’t let an AP story appear in your paper from a Florida State-Alabama game in your state. That goes beyond budget.

Q. USF is a big story – how will you cover it?

A. I went for the USF-UCF game. I’ve gotten no indication we should turn our attention to USF. The only thing you hear is that times are changing and we’re not going to do as much as in the past. If we’re not covering the traditional schools as much, then I don’t know what’s going to happen with South Florida. I certainly have voiced my opinion.

I wrote a column last week comparing USF and UCF to the rise of Florida State and Miami twenty years ago. It was buried on the bottom of the sports section beneath a prep swimming advance. I have to believe there’s more interest in a rivalry like USF-UCF, with a lot of alumni here, than a prep swimming advance.

Then the game column appeared on 1-A. So they’re still sorting out what’s important and what’s not as editors.

Q. How is it being played elsewhere?

A. Orlando played it huge – UCF was a local school. The Tampa Tribune and St. Pete Times are blowing it out. Sarasota and Bradenton as well. Ft. Lauderdale was there. It’s snuck up on everybody this year – everybody has got to rethink what to do and reevaluate priorities.

Q. How good of a story is it?

A. It’s a Cinderella story. USF has been in existence 11 years. Jim Leavitt’s first office was a trailer. He bought the first washer and dryer out of his own pocket and turned down an offer to go to Alabama. He’s from St. Pete and he’s committed to his hometown college. He’s slaying SEC and ACC schools – it’s a Cinderella story.

Q. Why do people like Cinderella stories?

A. It’s universal. Everybody considers themselves an underdog inherently as a human being.

By the way when you root for the story it doesn’t have to be Cinderella – sometimes the best story is Tiger wining the golf tournament.

Q. How much attention do you pay to golf?

A. Every year I’ve covered the Bay Hill, which is now the Arnold Palmer Invitational. I’ve gone to the Masters every year – but it was touch and go the last couple of years. I hope it’s still a go – it’s one of my favorite things to cover.

Q. Is golf a good writing sport?

A. Yes. To me what makes anything good is people. I focus on people. People relate to people. I refer to what I do as thinking about outside the boxscores. People know the numbers and the scores. You’ve got to give them something more than what they know – the sights and sounds and emotions. You’re there as their representative. What I try to write about is what they would talk about if they went out with their buddies.

Q. Who do you read?

A. Florida’s got the best sportswriters in the country – across the board. Columnists up and down the state are outstanding. Mike Bianchi (Orlando Sentinel), David Whitley (Orlando Sentinel), Martin Fennelly (Tampa Tribune), Gary Shelton (St. Petersburg Times). John Romano (St. Petersburg Times), Dan LeBatard (Miami Herald), David Hyde (Sun-Sentinel). Smaller columnists like myself all think we’re as good as the metro guys. Roger Mooney (Bradenton Herald ), Pat Dooley (Gainesville Sun)/ I like to read all the guys around the state.

Outside the state I like Bill Plaschke (LA Times) – I worked in LA for four years. I covered the Rams for the LA Daily News in the 80s. I was competing against a lot of people in a major market. You do not sleep well at night.

Q. Are the job pressures invisible to the readers?

A. I think so. They say ‘you have such a great job’. It is good, but the deadline pressures and competitive pressures are enormous. The thing about the Internet now is that it magnifies every little mistake. I wrote a column about the Dolphins today that mentioned a 1985 game and had it in the wrong stadium – and I got hammered. I had the Dolphins playing the Bears at Soldiers Field instead of the Orange Bowl and people think you’re a dolt. If you had a job where every day your picture was put on the quantity and quality of work you do – not only for the community, for the whole world – you would understand pressure. It doesn’t matter if you have a headache or home problems or whatever it is that divides your attention. My father died this year and I’m doing a lot for my mother who is still grieving. We have lives away from our work. But if you have one off day everybody can see it and respond to it. How would they like it if every day their picture was on everything they did?

I have a college degree, I’ve won APSE awards and I’m at the top of my profession, but when I tell people what I make – friends I’ve know for years – they’re absolutely dumbfounded. They cannot believe it. When I tell them my Christmas bonus is a $25 gift certificate at a local grocery store they don’t know whether to laugh or cry for me.

Peter Kerasotis excerpted from Florida Today, October 11, 2007:

Close your eyes and it is the ’70s.

Bell bottoms, platform shoes, disco music. And, oh yeah, two football programs nobody took seriously.

Miami and Florida State.

Goodness, there was a time when administrators at Miami — which, back in the day, announcers had to distinguish by saying, “Miami of Florida” — almost shuttered its football program.

Seven national championships and four Heisman Trophy winners later, and it’s safe to say UM and FSU have been the country’s two most successful college football programs the past quarter century. Not only that, but they’ve also been the best rivalry in college football during that time.

Open your eyes and it’s ’07.

Is anybody still not taking the University of South Florida and the University of Central Florida seriously?

If so, take note. This Saturday, two Florida universities are meeting in a sold-out stadium. One is the state’s highest-ranked team and the other has the state’s best running back — who is gaining Heisman Trophy ground with every game.

And get this, neither school is Florida, Florida State or Miami.

