Geoff Calkins

An Interview with Geoff Calkins

“You rise and fall on the strength of your work – that’s the beauty of this job – it doesn’t matter if you have a college degree. It only matters if you can relate to your readers, inform, entertain and outrage, and break news and tell stories – it doesn’t make a flip of difference where you went to school.”

“There’s a rhythm to the way anyone writes and when I’m writing I just hear it in my head. Some people hear it with a lot of commas, I don’t hear with a lot of commas…Why do I talk the way I talk or write the way I write – it’s just who you are. I write short sentences, period.”

“In Memphis there’s no universal language. In Boston there’s the Red Sox, in Buffalo the Bills, in Green Bay the Packers…there’s no one sport you can write about and know all the readers will be interested. So I try to reach for the universal that people can relate to outside of sports…I’m not burdened here by too many darn pro sports hiring and firings, transactions and draft picks.”

Geoff Calkins: Interviewed on February 9, 2007

Position: Columnist, Memphis Commercial Appeal

Born: 1961, Buffalo

Education: Harvard, 1983, history; Harvard Law, 1987; Columbia, 1992, MJ

Career: Anniston Star 1992-94; Sun-Sentinel of South Florida ‘94-96; Commercial Appeal 96 –

Personal: married, three children

Favorite restaurant (home): Gus’s Fried Chicken, Memphis “it’s impossible to pick the best barbecue place in Memphis but the best fried chicken is easy. Memphis is on everyone’s list of fattest/unhealthiest/greasiest/most profoundly deep fried cities in America and Gus’s is one of the reasons.”

Favorite restaurant (road): Charlie’s Kitchen, Cambridge, Mass. “the double cheeseburger special, which is all I could afford as a college student – I go back for pure nostalgia – in an ideal world, I’d be able to bring along a Sunday edition of the Boston Globe, circa 1980”

Favorite hotel: Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island. Mi.

Geoff Calkins excerpted from the Commercial Appeal, January 24, 2007:

To clear up any confusion, I would like to say to the media that, no, I have not asked The Commercial Appeal to trade me to the Chicago Tribune or any other paper. I love Memphis. I will continue to defend the CA shirt until the last of my …

Uh, did you say your CA shirt?

Right.

Is there a CA shirt?

There used to be. It said, “It’s all about you.”

And you defend this shirt?

OK, not so much. But I liked it when Pau Gasol said he’s going to continue to “defend the Grizzlies shirt until the last of my days.”

The last of his days? He’s gone from wanting to be traded to wanting to die as a Grizzly?

No, he still wants to be traded.

Then why did he say “the last of his days?”

I don’t know. Why did he say “I love being in Memphis?” If he loves it so darn much, why did he and his parents have a meeting with Michael Heisley to request a trade?

Good point. So, you’re saying Gasol is fibbing?

I’m saying that he’s made a hash of the whole thing. I don’t think Pau is a bad guy, either. He’s one of the most gracious players I’ve ever covered, a player who has been vastly under- appreciated during the course of his time in Memphis. But to ask for a trade this year, after his injury, was a serious mistake. He should have come out and admitted this.

What did he do instead?

He blamed the media.

Nooooooooooooo.

Yes. Can you believe it?

Q. Have you been traded to the Chicago Tribune?

A. I have not been traded to the Chicago Tribune. I don’t have a no-trade clause in my contract, either. I like Chicago – it’s one city I would consider being traded to. When I came to Memphis 11 years ago it wasn’t with the idea this would be my last stop but increasingly I think it will be. I’m dug in here – all three of my kids were born here – and it works. At what point do you trade happiness for the prospect of happiness at another job down the road?

Q. Do readers think of writers as tradable as players?

A. Clearly not. I don’t think people relate to us as they do players. I hope people in Memphis think of me as more a part of the community than any athlete. I have a stake in this place. I don’t think most athletes who come through have a particular stake in Memphis. To the extent that my column is effective, part of the reason is that people understand I’m here as a neighbor.

Readers don’t particularly notice bylines. I did, but that was because since I was twelve I wanted to do what I am doing. I tend to think readers notice column mugs just because they can’t miss them.

Q. Do you think readers are interested in you as a person?

A. I don’t think I write more than a column or two a year that has personal stuff in it. No question as a columnist you are not just the person who is relating the story. You are yourself a personality – you’re Katie Couric a bit – you just are. I don’t think I am indulging myself when I write about something that has to do with my life. For example, I had leukemia as a kid and I once wrote a column about that. Honestly, I think people relate to you as a human being. They turn to you for what feels like a morning conversation, though it’s obviously one-way. My voice is telling them about the world – through my eyes. So to know something about the experience of my life is probably useful. Honestly, the one place where radio helps is it gives a sense of you as a three-dimensional human being. I think it’s useful to occasionally let people into what you’re about.

Q. How many sports columnists went to Harvard and Harvard Law?

A. There’s a small fraternity of Harvard people – John Powers (Boston Globe), Gwen Knapp (SF Chronicle) – writing sports. But Harvard Law is a little wackier. A guy named Paul Attanasio went through Harvard Law and then became a screenwriter and TV producer. It’s always been my view that if you go to a liberal arts school and you’re good at school and you get out and think the world will embrace you and shower you with money and a wonderful position of responsibility and then you find it’s a lot harder than you thought – a lot of those people go to law school because it’s a path. They’re told they can do things with a law degree, and unlike medical school you don’t need organic chemistry to go.

I was good at school and I applied to see if I could get in, and then you get in and you think “Omigosh I can do anything with a law degree”. The truth is, you can do anything in spite of a law degree. It’s awfully expensive general education. I went out of a sense of need for a path in my life and found myself at age 30 quite unhappy working at a big DC law firm.

Q. How did you get from law to writing a column in Memphis?

A. When I went to school in Boston I knew it was a privilege to be reading the great Boston Globe, with Bob Ryan and Leigh Montville and Peter Gammons. I graduated from Harvard in 1983 and from the Law School in 1987 – so I was in Boston for 7 years with one year off – and for the Globe to arrive at my door every morning was a gift. I knew then I was reading a great sports section.

As an undergrad I had done a newspaper internship at Time-Life and the Miami Herald. Doing the summer internship after my senior year in Miami I was going to city council meetings – it wasn’t fun, and I honestly didn’t think I would like it. And even though I knew I wanted to be a sportswriter I thought it wasn’t respectable. I took the news internship because a guy from Harvard should be serious enough to do news and I didn’t like it.

I clerked for James Buckley on the U.S. Court of Appeals in DC. Then I went to a law firm called Hogan & Hartson and was there for 2 1/2 years before I took a leave of absence to go back to J-School at Columbia. It was a way of putting my toe in the water – I didn’t have to quit the law firm. People say I was courageous but I wasn’t that courageous. I started looking for jobs and the only one was in Anniston, Alabama, a 12-week internship for $225 a week. The Star was a good paper better known for its news side – I spent two years there.

I got a great break when Fred Turner, the SE in Fort Lauderdale – he took pride in finding talent off the beaten path – saw my resume on his desk. Gordon Edes was the baseball writer, a good friend, and he had just covered the inaugural season of the Marlins and wanted to be the national baseball guy for the Sun-Sentinel. I was 32 and all I had done was a year-and-a-half at Anniston – I wasn’t steeped in baseball and didn’t have the foggiest idea of what I was doing. Fred hired me – I went from making $15,000 to $50,000. Fred is responsible for my career – he also hired Gene Wojciechowski, Mitch Albom, Gordon, Bill Plaschke, Dave Hyde, Randy Mell and probably Steve Hummer.

So that was a great opportunity and he took a huge chance on me. After two years there I got this column, in January ’96. At the time it was less than four years after I finished at Columbia.

Q. Did your resume, with Harvard Law, make you stand out?

A. It probably made me stand out in this great sea of people applying. You notice. Honestly, there were times early on I felt some resentment that I got this job because of my bizarre background. But I did those things – I accomplished those things and they are a part of who I am. If in the end it helped me get the job I’m not ashamed of that. I don’t think it has anything to do with how effective or ineffective a columnist I am. Very few times have I been called upon to use legal knowledge.

You rise and fall on the strength of your work – that’s the beauty of this job – it doesn’t matter if you have a college degree. It only matters if you can relate to your readers, inform, entertain and outrage, and break news and tell stories – it doesn’t make a flip of difference where you went to school. No question I leveraged a law degree to get people to notice me early on but in the end you’ve got to do the work.

Q. Anything from your legal training applicable in writing a sports column?

A. In “The Paper Chase” the professor says, “you come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer”. I don’t think lawyers think any different than any other group of human beings. In law school you have to present an argument in a logical fashion and write – same for a columnist. From that perspective there is some overlap in terms of the skills, but honestly, it took a lot more discipline to be a lawyer. There were times I would will myself through the day – take a deep breath and say ‘three more hours of working on this brief or interrogatory’. The idea of willing myself hour-by-hour was so repugnant – that’s why I stopped.

Here, in the act of writing a column I take the same breath – okay I have to address the task at hand – but the talking to people and making phone calls and finding stories doesn’t feel like work to me. Putting my brain to paper feels like the sort of work I did as a lawyer, but the rest of it is mostly an outgrowth of who I am: sit next to me on an airplane and I’ll probably know your life story by the end of the flight. You have to be naturally curious and interested in people’s stories and people’s lives. The writing is the real labor – that’s the same as being a lawyer.

I’m one of nine kids – I was the eighth of nine. Three are doctors – I was the third lawyer. Every one of us is hyper-professional – my parents thought they created a bunch of monsters. They were happy to see me do what I wanted to do – they knew I was ill-suited for the law before I knew it.

Q. You write with frequent one-sentence grafs – Bob Ryan’s pet peeve – any reason?

A. I think I overdo it at times. There’s a rhythm to the way anyone writes and when I’m writing I just hear it in my head. Some people hear it with a lot of commas, I don’t hear with a lot of commas. I did it more early in my career, but at times I think it’s a bit of a rut I fall into. Basically I write the way I hear it – it’s not for effect or anything else. Why do I talk the way I talk or write the way I write – it’s just who you are. I write short sentences, period. I would never voluntarily put myself into the same graf as Hemingway or Faulkner who each had different styles, but I don’t know that there’s controversy if you like one over the other. Do you like the way I do it or do you like the way someone else does it?

Bob Ryan writes very differently than I do – I liked Bob Ryan but when I was reading the Globe every day but I loved Leigh Montville. I’m not comparing myself to Leigh Montville but he doesn’t write like Bob Ryan – and I thought Leigh Montville was it. Different strokes. I related to Leigh Montville. People will ridicule Mitch Albom (Detroit Free Press) now because of jealousy and other things but I loved him coming up – I thought he was a different kind of sportswriter – he wrote with different rhythms. He wrote about people in a way Bob Ryan doesn’t. I think I write about people differently than Bob Ryan.

Geoff Caulkins excerpted from the Commercial Appeal, February 1, 2007:

DAVIE, Fla. – Each night, at slightly before midnight, Betty Jones would strap on her head lamp, and her battery, and then she would say a small prayer.

She would pray for her seven children, back sleeping in their beds. She would pray for her husband. She would pray that she would see them all again when her shift was done.

Then she would get in a small cart, smaller than a golf cart. And the cart would jolt to a start, and enter the yawning mouth of the cave, and begin its long trip through the tunnels and into the mountain.

Sometimes the trip would take 10 minutes. Sometimes, half an hour. And then the small cart would stop, and Betty Jones would step out, and work in the darkness for eight hours.

She would cut coal from the wall of the mountain. She would shovel it onto the endless conveyer belts. She would stop for 30 minutes, and try to find a place to eat her meal, and then she would cut and shovel until her shift was finished.

Q. Your Betty Jones (mother of Bears RB Thomas Jones) story was touching – how did that come about?

A. At the Super Bowl anytime you can talk to someone – as opposed to talking to Thomas Jones with 700 other people – you do it. I talked to the mama who went down to the coalmines – her story is an unbelievably compelling American story. She didn’t go to college, and her husband didn’t, but she went to the coalmines for 21 years. They have seven kids and everyone goes to college – it’s an American saga. I’m not the sort to write about Thomas Jones and whether he has the cutback ability against the Colts defense – but the saga of Thomas Jones is universal and compelling. The hard-core sports fan will relate to it but the person not particularly into sports will relate to it too.

In Memphis there’s no universal language. In Boston there’s the Red Sox, in Buffalo the Bills, in Green Bay the Packers. I guess the Memphis Tigers basketball team could be – but there’s no one sport you can write about and know all the readers will be interested. So I try to reach for the universal that people can relate to outside of sports – that becomes the column language. Talking about the American Dream in front of you at the Super Bowl – that strikes a chord. In Boston I couldn’t write about Jack Williams, an 11-year-old kid who hit a foul shot on the day of his mother’s (pre-funeral) visitation. In Memphis I can. That’s part of the privilege of writing here. I was thinking about going to the NBA All-Star Game this year and I realized there is nothing I can find there that will be among the memorable columns I write – Jack Williams was. I’m not burdened here by too many darn pro sports hiring and firings, transactions and draft picks. I have enough to keep me entertained.

Q. My impression is that your arsenal does not include vitriol.

A. John Calipari will tell you I have vitriol in my arsenal. Mike Fratello will tell you I do.

Brian Davis thinks I have vitriol – I wrote about his clownish effort to buy the Grizzlies. When Michael Heisley put the team on the market a year ago he had a bid to buy the team from two people, Brian Davis and Christian Laettner. Everybody knew it wouldn’t come through, but in the meantime Jerry West’s hands were tied, he couldn’t trade or fire anybody. The whole thing has gone into the toilet, and I blame ownership as much as anything else.

I hope I don’t have vitriol in my arsenal. It is odd, if you separate columnists into categories, I am probably one of the kinder and gentler. I write human issues as they come up. I had a conversation with Bob Kravitz (Indianapolis Star) – we were talking about Joe Posnanski (KC Star) and he said, “Yeah, he’s too soft for me – my job is to make arguments four times a week.” Well, mine isn’t. I don’t.

I cover college sports. In college sports the vitriol can only be directed at the coaches and what college sports have become. Unless an athlete has dragged his girlfriend down the stairs I don’t think it’s appropriate to hammer a kid. When it comes to civic issues – whether to build a stadium or not – I can get fairly worked up. I like to think I have three pitches – humor, feel-good or human stories, and hard-hitting on issues when I have to be. But I don’t do humor like Tony Kornheiser, I don’t do human stories like Mitch Albom and I don’t do hard-hitting like Michael Wilbon.

So I try to mix it up. Some of it is who you are writing to. If I were Chicago I don’t know that it would work next to Jay Mariotti – I don’t know if it would be effective there, but I would write a little differently because people are more quick to perceive you as being unfair in Memphis than in Chicago.

Oddly, in Memphis I am considered a hatchet man by many – my first two weeks here a guy wrote me and said I shouldn’t buy a house because of the way I wrote – I would be run out of town. Coming from South Florida, which was so competitive, I was astonished.

Calipari made a big deal that the only time he sees the Commercial Appeal is when he backs over it on his way out the driveway. So I’m Calipari Enemy No. 1 – some of it is just because of where I write – there’s a different sensibility down here.

Q. How is the Commercial Appeal business-wise?

A. We have had some reduction in staff – some layoffs and some vacancies not filled. I find the whole thing to be incredibly discouraging, looking around the industry. From my perspective the impact has been on deadline – we’ve zoned our paper so that in suburban Memphis it’s not called the Memphis Commercial Appeal, it’s called by the name of each suburban town. We do each zone edition separately. The consequence is that the sports deadline has moved from 11:30-11:45 to 10:30-10:45. That hour makes a huge difference. I write fewer gamers than when I first got here. You have to make a choice between writing a cogent column with complete sentences and talking to people in the lockerroom. Increasingly I find I can’t get to the lockerroom.

Q. And yet lockerroom access is what distinguishes newspapers from blogs.

A. Gary Parrish covered Memphis basketball for this paper and is now the national writer for CBS Sportsline. He is able to go to the games, watch, go into the lockerroom, think and write. I am jealous. The idea of watching a game without having three different versions of a column going seems like some kind of dream.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to read 5,000 words online. Breaking news is great online. But it’s hard to believe a lot of readers will read 5,000 words online, whereas if you pick up a magazine you will. Some things seem to fit in one medium better than another.

Q. How much radio do you do?

A. Two hours every morning, Sports 56, WHBQ. It’s a call-in show with George Lapidus – he does the heavy lifting. Gordon Edes is our regular baseball expert during the baseball season; Sam Smith does basketball. I do it to put a little extra bread on the table. If I won Powerball tomorrow I think I’d keep writing a column but I’d probably stop doing radio. I’ve got three boy, 9, 6, and 5. One of the payoffs of this job is that days generally are flexible. I used to make breakfast and take the boys to school but with the radio show it’s harder.

Q. Writers you admire?

A. Gary Shelton (St. Petersburg Times). Bill Plaschke (LA Times), Joe Posnanski (KC Star), Dave Hyde (Sun-Sentinel), Martin Fennelly (Tampa Tribune) – I’m stunned by how many good ones there are, honestly. Mike Vaccaro (NY Post). My dream staff would be Plaschke, Posnanski and Shelton. A guy who is underrated is Mike LoPresti (USA Today). He always sets himself up to write the right column and he works incredibly hard at finding interesting slightly offbeat columns.

