An Interview with Robert Lipsyte

“I’ve come to realize that most jocks are really sissies – they roll over so quickly for uber-alpha males, they’re thin-skinned and they like to beat on weaker people, including the women in their lives. Most of them don’t grow up until their playing days are over. Even considering them as role models for anything but hard work and peak performance is hilarious.”

“I liked hardcore sports writing most covering hockey and Nascar where people were interested in explaining what they did and why, the gritty joy of digging the puck out of a corner or pancaking someone into the Plexiglas…Most of the rest is speculation and blah-blah to fill time and space.”

“Did tanking on the steroids story, which is sports writing’s shameful equivalent of the weapons of mass destruction story, come out of denial, laziness, lack of chops? The current catch-up, blaming editors or mild mea culpas or trashing A-Rod and fellow users, is even more pathetic.”

Position: Free-lance writer, Young Adult fiction author, TV host.

Born: 1938, New York City

Education: Columbia College, ‘57, Columbia Journalism School ‘59

Career: New York Times 1957-71 and 91-2003; CBS 82-86; NBC: 86-88; WNET 88-90; Twin Cities TV 2008 –

Personal: Married to the writer, Lois B. Morris; two children, Sam and Susannah, two grandchildren, Alfred and Sylvia (Squidge).

Favorite restaurant (home): Home-cooking, including mine.

Favorite restaurant (away): Room service.

Favorite hotel: St. Paul Hotel, St. Paul, Mn. “Casually elegant”

Website: http://robertlipsyte.com/disc.htm

Robert Lipsyte, excerpted from USA Today, April 10, 2008:

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/04/jock-culture-pe.html

If you’ve been listening to political candidates, you probably think that America is fragmented by religion, gender, race and ethnicity, as well as wealth, class, age and manual dexterity — do you text-message or are you all thumbs?

No wonder sports can seem comforting. In what I call Jock Culture, there are only two kinds of Americans — winners and losers.

The political season will be over in a few months (with its winners and losers), but the sports seasons will roll on, one after another, often concurrently, and the messages will be drilled into our minds: First place is the only place. Win or die a little. Losers slink home.

In sports, the pressure of those messages to win has given us recruiting scandals, academic cheating, helmet-spearing, bean balls, steroids and industrial espionage — the New England Patriots used video cameras to gain an edge. In real life, those messages about winning have been performance-enhanced to bring us dishonesty in banking, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, energy and foreign policy.

There’s a connection between cutting corners to win a football game and to start a war. For many Americans, certainly for the majority American boys, the most vivid and lasting lessons are learned in the sports they play and watch. Jock Culture is the incubator of most definitions of manly success.

Lessons about the rewards of discipline, playing fair and working hard compete against lessons about the punishment-free payoffs of cheating. Dads pour illegal additives into the quarter-midget race cars of their 7-years-olds. A Little League pitcher lies about his age. A coach winks when a teenage basketball star fabricates an address to join an out-of-town team. Kids who grow up seeing grown- ups shrug, if not actually pulling the strings behind the scenes, come to think it’s the way of the world…

Q. Why is disillusionment with Jock Culture a regular theme in your writing?

A. That’s an interesting thought since I never considered myself illusioned. Are you romanticizing my career? I was not an engaged fan as a kid and at 19 when I landed in the NYTimes sports dept as a copyboy I stayed because it looked like a terrific career move – lots of good stories and the freedom to write them.

I covered boxing early on and there was no way to avoid the hypocrisy, corruption and bullshit if you considered yourself a journalist instead of a Superfan with a license to score free tickets and jock-sniff. I fed off the response, positive and negative. I wasn’t the only one, it was a golden era for terrific young sportswriters – Larry Merchant, Stan Isaacs, Ira Berkow, Pete Axthelm, Pete Bonventre, Neil Amdur, Jerry Izenberg, Sandy Padwe, among others – but the pulpit of the Times was a great advantage.

In those days the Times didn’t care that much about sports so the pressure from Madison Square Garden or the Mets or the Tennis establishment to dump me didn’t have the impact it would have had at some other paper.

Q. How would you describe your sports media niche and your objectives?

A. I’ve begun writing my memoirs, so I am slowly figuring out that I did have a niche, or at least a pattern. I was interested in the nick between sports and the surrounding society more than in the games or even the personalities, particularly racial, political, health and pop cultural issues, most particularly how sports’ definitions of manhood have often become the larger society’s definitions. I think that’s why I’ve had a fascination with gay athletes, women athletes and the split between jocks and pukes (as one Columbia crew coach called non-jocks on campus).

I’ve come to realize that most jocks are really sissies – they roll over so quickly for uber-alpha males, they’re thin-skinned and they like to beat on weaker people, including the women in their lives. Most of them don’t grow up until their playing days are over. Even considering them as role models for anything but hard work and peak performance is hilarious.

Q.Tell us something of your emotional life as a writer and TV personage.

A. I’ve had a great time and a charmed life. I loved the travel and excitement of daily journalism back when newspapers were healthy and then when the TV networks still used limos, and now I love the combination of the solitude writing young adult fiction and the sociality in TV, especially my current gig as host of a PBS show on aging with the chance to interview the likes of Mike Huckabee and Martha Stewart, who are simply more interesting than A-Rod and Mannings.

I liked hardcore sportswriting most covering hockey and Nascar where people were interested in explaining what they did and why, the gritty joy of digging the puck out of a corner or pancaking someone into the Plexiglas, the romance of floating out of the corners or punching holes in restrictor plates. Most of the rest is speculation and blah-blah to fill time and space.

Q. What has the widening gap between sports media and its subjects meant to the product?

A. It’s totally changed the tone. When I started in 1957, writers and athletes tended to trust and protect each other. It made for an easy life, entertaining stories and bad journalism. The gap, which includes the racial and economic gulf as well as the lack of access, has probably improved the product but not quite as much as one would think.

Did tanking on the steroids story, which is sports writing’s shameful equivalent of the weapons of mass destruction story, come out of denial, laziness, lack of chops? The current catch-up, blaming editors or mild mea culpas or trashing A-Rod and fellow users, is even more pathetic.

Q. Sports media has increased in sheer volume from the time you broke in. What has this meant to the consumer?

A. As a consumer, I love it. More games to watch, more commentaries on them. Sports is entertainment. Who wouldn’t want more entertainment choices. And the surrounding babble is part of that entertainment.

Q. If you were named Czar of Sports Media, with unlimited power, what would you change?

A. I don’t know. I do believe that journalism is a calling and disseminating information in any form entails responsibility. I wish a lot of people were more responsible, but I wouldn’t want any rules in place to limit their freedom. Sports is important, though, as a definer of values and people need and deserve honest reporting here as surely as in arts, politics, business.

Q. Who and what do you read and watch in sports media? What non-sports media do you consume?

A. I watch and read everything, promiscuously and haphazardly, mostly on line. I don’t listen to much talk radio. There are only a few places I seek out, looking for a line of thought I’d never come to on my own. Dave Zirin’s Edge of Sports column on line is a must. Jason Whitlock always has something to say. Bryan Curtis when he deigns to say something. Bill Simmons because I think he has the pulse of the fan. Deadspin. ESPN.COM.

Non-sports? Again, mostly on line. NYTimes, Tomdispatch.com, The Daily Beast, MediaBistro, Romanesko, AlterNet, and various right-wing and left-wing blogs to keep my blood moving.

Q. Who were your sports media influences?

A. Starting out, I thought Jimmy Cannon was fun to read, over the top, had a social conscience. Gay Talese (I was his copyboy) was an enormous influence – he approached sports as a writer, a journalist, never as a “sportswriter.” My biggest influence as a young writer was John Steinbeck.

Q. What are your interview tactics or techniques? How do you approach a hostile subject as opposed to a friendly one?

A. I’m pretty matter-of-fact, neither bully nor waif, and if the subject thinks you’re open to giving him/her a fair shake you’re halfway home. It’s easier these days because people are media savvy and think they can maneuver the interview. They tend to forget you have the last edit. Even on TV, which I do more and more of lately.

Q. Red Smith in retrospect, warts and all?

A. Red replaced me as Times columnist when I left the first time in 1971 and when he won the Pulitzer, I told him I would have left earlier had I known. He was simply the most elegant writer I ever read on the sports page. His early years were spent using that incredible talent to spout the conventional wisdom – his attacks on Cassius Clay were embarrassing. But unlike almost anyone in the field, he just got better with age. Without losing his stylishness he put it into the service of smart, clear-eyed commentary. In his later years, he was the best.

Q. Next project?

A. I’m hosting a weekly PBS show, LIFE(Part2) about the aging of the boomer generation. It starts airing in September 2009.

I’m also writing my memoirs for Ecco (HarperCollins) called “Lessons from the Locker-Room: The Education of an Accidental Sportswriter.”

I want to come back here after you’ve read it.