Ladies and gents, welcome to Generation Next. Welcome to South Florida and Central Florida, two directional schools who are heading north in a fast way. Especially South Florida…

(SMG thanks Peter Kerasotis for his cooperation)

October 6, 2007

Hurdle’s success no surprise to us

When my family moved to Merritt Island in 1966, one of the first places my dad took me was the Little League field, and the first kid I became aware of was Clint Hurdle.

Clint had a presence. Always did, growing up.

As kids, you wonder what you’re going to be one day. None of us ever wondered about Clint. He was going to be a major league baseball player. Given the odds, that seems silly now, that we thought that back then. But that’s just the way it was, and not only in our minds.

When we were talking the other day, Clint’s dad, Big Clint, pulled out a school paper his son wrote when he was a third-grader at Mila Elementary School. The sentences were declarative, the message straightforward. Clint didn’t just want to be a baseball player, he was also specific.

He wrote about wanting to be like Babe Ruth, because then he would be a great baseball player. He wrote about wanting to hit 62 home runs, because then he would have one more than Roger Maris. He wrote about wanting to steal more bases than the record 104 Maury Wills stole in 1962. He wanted to win the triple crown five times, so he could be better than Mickey Mantle.

It was all spelled out. He didn’t want to just make it, he wanted to make it big. And it wasn’t all talk, either.

During his teen years, when other kids were heading to the beach, it was a common sight to see Clint on a baseball field, hitting pitches delivered from Big Clint, with mom Louise and sisters Bobbi Jo and Robin shagging balls, the family French poodle running around and loving it all.

“One thing that set him apart for me,” said his high school coach, Chuck Goldfarb, now the Cocoa High athletic director, “is that not only was Clint by far the most talented player I ever had, but also the most dedicated and hard-working. Sometimes you have one or the other. Clint was both.”

He was one other thing, too. Smart.

“He was as smart as I was when it came to knowing baseball,” Goldfarb said. “Now that might not be saying much, but he was only 16.”

So when Clint was 17, just finishing his senior year at Merritt Island High, and the Kansas City Royals made him the highest-drafted player ever out of Brevard County, none of us was surprised.

When he made the major leagues only two years later . . . or the cover of Sports Illustrated, touted as baseball’s next phenom . . . or hit .294 on the 1980 Royals’ American League championship team . . . or hit .417 in the World Series that same year . . . again, no surprise.

We saw it coming, all of it.

What we didn’t see is this. What we didn’t see is that maybe Clint’s real baseball calling wasn’t as a player, but as a manager.

Some 32 years after he went off to make his mark as a player, Hurdle is sitting atop the hottest story in all of sports, manager of the amazing Colorado Rockies, winners of 16 of their last 17 games, one win away from going to the NLCS, five wins away from the World Series and nine wins away from a world championship.

Are we getting ahead of ourselves? Not if you’ve seen how these Rockies play. Smart, hustling, unselfish, brimming with confidence — all of it, if you know Clint Hurdle, flowing from their manager on down.

In retrospect, how did those of us who grew up with Clint, sat in class with him, played ball with and against him, not see this coming?

It wasn’t just that Clint had talent, he also worked the hardest, and was a straight-A student, too. Even now, he’s a voracious reader, and whenever we talk, one question I usually ask him is, “What have you been reading lately?” He’s turned me on to a lot of great books and authors.

Back in 1975, when the Royals drafted him, John Schuerholz, the current Atlanta Braves GM, was with the Royals, then a fledgling franchise. Scheurholz had some innovative ideas. One of them was an aptitude test for prospects. The player who graded the highest ever? Clint Hurdle.

People forget, too, that Clint played football, a quarterback in high school, and that he signed to play both football and baseball for the Miami Hurricanes. Perhaps he, and not Jim Kelly, would’ve started the Canes’ reputation as Quarterback U.

“Even when he was playing midget football, he had such a good head on his shoulders,” said his dad, Big Clint. “He had such a good, quick mind. He had an ability to weigh all the situations and then know what the other team was going to do.”

At Merritt Island High, Mustang offensive coordinator Travis Akin not only allowed Hurdle to audible as his quarterback, but he was one of those rare players whom Akin actually allowed to call his own plays.

“Clint had something special about him,” Akin said. “Some quarterbacks, you’d have to talk with them about leading. Clint was a natural leader. He wasn’t cocky, but he was confident. When he got into the huddle, he took charge.”

Back then, in the mid-’70s, Merritt Island was not only coming off a state football championship in 1972, but the year before only lost one game, to eventual state champion Fort Pierce Central. The Mustangs were a power in the ’70s, but in Clint’s senior year, the team lost two games, inexcusable to many fans.

“One thing I’ll always remember,” Akin said. “At our banquet, Clint got up in front of everybody and said, ‘I’m not Jimmy Black, and Roger Lee isn’t Leon Bright. But we did the very best we could do, and we enjoyed playing.’ “

Jimmy Black, the quarterback who preceded Hurdle at MI, went on to become Bobby Bowden’s first starting QB at Florida State, and Leon Bright, the Mustangs’ dazzling running back, went on to an NFL career.

Clint had an ability, even then, to rise above the fray, and when you see him now, in the pressure cooker of baseball’s postseason, calm except for that poor overworked wad of gum in his mouth, you see the same Clint.

Well, you see the same Clint, but you see him differently now. We all thought we’d see his greatness come as a player. What we are seeing instead is one of baseball’s great managers.