Q. How do you stay informed?

A. I get the New York Times delivered. The Commercial Appeal. Sportspages.com – I am a subscriber – I actually expense it to the Commercial Appeal. I’m all over the Internet basically. My best friend in the world is Charles Fishman – a Harvard classmate – he wrote “The Wal-Mart Effect”. He doesn’t know a damn thing about sports but I talk to him five times a week about the art and craft of storytelling. He read me every chapter of that book aloud before it was published. Every important column I write I read to him aloud. At any paper you’re lucky if you get great guidance from editors, though it’s not inconceivable. You have to go to people you can rely on and trust. In Fort Lauderdale it was Gordon Edes. Here it was Geoff Grant, who is now a mucky-muck at mlb.com. He was an assistant editor here and he was that kind of guy.

Once you find someone you can talk with about writing and storytelling you keep him forever. I still call Gordon and ask him what he thinks of this or that – you have to assemble your own staff of editors. I’m not so confident that I think every idea I have is a good one. I like to bounce things off people. You have to find people whose judgment you trust. When I got here Geoff Grant said my column didn’t do it for him – I trusted him enough that I’d take another run at it. I don’t trust everyone. I take it to my kitchen cabinet and ask them about it. Editors can be great editors but not invariably so. Even if they are they may not relate to your style.

Discussions such as you have on your site don’t happen in the newsroom anymore – there’s very little discussion about writing newspapers, or how you do the job. It’s just ‘please do the job’.

Given the customs of today you don’t have to come into the office, and you can’t ask the writers to come in – there would be rebellions if you did. But there’s definitely something lost by not having a community of writers and reporters kicking things around.

Q. Do you blog?

A. I’m supposed to, but I’ve resisted it. I find I’m busy enough writing four columns a week and the radio show. I admire people who pull it off – John Canzano (Oregonian) does a good one.

Q. Worst team – Celtics or Grizzlies?

A. Celtics. The Celtics are 4 1/2 point underdogs tonight at home to the Nets. The Grizzlies are 2 1/2 point underdogs at home to the Timber Wolves. The advantage the Grizzlies have is they play in the west. Boston has to play Atlanta and Charlotte – teams they might beat by mistake. The Grizzlies will have an easier road to being the worst team, but I admit I am dazzled by what the Celtics have done in their losing streak. Their last win was here. I hate to say the future of the Grizzlies in Memphis could be at stake in this draft lottery, but it might be. Right now the franchise is in dismal condition from the ownership on down and it might take Greg Oden or Kevin Durant to save them.

Q. Who loses in a playoff for worst team – Celts or Grizzlies?

A. I think they split. Memphis beats them in Boston and Boston beats them here.

(SMG thanks Geoff Caulkins for his cooperation)

One-sentenc

Phone 901 488 9055

About Geoff Calkins

Some people say Geoff Calkins is brave. Could be he’s just nuts. Ten years ago, Calkins worked as a labor and employment attorney at a 500-lawyer firm in Washington, D.C. He had an undergraduate degree from Harvard College, a law degree from Harvard Law School and a future paved with . . . “Interrogatories,” Calkins says. “Billable hours, too.” This did not please him. Besides, Calkins really wanted to be a sports columnist. So at age 30, he junked it all — “came to my senses,” is how he puts it — and found a job covering high school sports in Alabama. Five years later, after a stop in Ft. Lauderdale, Calkins found his way to Memphis. He writes four columns a week and still doesn’t make as much as he did as a first-year associate at the law firm. “On the bright side,” he says. “I also don’t have to wear socks.” Calkins can be reached by e-mail
or by telephone at 901-529-2364.

Sports

Pau asked to be traded, and all I got was this stupid shirt —

Geoff Calkins

919 words

24 January 2007

The Commercial Appeal

Final

English

Uh, did you say your CA shirt?

Right.

Is there a CA shirt?

There used to be. It said, “It’s all about you.”

And you defend this shirt?

OK, not so much. But I liked it when Pau Gasol said he’s going to continue to “defend the Grizzlies shirt until the last of my days.”

The last of his days? He’s gone from wanting to be traded to wanting to die as a Grizzly?

No, he still wants to be traded.

Then why did he say “the last of his days?”

I don’t know. Why did he say “I love being in Memphis?” If he loves it so darn much, why did he and his parents have a meeting with Michael Heisley to request a trade?

Good point. So, you’re saying Gasol is fibbing?

What did he do instead?

He blamed the media.

Nooooooooooooo.

Yes. Can you believe it?

Sports

Don’t boo Pau; this ain’t the opera

Geoff Calkins

1174 words

27 January 2007

The Commercial Appeal

Final

English

To boo or not to boo, that is the question.

Or maybe you think that lead is hopelessly weary and cliche.

In which case you might already be booing over your breakfast cereal.

Boooooooo!

What a hack!

Can’t you do any better than that, writer boy?

So at least you’re in the proper frame of mind. Because booing really is the issue of the moment.

Do you boo Pau Gasol when he makes his first appearance at home since asking to be traded away from Memphis?

Do you boo him whenever he touches the ball? Do you limit your booing to the introductions? Do you stay silent?

On the Grizzlies message board, there is a long thread about all this.

From a poster named Al: “I know everyone is PO’d at Pau right now, and rightfully so, but let’s take the high road and not boo him on Saturday.”

From a poster named DaBobs: “Boooooooooooooo!”

So which is it, sports fans? To boo or not to boo? Is it better to offer the slings and arrows …

There you go, with that weak stuff again, writer boy.

Boo! Hiss! Boo!

umps of coal were Bear RB’s great gift

Geoff Calkins

1305 words

1 February 2007

The Commercial Appeal

Final

English

DAVIE, Fla. – Each night, at slightly before midnight, Betty Jones would strap on her head lamp, and her battery, and then she would say a small prayer.

She would pray for her seven children, back sleeping in their beds. She would pray for her husband. She would pray that she would see them all again when her shift was done.

Sometimes the trip would take 10 minutes. Sometimes, half an hour. And then the small cart would stop, and Betty Jones would step out, and work in the darkness for eight hours.

At which point, she would climb in the small cart again, and begin the trip back up through the tunnels, out of the yawning mouth of the cave, and into the morning sunlight.

She would shower. She would try, in vain, to wash away the coal dust.

And before she went to sleep, she would drive home and make breakfast for her seven kids.

Usually, she made pancakes.

What would you do for your children?

Anything, of course. All of us would.

But would you do what Betty Jones did? Would you spend the equivalent of 1,667 full days – or 4 1/2 years – living underground, in the darkness, breathing black dust, wondering if the next groan of lumber would bring a mountain down on top of you?

Would you do this so your seven children could go to college? So two of your sons could grow up strong and fast and play running back in the NFL? So one of them could play in the Super Bowl?

December 24, 2006

The kid stepped out of the crowd, grabbed the basketball and the cheer began to fill the gym.

“We want Jack! We want Jack!”

Jack tried to keep a straight face.

“If Jack hits this shot,” said the guy with the microphone, before stopping himself.

“When Jack hits this shot,” he corrected, “please don’t rush the court and mob him.”

It seemed a sensible precaution, given the stakes. Jack, who was then a fourth-grader at Presbyterian Day School, measured the distance to the basket.

“I’m a terrible free-throw shooter,” he said. “I usually hit, like, 4 out of 10.”

This was one shot. This was a shot he would remember all his life, whether it bounced out or fell true.

“I was a little bit nervous, but I tried to put that in the back of my head,” Jack said. “I knew if nervous took over my body I wouldn’t make it.”

Jack balanced the ball on his fingers, the way his mother had taught him. He bent his knees and extended his arm and the crowd had fallen silent by now.

The ball spun toward the rim.

“Even today, thinking about it gives me goose bumps,” said Lee Burns, the headmaster of the school.

Except, the shot looked to be short. Everyone who saw it said so.

“I thought it was short,” Jack said. “And then…”

Sports Illustrated picked Dwyane Wade as its Sportsman of the Year, and I suppose that’s a reasonable choice. He won a championship with the Miami Heat. He seems to be a decent enough guy.

Also, the people at Sports Illustrated probably never heard the story of Jack Williams. He’s only 11, after all.

Jack didn’t win an NBA title. He wasn’t on network TV.

But for the several hundred who crowded into the PDS gym on March 9 of this past year, Jack became the freckled embodiment of everything good and pure about sports.

“Nobody planned it,” said Burns, 38, the headmaster. “It just unfolded the way it did. And I don’t think anyone in that gym will ever forget what they saw that day.”

They saw a boy in pain, at first, grieving the death of his mother two days before.

Michelle Williams, 44, died after a nearly two-year struggle with acute lymphocytic leukemia. She left her husband, David, and three children, Chip, Jack and Mary Margaret.

You can imagine the darkness of those hours, the quiet planning of the funeral, the somber gathering of family and friends.

As it happens, the student-faculty basketball game at PDS was scheduled for the same day as the visitation. A friend offered to take Jack to the event, just to take his mind off things.

Basketball had always been a happy distraction in the Williams household. David, Jack’s father, was crazy about the game.

But Michelle had the touch. According to family legend, she hit 21 consecutive free throws on the hoop in the driveway when she was seven months pregnant with Chip.

“We believe that’s a family record that will never be broken,” David said. “Whatever ability the children have, they got it from her.”

At PDS, the student-faculty game is a raucous affair, pitting the sixth-graders who are about to graduate against their teachers. The whole school shows up to watch.

“We had no idea Jack would be there,” Burns said. “But we looked up shortly before halftime and there he was. So we started thinking, ‘Is there something special we can do for Jack?’ We had been bringing students out to hit foul shots for pizza or some little prize. We decided, when the game was over, we’d bring Jack out for something bigger.”

Ahhhh, but what?

“What’s bigger for boys than two nights with no homework?” Burns said.

So that was the answer. They would have Jack shoot to win the school a two-night homework reprieve.

“I had no idea it was coming,” Jack said. “They just announced it and the crowd pretty much went crazy.”

What a great idea, eh? No homework! All Jack had to do was …

Then it occurred to some of the plotters: What if Jack missed?

“He won’t miss,” Burns said.

No?

“It’s one of those things I just knew,” Burns said. “Every once in a while, God whispers something to you. He was going to use this moment to help this boy get through a difficult, difficult time in his life.”

Jack stood at the foul line and bounced the ball. He looked brave and confident and all alone.

“I remember thinking, in roughly an hour and a half, this boy will be standing next to a casket with his mom’s body in it,” Burns said. “How do you block out that?”

Jack released the shot.

“Everyone who was there told me they thought it was going to be short,” said David Williams.

“And then my mom carried it into the hoop,” said Jack.

Just like that.

She always did have the touch.

“It hit nothing but net, no rim, no backboard,” said Burns. “It was the cleanest swish I have ever seen.”

Naturally, the PDS kids ignored everything they’d been told about not rushing the court. It was boy bedlam and it was headed straight for Jack.

“I had to run away from them,” Jack said.

The kids caught him, of course. And pounded him on the back and and gave him triumphant piggy-back rides.

“I’ve never been so happy to have boys disobey me,” said Burns. “The school was looking for a way to shower Jack with love and that was their chance.”

And then, it was back home for Jack, and into his dark suit, and off to the visitation and a lifetime without his mom.

The shot didn’t change any of that. There’s a limit to what games can do.

But the shot helped Jack through one of his darkest days. It gave him a reason to smile and to believe that, yes, his mother is watching over him still.

“A sporting event was able to uplift the spirit of a boy,” said Burns. “What’s more powerful than that?”

To reach Geoff Calkins, call him at 529

One of the great fallacies of the law is that you think you’re out there standing up in court with your clients. The law as I practiced it was not a social endeavor – it was being at the library grinding through documents. You have all these social people and they become lawyers so they can put their talent to use and they find themselves for five years grinding away. A good day for me as a lawyer was a 14-hour stretch looking through documents or looking for precedents for this brief or that brief. Oddly, at its highest levels it can be a lonely profession. When I clerked for James Buckley it was the judge and three clerks wrestling with intellectual problems of the law. I’m not an intellectual. It takes a true intellectual to love that job.

John Canzano

An Interview with John Canzano

“Five years ago I didn’t know about Freedom of Information requests. I couldn’t live without it now. You can get a lot of good stuff – budgets and coaches’ contracts – the contract details are invaluable.”

“I align myself with Joe Fan who has kids and wants to be entertained and doesn’t want to be worried about whether the power forward is drag racing with a gun in his car. That happened with Zack Randolph on Broadway over the summer.”

“I once locked myself in a meat locker that was minus-5 degrees to simulate what it’s like for Bret Favre on a frigid day in Green Bay. It wasn’t a good idea. I lasted 22 minutes and I was bundled up…My computer battery drained in less than 20 minutes.”

John Canzano: Interviewed on November 2, 2006

Position: Columnist, The Oregonian

Born: 1970, Medford, Ore. (grew up in Bay Area)

Education: Cal State – Chico, 1995, English

Career: Gilroy Dispatch, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Fort Wayne News Sentinel, Fresno Bee, San Jose Mercury News, Oregonian 2002 –

Personal: single

Favorite restaurant (home): South Park, Portland

Favorite restaurant (road): Original Joe’s, San Jose, “no better burger in the Bay Area”

Favorite hotel: Marriott “anywhere”

John Canzano excerpted from The Oregonian, September 19, 2006:

The seventh threatening telephone call at Gordon Riese’s home came a few minutes after eight o’clock on Monday morning. It was from an Oklahoma fan who told Riese, the Pacific-10 Conference replay official from Saturday’s Ducks-Sooners game, he was going to fly to Portland, find the family home, and kill Riese and his wife.

“I called the police,” said Riese, 64, “then, I unplugged the phone.”

The deputy who arrived to take the report assured Riese that murderers don’t typically alert their victims before flying in from out of state to commit the crime. Then, the deputy added, “Maybe you should leave town for a couple of days, if it makes you feel better.”

Football is a game, you’re thinking.

Q. You were the only reporter Gordon Riese talked to. Why?

A. I went in the right way.

Q. How?

A. I found his daughter. I figured if anybody would be agonizing for him it would be his kid. I called her and told her how I would handle the column. She facilitated it. He would have said “no thanks” to me but she told him that this thing was going against him and he needed to get his side out there.

I also think people know I’m my own person because of the heat I take for the Blazers stuff I write. They know I’m not going to buckle.

Q. How did you find his daughter?

A. Public records. Voter registration.

Without sharing too much… we have access here at the newspaper to DMV, criminal records, property tax records, licenses, liens, court records, USPS change of address, etc. I use all of these. I was able to determine that his daughter had a different last name but had shared an address. I then found her using voter registration.

If I had struck out, I would have found another way, or located her home address through property records, and just dropped by to talk.

Q. Those are news reporters’ tools.

A. It helps to have editors who have worked in other areas. Five years ago I didn’t know about Freedom of Information requests. I couldn’t live without it now. You can get a lot of good stuff – budgets and coaches’ contracts – the contract details are invaluable. You can see how it’s structured – if there’s an extension date and it hasn’t been extended you know he’s in trouble.

Q. Do you have police sources?

A. Yes. That’s standard. You’re finding more sports departments bringing in editors with expertise in cops and courts. Two years ago the Oregonian’s crime team leader transitioned into the Deputy Sports Editor position – finally we had somebody who knew his way around the courts.

Two stops prior to coming here I was covering Fresno State, which had Jerry Tarkanian and all their incidents. I got experience with public records and developed police sources. Sources talk to me simply for the fact they know I’m not beholden to any team or organization. If something is wrong they can talk to me and know that I know what to do with the information. A lot of times the police can’t prosecute – they might not have enough evidence – but they can get a message out if somebody will listen to what they’re saying.

Q. Can a Blazer get a drink in town without you knowing about it?

A. Yes. But a lot of times they get a drink and I know about it and it’s not relevant and doesn’t end up in the paper. We had an incident with Darius Miles recently…you get a call and Darius is at a bar – ‘Henry’s’ – having a mixed drink. You get repeated calls – which is alarming because he showed up to practice once last season smelling like alcohol – and you pay attention. You make the call to the team and they think he’s getting treatment at the practice facility. Combine that with the fact that the team was getting dressed for its final exhibition game, and he’s one of the highest-paid players, and it’s newsworthy. Darius was at a strip club one night and people called. I said, “There’s nothing illegal about it.” He played that night. As long as performance isn’t affected and the police don’t care I don’t have much interest in it.

Q. I’m going to read from a column you wrote recently (October 28):

The next day, just before tip-off, a taxi pulled up to the steps of the Rose Garden. A twentysomething blonde slipped out of the taxi and headed toward Will Call, where she collected a complimentary ticket and came through the turnstiles.

She told me she had been flown from Seattle to Portland by one of the Lakers players and had spent the night in his hotel room. She then explained, “The hotel doors of the other players were swinging open and closed all night there were so many different women coming in and out.”

It’s a scene that goes down all the time in the twisted culture of the NBA.

Do the Blazers consider themselves part of a “twisted culture”?

A. Players don’t. I think they view what’s going on as normal – the permissive attitude is caused by the salaries they’re making and by being coddled their entire youth – an extended youth. They feel entitled. I’m talking in general because there are some good guys in every lockerroom. But there are a lot of yahoos.

Management is so focused on the bottom line – the league is more concerned with image – that management is focused on day-to-day operations and marketing the team and selling tickets. They don’t look at the culture – that’s the league’s issue.

Q. Do the players resent being referred to as a “twisted culture”?

A. They don’t see themselves in it. When you talk to players they think it’s guys on other teams – they don’t see their roles in it. We had four Jazz in a restaurant at closing time, good guys, but they didn’t want to leave and they basically said, “How much money will it take to keep the restaurant open? What’s it going to take? We’ve got money.” Nothing is above reproach. That attitude permeates into other aspects.