Robert Lipsyte, excerpted from Columbia Journalism Review, July 1, 2006:

In 1938, the year I was horn, Paul Gallico published his valedictory Farewell to Sport, a thoughtful meditation on the “wildest, maddest, and most glamorous period in all the history of sport,” which just happened to coincide with his fourteen years as a New York Daily News sportswriter. Gallico was no mere pressbox pundit. Long before the late George Plimpton’s showy turns as quarterback, pitcher, and boxer, Gallico pioneered participatory sports journalism. He swam with Johnny Weismuller, golfed with Bobby Jones, and lasted less than two minutes in the ring with Jack Dempsey.

I was about fifteen when I first read the book and readily absorbed its Galliconian pronouncements, such as “like all people who spring from what we call low origins, [Babe] Ruth never had any inhibitions”; Mildred (Babe) Didrikson Zaharias became one of the greatest athletes of the century “simply because she would not or could not compete with women at their own and best game – mansnatching. It was an escape, a compensation. She would beat them at everything else they tried to do”; and the reason basketball “appeals to the Hebrew … is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness.”

Even as a Hebrew without much game, I was swept along by Gallico’s confidence. He had a cool and cocky style leavened with just enough Great Books references to connect a young 1950s smart-aleck to the elitism, sexism, and faux macho of the 1930s sportswriters who had dipped their noses as well as their pens in other men’s testosterone. I felt manlier through his access to the Manassa Mauler, the Brown Bomber, the Iron Horse. And his dismissal of women athletes was reassuring; if a girl did manage to whip you, it was only because she was likely not truly female. Boys in my day were labeled “girls” and “fags” if they didn’t at least pay lip service to the emerging values of what I now call Jock Culture, that stew of honor, self-absorption, generosity, greed, bravery, emotional constriction, tenderness, domination, and defiance that commands so much of our national life.

I was, however, slightly uncomfortable with Gallico’s remarks about the “colored brother” who is “… not nearly so sensible to pain as his white brother. He has a thick, hard skull and good hands.” It smacked of racism; my parents worked in black neighborhoods and I knew better. But I was willing to give Gallico the same pass that most of my textbooks gave the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson. Gallico, too, was a man of his times. After all, he had written Farewell a decade before Jackie Robinson.

Four years after I read the hook, still a teenager, I landed in the sports department of the New York Times; I’d answered an ad for what I considered would he only a summer job before heading West to write hooks and movies, just like Gallico. But as much as I hated being a copyboy, I stayed on past that summer because I dreamed that someday, I, too, might be “at the tennis tournament at Forest Hills . . . drinking an ice tea . . . surrounded by beautifully dressed women and soft-spoken men in summer flannels,” and the next day be “in a frowsy, ribald tight camp, gagging over a glass of needle beer,” where I’d find “doubtful blondes . . . and blondes about whom there was no doubt.”

Eventually I got to both places, and they were as good as Gallico had promised, especially the fight camps. As a young boxing reporter, I kept two books handy, Gallico’s Farewell and AJ. liebling’s The Sweet Science, which was No. 1 on Sports Illustrated’s 2002 top 100 sports books of all time (Farewell was No. 82). Liebling was ultimately discouraging; no one else could eat and drink so much and still write so well, not to mention come up with eloquent quotes from grizzled corner men who were all but mute for me….

I was around thirty-five when I read Farewell to Sport cover to cover for the second time, as research for my own 1975 valedictory, SportsWorld: An American Dreamland. (Sports Illustrated made it No. 97, calling it “an angry screed.”) Now I saw Gallico as a prime example of what had been and was still wrong with sports writing: the jock-sniffing, the intellectual laziness, the moral cowardice.

What an old whore he was, always begging Babe Ruth or Gene Tunney to show up at some event he was promoting. How did that affect his coverage? His line about your circulation falling off if you destroy too many illusions began to sound like a justification of all those years he spent, to borrow a phrase of the great Herald Tribune sports editor Stanley Woodward, “Godding up the ball-players.”

Gallico wasn’t bashful about Godding up himself either. Take his line about Babe Didrikson honing her championship hurdling and jump-shooting skills to compensate for her man-snatching defeats. In his autobiography, The Tumult and the Shouting, the sportswriter and sportscaster Grantland Rice describes a little joke he played on his pal Gallico. During a golf match, he talked Gallico into a foot race with Didrikson, and she left him for dead. Babe tells the same story in her autobiography, This Life I’ve Led. After that race, Gallico suddenly noticed Babe’s Adam’s apple. Of course, if a woman beats you, she can’t really be a woman…

But I couldn’t stay away from Gallico’s Farewell. What drew me back to it for the third read was the steroids story, particularly the anguished cries of the baseball wonks that Barry Bonds’s chemically aided statistics had made a mockery of the game’s history and should be erased or footnoted. Who cares! I thought. (Unless you want to asterisk Babe Ruth’s records: *Never batted against colored brothers.) What matters is the discrete joy of tonight’s game, pitch by pitch, inning by inning. I remembered how touched I’d been at fifteen by Gallico’s lyrical passages on baseball as theater, the beautiful geometry of it, the small dramas, the looming threat of a home run, the liberation from everyday life.

And so it was Farewell again, from the beginning.

This time I laughed out loud when Gallico described international figure skating as “joyously crooked” and the judges as “scamps and vote-peddlers.” He knew this even before the French judge sold out to the Russians at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. I was thrilled by his paean to cars at speed and to the auto racer as athlete. In the closest I’d come to Gallico’s participatory journalism, I’d driven a stock car at 130 miles an hour while covering NASCAR in 2001. Drivers were certainly as athletic as “the stick-and-ballers.” Gallico and I also agreed that horse racing was basically gambling, and that “college football today is one of the last great strongholds of genuine old-fashioned American hypocrisy.” Gallico was railing about Yale selling its broadcast rights for $20,000.

One of the areas I reread with interest and trepidation was about women. I winced when Gallico wrote, “No matter how good they are, they can never be good enough, quite, to matter,” but in a way he was right. How else explain why women’s records, accomplishments, and attendance figures are always measured against men’s? Why does Billie Jean King beating that old clown Bobby Riggs, or Michelle Wie, the Tigress Woods inching her way into the men’s game, get so much more coverage than the revolution that Title IX has wrought in the everyday lives of girls and their families?

I think Gallico, if he were around, could have some fun in his column with the vulnerable veneer of our macho heroes – if it didn’t interfere with booking them for his TV and radio shows. He’d have to deal with jock girls calling each other “fag” for intimidation or motivation. He’d also have to explain why male pro athletes are terrified of having open gays in their locker rooms lest their relatives, friends, and fans think they are gay, too.

Gallico would have flourished in today’s atmosphere, been a multiplatform star like Mike Lupica, Stephen A. Smith, Sally Jenkins, Frank Deford, Tony Kornheiser, Christine Brennan, Jason Whitlock, and John Feinstein. Gallico would know the territory, be smart enough to navigate Jock Culture and snipe at it, be enough of a believer to never attack it systemically. While the new diversity of the current press box has sensitized coverage, the biggest problem remains the widening distance between reporter and subject – except where ex-jocks playing reporters on TV manage to straddle the gap. I have no doubt that Gallico would find a way to walk the line with style, confidence, and residuals.

I probably won’t read Farewell again cover to cover, but the presence of Gallico’s papers at Columbia University teases me. Maybe I should write about him since, after all, this piece was about me. But then I’d have to deal with Gallico’s best piece of advice: Your circulation begins to fall off if you destroy too many illusions, especially if you yourself have created them.

(SMG thanks Robert Lipsyte for his cooperation)

An Interview with Greg Logan

“But basically I am the only one with the Islanders on a daily basis. Even though you would think that would be an ideal situation for a beat writer…In some ways there’s an even greater pressure on me – I have to ask all the tough questions. I don’t get to share that with anybody…”

“I never played the game, so I take extra care talking to people about strategy and what they’re trying to accomplish and really listen to what they’re saying and their opinions. I normally value athletes’ opinions over writers’ opinions in any sport because they are playing but even more so in hockey.”

“Scoops are important. But is it a scoop if it’s wrong? If you’re going to have a scoop you better be right about it. If somebody can prove it’s wrong then all you’ve done is get a headline and stir up discussion and controversy but ultimately you were wrong.

“There’s a guy on the Flyers named Afanasenkov. Afinogenov in Buffalo is fine. But Afanasenkov in Philly throws me…Always use their first name. In this case – Dmitry.”