Contact Kerasotis at 242-3694 or at HeyPeterK@aol.com
. Listen to him Friday mornings from 8:45-9 on WMEL-AM 920.

College football History repeats with the rise of the University of South Florida and the University of Central Florida

Close your eyes and it is the ’70s.

Bell bottoms, platform shoes, disco music. And, oh yeah, two football programs nobody took seriously.

Miami and Florida State.

Goodness, there was a time when administrators at Miami — which, back in the day, announcers had to distinguish by saying, “Miami of Florida” — almost shuttered its football program.

Seven national championships and four Heisman Trophy winners later, and it’s safe to say UM and FSU have been the country’s two most successful college football programs the past quarter century. Not only that, but they’ve also been the best rivalry in college football during that time.

Open your eyes and it’s ’07.

Is anybody still not taking the University of South Florida and the University of Central Florida seriously?

If so, take note. This Saturday, two Florida universities are meeting in a sold-out stadium. One is the state’s highest-ranked team and the other has the state’s best running back — who is gaining Heisman Trophy ground with every game.

And get this, neither school is Florida, Florida State or Miami.

Ladies and gents, welcome to Generation Next. Welcome to South Florida and Central Florida, two directional schools who are heading north in a fast way. Especially South Florida.

Not only is USF 5-0 and ranked fifth in both major polls, the Bulls could conceivably run the table this regular season. The toughest part of their schedule — which resulted in victories against Auburn and West Virginia — is behind them and only one currently ranked opponent lies ahead. That would be Cincinnati, though unranked Rutgers, Louisville and Pitt could pose problems.

And, of course, UCF could, as well.

But, yes, USF might go undefeated. And unlike Urban Meyer’s Utah Utes three seasons ago, the Bulls are in a BCS conference, which also means a legitimate, honest-to-gosh shot at a national title. Also, unlike Urban Meyer’s Florida Gators, South Florida beat Auburn this season. And in Auburn, too.

South Florida as national champions.

Can keyboards type that sentence without incurring an immediate blue screen of death?

If you think such a notion is improbable, perhaps you’ve forgotten our homeboy Kenny Calhoun, and how the Titusville native’s big mitt batted down a 2-point conversion pass, preserving a 31-30 win for Miami over a powerhouse Nebraska team that rode into the ’83 Orange Bowl on a 22-game winning streak, seemingly invincible.

That week, John Underwood wrote this in Sports Illustrated, “If you missed Monday night’s game, you missed an emergence . . . Down went Nebraska’s 22-game winning streak, and up went the burgee of a team that may well be the next great name in the game.”

True to Underwood’s words, it was the first of — count ’em — five national championships for Miami.

There was one other thing about that Nebraska team. It had a Heisman Trophy winner by the name of Mike Rozier at running back.

Which brings us to UCF.

How’s that?

Well, have you seen Kevin Smith and the way he runs the ball for the Knights? Don’t look now . . . well, then again, please do look, because the kid has 860 rushing yards in five games. At this pace, he’s racking up enough yards to take him from Orlando all the way to New York City’s Downtown Athletic Club.

A Heisman Trophy winner? From UCF? People posed the same question marks about Miami and a New York kid named Vinny Testaverde, until he picked up the coveted award in 1986.

Yeah, there are a lot of similarities when you look at where USF and UCF are today and where Miami and Florida State were yesterday.

There’s also a lot of similarities between USF and UCF.

Both are metro colleges struggling to emerge from commuter school images. Though, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Actually, I have a theory about that. Maybe a generation or two ago, kids were intimidated by cities. Not today’s generation. All things being equal, I think many kids today would prefer to play for a school attached to a big city, rather than a small college town.

More comparisons?

Well, both have coaches with big-time cache, just as big as Florida, Florida State and Miami. It wasn’t too long ago when Notre Dame hired UCF head coach George O’Leary. Three years ago, Notre Dame tried to swoop in and hire Urban Meyer before Florida could ink his name to a contract.

Before going after Mike Price, Alabama tried to hire USF head coach Jim Leavitt. In fact, Leavitt still keeps Alabama’s contract offer in his desk, as a memento. There was a time, too, when Alabama tried to hire Bobby Bowden away from Florida State.

If you ask Leavitt and O’Leary today, both would tell you there’s no other program where they’d rather be, and actually mean it. Leavitt, especially, is committed to building USF’s program into a national power. A St. Petersburg native, he was with the Bulls when the football office was a trailer, back when he pulled out his own wallet to buy the team’s first washer and dryer.

He isn’t going anywhere. But USF is. So is UCF.

Don’t think so? Remember what they say about history. It tends to repeat itself.

Minus, we hope, the bell bottoms, platform shoes and disco music.

Contact Kerasotis at HeyPeterK@aol.com
or 242-3694. Listen to him Friday mornings from 8:45-9 on WMEL 920-AM.

Sports columnist Pete Kerasotis is a native of Merritt Island and a graduate of Merritt Island High and the University of Florida. His cutting-edge columns focus on nation, state and local issues.

n 1966 Cape Publications founded the TODAY newspaper – a daily newspaper serving Brevard County. Over the next 20 years, TODAY continued to grow and add more products and services to meet the ever-changing needs of the community. To reflect the changing times and keep up with the county’s growth, on August 26, 1985, we officially changed our name to FLORIDA TODAY.