We’ve had a rash of 911 calls involving NBA players in this community – two in six weeks although prosecutors say they don’t have enough to make a case. Prior to that there were other incidents with Blazers and visiting teams.

I view myself as a representative of the community and there are females in this community and if players are going into restaurants hassling them I have to say something.

The league has a problem in that there are no female executives in power. It would be healthy if the players could see a female in a position of power. The Blazers have one female vice-president out of seven – she’s in charge of marketing and outside sales. That’s a problem throughout the league.

Q. You’ve written about that – is anybody listening?

A. I’ve gotten responses from various executive and coaches who pulled me aside and said “You hit it on the head – these guys don’t have a healthy attitude toward women.”

Q. Would it help if more women covered the league?

A. Yep. It would help. That is an issue – most people covering the teams are male. But if you’re a journalist – male or female – you have the obligation to see things and voice things and not go along with the herd. I’ve got to walk in my own shoes.

Q. Would you rather cover a good team of reprobates, or a bad team of altar boys?

A. I can’t have a good team of altar boys? I would rather cover a good team, for the simple fact that there’s more interest in a good team. It’s a lot of fun to be writing about things that people care about. I’ve covered good teams with questionable characters – I was at Fresno State during the Samurai Sword incident – and you wonder about your obligation to protect the community from the team.

Q. So you view yourself as a watchdog?

A. You have to be. You’re part of the community. You’re certainly not part of the team. Frankly, members of the organization would prefer I wasn’t around because I write about things they prefer to keep quiet. I align myself with Joe Fan who has kids and wants to be entertained and doesn’t want to be worried about whether the power forward is drag racing with a gun in his car. That happened with Zack Randolph on Broadway over the summer.

We had a player – Derek Anderson – who drove through a McDonalds. Normally that’s not newsworthy, but it happened during a game that he called in sick. He was buying a milkshake and somebody called us during the game. It became relevant and important because he was supposed to be at the arena. He’s making $8 million a year to play basketball and people are buying tickets with the expectation of seeing the team at full strength.

Q. Aren’t things magnified in Portland more than in the big cities?

A. Nobody denies that. But no more than football in South Bend, or basketball in Bloomington – which I covered. You have the opportunity in a fishbowl to amplify positives or negatives. If you’re doing the right things it’s a valuable asset. If you’re screwing up it can be a huge negative.

Q. Why is the Oregonian hiring a free lancer to write about the paper’s relationship with the Blazers?

A. Ask the executive editor and sports editor about that. I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea – I don’t think we have any explaining to do to the public or the team. We do a good job of covering the team. Management is trying to give readers and independent objective outside look at the relationship and how contentious it is and how difficult it is to be in a fishbowl for them and how difficult it is to cover them.

When I covered Fresno State PBS did a documentary on how difficult it was to cover Tarkanian in a small town – they followed me around with a camera. I don’t necessarily see the value. I don’t think readers care that much if they’re making life difficult for us. They want to read about the team and what’s going on with the team. Readers are smart enough to make up their own minds. I know we’re having an independent writer and editor do this story, but it feels self-conscious to me. What explaining do we have to do? We hold ourselves to a high standard.

Who knows? It might be riveting. I was interviewed for it – people are asking me about it. I’m not that interested in what it says because I live it. It would be the same to me as a reporter following anybody in their jobs and examining the natural friction. If a grocery clerk has problems with the delivery people are you interested in that? I’m not, as long as I get my groceries. Readers are that way with news.

Q. How would you describe your writing style?

A. I would say I’m opinionated. Hopefully I make people think – I have a fairly good range as far as being critical and maybe writing a good story now and then. I don’t have one style – my approach is determined by the subject.

I’m outside a sports bar now. A former NHL player (Jim “Redeye” Hay) who was a goon sits in here every day and watches hockey and drinks beer. I’m going to sit in his seat and watch him walk in and watch how he reacts. I’m going to have fun with it. I’ll introduce myself after he comes up and knocks me off the stool. I got this from a tip. He comes in every day at 5 o’clock. He won a Stanley Cup in the 60s.

Q. How do you come up with ideas?

A. People tell me I have original ideas. At the World Series of Poker I was going to write about Greg Raymer, but I found the guy sitting to his left – his main opponent at the table – a computer programmer. So I wrote what’s it like to set next to Greg Raymer. You have to adjust your lens. There are so many stories out there – you have to take a step back.

I once locked myself in a meat locker that was minus-5 degrees to simulate what it’s like for Bret Favre on a frigid day in Green Bay. It wasn’t a good idea. I lasted 22 minutes and I was bundled up. I called some Army researchers who told me some people can handle the cold and some can’t. My computer battery drained in less than 20 minutes.

I called Jeff Garcia from the meat locker – the 49ers were playing Green Bay. I said, “I’m in a meat locker.” He said, “Where?” When I told him he laughed. He appreciated it because he had played at Calgary.

Q. Writers you admire?

A. I read a lot – there are so many good writers out there, who write things I wish I had thought of. Sally Jenkins (Washington Post. Bill Plaschke ( LA Times). I read 10 or 15 things every morning – from around the country. It’s important to see what people are doing.

Q. How much time do you spend on it?

A. I spend an hour or two in the morning blogging and keeping myself informed. I also go to a lot of Blazers practices – which is not normal for a columnist. People are so engaged in this team it helps to be there.

Q. What’s the difference between your column and your blog?

A. The blog is an extension of the column. When they came to me to do the blog I wasn’t comfortable. I’ve been doing this for 10 years and this was sthe first time I’ve been asked to share information outside of the column. The blog gives you a chance to air things you couldn’t fit in the the column, whether it’s an elaboration or a nugget. Blogs aren’t going away – everybody is doing it – but if they went away it would be fine with me.

I rarely read blogs. Somebody will send me something sometimes. I get 300 e-mails a day and I answer all those. I was an English major in college so I read a lot of non-sports stuff.

Q. How does someone become a columnist?

A. Kids always are asking me that. I don’t have a good answer. I tell them to do good work and try to keep moving and to watch what people are writing.

(SMG thanks John Canzano for his cooperation)

You wrote about Gordon Riese (the official who messed up the call in the Oregon State-Oklahoma game) “This is probably a good time to remind ourselves that sports isn’t war. It’s not life or death. College football is supposed to be a pleasant, passionate weekend diversion, void of death threats for sure. There’s just something that doesn’t feel right about villifying Riese, especially after further review.”

You’re cautioning fans against being overwrought. Do columnists get overwrought?

Football is just a game, until you’re on the clock

John Canzanohas been asports columnist at The Oregonian since Dec. 2002.

Canzano has worked at five other daily newspapers including The San Jose Mercury News, where he coveredthe National Football League and Major League Baseball.

Canzano also worked at The Fresno Bee as a sports columnist. As a beat reporter he’s also covered a variety of programs including Purdue football and basketball, Notre Dame football and Indiana basketball under coach Bob Knight.

Canzano has won numerous writing awards, including Associated Press Sports Editors awards in column (2002) and enterprise writing (2001). He’s been a frequent winner in the Football Writer’s Association Awards. And in 2004, Canzano was recognized by The Press Club of Atlantic City with a first place among all sports writing entries in the National Headliner Award

Excerpted from the Oregonian, October 28, 2006:

It’s a scene that goes down all the time in the twisted culture of the NBA.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

The Oregonian

Canzano: Official wasn’t shown all replays shown on TV

John Canzano excerpted from The Oregonian, September 19, 2006:

“The seventh threatening telephone call at Gordon Riese’s home came a few minutes after eight o’clock on Monday morning. It was from an Oklahoma fan who told Riese, the Pacific-10 Conference replay official from Saturday’s Ducks-Sooners game, he was going to fly to Portland, find the family home, and kill Riese and his wife.

“I called the police,” said Riese, 64, “then, I unplugged the phone.”

Football is a game, you’re thinking.

Right up to the point where an Oregon player touches an onside-kick attempt a step too early, turning the scramble for the ball into a melee where players are rushing the field celebrating, and the ball is squirting through everyone’s legs like they were wickets in a human croquet match. Then, the officials on the field blow the call. Then, the review process, instituted to rectify situations just like this, upholds the bad call, causing many of us, including some self-important university president at Oklahoma, to wonder, “Was Mr. Magoo in the replay booth?”

Well, no.

It was Gordon Riese in the booth. He has a name, he has a life. And after visiting with him on Monday, and learning more from some others about what happened in that review booth, I’m convinced that every honk who criticized Riese in the last 72 hours owes the man a swift apology.

Said Riese: “I’m having a difficult time letting the blown call go. I always prided myself on getting it right. I didn’t get the job done. I didn’t get it right.”

Joe Castiglione

An Interview with Joe Castiglione

“You try to paint a word picture of what’s happening on the field and you try to entertain and inform between pitches. That little sphere with 108 stitches is only in play for about eight minutes out of three hours. You have to be more prepared than any other sport because there’s so much down time. You prepare a lifetime.”

“Part of my on-air personality is really my off-air personality. You can tell I want the Sox to win. People say they can tell if the Sox are ahead or behind by my tone of voice. I take that as a compliment, though if I were an objective reporter I would not. I give you an honest report but it’s with passion. It that’s the case I’m proud of that. I do take wins and losses to heart.”

“I try to be conversational and friendly. I don’t have the booming pipes. Be as conversational as possible, which I think is what the audience wants. Be consistent. You have to be wearable. We’re on three hours a day 162 times a year. I would say my voice is wearable.”

Joe Castiglione: Interviewed on November 16, 2007

Position: play-by-play radio broadcaster, Boston Red Sox

Born: 1947, New Haven

Education: Colgate, 1968, history; Syracuse, 1970, Masters TV and Radio

Career: Youngstown, Ohio, TV and radio, 1970-72; Cleveland TV and radio, 1972-79; Cleveland Indians TV play-by-play, 1979-80; Milwaukee Brewers pay-TV, 1981; Cleveland Indians and Cavaliers, cable TV, 1982; Red Sox radio play-by-play, 1983 –

Personal: married (Jan), three children, two grandchildren

Favorite Restaurant (home): Luciano’s, Wrentham, “best Italian restaurant in New England – a little more upscale than North End spots”; Bunker Tavern, Scituate “great swordfish”; Assaggio, Boston North End

Favorite Restaurant (road): La Scarola, Chicago; La Scala, Baltimore; Foley’s, New York

Favorite Hotel: Renaissance Vinoy Resort and Don CeSar Beach Resort, St. Petersburg “old pink hotels that were built in the 1920s and have been renovated”

Author of: Broadcast Rites and Sites, 2005 “so many Red Sox fans plan vacations around the Sox schedule I wrote a book about restaurants and things to do before games”

Joe Castiglione’s call of the final out, Game 4, 2004 World Series:

“Foulke to the set, the 1-0 pitch, here it is … swing and a ground ball, stabbed by Foulke. He has it. He underhands to first. And the Boston Red Sox are the world champions. For the first time in 86 years, the Red Sox have won baseball’s world championship. Can you believe it?”

Q. Did you plan your call of the final out in 2004?

A. It was pretty much spontaneous. I thought about it for years – what am I going to say? I thought about it through the Yankee series, which was the greatest win in Sox history even thought I was 10-3. It was the only time the Yankees lost to the Sox with the season on the line since 1904, when the Sox won on a wild pitch by Jack Chesbro, but the Sox couldn’t go to the Series that year because there wasn’t one. Other than that the Yankees always had won with the season on the line. I planned to say that.

With the World Series the only thing I thought about was to not say anything that would be trite or wouldn’t stand the test of time. Keep it simple. Don’t interfere – get across the greatest comeback of all time, especially get in the 86 years. ‘Can you believe it’ sort of came out – I probably had used it in the past – I used it when Bill Mueller hit the home run off Rivera in July of that year. I wasn’t conscious of it. I only use it for big moments, like Papelbon’s pickoff in this Series because it was startling. It’s become a trademark. When the Sox won this year I made sure to mention that they were the first team in the 21^st century to win two titles.

’04 probably will always stand by itself, though the two Series were fairly similar. You can’t pick between world championships – there were different players – it’s like picking between your children. ’04 was about history and the end of curses and winning for people no longer with us, our deceased relatives. ’07 was about having the best team in baseball.

Q. What are the ABCs of broadcasting baseball?

A. You try to paint a word picture of what’s happening on the field and you try to entertain and inform between pitches. That little sphere with 108 stitches is only in play for about eight minutes out of three hours. You have to be more prepared than any other sport because there’s so much down time. You prepare a lifetime. It starts when you’re playing sandlot and Little League and collecting cards and reading bios and stats about the greats of the game. It’s important to have a total background. It’s like a pyramid – what happened today is built on what happened yesterday and last year. It’s built on the last generation and on the generation when Ruth and Cobb played.

Q. How do you paint a word picture?

A. You have a blank canvas and you put a painting on a canvas. Describe every move of the pitcher in going to the stretch and as his arm comes around, the batter swings and fouls it, where, right field line or upper deck? Be very descriptive about what happens to the ball. You have to fill between pitches with interesting material, and not just stats. Bio material, or things that have nothing to do with baseball. We do that a lot. Always be ready to capitalize on action, because you never know when it’s going to happen – it could happen in the first inning or the twelfth. The great thing about radio is that nothing happens until we say it does. Baseball is an announcer’s medium. TV is an analyst and director/producer medium.

Q. Is talking too much a concern?

A. Yes. You have to let it breathe. You have to back off of superfluous information when the game is on the line. Set the scene, the count, where the runners are, who are the runners and who is up next, who is up in the next inning. Anticipate what the audience wants to know – the audience wants to know the same things you want to know. If I’m watching a game I get irritated if they don’t tell me who’s up next and who’s available to pinch hit. You have to focus on those things when the game is on the line. The rest of the time you might tell a story or laugh about something or come up with an anecdote. No game has the same pace – you have to change gears. Baseball is the only sport where the defense controls the ball.

Q. Do young announcers rely too much on stats?

A. I don’t know if we can generalize by age. Guys older than me were stats crazy. Stats should tell a story – not just be a number. Given a choice between a human interest story and a stat go with the human interest story – people are more interested. Some audiences are turned off by stats. Not that you have a great story every day, but it could be something you read or hear on the way to the ballpark.

Q. Do you look for anecdotes and human interest?

A. Yes. They come up in normal conversation. We spend a lot of time shooting the breeze with players, executives, and scouts for other teams in the media dining rooms – it’s a great source of information. We get to the ballpark three or four hours before the game – there are so many pre-game shows to do. If you’re not recording an interview you’re still talking baseball and getting information. It might be a scouting report or something humorous that happened to a player – you always have your antenna up.

Q. How is your job different from print reporters?

A. In some ways it’s the same. I’m looking for updates, injuries, status of players and reaction. But in many ways it’s different. We are the first line to the club – we’re not paid by the club but we’re still part of the organization and we know that. The newspaper guys are entirely different concept. The electronic media took the game story away from the print media. They do other things – features, gossip, rumors. Our job is to describe what happens in the game – we call balls and strikes – and our other job is to entertain.

Q. What type of print stories do you avoid on the air?

A. You can’t make a general statement. The difficult stories involved off-the-field issues. When Wade Boggs had Margo Adams we didn’t get into that because he still hit .370. When we had a pitcher charged with spousal abuse we reported it because he wasn’t with the team. Every case is individual – you can’t make a blanket statement.

Q. Are you more circumspect with criticism than print?

A. I would think so. We’re still an arm of the club – though not employed by the club. You use common sense with each story. You have to be honest. If a guy makes an error or doesn’t hustle we have to point it out no matter what uniform he’s wearing. You’re not going to say that’s a horrible signing they just made – though you might later if it doesn’t work out.

Q. Does your tone of voice convey more than the words you use?

A. Part of my on-air personality is really my off-air personality. You can tell I want the Sox to win. People say they can tell if the Sox are ahead or behind by my tone of voice. I take that as a compliment, though if I were an objective reporter I would not. I give you an honest report but it’s with passion. It that’s the case I’m proud of that. I do take wins and losses to heart. Nothing is more euphoric than winning a World Series. I always said my greatest call hadn’t come yet till ’04. Now it’s happened twice.

Q. How would you describe your voice?

A. I try to be conversational and friendly. I don’t have the booming pipes. Be as conversational as possible, which I think is what the audience wants. Be consistent. You have to be wearable. We’re on three hours a day 162 times a year. I would say my voice is wearable.

Q. Does the frequency of ads intrude on the call?

A. Most are natural breaks and come at the half inning. When you have to drop in an announcement into a live half inning you try to do it with a foul ball or a batter stepping out – now when the ball is in play. If you have a sense of timing it doesn’t interfere. There are plenty of opportunities with all the down time.

When rights fees are $16 million there’s not enough inventory. It gets back to paying the players. The Fallon Community injury report. Volkswagon keys to the game. Verizon call to the bullpen. There are some creative salesmen working for the club.

Q. How do you ask a tough question?

A. I tell my students (at Northeastern) there are three keys. Be prepared. Be sensitive. Listen. You try to be sensitive and ask in a way that will get a better response. This is not investigative reporting where you’re pounding on the door of the slum landlord. Put yourself in their shoes and ask in a sensitive way so you get an answer that’s expansive. It’s always tougher to do an interview after a loss than a win.

Q. The season is long – how do you keep from getting on nerves?

A. There are 25 players. If somebody doesn’t want to talk you get other people. You deal with the manager every day and they become friends, although they come and go. I don’t find it to be a problem – there’s always somebody – you can move on if somebody doesn’t want to deal. Not many have been difficult over the years. Manny might not want to do an interview but he’s always hugging people.