Greg Logan: Interviewed on January 24, 2007

Position: Islanders beat reporter, Newsday

Born: 1951, Albuquerque

Education: Missouri, 1973, Journalism

Career: Norman Transcript 1973-74; Arizona Republic 1974-77; Trenton Times, 1977-79; Bergen Record 1979-82; Newsday 1982 –

Personal: married, three daughters

Favorite restaurants (home): Paula Jean’s Supper Club, East Setauket, NY “good Cajun food and live rhythm and blues to match”

Favorite restaurant (road): Sweet Georgia Brown’s, Washington DC “down home southern style cooking – superb”; Wild Ginger, Seattle “late night gourmet Chinese”; Nick and Sam’s, Dallas “great steak” : Ojeda’s, Dallas “authentic Tex-Mex with great pour-your-own salsa on the tables”; Columbia Seafood Restaurant, Tampa “seafood with a Latin flavor and I love the ambience of the original restaurant in Ybor City”; Sassafraz, Toronto “a jazz lounge in the Bloor-Yorkville area for music and cocktails”

Favorite hotel: The Renaissance Seattle, “the personal treatment you received there was high-end luxury treatment for a bargain price and beautiful city”;

Greg Logan’s “15-Year Concept” excerpted from Newsday.com, November 6, 2006:

There’s no mistaking the concern of Islanders fans about the 15-year contract signed by goaltender Rick DiPietro this season, and it came through loud and clear Saturday night when the Nassau Coliseum crowd called for backup Mike Dunham after DiPietro gave up three first-period goals in a 4-1 loss to Atlanta.

Every goaltender has off nights, but it’s as though signing that landmark deal has raised the bar of expectations for DiPietro. As he said after the game, the contract didn’t gift him with “superpowers,” and if the fans are looking for nightly perfection, “It isn’t going to happen.”

Excuse DiPietro if he was agitated after a rough outing. He simply was saying that he’s human and mistakes are inevitable.

And that’s at the root of the problems a 15-year deal creates. Anyone would have signed for the security represented by such a $67.5 million deal. But athletes are human, and their performance is subject to fluctuations on a daily basis, never mind over a 15-year term.

Take DiPietro out of the equation. It would have been a huge risk to sign Hank Aaron or Babe Ruth to a 15-year deal (Okay, maybe not Wayne Gretzky, whose 21-year deal with former Edmonton owner Peter Pocklington was a personal services contract that obviously didn’t make it impossible for the Oilers to trade him).

Too much is subject to chance. Isles owner Charles Wang might have fixed the price of his top goaltender at $4.5 million per year, but a goalie is not an inanimate commodity like porkbellies whose value can be fixed forever at point of purchase.

Hot streaks alternate with rough spells and bouts of confidence on a regular basis. You need look no further for proof than the early travails this season of the Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist, who has given way lately to Kevin Weekes as the starter. No doubt, Lundqvist will regain his touch and his job at some point.

But that speaks to the other major problem posed by a 15-year deal. How does it handcuff a coach in the decision-making process?

If his top goaltender had just signed, say, a five-year deal, would Ted Nolan have hesitated to pull him after a bad first period? Hard to say. Maybe, as Nolan said after the game, it was best to allow the goaltender to fight through a tough situation. There’s plenty of merit to that argument, and Nolan’s decision turned out well.

But did it cross the coach’s mind that he might be viewed as showing up the owner if he pulled the goaltender in that spot? It’s a fair question.

… you wonder if a coach’s control is undermined by a deal of that length in the sense that he has little leverage with a player destined to be around much longer than he is. The same goes for a general manager. If a top goaltending prospect is available in the draft, does Garth Snow take a pass because the franchise only has room for backup types?

The list of “what ifs” goes on and on. Even DiPietro is affected in the sense that he’s keenly aware of the reaction to his contract and, as a competitor, is likely to feel more internal pressure to perform and justify the deal.

There’s simply no escaping the fact that every move the Islanders’ goaltender makes this season — and maybe for many to come – will be judged in the context of his 15-year contract. It’s going to take some getting used for everyone, fans included.

Q. Any touchy moments this season?

A. Rick DiPietro signed a landmark 15-year contract and that’s been a sensitive issue because of some of the negative fan reaction to that kind of long-term obligation by the club. I tried to divorce contract issues from personalities by writing a blog – entitled “The 15 Year Concept” – in which I questioned the whole idea of a 15-year contract for anyone in sports, whether it’s Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron or Rick DiPietro. It creates so many difficult situations for coaches and managers that don’t seem to make sense to me. But because it’s Rick’s contract and fans reacted negatively to him early in the year he took it very personally.

We talked about it and things have been ironed out since then and we’re getting along just fine.

Q. Who can you go to in the lockerroom?

A. Everybody I talk to is highly cooperative. That seems to be the nature of hockey players. Some are a bit more outspoken than others – obviously the captains and alternate captains are very good. Mike Sillinger and Brendan Witt are the alternate captains and Alexei Yashin is the captain – he’s been very cooperative – he sought me out at training camp to ask about my background. Jason Blake and Rick DiPietro are some of the better talkers in the lockerroom and a lot of guys up and down the roster beyond them.

Q. How would you describe the Islanders beat?

A. Like any other beat – it’s covering games and practices and all the news generated by the beat. It has a couple of differences. One, because the profile of the team and the team’s attendance has gone way down since the Stanley Cup years in the early 80s I am the only beat writer who travels with the team on the road. Newsday and the Daily News both staff home games, and occasionally the Post and Times will send someone to cover home games.

But basically I am the only one with the Islanders on a daily basis. Even though you would think that would be an ideal situation for a beat writer to have a minimal amount of competition only at home I still feel the responsibility to cover the news in the same competitive way I would on another beat with several competing reporters. I’m still always trying to focus on the heart of the story and any controversial angles that might come up.

In some ways there’s an even greater pressure on me – I have to ask all the tough questions. I don’t get to share that with anybody – even the radio and TV people wait for me to ask the questions, and they feed off those because they don’t want to be in a position of challenging anyone.

Q. What’s the upside to being the only full-time reporter on the beat?

A. Obviously it’s very important to the club to get their side of the story out, so naturally you have a lot of access at almost all times to people you need to talk to in the organization. Also the players – you’re their source of news, so I think it actually helps the relationships because you both need each other equally to get the message out.

Q. Has access in the NHL improved after the lockout?

A. The NHL has always been good for access and cooperation. Even at the height of its popularity in the 80s and into the 90s it was still at best No. 4 among the major sports in America. It’s always been very media friendly and accessible. I don’t know if the lockout has helped that or not. If they’re not desperate for coverage they should be. You see it in attendance problems all over – particularly in the U.S. teams – and the traditionally strong teams are way down. They have to do whatever they can to raise their profiles.

Q. How would you describe Newsday’s hockey readership?

A. A very vocal group of hard-core Islanders fans who care intensely about the team and are upset about they consider years of mismanagement under a variety of owners since John O. Pickett sold the club 15 years ago or so. They’ve been upset with the decline in performance and the increase in ticket prices so you hear a lot from them. However, the numbers on our website show it goes well beyond that and the Islanders are actually very competitive with other winter sports – primarily with the Knicks – readership runs fairly even with basketball during the winter. So there’s widespread readership and because it’s the only pro franchise on Long Island – unless you count Jets training camp – there’s very strong interest here.

Q. What’s your history covering hockey?

A. When I first moved from Phoenix, my first East Coast job was with the Trenton Times, and my first beat was the Philadelphia Flyers – I covered them for two seasons from 1977 to 1979. When I moved to the Bergen Record in the spring of 1979 I found myself covering a number of Islander games and all through the early stages of their first run to the Stanley Cup because they were a big story at that time. Even though we didn’t staff Islander games we attended a lot of them, and covered all the home games on their playoff runs. I traveled to Boston in 80 and saw Clark Gillies pummel Terry O’Reilly, which was a signature moment of their first Cup run. After covering the NFL for 10 years I covered the New York Rangers in 92-93 when they finished last one year before winning the Cup, and then again in 2000-2001 in the middle of a long seven-year absence from the playoffs.

Q. Some American-born writers are not comfortable with the game – what about you?

A. Yes. Surprisingly so in terms of being comfortable recognizing who is doing well and what’s working and what’s not working. I don’t consider myself an absolute expert because I never played the game, so I take extra care talking to people about strategy and what they’re trying to accomplish and really listen to what they’re saying and their opinions. I normally value athletes’ opinions over writers’ opinions in any sport because they are playing but even more so in hockey.

Q. Where do you go for hockey information?

A. I subscribe to TSN hockey report. Every day I go to the headlinehockey.com website for a compilation of hockey stories around the country. Occasionally I like to go to some of the Canadian websites.

Because he’s been around for so long and he’s the gray eminence of hockey writers, I’ve always checked out what Red Fisher of the Montreal Gazette has to say. I’ve always loved reading Michael Farber of Sports Illustrated. Cam Cole of the Vancouver Sun is an excellent writer I’d forgotten about until recently when I cam across one of his columns – because he left Toronto. Dave Molinari of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has been around forever and probably knows more than any U.S.-based hockey writer and is a very helpful and nice guy. I also read Eric Duhatschek of the Toronto Globe & Mail and E.J. Hradek of espn.com.

Q. Favorite hockey cities on the road?

A. All the Canadian cities. I love being there because it’s the one place a hockey writer can go and be immersed in hockey as the number one sport and nothing else comes first. But some American cities are fun to cover hockey in, including Pittsburgh, and people really care about it in Buffalo. And San Jose, the Shark Tank, is a raucous place. I haven’t been to Detroit this season and won’t get there, but in the past obviously Hockeytown was a good place to see a game. Those are the ones that stick out – and Minnesota – the Wild arena in St. Paul – is a fun place to cover hockey.