In 1986 we moved from a building in Cocoa into our current location at Gannett Plaza. A 28-acre National Wildlife Federation Backyard Wildlife Habitat, Gannett Plaza is a safe haven for the birds, animals, reptiles and plants that have always made their home here. Surrounded by nine satellite dishes, our facility is an impressive 191,000 square foot building made of glass and steel.

As a member of the Gannett
Company’s extensive list of daily newspapers, we are also one of more than 30 print sites for USA TODAY
, the nation’s newspaper. We operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. Our main plant in Melbourne is centrally located within the county and we maintain a presence throughout the Space Coast with bureau offices in Titusville, Palm Bay, Merritt Island and Sebastian.

y Jack Carey, USA TODAY

In the continuation of one of the most tumultuous college football seasons in recent memory, the first edition of the Bowl Championship Series standings features two teams at the top not expected to be anywhere near there when the year began.

Ohio State (7-0), which opened the season ranked 10th in the USA TODAY Coaches’ Poll and appeared to be facing a big rebuilding effort after last season’s national runner-up finish, is No. 1 in the BCS.

BCS STANDINGS: South Florida snares second place behind Ohio State

COACHES’ POLL: Ohio State leaps to No. 1; LSU falls to fifth

In second place is a team — South Florida — that started its football program a decade ago and wasn’t even in the top 25 in the preseason.

USF (6-0), which has beaten Auburn and West Virginia, is second in the BCS despite being ranked third, behind the Buckeyes and Boston College, in the USA TODAY Coaches’ Poll and Harris Interactive rankings, which comprise two-thirds of the BCS formula.

But the Bulls are first nationally in the other component — the computer ratings, despite having played Florida Atlantic, Central Florida and Division I-AA Elon. BC (7-0) has also played a I-AA team (Massachusetts) along with North Carolina State, Army, Bowling Green and Notre Dame.

The top two teams in the final BCS standings will meet for the national title Jan. 7 in New Orleans.

Analyst Jerry Palm, whose website, CollegeBCS.com, approximates the standings, believes USF can get to the title game if it finishes 12-0. “But they don’t control their own destiny, I don’t think, because they’re not No. 2 in the polls. That computer gap is going to close (if BC or No. 4 LSU win out),” Palm says. “But it is doable.”

An Interview with Tim Keown

Position: Senior Writer, ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com

Born: 1964, Pittsburgh, Pa.

Education: UC Berkeley (1982-84), graduated Washington State University (1986, Communications)

Career: Yuba-Sutter Appeal-Democrat (1986-88), Sacramento Union (1988-1989), Sacramento Bee (1989-1991), San Francisco Chronicle (1991-1999), ESPN The Magazine (1999-present)

Personal: Married, four sons

Favorite restaurant (home): 1. Norman Rose Tavern, Napa, Ca. – “great food, casual, the ballgame’s on behind the bar and you don’t have to mortgage the house to feed four large sons.” 1a. Nopa, San Francisco.

Favorite restaurant (away): The Purple Pig, Chicago, “one of the rare places worth the ridiculous wait. Order the skate wing.”

Favorite hotel: The Cosmopolitan, Las Vegas. “ridiculous people-watching, crazy rooms – almost enough to make Vegas palatable.”

Q. Two major elements to “After the NFL”: Steve Hendrickson and your family. Why?

A. The explanation might take a while. The conversation for this story started two years ago, when Seth Wickersham – a very smart and excellent writer for The Magazine – and I sat in the press box in Houston watching the Steelers and Texans. I had flown to Houston on a redeye the night before after watching one of my son’s high school games, and Seth remarked on how unusual it is to find someone with four sons who all played football. We talked about the growing concerns of concussions and injuries and the future of the game. “You should write ‘Confessions of a Football Dad,’” he said.

I knew it could be a good story, and Bruce Kelley – a very smart and excellent editor at The Magazine – took up the cause. I was hesitant to write solely about my sons, though, because I thought it might come across as either too self-centered or too precious. So when I saw a story in the Napa Valley Register in the summer of 2012 about Steve Hendrickson and his post-football issues, I knew I’d found a way to incorporate all of these disparate elements into a story that might do more than recite head-trauma statistics or tell yet another sad tale about a former player who’s down on his luck. Steve is a legend in Napa – for nearly 30 years his jersey was the only one retired at Napa High – and he is remarkably honest about what the game did to him. He is also uniquely situated to tell the story of the evolution of the concussion issue; his job, quite literally, was to run full-speed and ram his head into other large, fast, strong humans. By definition, as a point-of-attack fullback/linebacker and wedge-busting special-teamer, there was absolutely no room for finesse in his game. His career depended on his ability to play through concussions.

Q. What were your considerations in writing about your family?

A. It needed to be in context, and it needed to speak to as many people as possible – parents, coaches, even kids themselves. My experience as the father of four good high school athletes has given me a unique look at the world of high school sports and youth sports in general. I’ve written about it before – the industry of youth baseball raises my blood pressure like no other – but never quite this personally. I know as a reader how often I’ve rolled my eyes when a writer decides to sell me on the wondrous qualities of his kids. That wasn’t what this was about. I wanted to fold the story of my sons into the larger story of parents trying to make the decision on whether to let their sons play football.