Boston is a tough place to play – not everybody can play here – they don’t have the temperament. Our job is not to be confrontational. Sometimes a writer might have to be more confrontational. We’re probably more conscious of the words we use in asking questions because we deal with the spoken word.

Q. Do you miss not having Jerry Trupiano in the booth?

A. I missed him personally and as a partner but I enjoyed my new partners. The transition was seamless from my standpoint but that’s something the audience has to judge. Both Dave (O’Brien) and Glenn (Geffner) are really good guys. We won the World Series – everything was upbeat.

Q. Pirates Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Prince was an early influence on you. What can you relate about Prince for people who never heard him?

A. The Gunner. He was a great star, a huge star – one of the great characters in baseball history, off and on the field. He had a larger-than-life personality. In some ways he was bigger than the Pirates, which probably irritated some management people and probably got him in the end.

I can’t use his style. He would say ‘We need a bloop and a blast’. That doesn’t work in New England. I can’t openly root like Gunner did. He was a wild guy – there’s a story about him jumping out of a third story window at the Chase Park Plaza into a swimming pool. The Hall of Fame has one of his sport coats with his sayings sewn on, like ‘a gnats eyelash’. ‘We had em all the way’ – I use that sometimes. I don’t know if he would be as successful today – the audience is more sophisticated. He struggled when he went to ABC – he was a fish out of water – not used to working with analysts.

I remember visiting him during rain delays. I was in Youngstown working high school games and anchoring TV and I would go to Pittsburgh on weekends. Once I asked him for advice on how to make it in the business. He said ‘the only sure way to make it is to hit .300 or hit 20 home runs’. He was a tremendous entertainer and a very generous guy, too.

Jim Woods was his No. 2. He was probably the best No. 2 in baseball – he never wanted to be the top guy. Woods was great – he should be in the Hall of Fame. He was here with Ned (Martin) in the 70s – they both hated doing sponsor things. Their last game was the ’78 playoff game and then they were fired – there was a great story in SI about it. I quoted Ned in ’04 and ’07 – ‘pandemonium on the field’ – that was Ned in ’67. He was doing TV when I was doing radio – we never worked together. Ken Coleman was my mentor – he brought me here. It was great to be associated with those guys.

Q. Do you study other broadcasters?

A. We copy. We have models. I know Vince Scully doesn’t listen to other broadcasters but I do. My ultimate hero was Mel Allen – the greatest who ever lived. I met him late in his life – he did the Righetti no-hitter on cable. Ernie Harwell is a good friend – I still go see him when we play there.

Q. Was more personality permitted in those days?

A. I think there are more broadcasters today and more venues – TV, cable, radio, satellite. In those days Mel Allen did radio and TV – he was a star on both. Same with Prince. When he went on TV he said it was like time off – he’d say ‘ball one, ball two’. I don’t think it’s not allowed. In some ways there’s more personality today because there’s more time to fill. The games are an hour longer. We have more byplay with partners than they did – those old guys were one-man bands. What do you do at a ballgame? You b.s. with the person sitting next to you – that’s the approach I take with my partners, except when the ball is in play.

(SMG thanks Joe Castiglione for his cooperation)

Gene Collier

An Interview with Gene Collier

“It’s an easy job…Basically, what you have to do for the day is read the sports section and go to the game. Who wouldn’t want to do that?…You’re getting paid to watch sports, go to sports and write your opinion. And you get in free. I got a tattoo on my butt, “Born to Get In Free”.”

“Even though I’m guilty of constantly criticizing (the Pirates) and the front office, for your own sanity you have to go down there. I try to look at it like a movie, either good or bad, as an isolated episode, rather than another manifestation of a hopeless situation.”

“I learned (to write) by learning how to read. I draw a parallel to music. You can’t be a musician if you don’t listen, and you can’t be a writer if you don’t read a lot. To see how language works, and what possibilities language holds for itself and you.”

Gene Collier: Interviewed on June 5, 2007

Position: Columnist, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Born: 1953, Coaldale, Pa.

Education: Penn State, 1975, BA, journalism

Career: Pottstown Mercury 1975-77; Philadelphia Journal 77-81; Camden Courier-Post 82; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 82-84; Pittsburgh Press 84-92; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 92-

Personal: married, two sons

Favorite restaurant (home): PF Chang’s China Bistro. Pittsburgh

Favorite restaurant (road): “don’t know – I’m not a foodie”

Favorite hotel: Grand Hyatt, New York “good location – next to Grand Central Station”

Gene Collier, excerpted from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 31, 2006:

From Day One — or was it The Get-Go? — it was evident the campaign for the 23rd annual Trite Trophy was Gonna Be A Dogfight.

Oh yes, you’ve stumbled into still another of these fruitless annual episodes in which we dishonor the worst sports cliche of the fast-fading year by flooding all examples of insipid sports language with the harsh rhetorical light of reason.

Or something.

…All right, please set your cell phones on vibrate. No flash photography. Yada yada yada.

Our third runner-up:

Managed The Game — Bit of a regression here as Managed The Game got Left At The Altar last year, but again, far more quarterbacks managed the game this year than mismanaged the game, at least in cliche world. This is sportspeak for not throwing interceptions.

Our second runner-up:

Blitzing Off The Edge — A first time finalist, this nonsense conveying the rush of a defensive end or outside linebacker (and sometimes a corner) might have won the Trite had it not morphed into two or three related phrases like Getting Help On The Edge, Attacking The Edge and Protecting The Edge.

Our first runner-up:

Thrown Under The Bus — No one was literally thrown under a mass transit vehicle, but hundreds of coaches, managers, players and even broadcasters were dismissed or scapegoated this year, almost all of them said to have been thrown under the bus. The derivation of this is too frightful to think about, particularly as it might apply to Jerome Bettis.

Now then without further undoing of our reputation, a reminder the three criteria for The Trite Trophy. It has to be essentially meaningless, it has to be pervasive and the Trite Committee (me) has to really, really hate it.

And the Trite goes to …

It Is What It Is.

Again.

Ohmygawd the first repeat winner and the first two-time winner of the Trite Trophy, It Is What It Is was even more ubiquitous than it was in winning the 2005 Trite, when it was merely revoltingly everywhere. Its list of star turns simply would not fit in our disappearing space.

The Steelers couldn’t repeat as champions, but they played a huge role in a second consecutive title for IIWII.

If Bill Cowher said it once, he said it 500 times this year, even to the extent that special teams coach Kevin Spencer said in December, “To quote coach Cowher, it is what it is.” Ike Taylor, having lost his starting cornerback job three months after signing a new contract, told the Post-Gazette’s Gerry Dulac, “It doesn’t even have anything to do with the contract. They said it is what it is … I don’t know what that means. It is what it is.”

And we all know why Ike doesn’t know what it is what it is means, because it doesn’t mean anything, meaninglessness being the first protocol of all Trite winners. It’s the equivalent of saying, “I don’t know what to say, so I’m saying this instead: it is what it is.” And that’s what everybody said, pretty much coast to coast, in lieu of actual communication.

Baltimore’s Ed Reed and Atlanta’s Michael Vick said it on the same sports page on the same day about two completely different topics. In Vick’s case, he’d just been fined $10,000 for giving fans an obscene jesture, and decided to contribute another $10,000 to charity. Asked to explain, he said, “it is what it is, 20 grand.”

…Not even Red Zone, the greatest living cliche, having spawned both an official NFL statistic and a deodorant, could repeat in 1995 in the face of the West Coast Offense.

But again, as Cowher would say and has said and said and said and said and said.

“It is what it is. And you deal with it.”

Q. Early favorites for the 2007 Trite Trophy?

A. Someone e-mailed the other day and mentioned something I’ve been hearing for years but haven’t included: ‘put a crooked number up’. You don’t want to score a couple runs – you want to ‘put a crooked number up’. Sort of like ‘put points on the scoreboard’ – a former winner that never goes away. Almost as though if you could put points on the scoreboard you wouldn’t have to play the game.

I got another e-mail – there’s a new thing proliferating – this business of saying “clearly”. Mike Greenberg says it 50 times a day. Buster Olney, answering a question about coverage of a players’ private lives, said, “Clearly the line has been blurred.”

Q. Is there an endless supply of trite-isms?

A. I’m amazed. I guess it was kind of a conceit to think if I pointed them out annually people might think about them and they might go away. But the opposite has happened. The Trite Trophy has had no impact other than to become trite itself.

Q. Is it a popular column?

A. Yes. There are a couple of dozen people who look forward to it. I got a letter from a guy, who was probably drunk and making it up, describing his Super Bowl ritual. He gets together with a couple of guys before the game, in a rec room, and they’re not allowed to say anything that is not a cliché. If you do you have to leave.

Q. Why is triteness rampant in sports?

A. It has to do with the expansion of the news hole. Sports coverage used to be whatever total number of newspaper column inches were allotted to sports that day, and a couple of minutes on the local newscast. With ESPN and its imitators people have to talk 24/7 and you can’t do that without crutches. Nobody can speak for hours on end and say something that hasn’t been said 50 times. People have to talk about sports too much and write about it too much.

Q. Are you saying there is too much sports coverage?

A. Yes. But there’s too much of everything. Too much weather on the Weather Channel – 24 hours of weather – it’s ridiculous. People want choices – marketers have figured everything out. Before long there will be a Left-Handed Golf Channel.

Q. As a writer, what is your gut feeling about triteness?

A. It’s an over-reaction on my part. In college I thought I was going to be a writer – one of the first things they tell you is don’t use clichés. If you heard it before, don’t use it. That scared the hell out of me – how am I going to write? When I figured out I could do it, I didn’t have to be afraid. I made it my thing. That’s why I do it. That’s me pounding my chest. I don’t consider myself to have any great natural ability. But I don’t think anybody else should have any trouble either. That’s how come they (clichés) aggravate me.

Q. On another subject, will the Pirates ever have another winning season?

A. Maybe not. I don’t think it’s as hopeless as five years ago. There’s more revenue being shared within baseball itself. They’re not as bad off financially as they were five years ago. But they’re not in the position we were told they would be in with the new ballpark. They’re somewhere in between.

It looks like they’ll tie the Phillies record for 16 consecutive losing seasons. I don’t see any reason they can’t keep it going and set the record.

Q. How do you approach the Pirates as a columnist?

A. Good question. People are getting sensitive to it. I always said when there was a chance the Pirates wouldn’t be here that bad baseball is better than no baseball. Even though I’m guilty of constantly criticizing them and the front office, for your own sanity you have to go down there. I try to look at it like a movie, either good or bad, as an isolated episode, rather than another manifestation of a hopeless situation.

I grew up watching the Phillies and they were horrible until the late 70s. My baseball experience was bad there, and now I’ve been here for 25 years and it’s been bad. I’m very much at home.

Q. How did you learn how to write?

A. I learned by learning how to read. I draw a parallel to music. You can’t be a musician if you don’t listen, and you can’t be a writer if you don’t read a lot. To see how language works, and what possibilities language holds for itself and you. Read a lot of different magazines and books. I was lucky enough to grow up in a house where my father and grandmother got out-of-town newspapers. I got to see a lot of different ways to write.

I went to college to be Walter Cronkite, but that was too much stuff to carry around. It was easier to carry a notepad.

Q. Your writing influences?

A. The guy who wrote the Hardy Boys books under a pseudonym (Franklin W. Dixon). Bill Conlin (Philadelphia Daily News), Stan Hochman (Philadelphia Daily News), Phil Pepe (NY Daily News) , Dick Young (NY Daily News). I grew up in Coaldale, Pennsylvania, which is equidistant from New York and Philadelphia. It was also the birthplace of cable TV. It’s mountainous, which is why they put cable in. We had the Phillies and Mets and Yankees on TV when I was growing up.

Q. Who do you read?

A. I read mostly people I come across on the Internet. I’m not going to buy out-of-town papers anymore. Mark Whicker (Orange County Register) is a tremendous columnist. I worked with him on the Phillies beat. The usual suspects.

I try to read things out of the sphere – The New Yorker, New York Times. I don’t have the mentality where I can read about and watch sports all the time. I got so tired of sportswriting at one point I got out of it. I was out for six years and I got pulled back in. I had forgotten how easy it is.

I was out from January 1998 to May 2004. I wrote feature stories, and columns on politics – that was fun, too. But there’s nothing out there as easy as sportswriting, unfortunately.

Q. What do you mean by easy?

A. It’s just easy. Once you figure it out – who’s available, who’s not available, what they’re going to provide for you. I never pretended like it was a hard job. It’s an easy job, which is what I was looking for when I went to college. Basically, what you have to do for the day is read the sports section and go to the game. Who wouldn’t want to do that?

This is a great gig – there’s nobody who wouldn’t want it. You’re getting paid to watch sports, go to sports and write your opinion. And you get in free. I got a tattoo on my butt, “Born to Get In Free”.

Q. But isn’t covering a beat tense?

A. In Philly it was. The baseball beat had Jayson Stark, Whicker, Conlin – you could barely turn around without fearing that someone would beat you. Even at that I was going to the Phillies games and writing about them and how cool was that? And I had my own parking place.

Past Trite Trophy winners

2005: It is what it is.

2004: Shutdown corner

2003: Cover 2

2002: Running downhill

2001: Put points on the scoreboard

2000: Walk-off homer

1999: Somebody’s gotta step up

1998: Eight men in the box

1997: Show me the money

1996: Been there, done that

1995: West Coast offense

1994: Red Zone

1993: It hasn’t sunk in yet

*-1992: Mentality of a linebacker

1991: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist

1990: Smashmouth football

1989: He coughs it up

1988: They went to the well once too often

1987: Crunch time

1986: Gut check

1985: Throwback

1984: Playing ’em one game at a time.

*-Awarded on WDVE during newspaper strike.

(SMG thanks Gene Collier for his cooperation)

Gerard Cosloy

An Interview with Gerard Cosloy

“I’ve read the same LA Times piece as everyone else that raised the notion we’re in some post “Costas Now” phase, but these are pretty wild generalizations. Some of the larger blogs have ownership and/or advertising issues to contend with, but I think most of ’em are pretty respectable to begin with (or at least down with the cultural status quo) to begin with. If TMZ can be shown on broadcast TV, I don’t really foresee, say, Coors Lite telling Gawker Media, “sorry, we can’t advertise on your site. We’ve got an ethical hang-up over what your new editor did to Stuart Scott.”

Gerard Cosloy: Interviewed on July 1, 2008

Position: Founder, editor and writer, Can’t Stop the Bleeding

Born: 1964, Norwalk, Ct

Education: UMass-Amherst, September 1983 – January 1984. “D-R-O-P O-U-T”

Career: “I’ve done this or that for a long long time. If anybody really cares they can look it up.”

Personal:Formerly married, currently single. No kids.

Favorite restaurant (home): Paul’s Place, 2nd Ave., NYC;Vegetarian Paradise, W. 4th St., NYC; Hai Ky, E.Oltorf, Austin

Favorite restaurant (away): Tu Lan, San Francisco

Favorite hotel: Linton Travel Tavern – “equidistant between London and Norwich”

Favorite punk rock band:The Marked Men

Posted by Gerard Cosloy on Can’t Stop the Bleeding, June 24, 2008:

The Will Leitch Farewell Tour of Deadspin continued today with a longish post
attempting to put my somewhat over the top attempts at antagonizing Will into some greater perspective.

Though admitting he once considered CSTB, “one of our favorites, though, and the one that seemed to have the best idea of how to run a general interest sports site” (keep in mind this was 2003, folks), Leitch also includes the caveat, “most of it was just long cutting-and-pastings of AP stories with a one-sentence ‘comment’ on the end.” So in other words, a mere parasite like me oughta have greater respect for someone who adds a two-sentence ‘comment’ to the end of stories cut and pasted from ESPN.com.

At the risk of C&P’ing far too much of Leitch’s self-described plucky midwesterisms, I’ll summarize the post in question. Outta the blue, mild-mannered Man From Mattoon was bulldozed by an invisible grouch
who proceeded to publish his cell phone number
and encouraged the homeless to use his fiancee’s portrait for target practice
. Though these missives were distasteful and oh-so-unprovoked, they ultimately help Young Will to buck up, grow-a-pair…and eventually blossom into the fragile butterfly we all saw torn to fucking shreds on HBO.

You’re welcome, Will. Anytime. But the following points need to be made : (continued at bottom)

Q. Will you miss not having Will Leitch to kick around anymore?

A. He’s still around. But if he were to disappear tomorrow, I don’t think I’d struggle to find someone or something to kick around. It wasn’t much of a problem before he turned up.

Q. Why don’t punk rockers get asked to sing the national anthem at baseball games?

A. I take it you don’t consider Adam Duritz to be a punk rocker. I don’t really know, I can only presume the folks issuing the invites figure Curtis Stigers is a better singer than David Thomas.

Q. Is CSTB a music or sports blog?

A. Neither, by design anyway. Though there’s obviously more sports content, there’s some things that don’t fall into either category. I kinda reserve the right to cover whatever I’m interested in at a particular moment. While I suspect it will always be a mostly sports oriented blog, I’d prefer not to be tied to that.

Q. What’s your first love – music or sports?

A. Probably sports but music came pretty soon afterwards. But I don’t think much about which I prefer — it just doesn’t occur to me. I don’t look for comparisons and two aren’t really related other than they’re both part of our culture and I tend to obsess over ’em a little too much.

Q. Describe a typical Cant Stop the Bleeding reader?

A. Honestly, I don’t know more than a few of the readers personally and that’s ok. I’m genuinely grateful anyone enjoys CSTB but I do this for my own entertainment. I’m not interested in pandering to any particular audience and I’m not sure there is a typical reader. I would like to think that CSTB has some portion of the audience who aren’t dudes, aren’t white and aren’t Americans, but without actually meeting the readers in question, I don’t know for sure.