Q. What’s more important – being first or being right?

A. Scoops are important. But is it a scoop if it’s wrong? If you’re going to have a scoop you better be right about it. If somebody can prove it’s wrong then all you’ve done is get a headline and stir up discussion and controversy but ultimately you were wrong.

This generally comes up at trade time because general managers have hundreds of conversations with one another and a few of them get out. Sometimes you might be right about a conversation taking place – so I consider that a scoop even if the trade doesn’t go through, because you’re on the right track and have the right principals. But I’ve also been in a situation talking to opposing club officials who knew for certain a particular deal wasn’t going to happen and I wrote it, and that doesn’t get as much attention as the original story saying something might happen. That’s what generate most of the talk – saying something might happen – and why there’s such an emphasis on getting that story. When you get one shooting it down it doesn’t generate as much attention even though it’s correct. I’ve been in situations where I had it correctly before others got off the trade and it just didn’t generate as much attention.

Q. Advice to youngsters trying to break into the business?

A. Any technological expertise you can bring to the business and incorporate into your blogging undoubtedly will help with your exposure. And speaking Spanish would be an excellent tool to have if you want to be a baseball writer. But don’t expect the kind of long careers that my generation has enjoyed because the field is changing at an accelerating pace into something unrecognizable from when I began.

Q. Sidney Crosby or Alexander Ovechkin?

A. The one time the Islanders played Washington I took off – so I haven’t seen Ovechkin. But I can’t imagine anyone better than Crosby. In all the years I’ve covered hockey he may be the best skater I’ve ever seen – not a pure scorer but a skater – and creative and clearly the best in the game right now from my perspective.

Q. Toughest NHL player’s name to pronounce?

A. (lol) There’s a guy on the Flyers named Afanasenkov. Afinogenov in Buffalo is fine. But Afanasenkov in Philly throws me.

Q. What do you do in that case?

A. I know their first name. Always use their first name. In this case – Dmitry.

Q. Is Miroslav Satan evil?

A. It’s Sa-TAN. (rhymes with baton). Like Franken-STEEN!

He’s very nice.

Greg Logan excerpted from Newsday.com, January 9. 2007:

GOALTENDER FOR LIFE: As much as Rick DiPietro might argue otherwise, it appeared to take some time for him to get used to the attention generated by his 15-year contract. Two of his three starts were rough on the opening road trip as he tried to play through a groin injury, and he was booed at home for a series of giveaways in a home loss to Atlanta. But he has gotten better and better, and for the most part, the communication between DiPietro and the defense has improved. His back-to-back shutouts against Columbus and the Rangers around Christmas were the high point, and he pretty much got robbed in the shutout losses that followed at Ottawa and home against the Devils.

When DiPietro minimizes the distractions – that is to say, when he doesn’t get caught fighting for the puck behind the net, doesn’t get caught up arguing with the referees and doesn’t get upset with the defensive breakdowns in front of him – he’s tough to beat. If his emotions sometimes get the best of him, they also are the source of the resilience he’s shown on a number of occasions this season.

But just as backup goaltender Mike Dunham stole two points at Anaheim on that opening trip and steadied the ship until DiPietro recovered from his injury, the Islanders need DiPietro to steady them now and maybe steal a game or two until they start finding the net again. If DiPietro maintains the same consistency he’s achieved lately and Snow can add a little more scoring to the lineup, they may yet finish this season in surprising fashion.

(SMG thanks Greg Logan for his cooperation)

An Interview with Rick Maese

“I’m one of those people obsessed with the business and who views it as a lifestyle more than a job. When I sit down to write a story I will pull a book off the bookshelf. Usually anthologies. Jim Murray, Red Smith, Gary Smith, Ralph Wiley, Dave Kindred. I’ll look through a book for inspiration before I write.”

“As long as you’ve got friends getting laid off or forced out of newsrooms, it makes you question the business. It’s shitty to face some of the realities. Maybe I clung too tightly to the romantic notion planted in me at 14. It’s scary, not for myself, but for the institution of newspapers and the friends who depend on it for a livelihood.”

“Whenever I read the histories it makes me wish I were a sportswriter in a different time. I feel any time other than now was the golden age for sportswriting – not just the history but the access and relationships.”

Rick Maese: Interviewed on September 26, 2007

Position: Columnist, Baltimore Sun

Born: 1979, Albuquerque

Education: University of New Mexico, 2002, university studies

Career: Albuquerque Tribune (part-time); Orlando Sentinel 2002-05; Baltimore Sun 05 –

Personal: single

Favorite restaurant (home): Yin Yankee Café, Annapolis “the closest sushi to my home and you gotta appreciate the ability of the staff to emanate the same friendly-funky vibe as the restaurant décor”, Middleton’s Tavern, Annapolis “the oldest bar in Maryland

Favorite restaurant (road): Sadie’s, Albuquerque “Mexican – every dish is smothered with green chili, tomatoes and seasoned lettuce and underneath is the best Mexican food you can find”

Favorite hotel: any Marriott property

Rick Maese, excerpted from the Baltimore Sun, February 7, 2007:

Good morning and welcome to the most hollow day on the sports calendar, when glitter is computer-generated and celebrity cultivated in a basement, when consequences don’t exist and when we grade our children like sides of beef.

I hope you bought a new mouse for your computer and took the day off work because National Signing Day has arrived. We’ve been sleep-deprived for weeks in anticipation, but it’s finally time; the nation’s top football players show off that fancy education by writing their name on a slip of paper. There aren’t enough exclamation points at the punctuation factory to express what this day means to some. And it’s completely insane.

The day actually illustrates the dark side of high school and college sports. It’s disgusting the way Internet sites that turn a buck off tagging high school athletes with stars have made such strides toward obliterating any innocence still attached to high school sports. The “new media” fan sites inflate kids’ egos, steal fans’ money and make the job of the high school and college coach much tougher.

The Internet recruiting site is a cottage industry suddenly housed in a virtual mansion. The sites wouldn’t exist, of course, if there weren’t a demand, so do we blame the college fans who are so thirsty to hear the future might be bright for their favored team?

On the contrary, I feel bad for the fan who’s paying money and getting little in return. To see how successful these sites are, I dug up Rivals.com’s list of the top 100 recruits from 2002. It includes such stars as Vince Young and Haloti Ngata
, as well as such troublemakers as Maurice Clarett and Marcus Vick.

Of Rivals’ top 100 players that year, 44 fell far short of expectations – including 18 of the 38 highly acclaimed “five-star” players. While one in five managed to eventually earn first-team all-conference honors, one in four managed to either transfer or quit his team.

While you don’t blame Web sites for a talented teenager failing to achieve his potential, you can certainly hold them responsible for building up unrealistic expectations for fans and players.

And you can bet college coaches are sick of three-, four- and five-star players setting foot on campus, thinking they’ve already accomplished something. Today’s football coach juggles more egos than a Hollywood super-agent…

Q. What was reaction to your National Signing Day column?

A. Most of it was negative. A column like that is posted on the message boards I referred to, and the regular visitors of those message boards are going to come to their defense. It doesn’t take much effort for them to send an e-mail. For a piece like that, or some of the reacion we saw this week to the Jenni Carlson column, it illustrates the growing disconnect between the sports media and sports fan. I don’t pretend this is a new observation, but more and more we’re viewed as the enemy, at least that’s the opinion fostered by coaches and players. The people we’re trying to reach and build a bridge of information toward largely despise us.

It’s only getting worse with the message boards and Rivals and Scouts sites. It’s not hard to find hypocrisy with college sports, but the NCAA has to do a better job of regulating those sites that are essentially unofficial branches of the university. The site operators or reporters or whatever they call themselves are allowed to call recruits as much as they want. They’re fans, not trained journalists. We cover Maryland here, and the site operators have written books with coaches they cover. People purporting to be journalists have financial arrangements with coaches and universities. They’re able to call recruits without any kind of oversight.

Q. Do readers grasp the distinction between new media and traditional media?

A. Depends. Readers of new media do. They’re part of the new media – they operate a blog or visit blogs. They feel they’re part of something new and better and more interactive and they feel a sense of ownership over it. They don’t appreciate everything the old media has to offer. I’m not sure a lot of the old media appreciate what it has to offer. We’re a business now run by focus groups and industry workshops and we’re getting away from the things we do best, which is writing and reporting and telling stories.

Suddenly we’re faced with the task of competing at somebody else’s game – we’re told to take video and blog and do audio – all of these things we’re not necessarily trained to do, and told to do it without training of course. Nobody is selling the paper for what it is or highlighting what we can do that a blog can’t. Instead they want us to compete with the blog head to head. We can create our own blogs but it shouldn’t come at the expense of things only newspapers can do.

Q. Who do you read?

A. Everybody. I’m one of those people obsessed with the business and who views it as a lifestyle more than a job. When I sit down to write a story I will pull a book off the bookshelf. Usually anthologies. Jim Murray, Red Smith, Gary Smith, Ralph Wiley, Dave Kindred. I’ll look through a book for inspiration before I write. Every day I’m reading writers all over the country – the list would take up too much time.