Q. Your voice, imo, finds a delicate balance in this story. How would you describe that balance and how did you find it?

A. Balance has been missing from this conversation. If I could summarize the two sides, I’d say the anti-football side says, “This is barbaric, outlaw it,” while the pro-football side scoffs at the evidence and cites “the wussification of America.” It’s kind of unhealthy that way. I was a pretty good player in high school who didn’t love it enough to keep playing, and I can see the arguments on both sides.

But I think one element has been missing from the conversation: the benefits that come with being challenged in a tough game. I know all the arguments against football, but I also know it was, overall, a valuable experience. (And this comes from someone who had an absolute tyrant as a coach my first three years in high school.) I haven’t read enough of that, so I decided to write it. Some of what’s happening out there is comical. The scene in the parents’ section of a high school game has changed completely over the past five years. There’s just so much hysteria now. During one junior varsity game, the quarterback kept on an option play to the home side of the field. As he turned the corner with nothing but open field in front of him, his mother screamed, “Be careful!” loud enough that the players on the sideline turned around.

Q. “Grand Reconsideration” – nice turn of phrase but ominous. Football is a revenue source for ESPN – what are your thoughts about biting the hand?

A. It never occurred to me, and it was never mentioned to me at any point. Regardless of how you phrase it, there’s no denying that football is undergoing a vast, system-wide reconsideration. It’s happening, and in my 15 years at ESPN I’ve never seen us shy away from addressing the real and difficult subjects of sports.

Q. You wrote about a Friday Night Lights side of Napa that tourists do not know. What else do townies know that tourists should?

A. Nothing. The tourists know everything they need to know. They should always stay on Highway 29, bumper to bumper through the Valley, leaving Silverado Trail for the rest of us.
But if they want to be as cool as the locals are, they should get the chili verde burrito from the taco truck parked behind the gas station on Salvador.

Q. What was it like to write an autobiography with Dennis Rodman?

I was a stranger in a strange land. At the time – and this was 17 years ago – I was amazed that someone could live minute-to-minute the way he did. We’d be driving down the street in Orange County. He would see a fitness center at the next intersection and decide to go in and work out. There was no schedule, no plan, just living in the moment. In order to write the book – and it’s worth noting that we had 2.5 months from start to finish to produce it – I had to immerse myself in his life. I couldn’t say, “Hey, Dennis, from 1 to 3 p.m. on Tuesday we’re going to cover the first eight years of your life.” It simply didn’t work that way.

Q. Your thoughts on Rodman’s self-proclaimed candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize?

A. I really have none, but I would love to see the acceptance speech. Could you imagine? I’d probably pay to watch a continuous crowd shot of all the geniuses and world leaders as Rodman takes to the podium.

Q. What sports media do you consume and why?

A. Unfortunately, I’m an omnivore. I need to be more discriminating because I waste a lot of time on unimportant stuff.

Q. Give us a recent story that caught your attention and why?

A. I loved Wright Thompson’s piece in The Magazine’s Body Issue on the world’s most badass bull. It was funny and illuminating and unexpected – all great things. He anthropomorphized the bull in a way that I thought was genius. I’m not a bull, but the thoughts he ascribed to Bushwhacker seemed perfectly plausible to me. I also thought the recent New Yorker piece on the Steubenville rape case was tremendous.

Q. Who were your creative and journalistic influences?

A. The Sisters of the Holy Faith at St. Apollinaris in Napa ingrained a love – and a fear – of language in me. They were Olympic-level grammarians, as was my mom, and the combination created an obsessive attention to detail. I grew up as the youngest – by far – of four kids, and I was an old man by eight or nine years old. I listened to talk radio and watched the news and read Herb Caen every morning and picked up books nobody my age was reading. I remember Sister Gemma standing next to my desk in fourth grade and asking to see the book I was reading. It was a history of the Gestapo. I was nine. I think she called my mom that night.

I was consumed with sports and sports statistics, but most of my influences were outside of sports. I went on a Stephen King binge when I was 12 or 13. That could be why, even as my taste evolved, I tended to veer toward dark novels. The first writer I read with awe was Don Delillo, and End Zone was the first book I read more than once. I worked in the same building as Pete Dexter at the Sacramento Bee, and I marveled at his ability to say a whole bunch without saying much at all. I could go on and on. George Saunders might be the best and most inventive writer in the English language.

Q. Career bucket list?

A. This is tough. I’m happiest when I’m off by myself, reporting a story about people and places nobody knows. I’ve covered most of the major events in sports, and I enjoy the spectacle but don’t really enjoy the process. Everybody’s fighting over the same crumbs. I’m far too American in my sports diet, though, so I would like to one day cover the World Cup or something similarly out of my comfort zone.

(SMG thanks Tim Keown for his cooperation)

An Interview with Tom Keegan

“Oftentimes the talented writers get so many compliments they start to think they’re more interesting than they really are. They start to write about themselves instead of the people the readers really want to read about. Like a great actor who starts overacting…”

“Really good radio people make it sound easy but it isn’t easy if you don’t have the innate rhythm that enables you to keep talking at the same upbeat pace never searching for a word. “

“In this market you’ve got to read Facebook.com and MySpace.com – you read what the college athletes post to see if they’re giving hints – and you read high school athletes to get an indication where they’re going.”