Q. How much time do you put into it?

A. That varies wildly. Let’s just say I get a ton of help from the other writers and there’s a number of readers who make very useful suggestions from time to time.

Q. What’s your daily routine?

A. Again, there’s not really a defined routine. I like to be up early and going over the previous night’s events, but sometimes that just isn’t possible. As time goes on, I find myself doing a bit less headline scanning / feed trawling and actively looking for stories I’ve not seen elsewhere. But aside from day job stuff and day-to-day crap that can’t be avoided, actually watching the games – for fun – is a big part of it. If it ever gets to the point where I’m only attending games or watching sports on TV in order to blog, that would probably be a good time to give it up.

Q. Tell us about your real job in the music industry?

A. Y’know, I don’t wanna be a jerk. Especially because it’s nice that anyone cares enough to ask. But my rock biz activities are very well documented elsewhere and are in no way related to CSTB, which is solely owned and operated by me. I thoroughly enjoy my (real) work and feel incredibly lucky to work with so many amazing characters. But I’m not interested in using the blog to plug the label, nor would I abuse the Matador notoriety in order to generate attention for the blog. I think they both speak for themselves.

Q. It has been suggested that sports blogs, such as The Big Lead, are becoming more respectable as their readership grows? Your reaction?

Q. I’m sorry, I’ve not actually seen that suggestion. I’ve read the same LA Times piece as everyone else that raised the notion we’re in some post “Costas Now” phase, but these are pretty wild generalizations. Some of the larger blogs have ownership and/or advertising issues to contend with, but I think most of ’em are pretty respectable to begin with (or at least down with the cultural status quo) to begin with. If TMZ can be shown on broadcast TV, I don’t really forsee, say, Coors Lite telling Gawker Media, “sorry, we can’t advertise on your site. We’ve got an ethical hang-up over what your new editor did to Stuart Scott.”

Q. Your blogroll is amazingly long, Are there any you left off?

A. Absolutely. I make an effort to include the blogs that I personally read – not necessarily those that I endorse, though many of ’em would fall into that category. But if there’s a sports blog that isn’t featured on the CSTB blogroll, you can probably assume that I either can’t stand the site or am simply unfamiliar. I no longer think it’s possible to be aware of every decent sports blog — there’s far too many.

Q. Why don’t you run more photos of actresses, models and bimbos?

A. I’ve run a shirtless pic of Gabe Kapler several times. What more do you want?

In all seriousness, I think it’s a bit of a cliche. It someone wants to peruse such material, there’s no shortage of places on the web to do so. If I was doing a blog primarily about actresses, models, bimbos or about leering at any of the above, said photos would probably be appropriate visual ads.

Q. Are we in the Golden Age of sports blogs? Or has it already ended?

A. Y’know, I’m not too hung up on the genre, either way. There’s always gonna be a bunch of sports blogs that transcend the genre and there’s always gonna be a pile – perhaps larger – that aren’t gonna be remembered in a

year.

Posted by Gerard Cosloy on Can’t Stop the Bleeding, June 24, 2008 (continued from top):

1) The CSTB category “Will Leitch Sucks”
did not appear “within 25 minutes” of Deadspin’s public launch. Said category was created weeks after the fact, though for the purposes of proper indexing, old posts relevant to the matter at handed were edited to include the category.

2) It is true I posted Will’s phone number, but I only did so after some moron at CBS Sportsline
sent a press release that included it. There’s a breach in Leitch’s personal security and he wants to blame the whistleblower?

3) re : the bit about encouraging the homeless to get busy with pics of Will’s ex. Not cool (dude). Hardly my proudest moment — especially the part where I had to pay the homeless to do it. This was a reprehensible act and I don’t think I will ever fully live down the way I exploited…the nation’s less fortunate!

(seriously folks, did it ever occur to Will or his dipshit loyal readers that constantly mocking him was not entirely different from targeting, say, Stephen A. Smith or Chris Berman, neither of whom, to my knowledge, have ever met Will Leitch or done anything to personally hurt him? Or that this long-running schtick is someone’s idea of humor? That if Will were to disappear I’d have to go back to making fun of Mushnick’s beard everyday?)

4) “It can be difficult for the blog uninitiated — which we most definitely were — when they are being hammered online, but, thanks to CSTB, we grew used to it pretty quick. Heck, no one was gonna say anything worse than what he was saying.”

Not until recently

, no.

5) The revisionist history
is all well and good for lazy types who never bothered to notice how the majority of anti-Leitch posts at CSTB were not in fact, sneak attacks mounted as part of some bloggy traffic war, but directly referenced Deadspin’s real content
and totally legit questions
about such.

6) Good luck at New York
, Will. Hopefully, the magazine won’t “focus too much on New York City for our tastes” and you’ll last more then two days at your new gig before someone compares you to Jm J. Bullock
.

(SMG thanks Gerard Cosloy for his cooperation)

Bryan Curtis

An Interview with Bryan Curtis

“There’s a false assumption that you can’t write sports unless you go the conventional route. I read the “Best American Sportswriting” anthology every year and half the pieces come from writers who aren’t conventional sportswriters – they’re just writers who have interesting minds.”

“…the attitude of ESPN.com is drawn from sports radio – sports radio is pugnacious and quick and fast – and they’ve applied it to the website.”

“I see many people my age who are imitators of Simmons. The problem is that he writes in a digressive style, about sports and pop culture, and he is uniquely capable of pulling that off. Not many can. Which is not to say Bill is a bad person to imitate. I just don’t think many can do it.”

Bryan Curtis: Interviewed Sept. 1, 2006

Position: staff writer, Slate.com; contributor, Play Magazine (NY Times)

Born: 1977, Fort Worth, Texas.

Education: University of Texas, BA, 2000

Career: The New Republic 2000-2001, Slate.com 2001 – , Play 2006 –

Personal: single

Hobbies: college football

Favorite Sports Movie: “hate them all equally”

Bryan Curtis excerpted from “Adrift on the Sea of Espn.com”, Play Magazine, June 4, 2006:

“ESPN, the television network, has long been able to hold the gaze of sports fans even when something rather dreary is happening on the screen. How else to explain the success of Texas hold ’em, lumberjack meets and “The Sports Reporters”? In recent years, that magnetism has passed to the network’s Web site, ESPN.com, another outlet for continuous grazing. A click or two will send you spiraling deep into the dark digital recesses of sports, into the N.F.L. draft, fantasy baseball, freestyle motocross or even worse. The other morning, I found myself reading an outdoors column about why fishermen don’t like to bring bananas with them on their boats, and I thought, in a rare moment of clarity, “What am I doing here?”

“ESPN.com is best understood not as sports pages or a sports magazine but as an all-purpose sports balm.”

Q. You wrote that if there’s a nagging concern about ESPN.com, it’s that the site has “grown too big for its gigabytes.” Can you elaborate?

A. I think that reading ESPN.com is like setting out in the Pacific Ocean in a canoe. You’re completely lost at the outset.

One, it’s clear to me that what ESPN.com has done and what the Internet has done generally is make sportswriting more “sophisticated” – put that in quotations – than it ever was. If you are a writer at a daily newspaper you have to consider the old lady who reads Marmaduke and might wander over to the sports page and you have to make it accessible to her. What we see on ESPN.com is that there are no worries about that. You can make it as insidery as you want. I’m totally stunned by the range of reference and how deep they go into sports – deeper than the mainstream sports publication ever has. They’ve taken Mel Kiper’s Draft Report and Baseball America – which were niche – and brought them into the mainstream.

Number two, the attitude of ESPN.com is drawn from sports radio – sports radio is pugnacious and quick and fast – and they’ve applied it to the website. You don’t have a formal newspaper style – columns are loose and rambling and tough and pugnacious. We recognize the style, for those of us listening to the radio for a couple of decades.

Q. Is that a good thing?

A. It can be. I’ll say that a little can go a long way. But it’s not the end of the world.

Q. In your profile of Bill Simmons you wrote that sports fans tend to view the neutrality of conventional columnists as “highly bogus and slightly implausible.” And you wrote that Simmons aims to reconnect sportswriting with the fan. Has Simmons made conventional columnists obsolete?

A. I don’t think so. I’m not an Internet triumphalist in the sense that I think it will replace all of journalism – or all of sports journalism. I love traditional sports columnists. What is strange is when they are at highly emotional events they come away and write very neutral columns. What Simmons did at the most basic level is break down that wall. He wrote as a fan would write instead of as a columnist would. What makes Simmons so appealing is that you have hundreds if not thousands of amateurs writing about sports on the Internet now and they look at Bill and say if he can do it I can do it. He made a brief attempt to be a conventional sportswriter with the Boston Herald – then he decided he would sink or swim on his own. Not only is he doing the writing many on the Internet admire he’s following the career path they themselves want to follow.

Q. Yet it’s unattainable to almost everybody, isn’t it?

A. It’s more plausible than paying dues for 10 years at a newspaper. One downside is that Bill writes so well, he’s so sui generis, that I think imitating Bill is a really bad idea. I wrote that he’s as imitated in his time as Dan Jenkins was in his – nearly every sportswriter of the last half of the 20^th century imitated Jenkins. Mike Lupica and Rick Reilly are imitators of Jenkins. I see many people my age who are imitators of Simmons. The problem is that he writes in a digressive style, about sports and pop culture, and he is uniquely capable of pulling that off. Not many can. Which is not to say Bill is a bad person to imitate. I just don’t think many can do it.

Q. Where does Slate.com fit into sports journalism?

A. I see Slate as covering sports basically analogous to the way non-sports magazines write about sports. You don’t think of Roger Angell at the New Yorker as being a critical part of the daily baseball coverage but you’re glad to have him writing about baseball in The New Yorker. Slate is similar. It does inventive things with sportswriting. Gregg Easterbrook’s ‘Tuesday Morning Quarterback’ column started in Slate in 1999 or 2000. It was a completely new kind of NFL column. It came at it from the viewpoint that anyone could write about sports on the Internet and that you didn’t need the so-called credentials sportswriters have sought over the years. Twenty years ago you would have covered high school football and bounced around from newspaper to newspaper and then gotten a gig writing an NFL column. The Internet said, well, there’s a smart guy from the Brookings Institute – let him write sports if that’s what he wants to write.

Q. Would you say Slate takes an intellectual approach to sports?

A. I wouldn’t use that word. The approach is just to write something completely new that you can reasonably assume no one has read before. It’s not a place where someone will weigh in on whether Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame. It’s a place where you look for new avenues that haven’t been explored.

Q. Why is a smart guy like you writing something lowbrow like sports?

A. Ask Michael Lewis. He made his career as a political reporter at The New Republic and he’s had a second or third act as a sportswriter. I would barely characterize myself as a sportswriter. If somebody asked me as an aspiring sportswriter – “Should I got to the Dallas Morning News and cover high schools or go to a magazine and try to come in through the side entrance?” – I would say both are equally valid. Michael wrote “Moneyball” and now his new football book and he would say sportswriting for him was a hobby at most. It’s just a matter of reporting and researching and writing like any other magazine story. There’s a false assumption that you can’t write sports unless you go the conventional route. I read the “Best American Sportswriting” anthology every year and half the pieces come from writers who aren’t conventional sportswriters – they’re just writers who have interesting minds.

Q. Your recent sports articles?

A. I wrote a profile of Troy Smith for Play (September 2006). I wrote a media column on Tony Kornheiser.

Q. How do you think Kornheiser will do?

A. He hasn’t said very much. He told me he might not say a word for the first few weeks of the season and he wasn’t kidding. I think he’ll be fine. It’s not fair to review him based on three or four telecasts.

Q. Writers you admire?

A. Dan Jenkins. Bud Shrake. They went to my high school (Paschal High) a couple of decades before I did. I saw them not only as great sportswriters but also from Ft. Worth. Beyond that I love Charlie Pierce, TJ Simers, Michael Lewis. Also Darcy Frey, who wrote “The Last Shot”; David Shields, who wrote “Black Planet”; and Buzz Bissinger, who wrote “Friday Night Lights”. Oh, and Robert Lipsyte, who wrote “Sports World” in the early seventies – a great book.

Q. Why does Slate Boldface its name every time it’s mentioned?

A. I think its vestigial thing from the early days of the Internet. Slate was saying “we are a magazine – really”. As the Internet has grown older we’ve gotten more secure about ourselves.

(SMG thanks Bryan Curtis for his cooperation)

Dan Daly

An Interview with Dan Daly

“Anybody who works for a newspaper knows the only way you know something is news is if you know what’s old… Be aware of what you don’t know. That’s some of the best advice you can give any journalist. Know that history is not your lifetime. History is history.”

“Can you imagine spending five or six hours on a train with a guy where you talk your life story away or the nuts and bolts of baseball? I’m so jealous of guys who worked in that generation and developed those relationships with players and got to learn things that are so difficult to learn now.”

“Overcoming hardship becomes a cliché. His dad wasn’t there or his mom wasn’t there or he grew up in a trailer with his grandma. We’re bombarded with these stories over and over again – the same story…My question is ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ Why do we have this infatuation with this type of story? To me it’s about the games.”

Dan Daly: Interviewed on October 5, 2007

Position: columnist, Washington Times

Born: 1953, Framingham. Ma.

Education: Williams, 1976, history

Personal: married, two boys (Danny 17, Patrick 14)

Career: Worcester Telegram 1976 – 1980, Arizona Republic 1980-81, Daily Oklahoman 82, Washington Times 82-

Favorite restaurant (home): Food Court at Montgomery Mall “spent my life there after games –the maitre d knows me”

Favorite restaurant (road): Outback Steak House anywhere “prime rib or steak – reasonable, reliable and fast”

Favorite hotel: Parker House, Chicago “Miller’s Pub next door – great downtown restaurant you can get food any hour coming back from an event”

Dan Daly, excerpted from the Washington Times, September 27, 2007:

The people have spoken — the computer-literate people, at least. Barry Bonds’ 756th home run ball won’t be shot into space or shipped to the Baseball Hall of Fame without editorial comment; no, it will be sent to Cooperstown affixed with an asterisk, sports’ version of the Scarlet Letter.

It’s a wonderful thing, democracy, and every once in a while it gets it right. Fashion designer Mark Ecko, owner of the historic spheroid, could have decided unilaterally what to do with the ball, could have imposed his own morality on the situation, but he realized the issue was bigger than him. So he put it to an Internet vote, and the Asterisk Party — his party, by the way — prevailed.

Cue the confetti.

After all, blasting the ball to the other side of the galaxy might have made for great television, but it wouldn’t have accomplished anything. The Neptunians, I suspect, would have been utterly flummoxed by the horsehide hurtling toward them — and might even launched countermeasures, thinking they were under attack. (Hell hath no fury like a Neptunian who has just had a baseball land in his yard.)

Instead, the Bonds ball will serve, as it should, as a reminder to future generations — a reminder of the evils of flaxseed oil and arthritis balm. Millions of Little Leaguers will be able to file past the display at the Hall, note ball’s unusual tattoo and be forever warned. It will be Barry’s greatest gift to baseball.

Besides, it’s about time Cooperstown was politicized a bit. The place has always been so darn neutral, so nonjudgmental. And let’s face it, the Hall is full of scoundrels, of players who used to grab base runners by the belt or throw pitches that defied the laws of physics. Maybe a separate wing should be built for them — to keep them quarantined, as it were. I can practically hear the tour guide now:

“And over here, folks, we have a jar of Gaylord Perry’s saliva. Yup, ol’ Gaylord really liked to load ’em up. The umpires finally caught him in the act in 1982 and ejected him from a game. Of course, he was 43 at the time, so it’s hard to know whether he was throwing a spitter or had just begun to drool.

Q. What makes a good column?

A. I try to look for humor where possible. I try to weave as much historical background where appropriate into any column I can. I was a history major in college – not journalism – I’ve always had an interest in history. I spend a lot of free hours going through newspaper archives on the Internet. Before that I spent days at the Library of Congress going through microfilm. Anybody who works for a newspaper knows that the only way you know something is news is if you know what’s old. What drives older readers crazy is when a writer writes about something as if it’s never happened before, or a performance that has never been surpassed, or an athlete is greater than any athlete before him – because older readers know different. They’re thinking, ‘this guy never heard of Bill Russell or never saw Roberto Clemente throw a ball in from right field.’

If you go into my study you would see 750 loose-leaf binders of printouts of stories – stuff I can use for background. A couple of years ago when Doug Flutie drop-kicked for an extra point, for the first time since 1941, I had a wealth of material on drop kicking. Two days later I had a 25-inch piece in the paper putting the whole Flutie event in a historical context.

Q. You’re saying young writers have to be aware of history?

A. Yes. Be aware of what you don’t know. That’s some of the best advice you can give any journalist. Know that history is not your lifetime. History is history. When you’re 25 you’re not going to have time to read the books and do the research on things somebody like me has found out in 31 years in the business. Over time you can acquire that knowledge. Some people who read my stuff probably are mystified why I would spend that much time with the historical part of my columns. It’s one of my niches – it distinguishes my column from somebody else’s.

After the Belichick spying story I wrote that this has been going on from time immemorial, in the time of George Halas and Paul Brown and probably forever. Are we supposed to revisit every championship the Browns won or the Bears won and put asterisks on them? The general reaction to the whole story was self-righteous furor, as if it was unprecedented, as if it was way over the line. It wasn’t way over the line – it was maybe a little more over the line than other people have gone.