Q. You study the craft?

A. I like to think so. I walked into a newsroom when I was 14 and never really left. I started at the Albuquerque Tribune and last month they announced that paper will be closed. It was one of the most devastating things I’ve heard in my life. I was raised in that newsroom around some of the best writers and editors you could imagine. That’s where I fell in love with the business. I stayed at home to go to school so I could continue to work at the Tribune.

Albuquerque is the kind of place where a lot of good writers and editors choose never to leave. I had the pleasure and honor of being around some of the best editors and writers alive. Unfortunately some will be unemployed in the next couple of months. I’m praying they land on their feet out there.

I feel like I’m in a crisis state. This conversation is taking place every day at some point. As long as you’ve got friends getting laid off or forced out of newsrooms, it makes you question the business. It’s shitty to face some of the realities. Maybe I clung too tightly to the romantic notion planted in me at 14. It’s scary, not for myself, but for the institution of newspapers and the friends who depend on it for a livelihood.

Q. What should a good column do?

A. That’s tough to answer. I’ve only been doing it for two years. When I started columns I talked to everyone around who had been doing it longer. I was worried because I wasn’t comfortable doing it after a few months. I surveyed older columnists. They said you might never get comfortable – that’s just a reality of doing it. I can’t necessarily say what makes a good column because what makes it good today might not a week or a month from today.

I know what I like to see does not always match what the reader wants. I don’t enjoy ripping people or clamoring for somebody’s head, though I know readers expect that. I like sharing stories with a unique voice, my voice. It doesn’t have to be a strong opinion but something only I could tell from my seat in front of the laptop.

Q. How do you approach writing about a team as bad as the Orioles?

A. It’s difficult. Just because the team is bad doesn’t mean the passion wavers. The Orioles have had a losing record for 10 straight seasons now. I’m not sure the apathy is as strong as I would have suspected – there is still a large audience of Orioles fans. But it makes my job tougher. You’ve got to find new ways of telling the story or addressing the topic. You’re not going to write about a game in mid-September that has no meaning. Fortunately the Orioles are inventive and creative in the ways they lose. When they lose 30-3 it’s much easier to write about. It mostly means you have to report more and find new ways to tell the story. My last Orioles column I lead with the team chaplain, and in the 30-run game I led with the official scorer who was charged with keeping track of the monstrosity of a scorecard. You’ve got to try harder.

Q. Does it open the door for more humor?

A. I think it does. The team pains the fans more that somebody in the pressbox. Certainly there’s a point in the futility when you’ve got to sit back and chuckle at it. Even the players and coaches and manager do. Journalists reach that point more quickly because we’re not as emotionally involved. You wonder what more can you say critically – do you write every week that the owner is a bad owner? At some point you’re just throwing cotton into the wind – what’s accomplished by repeating it over and over, about an organization that makes the same mistakes over and over. I’m writing the same columns Ken Rosenthal wrote a decade ago.

That’s the challenge only the old media tries to step up to. I don’t know that the new media steps up to that. It’s because we have access. I can find the team chaplain or bullshit with the official scorer. The blogger is sitting at home writing his gut reaction.

Q. What’s with the Ravens defense?

A. If I knew the answer I’d be making a lot more money. There’s something funny in the leadership of the defense we haven’t put a finger on yet. The whole aura of Ray – is it diminished or not, is he the true leader or by name and appointment only – that’s something we have to look into a bit more. SL Price (Sports Illustrated) wrote a piece last year that showed the many faces of Ray Lewis – part of him looks like a phony and part like a true honest-to-goodness believer. I don’t know if anybody but Ray knows what he truly is. Price is amazing. I grew up in the generation idolizing Gary Smith (Sports Illustrated). Other writers who also read Gary are taking a step back and wondering if we appreciate Price enough.

Q. What did you know about Baltimore when you took the job?

A. I had never been here. I knew a bit about the rich sports history and the sports teams. It’s been an education from the moment I stepped foot in town, and it’s continuing today. I have books about the city’s history and the sports history and I have a job where you go out and talk to people every day – the best way to learn.

Whenever I read the histories it makes me wish I were a sportswriter in a different time. I feel any time other than now was the golden age for sportswriting – not just the history but the access and relationships. I only know of it through the stories or the movies – the Baltimore I wake up to every day is different.

Q. What’s in your future?

A. As a writer you want to be relevant. The question is, is a newspaper the most relevant medium to work in? The way my career has gone I don’t know from one year to the next. I never wanted to be a sports columnist – when I wake up every day I still don’t know.

The way I look at the column I’m honing skills I wouldn’t be working on otherwise. I could take it back to long form, which is my true passion and have a stronger voice and a more authoritative approach. In Orlando I did long form. I don’t think I appreciated how difficult the column would be – I’m not sure anybody who hasn’t written four columns a week can appreciate it.

Q. Four seems like a lot.

A. It’s amazing to think about guys who wrote five or six. I have to report a lot because I’m young and don’t have the historical perspective – I probably lean on reporting more than I should or others do, just because I’m not comfortable sitting back on the couch and reacting. Guys who go on TV and have opinions on everything every 30 seconds blow me away. I’m thirsty for three or four opinions a week. To have three or four every ten minutes seems impossible.

Q. Boxing is nearly dead –why write the Mazyck column?

A. I was wondering that yesterday at about 5 o’clock myself. Boxing was one of the first sports I covered. There’s still something romantic to me about covering boxing and horse racing. The boxing I knew early on was full of rich characters – part of me doesn’t want it to die when there are still so many stories to be told. If the sport is going to pass on part of the reason will be evidenced by newspapers or media choosing to stop covering it. Maybe a small part of me feels responsible to keep writing about it. There are still fans out there – a thousand fans will show up to a card in Baltimore tomorrow night. There’s still an audience though I don’t need that as an excuse to write about it.

Q. What’s more important – the intrinsic value of the story or the potential readership?

A. That’s the juggling act. That’s something that is changing a bit – one of the frustrations I have with my job. With the Internet we’re able to quantify the success of a story or column through web hits. Which is good, because it gives ad reps something to shop around to businesses. For editors or writers we can see what is successful, but not in the ways we traditionally judged a story – was it entertaining, informative and interesting to read. This boxing column isn’t going to have more hits than a Ravens piece. We can write anything about the Ravens – we can write about the lunch menu at the practice facility – and it will get more hits than almost anything else. So it’s a juggling act. We’ve got to pursue stories we want to tell, and we have to have faith the audience will be out there.

I try to pick one a week readers aren’t necessarily expecting but is a good story. It can be anything – last week I golfed with an 87-year-old man. Nobody expected that in the paper – and maybe when they finished reading they still wished it wasn’t in the paper. All of them aren’t going to fly but you have to keep swinging. The biggest anxiety I feel on my job is nailing down the right topic. I’m like a drug addict always trying to recreate that first high – looking for a special topic readers don’t expect and as a writer you don’t know what to expect.

Rich Maese, excerpted from the Baltimore Sun, September 26, 2007:

Out of a small boombox, James Brown is preaching about shaking your moneymaker, getting up and staying on the scene, while the Giant’s size 18 feet bounce in steady rhythm on the mat. Way, way up above, the boxer’s meaty hands, each the size of a catcher’s mitt, punch holes in the humid air.

This isn’t a place where a champion tries to get to — it’s the kind of place you want to be from. But if someone were to go looking, we’re in the no-frills boxing gym housed in the basement of a suburban Washington strip mall, as far away from fame and glory as you can imagine. Down the concrete steps and to the left. Under a shoe repair shop and a beauty salon, to be exact. This is fertile soil in the boxing world.

What’s happening in the ring at the far end of the room speaks to either the dearth of talent in the heavyweight ranks, the Giant’s immense potential or maybe both.

“I’m the future heavyweight champion of the world,” says Ernest Mazyck, whom everyone calls Zeus. “There’s not a doubt in my mind.”

Mazyck (pronounced muh-ZEEK) fights tomorrow on a Ballroom Boxing card at Michael’s Eighth Avenue in Glen Burnie. It’s only his seventh professional bout. Mazyck is listed as 7 feet, 325 pounds, which makes him one of three things in a boxing world starved for heavyweights — an oddity, a novelty or a future contender.

For right now, at the very least, it makes Mazyck intriguing. Not only has the sport lost fans to mixed martial arts, but it has lost athletes, too. If you can find a boxing gym — look quickly, because they’re disappearing — you won’t spot many big guys. At the highest level, all four heavyweight champions are foreign-born…

(SMG thanks Rick Maese for his cooperation)

 

Wendell Maxey Jr.: Interviewed on December 1, 2006

Position: New York-based NBA reporter, Basketball News Services; shipping/receiving manager, Pottery Barn

Born: 1974, Osmond, Nebraska

Education: Portland State, 2003, liberal studies, black studies

Career: shoe salesman, 1995; Nordstrom salesman, 96; used car salesman, 97; Pottery Barn 98 – ; Basketball News Services (Hoopsworld.com and Swish Magazine), 2004 –

Personal: married, one daughter (Piper, born November 27, 2006)

Favorite restaurant (home): Sushi a Go Go, Manhattan “never enough but always so good – being from Nebraska I’m a meat and potatoes type guy and sushi doesn’t fill me up – I have to order a lot”

Favorite restaurant (road): Baja Fresh, Portland, Oregon “Mexican fresh -missionary style – I crave it”

From the Basketball News Services website:

Basketball News Services is a full service basketball specific news resource. From first hand interviews and game reviews to back-end content and content services, Basketball News Services provides a full range of professional, collegiate and amateur news products to print, radio, interactive and television media outlets.