Tom Keegan: Interviewed on November 17, 2006

Position: Sports Editor, Lawrence (Kansas) Journal World

Born: 1959, Rochester, NY

Education: Marquette 1981, journalism

Career: Orange County Register 1984-89, The National 90-91, The Daily Southtown 91-94, Baltimore Sun 94, NY Post 95-2002, ESPN Radio NYC 2002-05, Lawrence Journal World 2005-

Personal: Married, four children

Favorite restaurant (home): Tellers, Lawrence, “best salad I’ve ever eaten – not that I’ve eaten many – get the front window table to watch people walking by”

Favorite restaurant (away): Capital Grille, Providence, “great beef but best strawberry cheesecake ever”

Favorite hotel: Marriott “anywhere – for the points”

Author of: “Sleeper Cars and Flannel Uniforms” an autobiography of Elden Auker, 2001; “My 60 Years in Baseball”, a biography of Ernie Harwell, 2002; “The First Baseman”, 2006.

Tom Keegan excerpted from the Lawrence Journal World, October 28, 2006:

The better the challenge, the more pure the course, the worse cross country is as a spectator sport.

Rim Rock Farm, with its hills and trees and twists and turns, is precisely what a cross country course should be. Normally, the best way to view a race there would be from a helicopter with a telescope. Or from a treetop. As it is, only those in as good a shape as the competitors (read: nobody) can see much of the race.

Friday morning’s event wasn’t normal. It was memorable. Bearded Kansas University junior Colby Wissel made it so.

On a cold and wet morning in which KU’s two-time-defending champion Benson Chesang finished 12th, Wissel kept the Big 12 individual title at KU with a kick to the finish line that called to mind old cap-wearing Olympic middle-distance runner Dave Wottle.

A junior from tiny Elm Creek, Neb., Wissel knows Rim Rock like a KU football crowd knows late-game disappointment. Wissel runs the course often, and not only in practice. He runs it in his leisure time, too, with his dog, Molly, an Irish setter, at his side.

A runner always tries to look ahead, tries to resist the temptation to turn and look over his shoulder at what might be gaining on him. Afterward, Wissel thought he had done a good job of that. In reality, he turned over his left shoulder five times after passing second-place finisher Joe Thorne from the University of Texas and over his right shoulder once while pumping his fist in the air.

As he approached the finish line, Wissel raised both arms in the air as the crowd cheered wildly for him.

He ran a smart race, a gutsy one, a clutch one.

Q. That’s the best cross country story I’ve read this season – the only one – to be honest. How did you do it?

A. I was totally inspired by Colby, the guy who ran the race – watching his kick. It brought me back as kid running – 140 pounds ago – and watching Dave Wottle on TV. I got goose bumps watching him – just to see a competitor doing it that great. He wasn’t expected to win, but he refused to lose. It was 9 in the morning and cold. It was just him – he was the inspiration.

Q. Good writing can come from a good event, but can it come from a bad event?

A. It can if you keep challenging yourself to report the heck out of it until you find something. Whenever people are involved there’s the chance of a good story, if you make it about the people.

Q. Can you write a bad story out of a good event?

A. Yeah – if you get in the way and try to make it about yourself. Oftentimes the talented writers get so many compliments they start to think they’re more interesting than they really are. They start to write about themselves instead of the people the readers really want to read about. Like a great actor who starts overacting – he’s getting his ass kissed so much nobody ever tells him he’s overacting. I saw Al Pacino on “Inside the Actors’ Studio” recently – he’s an example of that.

Q. You’re saying Al Pacino overacts – are you sure you want to go out on a limb?

A. Yep. If he had anybody in his life to edit his behavior he wouldn’t have that poufy hairdo that looks ridiculous.

Q. And some sportswriters fall into Pacino’s trap?

A. Some would have been well known if they hadn’t fallen into that habit – they would have gotten better. You didn’t see Mike Royko using “I” a lot and he was great.

Q. “Albert Belle glared exclusively at the Post yesterday.” Did you write that lead?

A. Yes. I’ll take responsibility.

Q. “Albert Belle glared exclusively at the Post yesterday.” Excuse me for repeating – it’s just so perfect. What’s the story behind the lead?

A. It was hard doing the reporting on that – because it was terrifying. Half a dozen guys were standing in the middle of the Indians clubhouse and the only player there was Albert. Nobody was going up to him because they figured he wouldn’t talk. I gave it a shot – I went up to him and introduced myself and told him what I wanted to talk about. He didn’t change expression – he scowled at me the whole time – his glare was glued on me – but he didn’t say a word. I’m surprised I still don’t have nightmares from that.

At first I thought, “Am I being too much of a clown writing this?” And then I thought, “What the heck – people will get a kick out of it.”

Marty Noble (mlb.com) put it in a pre-season baseball magazine as the “lead of the year”. That’s why a lot of people saw it.

When I applied for the Lawrence job it was on the top of my pile of clips. I figured why not let them know the real person they’re interviewing.

By the way, Bob Verdi (Chicago Tribune) had the best line about Albert Belle: “Playing cards three feet from me in the White Sox clubhouse, Albert Belle could not be reached for comment.”