Q. What was your historical perspective on the Ecko column?

A. One of the things I tried to talk about is how antiseptic these Halls of Fame can be. They go out of their way to be neutral and non-judgmental and non-political. I think in some instances you can overdo it. If you’re going to have the Bonds ball without editorial comment – how great of an idea is that? Obviously this is a grandstand play by this guy but I understand the spirit of what he’s doing and I agree. I talked about the history of the game and about Gaylord Perry’s habit of loading up on baseballs. Imagine a guy giving of tour of the Hall of Fame and pointing out Perry’s saliva, an odds sheet of Pete Rose’s, or Norm Cash’s corked bat from when he won the batting title in ’61. If the Halls of Fame tried to tell the entire story of their games they would have to have wings to keep articles like this. This will be a real exception going into the Hall identified as it is.

Q. Did you deal with Bonds?

A. I’m so away from baseball. The last World Series I covered was ’87. For years we didn’t have baseball here. Now that the Nationals are established I will have to do more, but I have to be careful because the interest in this market is still with the Redskins, I have to look for every opportunity to write about them – that’s just a matter of trying to serve the readership.

Q. Until the Nationals make a run like the Rockies.

A. That’s like a guy being married and a beautiful woman strides through the room and his head turns and a couple of weeks later the beautiful woman strides out the exit. They’ll still have the Broncos. There will be momentary flirtations, but it will take years of success to attain the Broncos’ popularity.

Q. Who do you read?

A. I like to read the iconoclasts. I don’t read columns to be agreed with – I read columns that help me look at something in a way I wouldn’t before. Bill Conlin (Philadelphia Daily News) is a little like that. He doesn’t necessarily worry about whether it’s in the mainstream, or agreed with by 75 percent of other columnists. He writes what he thinks. Dave Kindred (Golf Digest) – he weaves in stories from other generations.

The guy who influenced me the most was Ray Fitzgerald (Boston Globe). I didn’t get a chance to read him until I got to college, and that’s when I read Leigh Montville (Boston Globe), too. Ray’s columns had a perfect tone of humor – he kept it in the context of sports and not life and death. It was something you can’t imitate – it was all Ray’s personality, the kind of column writing that wears well on you. You can go back day after day.

Q. There’s an anthology of Ray Fitzgerald’s columns – have you seen it?

A. I have it. The great thing about the Internet is that it enables you to get old books – I used to search through old bookstores. I was glad to see some of the columns I liked the most, including one where people wrote him and asked where he got his ideas for columns. He walked you through the thought process – ‘always bash the Sullivans if you need to’ – he goes through seven or eight standbys when he was stuck for an idea – and the last sentence was ‘and this is another one.’

Q. Bob Ryan talks about how Ray was disillusioned before he died (1982). What would he think if he could come back and see sports today?

A. Money was just starting to come in when he died – that was probably a big part for him – the changes it created in sports and athletes. Every guy of his generation was used to having great access to athletes and coaches – access we can only dream of today. Can you imagine spending five or six hours on a train with a guy where you talk your life story away or the nuts and bolts of baseball? I’m so jealous of guys who worked in that generation and developed those relationships with players and got to learn things that are so difficult to learn now. There’s no way to spend that time and knock down the walls of suspicion that exist between athletes and writers today – there’s such guardedness.

Q. That distance – is it manifest in coverage?

A. Sure. I remember a conversation with Mike Wilbon (Washington Post) before a preseason game. He said ‘the thing that drives me crazy about writing sports is that the access is so much more limited. Before, you could get half a dozen guys and a couple of coaches walking off a practice field – now you settle for a couple of guys and one coach’. It forces you to lower your own standard – it forces you to write columns that have less information, less input from individuals. You just don’t have as many people for as long.

The news is so much more managed by teams now. They’re trying to develop websites as sources of revenue – they’re not inclined to make people available – they want exclusive stuff on their own websites. You’re in the same business with these teams and you’re not seen as part of the publicity machine – you’re seen as an actual competitor.

In sports, media is divided into two groups – one group puts money into the pockets of the sports, and one group doesn’t. Print media has become part of that second group, which relegates you to second-class status.

Q. But isn’t print more credible with the public?

A. I try not to speak for the public. Public tastes mystify me. I try to write things that make sense to me. I can’t be sitting over a keyboard worrying whether this agrees with 51 percent of my readers, because in our business I think that can be a concern.

I came across a quote – I’m not going to say from who – but a guy was talking about writing for Sports Illustrated and the pressures involved. He talked about writing stories off Sunday events and having to wait until the middle of the week until it got into print. He said ‘You worry because by the time it gets into publication ESPN has already shaped the national conversation’. And I’m thinking why does anybody in print media worry about what ESPN shapes or doesn’t. To me the biggest danger in the print media is the idea that we somehow have to mirror whatever opinions are being presented on TV. That if we get too far away we run the risk of alienating readership – that we’ll be seen as out of touch. To me I pick up a newspaper looking for different-ness. I know what TV is going to give me. I worry that we try to be too much like TV instead of doing what we do best.

Pete Hamill came up with a great term – he called it ‘necro-journalism’, which means that no story has enough gravitas unless it has a dead body. I envision somebody sitting down for an ESPN interview. The first question is ‘has somebody in your family died recently?’ Second question: ‘Does somebody in your family have a communicable disease?’ Third: ‘Does somebody in your family walk with a limp?’ Sometimes it seems that’s what the business has been reduced to – we’re getting too far away from the game.

Overcoming hardship becomes a cliché. His dad wasn’t there or his mom wasn’t there or he grew up in a trailer with his grandma. We’re bombarded with these stories over and over again – the same story – and it’s choking the life out of the business. I don’t love sports because of that. To me it doesn’t add anything to know somebody came out of meager circumstances. We all have sad stories. To me that’s not the heart of sports coverage.

A story ran in the Washington Post after the APSE awards came out in the spring, announcing the award winners. Mike Wise (Washington Post) won in the feature category for a story about Gilbert Arenas’ estrangement from his mother. The thing that made me smile was that Amy Shipley of the Washington Post won in the same category the year before for a story about an Olympic athlete’s search for his birth mother. Essentially the same story was awarded APSE’s highest honor for feature writing two years in a row.

My question is ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ Why do we have this infatuation with this type of story? To me it’s about the games. People don’t pay fifty dollars for the pay-per-view fight because some boxer spent his life in an orphanage. They pay fifty dollars to see them beat each other’s brains out. The other stuff is so far removed from what it is that causes people to be invested in sports. I don’t know if the attitude is ‘it’s all been done’. Maybe we’re in the era of post-modern sportswriting now. It’s all been done.

Q. You son is a high school senior and he’s interested in journalism – what advice have you given him?

A. My initial reaction was that it’s a tough racket and getting tougher. He’s looking at what I do and thinking it would be a great job. But it took me almost 15 years to get this – there was a lot of pain that took place before I got it. He doesn’t see the pressure of the job, the stories on deadline with a gun to your head when you cover a baseball or basketball team. He doesn’t see the time spend away from the family. It’s not easy on families or on guys traveling in the post 9/11 world. He’s not aware of the non-glamorous aspects of it. Sometimes I have him read SMG interviews. They educate him about this business but also strip away the glamour – the people talk about it’s like any other job and it’s very difficult if you want to do it well.

One thing I said was ‘I hope you’re not thinking about this to make me happy’. I was the first in my family to get in the journalism business – I’m not following anybody else – there’s no reason you have to feel like you have to’.

Q. He could become a hedge fund manager and rule the world.

A. He’d rather be a General Manager if not a sportswriter. He talks about sports management. It wouldn’t shock me if he switched off and headed in that direction. There’s a tough job – imagine having to deal with agents on a regular basis.

Q. You think that’s tough?

A. Sure. You’re talking a lifetime of being second-guessed. I can’t imagine having that job and not having high blood pressure – so many things are out of your control, such as injuries. Face it – how many good jobs are there in that field? If you got into management you might do it on a minor league level, or manage an Arena Football League team. God knows. Obviously it has its rewards, but you have to have the constitution for it. Like all these sports they become 365 deals – it’s so much harder to get away from it than it used to be. I’d like to think that whatever career you choose you have the opportunity for a bit of a life.

Q. Can you have a life as a columnist?

A. Yes. Being free from beat work gives you a lot more flexibility. I don’t work any less hard – I just think it has more flexibility. My focus a lot of the year is the Redskins – that beat is so much more important here than anything else – and covering the football team is so much saner from a travel standpoint. They’re on the road eight weeks, and one is a train ride to Philadelphia and another is a train ride to New York. It makes it easier on families – when the kids get older and need to be carted here and there – you’re not always tied up with night work.

Q. What did you cover?

A. My first beat was Holy Cross, and then I covered the Patriots and the Red Sox in the summer. Then I went to Arizona and was doing Arizona State football and basketball. I was at the Oklahoman for six weeks – I covered OU spring football. In the Alumni game an alumnus blew out his knee, went in for surgery, and died on the table – that was my big story in the brief time I was there. The Washington Times was starting up and a guy who had been with the Republic and was with the Time called me up. I had an interest in being in the east and working on a start-up – it seemed to be such a rare opportunity given the state of the business. How many major metros are ever going to start up? USA Today started a couple of months after we did – that’s it for the last 25 years.

Q. What did the Times hire you to do?

A. They hired me to cover Maryland sports but everything changed when I got here. Some initial hires didn’t work out. I did features for a few years – longer takeouts. In ’88 I started columns on a semi-regular basis. Mo Seigal had health issues – they had me fill in. Within a year it was a regular gig. I’ve been writing columns for 19 years.

Q. Have you mastered the format?

A. Mastered? No. If I did I would stop and do something else. I think I’ve settled into the form. You start thinking in 750 and 800 word bites. The way I knew I settled into the columnist life was when I came back from a vacation in the summer and the first column wouldn’t take so long to write. I had found my voice and my style – getting back was no big deal – it was an extension of me. In the early stages the columns are more of a struggle.

Dan Daly, excerpted from the Washington Times, January 5, 2006:

Today the drop kick, tomorrow the Statue of Liberty play.

It’s hard not to get giddy about Doug Flutie’s old-fashioned extra point the other day. Perhaps you saw the replay, oh, about 64 times on television. That’s how many years it had been since somebody had drop kicked a PAT in the NFL – one more reason to call it the No Fun League.

For the uninitiated, the drop kick is a vestige of the Pre-Facemask Era. It involves no holder, only a kicker standing about 10 yards behind the center. He receives the snap, drops the ball gently – as would a punter – and then, just as it hits the ground, boots it through the uprights.

Hypothetically, at least. It’s harder than it sounds – which is one reason it’s now a lost art. Back in the day, though, pro football fans thrilled to the drop kicking exploits of Fats Henry, Paddy Driscoll, Pid Purdy and Frosty Peters – not to mention Al Bloodgood, who booted four field goals in a game…

(SMG thanks Dan Daly for his cooperation)

Article published Sep 27, 2007

Ecko making sure 756* isn’t forgotten

September 27, 2007

by Dan Daly – The people have spoken — the computer-literate people, at least. Barry Bonds’ 756th home run ball won’t be shot into space or shipped to the Baseball Hall of Fame without editorial comment; no, it will be sent to Cooperstown affixed with an asterisk, sports’ version of the Scarlet Letter.

Cue the confetti.

“On your right is an odds sheet once belonging to Pete Rose, the all-time hit leader with 4,256. Pete denied for almost two decades that he bet on baseball, was suspended indefinitely from the game, then finally confessed to help sell a book he ‘wrote.’ He’s banned from the Hall right now, but a lot of people think he might get in the day after hell freezes over.

“Just ahead you’ll see the corked bat Norm Cash wielded when he won the 1961 American League batting title. Norm batted 75 points higher that year than he did in any other season, so it must have been pretty good cork. I’m guessing it came from a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, probably a ’59.

“There are also a number of other interesting items — Joe Niekro’s emery board, Kevin Gross’ Black-and-Decker sander, the telescope Herman Franks peered through to steal signals for the Giants in 1951 and Barry Bonds’ original size 101/2 cleats, the ones he wore before his feet began looking like Herman Munster’s. A pair of his later cleats, the size 13s, are in the Museum of Natural History …”

Bonds has already called Ecko “stupid” and “an idiot” for not according the artifact more respect, for not treating it as an investment property. “He spent $750,000 on the ball [$752,467 to be exact], and that’s what he’s doing with it?” Barry said incredulously.

But Ecko was undeterred. And indeed, why should he care whether he has the approval of Bonds, the guy who put the “ass” in asterisk? It’s clearly important to him to make this symbolic gesture, to express his concern that “some of the best athletes in the country are forced to decide between being competitive and staying natural.” And while he might have a weakness for self-promotion, his heart is in the right place.

So the ball, adorned with a “*,” will be packed off to Cooperstown, there to reside with Edd Roush’s 48-ounce bat and Joe Morgan’s kid-sized glove. The Hall is happy to get it, branded or unbranded. It’s the ball Barry Bonds belted to break Hank Aaron’s home run record, the foulest fair ball in major league history.

Sing Sing was tough in the ’30s.

Washington Times, The, May, 2005

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Byline: Dan Daly, THE WASHINGTON TIMES Though I’ve yet to see the movie – it opens nationwide tomorrow – I suspect the remake of “The Longest Yard” features more (Chris) Rock than rock pile. Adam Sandler as an NFL quarterback-turned-convict? Not a whole lot of verite in that cinema.

(At least Burt Reynolds, who had Sandler’s role in the original film, played some college ball at Florida State.) So let me tell you about a real prison football team, just so you’ll know the difference. Let me tell you about the team they had at Sing Sing from 1931 to ’35. The Black Sheep,

Publication: The Washington Times

Publication Date: 05-JAN-06

Delivery: Immediate Online Access

Author:

Article Excerpt

Byline: Dan Daly, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Today the drop kick, tomorrow the Statue of Liberty play.

AJ Daulerio

An Interview With AJ Daulerio

“…come on, you’re telling me Shirley Povich didn’t canvas the titty bars to get inside information on the players he covered?”

“Every Deadspin post doesn’t have to be overly crude, or arched for it to work on the site. Sometimes it’s necessary to let the readership know that you are capable of being a decent human being. If it’s truthful and not stilted, I think the “earnest” stories can be just as successful as those littered with dick jokes and smart-assery.”

“I rarely monitor the comments to see who’s a good or bad commenter. I think what happens down below the post is its own universe and is self-policed…It’s very Lord of the Flies”

AJ Daulerio: Interviewed on November 15, 2008

Position: Deadspin Sea Captain (and editor)

Born: 1974, Philadelphia, “home of the World Fucking Champion Philadelphia Phillies”

Education:La Salle University, 1996 1/2, Communications/English

Career: “Various legal and financial trade publications, The Black Table, Oddjack, Philadelphia Magazine, Deadspin. Numerous other places before and in between”

Personal:SINGLE

Favorite restaurant (home): Mercato, Philadelphia, 12th and Spruce. “I could bathe in their short rib ragu”

Favorite restaurant (away): Blue Ribbon Brasserie, New York. “I think I could eat 96 oysters”

Favorite hotel: THEhotel, Las Vegas, “Mini flat-screen right next to the toilet”

AJ Daulerio, posted on Deadspin, November 12, 2008, 2:30 p.m:

http://deadspin.com/5084216/when-we-were-kings-one-night-at-ricks-cabaret

“I don’t get the Derek Jeter thing, ” one dancer named Julianne says from across a four top table in the dimly lit dining room of Rick’s Cabaret. “He’s so normal looking.”

Two other girls, Holly and, oh, I don’t know remember what her name was — Bambi, maybe?— agree. “Yes, he’s really not that handsome.”

This was the extent of the “athlete” conversations we had with the dancers, three of them, sitting around our table, boobs and bubble-headedness on full display. It was tough to get the girls to talk about the professional athletes they’ve had has clients. Most were willing to go there, but simply couldn’t remember any names, or teams, or what day of the week it was.

I’ve interviewed strippers before and, like all humans, some are brighter than others. Some keep careful track of the notable names and faces that they meet. Others could give a lap dance to the president and won’t treat him different than any other dude waving a $20 — unless they’re told to. Special treatment is a directive passed down from the host of the club. Athletes are the whales in these places and on Monday night, we played that role. Granted, it could only go so far, because everyone in the club could tell that we were just a couple of idiots playing dress-up. The staff happily obliged, though, and we experienced for one night what Rick’s Cabaret is like for those with athlete celebrity status and disposable income.

The reason we picked this Monday was also to watch the “beloved” Arizona Cardinals on Monday Night Football. Will was adamant about this. Whatever other kind of shenanigans transpire, he still gets to watch the game. “We get to watch the game, though, right, that’s why we came here…” Yeah. Got it.

Our host for the evening was accommodating, making sure that we had a table right in front of a television and ensured we were never lonely. ” If the girls get too annoying or distracting, just tell them to leave,” he said. I envisioned a scenario with Will politely asking strippers to leave the table so he could watch the game because, “I’msorryma’amthat’s my team, I love the CardinalsgoCardinals!Notthatyou’renotalovelyhumanbeingbutthisismyteamandI…I…I…I.” That whole thing.

We ate our steaks and watched our game and shared pleasant, awkward, nonsensical conversation with the women seen pictured in many of these photographs. This is what differentiates us between actual athletes — they’re smart enough to know that small-talk should be limited to money exchanging and if they want more drinks. Conversations about family or world economic policy are not they types of topics that should be broached before a woman jams her knee in your crotch.