Q. You’re a new father – congratulations.

A. Thank you. It’s amazing how things look different – stepping outside even the sunset looked a little different last night.

Q. How does a kid from Osmond, Nebraska get to New York?

A. I’m the youngest of 11 kids. My family moved to Corvalis, Oregon in 1976 and my siblings began to head out on their own. When I was 16 my Dad lost his job and moved us back to Beemer, Nebraska, where my older brother was living and working. I went to high school in Beemer (population 600) and junior college in Norfolk for a year. In ‘95 I moved back out to Portland – where I met my future wife – and we moved to the city a couple of years ago.

Q. How did you get into this line of work?

A. My girlfriend suggested I go back to school – I didn’t want to but she made me – and I started taking classes at Portland State – as a history major before I switched to liberal studies with a minor in black studies. When I finished I didn’t know what I wanted – but I loved writing. I figured if I could do a 13-page history paper what could I do writing about something I was passionate about. Being a country boy from Nebraska sports is part of growing up – especially with 11 kids. I always loved basketball – but I really wanted to write baseball. I’m a diehard Sox fan – one of the first games I remember was Game Six of the 86 Series. I fell in love with the Sox out of sympathy. When we moved to New York in 2004 they had clinched against the Yankees – my wife was crying because we were leaving Portland and I was crying because the Sox were in the Series.

My first thought was writing for a website. I didn’t think I was equipped enough to look at papers. There’s a lot of websites out there – anybody is going to shoot the moon and go for espn.com – but realistically you have to look for smaller websites. First I got connected with collegehoopsnet.com after I sent them a couple of pieces and they liked what I had to say – I did something on Sebastian Telfair. Then I came across hoopsworld.com at Basketball News Services – that’s where I’ve been for the last two years.

I thought it might be a steppingstone to get me in the direction of a newspaper or magazine or quarterly publication – I lacked the knowledge of what they’re looking for from newspaper reporters – and I thought of it as a resume builder to get where I eventually wanted to go.

Q. What do you want to be doing?

A. I think I’ve found it – I’m really excited about where I’m at now – to see how the site has grown with Basketball News Services – putting out a quarterly magazine – and now its getting advertisers. It’s a growing company.

I’m like any writer – I want to write as much and as often as I can for whomever I wish. The beauty of being a writer or sportswriter is not punching the clock, per se, but just moving in that direction – which led me to Hoopsworld. I’ve been rewarded with being credentialed and covering the Knicks the last two seasons, and contributing to Swish Magazine.

Q. Your take on the regular Knicks reporters?

A. I get envious in the media room when I see Marc Berman of the Post or Frank Isola of the News – the beat writers. Maybe it’s like a lockerroom where you have a clique – they see each other more than they see their families – it’s a community. They’re at early shoot-around every day, on the beat, and here I come trying to get my feet wet.

My editor is telling me I have credentials for the Knicks and Nets – but what background do I have? How do I go about it – they don’t tell you – they pretty much throw you into the fire – which is great.

Experience may be the best way to learn rather than J-School – so I feel I have a leg up. But I look around and see guys who have been doing it for 10 years and I’m thinking I want to do that – for the long haul. To have the satisfaction of doing a job and loving it and swapping stories and schmoozing at the arena about away games – I miss out when they’re on the road.

When they’re at home I feel like I’m in there with the beat writers when they’re trying to make their deadline at 11:30. I write after the game – so they can see we’re working toward the same thing – I want to show them I’m not just writing for the website. I want to experience what they are – it’s a kind of osmosis – that’s why I write after the game – I could go home and write. I’m looking to go home to my wife, but when these guys are sitting there writing it’s just so motivating. I want to sit there and hear them sigh or mumble or drop an f-bomb about somebody and be in that element. That’s where the fuel for the passion comes – to be there and hear the keys going – it’s motivating.

Q. So you look at beat reporting as a desireable fraternity?

A. It’s always part of sports. Loving sports as much as I do you love the things that surround it – as a kid you watch the post-game coverage and see the guys in the lockeroom and you wonder how they got there.

Have you seen the trailer for Will Smith’s new film, “The Pursuit of Happyness”, where he says to the guy with the fancy car, “What do you do and how do you do it?” Same thing I think about these guys – watching them covering the games – I’d love to do that. I’d love to be at the arena and feel in the moment – like you’re part of it.

I’m not even in the first four rows. At the Garden sometimes they stick you up in Row 300 with Joe Public. When I covered the Nets and Heat last year in the playoffs I was seventh row baseline. I felt more a part of it.

Q. You have a day job?

A. Yes. I’m a shipping and receiving manager at Pottery Barn. Have been for nine years – 40 hours a week – 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. That’s my regular job.

It’s a company that is people first – they want you to have family outside of work – everybody has side jobs and things they’re aspiring to do. Some love the work. It involves lifting 400-pound dining tables and schlepping to get boxes out – it’s a grind. You have a lot of time to think about what it is you really want to do. Listening to customer is one thing but listening to your heart is more important.

Q. How much time do you spend covering basketball?

A. More than my wife wants me to – I get up at 5. We’re assigned teams to cover and do game coverage – I have the Knicks. Being from Portland I still do a team report on Portland on Saturday mornings and the Cleveland Cavaliers are assigned to me Monday and Thursday.

My first year I covered on a game-by-game basis and I established a relationship with the Knicks. I used the summer to work my tail off and write as much as possible and make contacts and I earned myself a credential for every home game. If the Knicks are at the Garden Monday, Wednesday and Saturday that’s an additional three stories. My editor also likes a one-on-one interview. We work on a daily deadline usually so I have to have something up seven times a week – maybe five or six if the Knicks are on a road trip – but never less than four. You really have to be hungry for it and work for it – that’s what I used the summer for.

Q. What’s a typical game like for you?

A. I might get to the Garden and do a pre-game interview – it might be an exclusive with Jamaal Crawford or Nate Robinson and I might put it up before the game. I always get there at 5:30 for the pre-game shoot-around and grab somebody coming off the court – they’re eager to get out but they’ll take five or six questions before heading to the lockerroom. I try not to run with the pack – if six guys are talking to Marbury I’ll go to David Lee in the corner – to get something unique or exclusive. We talk while they’re walking to the lockerroom.

Then I’m required to do a game-time story – setting the tone beforehand – or I might do it afterward and give the rundown. Do I need to write after the game? – no – but that’s the difference between Bob Ryan and the guy who left as soon as he got his audio and was out the door. One night I stayed late and a week later NBA TV contacted me and interviewed me before the Knicks-Rockets game – 10 minutes. I felt like it was a godsend – if I hadn’t stuck around to write that story they wouldn’t have asked me.

They wanted me to elaborate on Isaiah getting tossed. I took one year of broadcasting at a community college in Nebraska 10 years ago – I looked at what I did and picked it apart – I shouldn’t have said this and I rambled here and needed to be tighter there.

Q. When do you write at home?

A. Usually early in the morning – from 5 to 6. Then I work from 7 to 4, and on game nights I come home, shower – I want to look good and feel good – and get to the Garden by 5:30. On days I’m home I’m researching and constantly checking my e-mail – I feel I have to continually write because you’re only as good as your next story. Why wait for a deadline – there’s so much to write about – especially here.

I’m good with four or five hours of sleep – I don’t know if it’s been God’s way of saying you’ve got a baby coming – but it’s worked for me.

Q. You get by on four to five hours of sleep?

A. I have to. And I want to. I pray about it all the time and that definitely helps. My Dad – Wendell Maxey Sr. – passed away a couple of years ago. He worked non-stop – with 11 kids you don’t have any choice. He worked at a paper mill for years and years, and he worked putting up irrigation systems in Nebraska. He worked construction. He was always at work – when I think about him not being here I think he had to do that – he couldn’t say I want to be a writer – he loved working with wood and crafting but he had to support a family and he was gone all the time – he had to grind it out. It was mixed blessing for me – he passed down his work ethic but he also made me consider going after something I’m passionate about – maybe he wanted to but he never had a chance.

Q. You minored in black studies – does that help you cover the NBA?

A. It definitely does. Different cultural upbringings and lifestyles don’t faze me. Hey, I’m a product of my environment just like African-American people are. I grew up listening to rap – to Public Enemy. I read Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Why not try to understand where somebody else is coming from? I take everything I learned in black studies – it makes me value people more – and I try to see where people are coming from. The idea is to be tolerant and find common ground – so it does help.