Q. Other memorable leads?

A. Jimmy Roberts once told me he loved my lead after the Mets played a terrible game: “If Bobby Valentine had known he would one day manage a team that butchered the game this badly he never would have invented the game in the first place.”

Q. Is it safe to say you value humor in writing?

A. My all-time favorite column was Gene Collier’s annual ‘trite trophy’ column – he’s now a Metro columnist (Pittsburgh Post Gazette). He would pick out a new cliché that came into vogue and do an experiment to demonstrate how ridiculous that cliché is – like “when these teams meet you can throw out the record books”. He went to some college and got a record book and threw it out the window – and detailed it – a couple pages came loose.

I conducted my own experiment. One year the hot cliché was “thinking outside the box”. I sat inside a box and tried to think about Billie Jean King – but the more I tried the more I kept thinking about Anna Kournikova. So then I sat outside the box and the same thing happened. So thinking outside the box didn’t help. I did it as a radio commentary but I wrote it up and submitted it to Gene and he ran it.

Q. Do you have any writing do’s and don’ts?

A. Yes. I’ve prepared a guide for part-timers on my staff. For instance, the first number in a game story has to be the final score, and it has to be in the first three grafs. Don’t use quotes unless they add to the story. The first time you write something go back and reduce it by 10 percent. Then go back and reduce that by 10 percent – writers are wordy when they’re starting out.

Q. Who do you like to read?

A. The two guys in Boston are great – Bob Ryan and Dan Shaughnessy (Boston Globe). Jason Whitlock and Joe Posnanski (KC Star) are a good tandem – their opposite styles compliment each other – they’re both compelling reads. Bob Nightengale (USA Today) is good – he’s such a manic reporter. John McGrath (Tacoma News Tribune) is good – I worked with him at The National – he would torture himself all day just procrastinating.

Another guy is Mike Lupica (NY Daily News) – he’s a controversial figure and a lot of people are jealous of him. But in New York people are so hooked on wanting to see his take when something big happens. They’re also hooked on (WFAN radio) Mike and Mad Dog’s take – I was as well – they’re smart takes. Francesa gives the insight and Russo gives the emotion – Lupica does both. He wrote one of the best things I ever read – every young guy getting into the business ought to read it in “Best American Sportswriting of the Century” – called “My Brother’s Keeper” – about Billy Conigliaro taking care of his brother Tony.

The person in the business I’m most grateful to is Steve Bisheff

(Orange County Register). He critiqued all the work of the part-timers and posted the critiques on the wall. It was a great motivator. Reading his copy also was a big help.

Q. You spent three years in radio – did that affect your writing?

A. It actually helped when I got back to writing a column. You’ve got to get to the point right away and not dance around – you just hammer it hard and keep hammering it home. Really good radio people make it sound easy but it isn’t easy if you don’t have the innate rhythm that enables you to keep talking at the same upbeat pace never searching for a word. A good radio person can do that. I don’t have that rhythm. My opinions were insightful and hard-hitting and honest. But someone with that presence and rhythm could say less interesting things and still be a more compelling listen only because people are less distracted. They could be listening to me and tune me out when I searched for a word.

Q. Who has good delivery?

A. Michael Savage – the right wing guy – has great presence. Brandon Tierney (WEPN) in New York has real presence on the air. Chris Russo – the Mad Dog.

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

A. Sometimes you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator. If you get too insightful you’re going to lose a lot of the audience that doesn’t want to think. People are doing 8 million things while listening. The good hosts – like Mike Francesa – can be insightful and still capture an audience. It’s a different medium and you’ve got to get the ratings – so your tenor better not be low-key. Radio probably attracts guys who are a little on the loud side.

Q. Why are print guys usually dismissive of talk radio?

A. One reason is the radio guys sometimes will read their stuff and use some of it to enhance their own knowledge and yet never say, “I read this from so-and-so and he had a good point”. They only talk about writers when they blast them. When I did radio I didn’t do that – I credited the writers.

Q. Would talk radio hosts benefit by having to do print work?

A. They definitely would be less likely to criticize writers. I don’t know – it might make them think too much instead of just being emotional.

Q. What went into your decision to jump to radio?

A. A couple things. Wally Matthews had left the Post for radio and I expressed an interest in replacing him as the general columnist – instead of being baseball columnist. I was told I wouldn’t be considered for that. So I looked for something else and found the radio gig. It had earning potential and I had two kids in college. The ceiling was really high – if it had been a hit I could have made a lot of money. It was definitely a gamble that didn’t work. But I’m happy where I ended up.

Q. How did you get to Lawrence?

A. After I lost the radio job and got replaced by Stephen A. Smith I had a book deal – “First Baseman” – so I was able to sit back and not just desperately leap. I had lunch with Matt McHale, the assistant SE at the LA Daily News, and he said he knew a job I would be perfect for. He knew I loved college basketball and liked working with young writers. The job was described as an old-fashioned SE who would be writing instead of office planning.

Q. How much do you write for the Journal World?

A. This week in seven days I will write seven columns and a feature. It’s a lot of writing but unlike anywhere else I worked it’s an eight-minute commute – so I have four extra hours a day. Nobody is holding a gun to my head telling me to write that much.