But who does come to Rick’s Cabaret? According to our host, members of the Knicks, Yankees, and Rangers are all frequent attendees. They get steaks, they get their favorite girls and they relax — it’s decompression time. Not all of them partake in multiple lap dances or get embarrassingly shit-faced. No, some just ignore the girls and the drinks altogether and just want to go some place where they won’t be bothered. (No photos in the club enable most of the athletes to relax a little more. And autograph-seekers and fanboys are less inclined to bother them at a strip club.) Many of the visiting teams pick up their side-projects there — “road beef”, if you will — and plenty of women treat those arrangements like a part-time job.

While we’re still in blind item mode, one woman that was at our table for a little while actually broke character for a minute to ask one of us out on a date. And one of us retardedly thought that this was something be flattered about and followed through with said date last night. (Note to people who still think this is a fantastic idea, even in a purely anthropological sense: IT IS FUCKING NOT.)

Our food was great, our drinks were bottomless, our service was top-notch — we were treated like Very Important People. We were whisked away from the upstairs dining area and thrown into the middle table in the downstairs cabaret lounge, still with a front-and-center view of the Cardinals/49ers game which actually turned out to be a great game. We were over-served with drinks and over-compensated by dancers.

But as soon as the Michael Robinson ridiculously dived right into the Cardinals defensive line and the final seconds ticked down, it was over in a cruel, anti-climatic fashion. The waitress grabbed our half-empty glasses off the table, our host shook our hand and thanked us for coming, the girls that were fawning over us quickly pulled up their tops and moved on to the next table. We sat there looking at each other and realized we both became entirely too comfortable with this type of treatment, which at that point, had gone on for more than four hours.

” I think if I was a professional athlete, I would go to a strip club every night,” I yelled over to Will.

He just nodded, contemplating the statement and replaying the whole evening back through his head.

“I can see how that might be enjoyable .”

Q. Were you disappointed the strippers didn’t name names? Is this the future of sports investigative reporting?

A. No, I was not “disappointed”, per se, but I was definitely hoping for more salacious anecdotes. It’s safe to say I was pretty distracted. And, come on, you’re telling me Shirley Povich didn’t canvas the titty bars to get inside information on the players he covered?

Q. Who got the date?

A. I did. Nice lady. But after an hour of conversation topics ranging from “What’s your favorite color?” to “Do you like Christmas?” I realized it was not going to end well. It’s safe to say there will probably not be a second date.

Q. When Jason Whitlock (KC Star) recently posted on Facebook that he “wishes he could poop right now”, you put it up on Deadspin with the comment, “Good God. Somebody send the man a laxative”. Why are Whitlock’s bowels considered newsworthy by Deadspin? Have mainstream media missed the boat on this issue?

A. Absolutely. I’m surprised most regional newspapers don’t have daily updates on their sports reporters’ bowel movements. It would definitely help their circulation numbers. But Jason is still my favorite columnist,regardless of any gastro-intestinal problems he may have.

Q. Can you tell us about how Deadspin is produced? Who does what, and when? What’s the daily drill?

A. It definitely changes all the time, but this is a pretty accurate snapshot of the daily routine: Rick Chandler is usually the first one up, so he handles most of the morning stuff. Then Dash Bennett will begin to file. I’ll oversee what they’re doing, plow through email, check out some of the bigger blogs, deal with any managerial button-pushing issues, watch Sports Center, plan out my own stories for the day. I smoke constantly, eat sparingly, and am always, always checking email.

Q. How many sports blogs do you monitor? Are there young Will Leitches in the hustings waiting for a big break? How does one break through in the sports blogosphere?

A. I hit the Big Lead, Sports By Brooks, With Leather, Fanhouse, and The Sporting Blog every day. Then I’ll scan SI, ESPN, NY Times sports section, Philly.com, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, LA Times, etc.

Q. How does someone get to be a Deadspin contributing writer? What’s the ‘right stuff’ for Deadspin? Are Deadspin writers born wiseguys or do they come to it through experience?

A. It’s very arbitrary. Usually the writers will have a uniqueness about their humor or approach or expertise that caters to a specific section of our readership. You have someone like Drew Magary, who could pretty much write about anything and be entertaining. Then someone like Matt Sussman, whose freakish live blogging ability just completely blows me away anytime he does it for us. But a writer’s blogging experience doesn’t matter at all. It’s whether their style fits in with Deadspin.

Q. How much oversight from the corporate suits at Gawker? Where does Deadspin rank in the Gawker constellation?

A. There is definitely a lot more oversight than there was when Will was in charge, but it’s necessary right now. The site is no longer a mom-and-pop operation and requires some long-view suggestions from the higher-ups in order for it to continue to grow. But they’re definitely not overbearing and never question my editorial oversight. Right now, I think Deadspin is right in the middle, but upwardly mobile.

Q. Almost everything in Deadspin is ironic or snarky. Have you ever felt like writing something serious or earnest?

A. Of course. But you have to pick your spots for that. Every Deadspin post doesn’t have to be overly crude, or arched for it to work on the site. Sometimes it’s necessary to let the readership know that you are capable of being a decent human being. If it’s truthful and not stilted, I think the “earnest” stories can be just as successful as those littered with dick jokes and smart-assery.

Q. How does someone get to be a commenter? All-time best commenters? Do you weed out and discard dumb or unfunny commenters? Though the strippers didn’t name names, can you name commenters you wish would go away?

A. It’s not a very complex process. Readers who wish to comment either email me or Rob Iracane – our comment guru – and then get let in. I rarely monitor the comments to see who’s a good or bad commenter. I think what happens down below the post is its own universe and is self-policed. People quickly realize who is in charge and will usually hear it from the everyday crew if they’re out of line or unwelcome.

It’s very Lord of the Flies. I check in on the commenters from time to time just to see what they come up with — honestly, there is some funny, funny stuff down there that usually has me laughing out loud once a day. As long as they’re having fun, they can say pretty much anything they want. My job is to monitor what goes on up top. But every day, I’ll make it a point to throw a couple of posts up where the commenters can continue to build their own community and carve out their own little piece of real estate on the site.

Q. Are you ducking the question?

A. No, not at all. I honestly don’t get annoyed by any commenters.

AJ Daulerio, posted on Deadspin, Nov. 14, 2008, 6:15 p.m:

http://deadspin.com/5087820/a-toast-to-this-smut+filled-week-of-debauchery

Thank GOD this week is over. Christ. Between going out on dates with dim-witted strippers
, gloom-and-doom reports from management
, litigious MMA fighters
and threats from spatially-challenged U of F co-eds
, this week has been a perfect storm of corporate drudgery. Well, not the stripper. But that was soul-sucking in its own predictable way.

Here’s some stuff that was managed to amuse:

• Jamboroo

• Florida State brawlers

• Olbermann gives a shout-out to Civil Negligence

• The Nutt gals

• Piazza writing a book

• Jason Whitlock had some issues

This weekend, you’ll have a cavalcade of weekend editors from KOGOD’s Weekend Army to keep you occupied and let you know if Brock Lesnar survives his first real fight.

Thank you for your continued support of Deadspin. Fuck it, let’s SKEET
and drink like there are no more Mondays.

(SMG thanks AJ Daulerio for his cooperation)

Mike DeArmond

An Interview with Mike DeArmond

“…I started feeling as if I wasn’t good enough at the things I did, and that I was at fault for nearly everything. My Aunt Helen’s suicide. My father’s expectations. Dan Devine leaving Missouri and handing over Tiger football to Al Onofrio, who could beat Notre Dame but could not beat Kansas. I’d like to say I’m kidding, but at some level, my taking blame for stupid things like that was very real.”

“In 1991, my dad died – his last heart attack. My mother found him on the floor of the garage in Joplin. I broke down on the telephone, though I soldiered on…And that was the edge over which I tumbled, although it was not until years later, in the summer of 2006, that I had a nervous breakdown. By the way, that’s the dumbest description of losing your self-control ever invented.”

“I told Barb I could not go back to work. I put my head on her shoulder. She gathered me in her arms. I cried for 16 straight hours. And then, the day after we got home to Kansas City, I went to a psychiatric hospital so broken in emotional pieces that they took away my belt and shoelaces and put me under observation for 24 hours.”

Mike DeArmond: Interviewed on March 25, 2010

Position: Sportswriter, Kansas City Star

Born: 1950, Butler, Mo.

Education: University of Missouri – Columbia, BJ ’72

Career: Kansas City Star, 1971 “through today – last I checked”

Personal: “Married to the wonderful and funny and smart and patient Barbara Withers DeArmond, son Gabriel, daughter Cortney”

Favorite restaurant (home): Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue, Kansas City, Missouri. “And if absolutely anybody says that isn’t the best barbecue in the history of the world, then they haven’t eaten there or they are a Kansas Jayhawk fan.”

Favorite restaurant (away): Pode Nostrum (Means Under the Bridge) in Prague. “Literally, it is under the Charles Bridge, is lighted by 150 or so candles, overlooks a slew in the river where the residents threw their handguns rather than give them to the Soviets back in the day. Cook their meat by charcoal grill in front of you and have a plum liquor that will knock you on your rear, which they served to us in a purple fabric-lined wooden box when the waitress found out it was Barb’s birthday.”

Favorite hotel: Club Intrawest, Zihuatanejo, Mexcio.

Mike DeArmond, posted on kansascity.com, August 24, 2009:

http://campuscorner.kansascity.com/node/152

I come not to criticize or praise Michael Beasley, but to empathize with him.
Yahoo Sports is reporting the former Kansas State basketball star, now a member of the NBA Miami Heat, is being treated for depression-related issues at a Houston rehabilitation facility. The Associated Press is reporting the same contention.

When I read those accounts today, I wanted to throw up.
Why?
Because I’ve been there. Three years ago, I spent a night in a psychiatric care facility under observation for depression.
It may have been the worst night of my life. They took my shoestrings, my belt. Informed doctors and nurses take depression seriously. I felt exactly how Beasley apparently felt when he left a cry for help on an Internet account:
“Feelin like it’s not worth livin!!!!!!! I’m done” and “I feel like the whole world is against me. I can’t win for losin’.”

It doesn’t matter why you feel that low. It matters only that you do. And trust me, you do.
I spent only the one night under lock and key, of my own volition. I spent several weeks in day-long group therapy sessions and it is those sessions that I honestly will tell you saved my life.
My last day of group therapy, I told my fellow sufferers that I would carry a part of each of them around with me for the rest of my life. The part that helped me gain perspective again.
It is why I’m sharing my experience. I was helped off a ledge by others sharing their experiences with me.
I don’t begin to know a thing about what demons are chasing Michael Beasley, if indeed there are any.

Depression’s causes and symptoms are as varied as the different people you’ll meet walking down the street.
Some depressives are alcoholics or drug addicts. Many, like me, are not.
For me, depression was – and on some days still can be – measured by the certainty that beneath my feet, just under the ground upon which I stand, lurks a deep, dark lake knowing no horizon.
Its surface is not ruffled by waves, or even a ripple. But to descend into the dark’s caress is to give up all hope. Loss of hope, I contend, beggars the loss of life.
If Michael Beasley is teetering over that abyss, then I pray he receives the help I received. I pray we let him seek that with the understanding I was granted by people at The Kansas City Star, by family, by friends.
It is the least we all could do.

Q. Your column was candid and courageous. What is the relevant history that preceded it – take us to the beginning and wind it forward.

A. When I was 12 years old and pitching Little League baseball in the birthplace of Harry S Truman (Lamar, Mo.) each night before every game I would crawl under the stands and lie face-down to the ground with hands supporting a stomach that felt as if it was going to burst. I was later told this was probably the beginning of an ulcer, which eventually did go away of its own accord and the understanding that no one but me gave a damn about Little League baseball.

That was the first time I remember wanting to do something and not wanting to do that something at the same time. But that soon was the case with competitive swimming as well. But at least in swimming, I had the good sense – and the rudeness I’m sure my swim coach thought – to say I would swim the free style and the backstroke and any relay involving either of those strokes, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to swim the breaststroke, at which I moved up and down the pool with the approximate speed of a corpse.

We moved from Lamar, upon my graduation from the sixth grade and right before my sister’s senior year in high school, to Joplin, Mo., and my parents were concerned how my sister would adjust. They should have worried more about how a small town boy would adjust to what seemed at the time to be a major city (population 40,000), in an era where pegged jeans were all the rage in Joplin and had yet to be heard of in Lamar.

The mortification of going to school with jeans that I rolled the bottoms up into cuffs lasted approximately two days. A girl I didn’t know kindly told me everyone would think I was a dork – which, of course, I was – if I didn’t get the bottom of my jeans sewn into a seam and if I didn’t get the legs tightened so much that I needed to bring a seam ripper and a needle and thread to gym class so that I could get out of the damned things and then tighten up the bottom of the Levi’s sufficiently to retain my air of cool. That is, more or less, how I managed to get through three years of what Joplin called Junior High School. Along with playing eighth and ninth-grade basketball, thanks not to any level of talent at the game but rather because I developed a defensive bravado that passed for supreme self confidence that so angered opposing players that they would make stupid mistakes trying to show me up.

There really was nothing remarkable about the three years at South Junior High, except for becoming modestly acceptable to some nice looking girls, and developing friends from two other junior highs through a church youth group we all attended for the social life rather than for any religious lessons.

It was here, in fact, that I had the audacity to inform the assistant minister that I thought organized religion was pretty much full of it and that half of the congregation of that particular church was probably as latently hypocritical as I was.

The first year at Joplin High School marked three big events. One, it became obvious I wasn’t a varsity athlete. Two, if I wasn’t going to play sports I could at least write about them. And three, I met Mary Wieman, the best teacher I ever had.

She happened to be the newspaper sponsor and my creative writing teacher. And was the first adult besides my parents and my Aunt Helen who actually said, “I love you.”

It was in the middle of the American Folk Music revival and I taught myself to play the guitar, began writing some of my own songs, and spending a lot of time on my own penning free verse that was somewhat influenced by equal parts Poe, the English murder mystery writer Edgar Wallace (who was also a sports writer) and by teen angst real and imagined.

Are you bored yet? I could go on for pages. But I won’t.

I thought I fell in love for the first time my senior year, with a girl from another town I had met at a summer journalism conference at Missouri the summer after my junior year in high school. And that generally meant I was either going over to Kansas to drink 3/2 beer with the guys or driving to another town to have a date or just an hour or two to talk about issues of the heart as if I understood any of them.

And then it was time to go to COLLEGE. Not Missouri Southern College in Joplin, which I informed my dear mother would be like high school all over again, but Mizzou. Where I pledged a fraternity, co-wrote its winning home-coming skit (the co-writer getting major credit because he could put a microphone into his mouth and actually sound like a Tiger), then along with some 30 other members of a 36-boy pledge class quit the fraternity. The exact moment of exit came within the first hour of Hell Week, when an active spit on a tile flood and handed me a toothbrush and told be to clean the grout. At which point I told him to shove the toothbrush up his tight ass, picked up my guitar and my other stuff and walked across the street and moved into an apartment the University didn’t know about.

At this point -and finally we’ve reached the point of your question – I started feeling as if I wasn’t good enough at the things I did, and that I was at fault for nearly everything. My Aunt Helen’s suicide. My father’s expectations.

Dan Devine leaving Missouri and handing over Tiger football to Al Onofrio, who could beat Notre Dame but could not beat Kansas. I’d like to say I’m kidding, but at some level, my taking blame for stupid things like that was very real.

I met Barb, my wife, the second semester of my freshman year and we dated throughout college – with a minor spell when I thought it was a good idea to date around but then found there was absolutely no one but Barb who could put up with me – all the way up to our marriage the December following our May graduation in 1972.

By this point my poetry and free verse definitely had a lot of Poe and a lot of dark shadings. I could, and sometimes did, cry for the silliest of things. Simply wondering if my parents were proud of me would do it.

But after a sports stringing job with The Kansas City Star my senior year turned into a full-time job, I charged headlong into marriage, sports writing and the inability to handle criticism at all.

I was offered the No. 1 beat position on Kansas City’s new NHL franchised and turned it down for the No. 3 position on a two-paper system covering Royals baseball. That first year, I literally considered driving my car into a tree on several occasions. For two reasons.

One, pro athletes generally treat rookie writers – and at 23 I was a complete rookie – as poorly as they do rookie ballplayers. Amos Otis threatened to hit me with a baseball bat. I started to walk away and heard the wolves gathering with

every step of retreat, so turned around and told AO to swing away. We developed a good relationship quickly thereafter. God Bless John Mayberry and Hal McRae.

And two, I really could not stand to have my copy changed. Took it as a personal affront. Once drove back from the Lake of the Ozarks on a Sunday morning after arriving on Saturday so that I could personally confront an editor who had changed ONE word in my lead.

In 1991, my dad died – his last heart attack. My mother found him on the floor of the garage in Joplin. I broke down on the telephone, though I soldiered on. I remember Mrs. Wieman came by and we sat in her car and smoked cigarettes and I told her stuff I couldn’t tell my mother. How I wasn’t ready to be a man (at age 41). How unfair this all was.

And that was the edge over which I tumbled, although it was not until years later, in the summer of 2006, that I had a nervous breakdown. By the way, that’s the dumbest description of losing your self-control ever invented.

Q. In a reply to a commenter, you mentioned a nervous breakdown on a transatlantic flight – what was that like and how did you respond?

A. I survived the hell of covering the Ricky Clemons Affair and the 45 Days of Quin Snyder’s Implosion, but suddenly, on an airplane back from Switzerland, I saw a guy in the aisle next to me working on a computer exactly like my work computer.