Q. Writers you admire?

A. Early on it was Bob Ryan. Most of my impressions of reporters came from “All the President’s Men”, and “Shadow Box” by George Plympton, and “48 Minutes” by Bob Ryan. Those are books you cling to – I always go back to those see how Mr. Ryan turns a phrase or describes details at the Garden. Now that I’m at the Garden more I read the beat writers – Frank Isola just doesn’t pull any punches but he knows not to bite the hand that feeds him. He’s entertaining and candid on his blog – he shoots from the hip and I love that. I read Howard Beck (NY Times) – he does a good job of representing the Times, which I view as a prestigious side of journalism.

The Post and Daily News might be considered rags – they do tabloid journalism – but when I’m at games I see these guys working and I just have to admire them.

Why wouldn’t I want to stay late and work beside these guys and see their work ethic and what they get in their papers. First thing in the morning I look at their stuff to see how they did it versus how I would have approached it. I use their stuff as a training tool – what did they see and hear that I didn’t. When I’m in the lockerroom I observe them to see how they go about it.

Opening night when the Knicks hosted the Pacers I walked into the media room and there was Bob Ryan – Boston was in Washington, what was he doing here – but it’s always great to see these guys.

(SMG thanks Wendell Maxey Jr. for his cooperation)

 

Based in New York, Wendell serves as a NBA Reporter for Basketball News Services. Wendell has covered the NBA as media for the past season. Wendell is available for radio and television appearances.

About Us

By Basketball News Services

Jan 18, 2004, 12:20

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An Interview with King Kaufman

“My demo is genius-level lit majors who chuckle to themselves at even

the most subtle jokes and allusions I throw in, happy in the knowledge that they’re among the few who would get them all, and also pleased at how good-looking they are. Seriously, I don’t know. They seem to be really smart, mostly pretty well educated, a mix of ages that skew older than the Web in general I’m guessing but still plenty of collegiate types. Overwhelmingly American and male. Probably pretty white.”

King Kaufman: Interviewed on July 23, 2008

Position: Sports columnist, Salon.com

Born: 1963, Los Angeles

Education: UC-Berkeley, ’86 BA History, ’89 MJ Journalism

Career: Netguide Live, Montclarion, Berkeley Voice, 1986-89; San Francisco Examiner, 89-1996; Salon, 1997 –

Personal: Married, two kids, 5 and almost 3.

Favorite restaurant (home): Home Plate, Cow Hollow. “Breakfast – I rarely go out to breakfast, rarely go to Cow Hollow, so it’s really a treat when I find myself there.”

Favorite restaurant (away): Janko’s Little Zagreb, Bloomington, Ind., “Steak.”

Favorite hotel: “I don’t travel enough to have a favorite.”

King Kaufman, excerpted from Salon.com, March 8, 2007:

A few weeks ago I mentioned
that I’d hit my 10th anniversary with Salon, and if I can just have another moment here, this column marks the fifth birthday
of this column.

I’d been writing about sports on and off over my first five years at Salon, and the Sports Daily wouldn’t debut for 15 more months.
But when I reviewed ESPN’s first original movie, “A Season on the Brink,” on March 8, 2002, it was my first piece after the boss had said, “How about just writing sports?”

That is: Quit writing about other stuff.

My last non-sports piece had been a feature about a Web site that presented furniture porn.
Like, photos of chairs and tables appearing to get it on. I can’t imagine what David Talbot might have been thinking when he took me off that beat, but when the boss says write sports, you write sports.

I’ve been thinking lately, because of the time of year, that two of the ideas prominent in my columns five years ago have become a lot more mainstream. One is that college basketball teams from so-called mid-major conferences are able to play on the same level as the big-conference powers.

The tide was just starting to turn five years ago, thanks to Gonzaga, but it was still routine for good teams from smaller conferences, teams like Southern Illinois, to get seeded around 12th in the NCAA Tournament while lesser teams from the big conferences were pulling down 4- and 5-seeds. That doesn’t happen anymore, and Cinderella runs by the likes of Vermont, Wisconsin-Milwaukee and George Mason have taught the most casual of bracket fillers that winners can come from anywhere in March.

The other idea is sabermetrics, the rise of which in baseball has been well documented. I was late to this party, just coming to embrace some of the ideas spelled out by Bill James
in the ’80s when I began this column. But even I was ahead of the curve by a bit. Five years ago, it was unusual to see on-base percentage on a TV graphic. Not anymore. Good.

The world hasn’t caught up to my brilliant ideas to remove timeouts from basketball and place-kicking from football, but I’m willing to give you people five more years.

Or until the boss says, “How about just working maintenance?”

Q. How would you describe what you do for Salon? Is it a blog? A

column? How often do you post? And how has it evolved since you

started it?

A. Yes, it’s a blog or a column. The first post after it changed over to

a blog format, which was recently, was about whether it’s a blog or a

column. My conclusion: Call it whatever you want.

I’m not fond of the word blog. It’s not descriptive enough. A blog

can be a 9-year-old’s occasional thoughts about Miley Cyrus or it can

be the best reporter in the world’s essential-reading “Reporter’s

Notebook”-style column. So I still like the word column because that

word carries some meaning. It says, or at least implies, that some

thought, preparation and professionalism went into the writing of it,

that there are certain standards at work, that someone hired you to

do it, so it’s not just something you do on your own. At least one

other person in the world thinks it’s worthwhile. Also, I’m just sick

of the word “blog.” But seriously, anyone calling it a blog gets no

argument from me.

I generally post two to three items a day. I now have the freedom to

post whenever I want to, and so there’s a temptation to just spew. I

try to fight that, to make each item, even if it’s very short, a well-

crafted piece. In that way — being able to post throughout the day,

and having the freedom to write something even if I only have 100

words to say about it, without having to wait until I have a column

that needs or can use an extra 100-word item — it’s different than

it used to be, when I posted once a day, like a newspaper column.

But I think the writing and the voice and the themes are pretty similar.

It’s still me. The method of delivery has changed a little is all.

I think you can see from the syntactical sloppiness of these written

responses that some effort goes into what I publish! A good deal of

what I do is going back and taking out commas and dashes.

Q. How would you describe a typical King Kaufman reader? What’s your demo?

A. My demo is genius-level lit majors who chuckle to themselves at even

the most subtle jokes and allusions I throw in, happy in the knowledge that they’re among the few who would get them all, and also pleased at how good-looking they are.

Seriously, I don’t know. They seem to be really smart, mostly pretty

well educated, a mix of ages that skew older than the Web in general

I’m guessing but still plenty of collegiate types. Overwhelmingly

American and male. Probably pretty white.

Q. Why aren’t there more King Kaufman videos? How would you

characterize your video persona?

A. Well, I just got started, and the producer I was working with, John

Henion of DoublePlay TV, who’s great, left that company, and the

whole thing kind of got put on hold. I’d like to get back into it and

do more. I’m just starting to learn how to do it.

I don’t know what my persona is. That’s one of the things I’m trying to learn about, but I suspect it’ll end up being a lot like my print – if I may use

that word – how about “writing” persona – only on video.

Q. Are you naturally a wise guy or is that just your writing shtick?

A. Probably some of both. I’m a wittier writer than I am in person but I

have my moments in person, especially if I’m among people I know

pretty well. I guess I’m kind of sarcastic and a smartass, though

I’ve gotten better at keeping that in check as I’ve gotten older. I

learned that the world doesn’t necessarily need to hear my every

sarcastic remark and caustic opinion. But if I’m getting paid for it…

Q. Is King your real name? Is Kaufman?

A. If you say King or Kaufman, I turn around.

Q. Other ‘Kings’ you admire?

A. King Kelly? Martin Luther King Jr.? Elvis Presley and Benny Goodman?

Never really thought much about it. King Cobra?

Q. You wrote this about Barry Bonds, “If you can put up a .400 on-base percentage with power, some team’s going to sign you unless you’re actually standing over a dead body with a smoking gun in your hand. And even then, four or five teams will ask if it’s your gun. One or

two will ask if anybody else knows about the body.” What went wrong?

A. We shall see, we shall see, he wrote on July 23. Still a ways to go.

Nobody’s gotten desperate enough yet. I’m still betting someone will.

But if nobody signs him I’d say what went wrong is that I

Under-estimated clubs’ desire to steer clear of public relations and/or clubhouse chemistry problems even at the expense of missing out on

likely improving their team on the field. I might have made the same decision myself, by the way. Not to want him around, that is. I’ll just be surprised if there isn’t some team willing to take a flyer.

Q. After Ahmed Almaktoum won the gold in the men’s double trap,

becoming the first person from the United Arab Emirates ever to win a

medal, you wrote: “I did a double-take when I saw him celebrating

his victory — a Middle Eastern man in a head scarf and an ammo vest

jubilantly holding a shotgun over his head. Whoa! Did I switch to a

news channel?” Which was more amusing, Ahmed or the double trap event?

A. What I wrote was, I hope, amusing. I don’t think Ahmed or the event

were particularly amusing. I like to think I added value there.