Our circulation is about 20,000, and our staff has seven full-timers and five part-timers. The space is great. For every KU football and basketball game we have two inside pages plus a cover. Our average section is anywhere from eight to 12 pages. We do a lot of special sections – which is unheard of for papers with our circulation.

Q. Is your paper profitable?

A. It’s profitable. Not a big profit, because the owner, Dolph C. Simons Jr., puts the money right back in. His grandfather bought the paper for 50 bucks – he also has the cable (Sunflower Broadband Channel 6) in town. We work with the TV people – convergence is a big word at the Journal. Our TV show, “The Drive”, got picked up by Fox College Sports Central.

Q. What’s the difference between writing in Lawrence and writing in New York?

A. You localize it more here in terms of high schools and KU. In New York it’s more about what they say and here it’s more about what they do. In New York there’s always some big flap going on and you get into a competitive mode where you want to see if you can get the sexiest quote. They’re more into controversy. There’s plenty of controversy here, too – it’s just that people are so into the team. Some things you do the same. Whatever the hot story is you just write it. You write what people are talking about.

Q. Is the atmosphere less cynical?

A. I would have thought that. Readers maybe take the perspective of the athletes more in a college town than in New York but I remember in New York with the baseball teams they can get pretty nasty if you criticize their favorite player. I remember one guy dressed up in Mets gear trying to look like Mike Piazza – sitting four rows behind the dugout. He yells my name out before a game – “Keegan, your writing” – and he is holding his thumbs up and when I look at him he slowly turns them downward and he screams, “You suck you suck”.

Q. That doesn’t happen in Lawrence?

A. No. But the anonymous e-mails are super nasty. If someone signs them I respond. If they don’t I return it and say you have to sign it if you want a response.

Q. Have you riled up your readers?

A. I wrote a column in the dead of summer on KU basketball explaining how it’s possible – a longshot – for the following reasons the way the schedule plays out – that KU could become the first undefeated national champion since 1976. The reaction was really nasty – how could I put that kind of pressure on them, blah blah. My prediction was looking good after one game, but now they’re 1-1 after a loss at home to Oral Roberts. I expected the link to be sent to me – and I didn’t have to wait too long.

Q. Do you cover the pro sports in Kansas City?

A. Not much. Probably six or eight baseball games – two or three were Jim Leyland columns – I had a relationship with him. I got to know him his first year with the Pirates as a visiting writer – I always found his office to be one of the most honest and interesting. It still feels like a manager’s office and not too many of them do anymore – a lot of managers don’t let you in their office – they do it on the field.

Q. Your take on access issues?

A. It really bothers me. They’re all trying to herd you – you all get the same stuff – it’s really hard to be at your best when you don’t have the access.

Q. Is that true in college sports?

A. It’s more the case than I would have guessed. For football the lockerroom is closed – they’ll bring you certain players you request after games – but not all the ones you request. You get access on one day, Tuesday, and often the players you want aren’t around. In basketball the lockerrooms are closed and you sometimes can get them five minutes before practice once a week – or they’ll bring three players to an interview room – that’s frustrating. But our beat writer has great access to (KU basketball coach) Bill Self.

Q. Do you pay attention to bloggers?

A. You do. Beat writers read the message boards – it makes their job so hard – there are good rumors and bad rumors and you have to check out everything. It’s also hard because anonymous posters are just destroying them – nobody posts and says so-and-so is a good writer – anonymity empowers cowards. It hurts to read that stuff.

When I was reading them I was getting destroyed so I stopped reading them. I get enough e-mails – I don’t need to read the message boards.

In this market you’ve got to read Facebook.com and MySpace.com – you read what the college athletes post to see if they’re giving hints – and you read high school athletes to get an indication where they’re going.

You get tips – like Terrell Arthur on MySpace was pictured with Sherron Collins – which was an indication that KU might not be out of Collins’ picture. He ended up going to KU – he was ready to hold a press conference to announce he was going to Baylor then he cancelled it – he said he had a dream during the night that he was playing with KU. Made me wonder if there was a bidding war and he was dreaming about all the cash.

Q. Your take on rivals.com and scout.com – are they doing journalism?

A. They’ve got a wide range. Tim Fitzgerald, at gopowercat.com, used to be at our paper – he’s a journalist – he does his site like a journalist.

Other ones you hear stories about the guy being so tight with the coaching staff that they tell him when they want him to call a recruit. Or if something is leaked the coaches don’t like they’ll contact the operator of the website and find out who posted it – it can get that sleazy. Let’s say a player leaked something – or a friend of a player leaked something – and the coaches want to know. It’s espionage.

They end up getting stories but they’re not playing by the same rules. Some are good journalists who took their skills to the web, but others aren’t. Then you end up looking bad. It’s a hard job being a beat writer.

It’s such a hard job now. I wonder if kids who get into it now will turn 30 and decide, “this isn’t for me”. Somebody once told me – and it’s kind of true – that 30 is the age when a lot of people leave journalism.

Q. Has the definition of news changed?

A. Sports have gotten so insanely popular – it’s news if the minute hand changes. Supposedly before I got to the Journal World – there was a headline: “KU’s Williams Has a Head Cold”. It shows how big KU is here. I guess it’s news if people read it.

(SMG thanks Tom Keegan for his cooperation)