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

A. Is it flies that fly in random patterns in search of food? That’s

kind of like me surfing the Web. I don’t really have a system — I

will go here first, then here, then there, same as yesterday. I

don’t really have a go-to site or writer or newspaper or whatever

that I rely on. I cast around. Through the process of that, I kind of

absorb the news.

I have my favorite places. The Baseball Primer newsblog is great for baseball news and commentary, and I wish there was something exactly like it for every sport. Google News is good. Rotoworld is very good. It’s interested in the fantasy angle, but it ends up giving you the news, player by player. On TV there’s the ubiquitous ESPN, though I actually watch very

little ESPN for news. “Outside the Lines” is good, though I don’t catch it very often. I like “Pardon the Interruption,” but again, don’t see it much. I mostly use TV to actually watch events.I have my favorite writers too, but nobody who I must read every day or every time they write.

Q. After Rush Limbaugh’s comment that “football is a lot like life”,

you wrote: “Football is nothing like life. It’s organized and neat

and rational. Everyone is either with you or against you, and the

boundaries are straight lines that are clearly marked. The only sport

that’s like life is bullfighting. And only for the bull.” Is it part

of your job description for Salon.com to put right-wing bloviators in

their place? How do you deal with left-wing bloviators?

A. I think my job is to write interesting things about sports.

Bloviators are often kind of interesting, whether they’re coming from

the right or left. There really aren’t too many of either in the

sports realm.

Limbaugh was interesting to me as a sports character less because of his politics than because of the role he played. He represented the catering of the sports networks to non- or casual fans, at the expense of their core audience, who they pretty much can’t alienate, because hardcore sports fans will put up with anything to watch the game. So ESPN brings in this guy, who has no particular insights or knowledge about football, because he’s famous and has a following and will cause controversy, all of which was

meant to bring in viewers who wouldn’t ordinarily watch football, or football pregame shows.

So, he came in and did his thing. The fact that his thing is right-

wing bloviating was secondary to me. If he were a jazz critic who

came in and tried to shoehorn his jazz agenda into the football

analysis the way Limbaugh shoehorned his right-wing agenda in, it

would have amounted to more or less the same thing. He just would

have referred to people as “cats” more often.

Or, as you suggest, if it were Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky coming in

and spouting uninformed views about football from a lefty perspective

much more in tune with my own, it still would have sucked and I’d

have said so.

Q. What is it about the Bay Area that gives us great stories like

Balco?

A. Nothing. Balco could have happened, has happened, and no doubt is

happening as we speak, anywhere. Haven’t they busted labs and

distributors in Florida and New York? I’m not sure there’s anything

about Balco that couldn’t have happened somewhere else. Maybe it’s

been easier just south of San Francisco, in the high-tech age, to

open a business that nobody knows what the heck you’re doing in there

without anybody really feeling the need to check up on it, because

there are all kinds of business that, even after it’s explained to you what they do, you have no idea what they do. But I don’t know. That’s probably true a lot of places. I don’t go to a lot of industrial parks.

I think I’m going to say there’s nothing really about the Bay Area

that produces better stories than anywhere else with a population as

large and diverse, and there are such places, and also nothing about

Balco that could only have happened here.

King Kaufman, posted on Salon.com, March 28, 2006:

Two sports-fan subcultures collided last week, and it wasn’t pretty, though it all ended up well enough.

ESPN Radio host Colin Cowherd used some material off a Michigan football fan blog, presenting joke questions from a Wonderlic test on his show Wednesday without attribution, as though it were original material. When e-mails started flooding in objecting to the theft, Cowherd fired off a series of rude, taunting responses calling those with complaints whiners.

Almost certainly at the urging of his bosses at ESPN, Cowherd offered a sincere-sounding apology on the air Monday, five days after the incident.

Oddly, this case of radio plagiarism happened the same week conservative Washington Post blogger Ben Domenech’s print and online plagiarism
created a firestorm in political and media circles. Yet beyond the blogs, the Cowherd affair created nary a ripple.

A letter
about the incident headlined “What about radio journalism?” was posted on Jim Romenesko’s blog at Poynter.org and gained no traction with the media pros who haunt that site.

The creators of the M Zone,
the aggrieved football site, had declared themselves
“pissed” last week at Cowherd’s not giving them credit for their work, which was a satire on news reports about Texas quarterback Vince Young having done poorly on a Wonderlic test at the NFL Scouting combine.

The M Zone authors accepted Cowherd’s apology
Monday, writing, “It’s over.”

“We felt powerless,” wrote Yost, one of the M Zone’s founders, in an e-mail to me. “An almost-6-month-old blog against ‘the Worldwide Leader in Sports.’ But we were mad.”

So Yost and his M Zone partner, Benny, who both wish to remain anonymous because they don’t want co-workers to wonder if they spend more time on their blog than they do on their real jobs, asked readers to write to Cowherd and, at the suggestion of a reader, to ESPN ombudsman George Solomon.

A procedural note: I’ve made some minor trims to Yost’s e-mail comments.

“We had no idea the response would be so overwhelmingly positive and the sheer numbers would be so staggering,” Yost writes. “It really seemed to have struck a nerve, not only among the online sports community, but bloggers in general.”

Cowherd fueled the outrage when, according to the M Zone and not disputed by ESPN, he responded to e-mails about the theft with replies such as, “WE WERE SENT IT … WE HAD NO IDEA … BUT THE INCESSANT WHINING … MEANS I WON’T GIVE YOU CREDIT NOW … GET OVER IT
CC”

“Those e-mails were inappropriate,” ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz said Friday, “and we’ve spoken to Colin about them and he admitted he overreacted.” Krulewitz said Cowherd would not be available for an interview, and a call to Cowherd’s producer went unreturned.

Cowherd made an oblique reference to those e-mails in his on-air apology, saying, “I got upset. I took it very personally, because again I take great pride in being unique.”

Cowherd accepted blame for not checking on the origins of the fake Wonderlic test he says a listener sent in without attribution. “I just didn’t do a good enough job checking a hysterical e-mail,” he said, then heaped praise on the M Zone, saying, “It’s very funny. They’re still absolutely killing me, and that’s funny. My bosses made me look at that this morning. They said, ‘You’ve got to see what these guys are doing to you. It’s really good.’ And it is.”

I’ve worked online since the days when seeing a URL on a billboard was a noteworthy event — run, kids, Grandpa’s telling war stories again! — and I’m still interested in the ways the Web interacts and clashes with other media and other cultures.

“Benny, who works in finance, and I were talking and he brought up an interesting point,” Yosts writes. “Benny said, ‘I don’t think the two audiences [sports radio and sports blogs] overlap. With so many choices, sports fans are finding their niche as to where to get their sports info. If they get it online, there is no need to tune into MSM [mainstream media] for the same info — info they don’t control or have feedback on.'”

Case in point: Yost says that the M Zone got a bigger boost in hits Thursday, when sports blogs such as Deadspin
and EDSBS.com
took up its cause, than it got Monday, when a nationally syndicated radio host spent four and a half minutes talking about how funny the M Zone is.

On the other hand — and cautioning that both he and Benny are fairly new amateur bloggers, not experts — Yost writes that he thinks sports blogs and the mainstream media are “merging in a way” as the mainstream becomes more personality-driven.

“With ‘Best Damn Sports Show’ and ‘SportsCenter’ being sold as entertainment instead of journalism, the guy at his computer and the six-figure ESPN anchor are the same guy,” he writes.

And one more point by Benny, as told to Yost: “There is resentment among some sports bloggers of this whole sportstainment culture in the MSM. Many of those fans wants scores and highlights and not schtick.”

I’ve written a lot
about TV networks forsaking hardcore sports fans, who the networks know will watch games and sports news shows no matter what nonsense they have to fight through, to focus instead on attracting more non-sports fans.

But I hadn’t thought about the parallel dynamic Benny brings up. The mainstream sports media, I think, is also becoming more gimmicky, more schtickified, if you will, as it tries to react to and keep up with the looser, more iconoclastic culture of the sports blogs.

It’s impossible not to overgeneralize when talking about “the media,” but I think there’s something to this. The mainstream media, afraid of looking like stick-in-the-muds in comparison with the no-holds-barred world of the blogs, rolls out more and more “edgy” stuff, as they say in TV. More Budweiser Hot Seats and newspaper columnists yelling at each other and in-depth reports about the five most-played songs on Reggie Bush’s iPod.

And the iconoclastic, new-media-savvy, blog-reading hardcore sports fan looks up from his laptop just long enough to say, “Did I miss the Pistons-Sixers highlights?”

Or, as in the Cowherd case, the mainstream media ignores the fusty old staid rules of ethics because, hey, dude, information wants to be free, right? Or the ostensible excuse: “Hey, someone sent us an e-mail. What are we supposed to do, check everything?”

And all the “amateurs” in blogland, the ones who have supposedly turned their back on the MSM and its creaky ways, rise up as one to harrumph, “It’s customary and proper to give credit where credit is due, sir.”

And that’s funnier than a fake Wonderlic test.

(SMG thanks King Kaufman 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)

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 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 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)