I told Barb I could not go back to work. I put my head on her shoulder. She gathered me in her arms. I cried for 16 straight hours. And then, the day after we got home to Kansas City, I went to a psychiatric hospital so broken in emotional pieces that they took away my belt and shoelaces and put me under observation for 24 hours.

Fortunately, my shrink took me out of forced confinement, and put me in daily group therapy sessions for a month. I took another extra month off work. Until – through talking out my life and finding a proper, if minimal, medication dosage – I felt I was ready to go back to work. And knew I was when I told a co-worker in all seriousness that I was crazy. And he smiled and said: “Mike, we always knew that.”

Q. What role did your family, colleagues and bosses play in your treatment and recovery?

A. I told our sports editor at the time that my collapse was not his fault. And it wasn’t. I had an emotional fault in my foundation the size of the crack in the House of Usher. But I will say this. Were all my bosses as understanding as Derek Sampson – then the college editor at The Star – I might not have broken down completely. Too many bosses in journalism treat reporters and assistant editors and copy editors like donkeys. When you have a donkey like me who already thinks he isn’t good enough and that everything that goes wrong is his fault, well, people can break.

Q. How do you assess your condition at present?

A. I’m much more forgiving of myself and others. I’m calmer, and that is in part because of meds. I don’t have to scream and throw a fit to tell people I need a break. And the people who work with me seem to appreciate that. On the first day after I poured out my insecurities to a shrink, he asked me: “What took you so long to come here?” I might not have broken down if I had gone earlier. I wish I had. But perhaps I needed to hit an emotional bottom. I still refer to bad days as being able “to see that dark lake that is flowing right under my feet.” But I’m sound enough to have been able to help some other people who have had the same problems as I. I’m in a good place right now.

Q. Why did you decide to write about your depression in a public forum?

A. I wanted to help other people. And it helped me at the same time. Depression deepens the more ashamed you are of being depressed, the more you try to hide it. I wanted to tell other people “You’re not alone.”

Q. What was it like writing that column – how did you find the words?

A. I don’t think about writing. I don’t craft things. They just pour out. I’d be a better writer if I was able to write and re-write and re-write. I do re-write. But I hate it. It, to me, injects artifice into what pours out of my gut and my heart.

Q. Reaction to the column?

A. Generally good. A lot of people told me it took a lot of courage. I kept telling them it didn’t. It wasn’t courageous. I simply told a story like I’d told thousands of stories I’ve run across in covering the Royals from 1973 through 1980, from covering eight Olympic Games, from covering more than 20 years of sports of all kinds at the University of Missouri, and six or seven in the ’70s when K-State was good at basketball and sucked at football. From covering the Golden Gloves with some guy named Steve Marantz, and from going inside the collapsed Hyatt Regency lobby to help report and write the story of the Hyatt Skywalk Tragedy.

Q. What impact did your job, and career, have on your condition?

A. It both increased the pressure to break and served as a safety valve. I may have reduced stress by working at another sort of job. But I might have exploded out of frustration. I picked the right profession. Sometimes I just didn’t do it very well.

Q. Aside from the long hours and travel, how might a job in sports media put stress on health and happiness?

A. Journalism – all sorts, I’d bet – isn’t what it was when I graduated from Mizzou. The profession contends fairness and accuracy remain basic tenets. I don’t believe that is the case beyond the pride of the individual. Get it first. Whatever IT is. Too many people don’t really care. It is all about Internet clicks, and getting somebody to leave comments at the bottom of your stories. Journalism no longer takes the time to explain. We no longer try to change the world for the better. We’re just trying to get along, to survive. And I hate that.

Q. In the past year, other sports columnists have written about personal battles with alcoholism and sex addiction. Why are writers now more apt to reveal personal matters when in the past it was off limits?

A. I don’t know that is true. Maybe it is. Blame it on Watergate. And part of that is a good thing. I think we’re being more honest, by choice or not doesn’t really matter. Each person, at heart, is what we call an “Olympic story.” Full of humanity, pathos, pride, disappointment. Journalists are fully developed characters, not entities existing in a single dimension. I like the way Cheryl Wheeler – a singer-songwriter who wrote the song “Aces” said it in another song: “Life is short, but the days and nights are long.”

Q. Mizzou alums are afraid to ask, but will: Is depression an occupational hazard of covering Mizzou sports?

A. No. It would depress me more if I had to daily try to report on the quasi-religious experience of Kansas basketball, Nebraska football or St. Louis Cardinals baseball. Mizzou sports and I have something in common. We’re sometimes quite good, often-times flawed. Sometimes we are just downright pathetic. But at the end of the day, I’d like to believe we’re both without too much artifice. At the end of it all, we’re not that hard to understand.

(SMG thanks Mike DeArmond for his cooperation)

Jeff Duncan (Part One)

An Interview with Jeff Duncan (Part One)

“I was the first reporter in the Dome…The Dome was such a symbol of Katrina and suffering. Even a year later talking to officers and military people we still don’t know what happened in there. There’s no way to nail down the deaths and rapes. Trying to peel away the myth and get to the truth was very difficult.”

It was the most rewarding experience of my career. I’m sure I’ll never cover another story of that magnitude…I was fortunate to sink my teeth into something so important and make a difference in the community…I’ve never felt my job was more important than it was these past two years.

“Obviously it changed my perspective on sports…I used to be the obsessive guy who watched ESPN all the time and would read the sports section first. Now I pick up the A section first and work back to sports. I watch…more CNN and broader-scope programming. It helped me become a better-rounded person.”

Jeff Duncan: Interviewed on March 1, 2007

Position: enterprise sports reporter, New Orleans Times-Picayune

Born: 1964, Louisville

Education: University of Louisville, 1986, communications

Career: Louisville Courier-Journal (part-time), St. Petersburg Times (part-time), Monroe News-Star 1989-96, Florida Today 96-98, Nashville alternative weekly 98-99, Times-Picayune 99 –

Personal: single

Favorite restaurant (home): Jacquimo’s “the quintessential New Orleans restaurant – get the alligator sausage cheesecake – it sounds horrible and if you’re not from here you wouldn’t order it – 10,000 calories but worth every one”; Cochon “warehouse district – hottest new restaurant in town – specializes in Louisiana pork”

Favorite restaurant (road): Jake’s Del Mar Restaurant, Del Mar, Ca., “beachfront dining and Del Mar is one of the most beautiful towns in America”

Favorite hotel: Grand Marriott, Point Clear, Ala. “where we stay covering the Senior Bowl – old historic hotel on a bluff – you get the points and you’re in a nice hotel”

Jeff Duncan excerpted from the Times-Picayune, September 12, 2005:

The concrete and steel titan on Poydras Street still dominates the New Orleans skyline. But the Superdome, like everything else in the brutalized city, looks much different now.

Hurricane Katrina’s 100 mph-plus winds relentlessly strafed the world-renowned stadium’s roof, peeled back its white weather- protective shell like a coconut husk. The force was so powerful it stripped off sheets of 2-inch foam and thick rubber and blew them all over the Central Business District. Three huge smoke dampers were blown from the roof. Seven other gaping holes were opened.

Once compared to a sleek futuristic spaceship, the Dome now looks like a beat-up car that has lost its primer. Sixty percent of the roof was damaged, said Doug Thornton, regional vice president for SMG, the company that manages the state-owned facility.

Thornton tagged the cost of damage at between $50 million and $100 million, less than some that have been tossed around in recent days, but substantial nonetheless.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the World Trade Center became an icon of their wreckage. After Hurricane Katrina, it’s the Superdome. Via helicopter fly-overs, TV networks beamed countless images of the hurricane-ravaged arena around the world in the days after the storm. As before, it symbolizes the city.

The unyielding eye of the cameras, however, never peered inside the 30-year-old landmark, which has been under armed-guard lockdown since the last of the 25,000 storm victims who sought shelter there were evacuated Sept. 4.

On Friday, Thornton led a team of 22 contractors and a handful of Superdome employees on a tour of the facility to assess the damage caused by the hurricane and the storm victims who used the building as a refuge. It was the first time anyone other than Thornton or National Guard troops had been inside the building since Sept. 4.

The group included representatives from several national companies that specialize in environmental disaster abatement and demolition services. They donned gas masks, white jumpsuits and rubber hip boots. Some even rubbed Vick’s Vaporub under their noses to block the stench….

Inside, the Dome’s 1.8 million square feet looks trashed. Its floors, concourses, ramps, meeting rooms, offices and restrooms are littered with debris and refuse from the evacuees who endured hellish living conditions in the building for as many as five days after the storm.

The floor and Momentum Turf playing field have been transformed into a mushy lake of inch-deep black water. The fetid soup coated a sea of trash and spoiled food. The bathrooms on the 200 level overflow with human feces and urine. In one men’s room, the human waste spilled out of the entrance and into the concourse. Blood stains several walls. Stagnant for days in the still air, the water, spoiled food and human excrement will require decontamination and will be removed by professionals…

Officials said at least 10 to 12 people died in the Dome, including a man who jumped or was pushed 50 feet to his death from one of the pedestrian walkways. A military police officer also was shot in the leg during an assault.

On the suite level, windows were shattered; holes and graffiti marred several walls. Damage to the luxury boxes varied from suite to suite.

In one, the liquor cabinets had been broken into and the chairs were rearranged but everything else was unharmed. Down the hall, one of the New Orleans Saints’ suites was ransacked. Leather couches were turned over. Holes were punched in the walls and pictures were shattered. A 10-by-18-inch picture of former Saints running back Ricky Williams lay in tatters on a bed of broken glass and splintered wood…

Friday’s tour was the first step in a two-month evaluation process to determine whether the Dome should be salvaged, renovated or destroyed.

There is a strong possibility the costs to save the facility will be too high. Thornton has estimated it could cost $50 million to $100 million to repair the Dome and as much as $500 million to $600 million to demolish it and build a new one.

The future of one of country’s world’s most recognized buildings, one that has hosted some of the biggest events in American history and along the way became one of New Orleans’ most enduring symbols, is now uncertain.

Six NFL teams won Super Bowls in it. The LSU Tigers celebrated the 2004 college football national championship in it. Frank Sinatra crooned in it. The Rolling Stones rocked it. And Pope John Paul II prayed in it.

The evaluation will be a laborious process. Thornton hopes to receive bids from the contractors by the end of this week.

“One guy asked me why we wouldn’t just want to tear down the Dome because it harbors so many bad memories of the storm, but we had 30 years of good memories here before the hurricane,” Thornton said. “It could be a symbol for the rebuilding of New Orleans, something people could rally around.”

But, he added, “there is a possibility that they’ve played the last game in the Superdome as we know it.”

Q. What was it like going into the Superdome after Katrina?

A. I was the first reporter in the Dome. The GM of the Superdome, Doug Thornton, contacted us about accompanying them on the first inspection after the storm. Because I had been the NFL reporter and had covered so many games there I was sent.

It was intense. We wore hazmat outfits – I remember putting on gloves and boots and a hat and thinking that two weeks ago I was concerned with who was making the Saints final roster -now I’m concerned about hazardous material – what a surreal experience. To get into the arena and see the damage – and to cover the renovation and the symbolism it had for the city – and to be there that night (Sept. 25, 2006) for the Falcons game – it was a tremendous experience beyond sports reporting.

A year later I worked on a story that was the most difficult assignment I ever had in sports journalism. They wanted me to write the Dome experience for the (Katrina) anniversary issue. They wanted me to relive the five days at the Dome, to write the definitive story of what happened in there. It was a year later and people still didn’t know. It was foggy. Traditional reporting methods were useless – you couldn’t call up a source at City Hall. Police reports weren’t issued – there were no public records you would traditionally go to.

It was boots on the ground, roll up your sleeves reporting and it took all of my time from July to late August. To dig that story back up and tell it was a great challenge. You had storm victims in the Dome, and the military, which was responsible for protecting those people. You had the Dome manager, Doug Thornton and his staff – they were trained in running a sport facility, not housing storm victims. You had the medical people who were there, and I found a group of tourists from England and Australia – vacationers who ended up in the Dome, trapped in sub-human living conditions. We ran the (anniversary) series daily – it started on Sunday before the storm and picked up the next day with the storm hitting. I tried to take readers into the Dome and what it was like.

The Dome was such a symbol of Katrina and suffering. Even a year later talking to officers and military people we still don’t know what happened in there. There’s no way to nail down the deaths and rapes. Trying to peel away the myth and get to the truth was very difficult.

Q. What is it like to walk into the Dome now?

A. There was a lot of criticism nationally that New Orleans’ priorities were out of whack in rebuilding the Dome. They don’t understand the significance of what the Dome means to people here. In a lot of ways it’s like Fenway Park or Wrigley Field – an iconic symbol that holds a strong place in the hearts of Orleanians – it was very important to rebuild it. For the NFL it was prerequisite to getting the team back. The city needed the Saints back here and it wasn’t going to happen without the Dome.

All I could think of were the workers who worked around the clock for nine months straight. Doug Thornton lost his home but he was at the Dome overseeing a project that should have taken three years condensed into nine months – all to lift the city and to provide a beacon to the city. That, to me, was the story of New Orleans.

Q. What did the Katrina experience mean to you as a journalist?

A. It was the most rewarding experience of my career. I’m sure I’ll never cover another story of that magnitude – it’s still ongoing and will be for the next decade in New Orleans. As a journalist you can go a whole career and never have something of this scale. I was fortunate to sink my teeth into something so important and make a difference in the community. That’s why most of us got into this – to inform the community and make a difference in everyday lives. It was tremendous on that level. I’ve never felt my job was more important than it was these past two years.

I remember after the storm – our base was moved to Baton Rouge and we had to truck the papers in – I would go down and hand out papers to military personnel and holdouts and some people were crying when we handed them out. It was very powerful to see the impact of that – the newspaper was a sign of normalcy for them.

Obviously it changed my perspective on sports. I look at it differently. I used to be the obsessive guy who watched ESPN all the time and would read the sports section first. Now I pick up the A section first and work back to sports. I watch less ESPN and sports-related TV and more CNN and broader-scope programming. It helped me become a better-rounded person.

Q. Was your home flooded?

I live in the Uptown area near Tulane and Loyola universities. My house is close to the Mississippi River – anything close to the river is on high ground because of years of natural flooding depositing sediment. So I’m on high ground, but I didn’t know about flood elevation when I bought my house – I’m a runner and wanted to be near a park. I had about $40,000 in damage from the actual storm including a new roof.

I also lost my SUV – it was parked at the Times-Pic and was lost in the flood. When I went out reporting Monday night I parked in front of the building in an area that was dry. As the waters rose overnight none of us knew what that meant – we knew the levies had breached but we didn’t’ know how high the water would get or how far it would go. I thought my car was safe – the next morning I saw four feet of water on my truck. We were awakened by the publisher and told to evacuate. It was pretty hectic, but I survived pretty much unscathed. Three weeks ago we had a huge tornado that hit my block and I escaped again.

The floodwaters got stopped about five blocks from my house, but when we evacuated Tuesday morning to Baton Rouge none of us knew. You can imagine the shock of seeing four feet of water lapping on the front steps of the newspaper where I had walked the night before – I can’t tell you how disorienting. We rode seven hours in the back of a delivery truck to Baton Rouge in searing heat. It was a brutal experience – almost like being a refugee.

I stayed at a colleague’s house that night. We had the radio on and Mayor Nagin came on and said they can’t stop the breaches in the levies and the city was going to fill with water. They expected eight feet of water on St. Charles Avenue before it leveled out. I figured there would be ten feet of water in my house. The next morning I received hundreds of e-mails from friends and colleagues around the country. I told them I feared I had lost my house.

Q. How long before you got back to New Orleans?

A. I was in Baton Rouge for two days. After watching events transpire I was dying to get back into the city – any journalist worth his salt is going to want to cover this story. We had a small band of reporters that had stayed in the city under the direction of David Meeks who was SE at the time. He had the perspective and foresight to realize we couldn’t abandon the city all at once – he had a handful of reporters working for two days and nights.

When I was in Baton Rouge in the initial days I talked to Gordon Russell on the phone. He had been where the police had shot a man and had got out his car to report it and the police threw him against a wall and put a gun to his head. He was on the phone with me afterward and he was terrified. Gordon is one of the most diligent bulldog reporters we have. To hear that in his voice spurred me more than anything to go help our team. They needed help not just for surviving but to cover the story.

I got through to the managing editor and asked to come join them. I knew there would be no power or water – that type of environment isn’t the easiest situation to work in and it’s not for everybody, but I’m healthy and fairly young. My colleagues were doing it and I knew it was dangerous but somebody had to do it. It was competitive – I knew the New York Times and Washington Post were there. But this was our story and we needed to cover it better than anybody.

I got in a rental car that night and drove with Michael Montalbano, a sports copy editor. We gathered supplies and drove to Houma (La.) – we were working out of the Houma Courier newsroom. We slept on the floor of the newsroom and went back into the city to report on Friday. Friday night we put out our first printed story after the storm – we were printing at the Houma paper.

Q. So now you’re a news reporter, not a sportswriter. What was your first story after Katrina?

A. I did a story on the zoo, which is in the back of Audubon Park. It struck me that no one knew what had happened at the zoo – were tigers running around? I had no idea. I went to the gate – they had metal gates down in front of the building – and I saw somebody in back. I called to them – the security staff came out but they would not open the gates because they were in such fear after what they heard on the radio. There was looting uptown and they were terrified and they wouldn’t open the gates for us. We interviewed them through the gates and wrote a decent story about the damage. I slept in the Houma newsroom that night.

The next day I went to the Wal-Mart in Houma and stocked up on supplies – I was preparing to stay for good. We stayed in a colleague’s house uptown – Stephanie Grace, a metro columnist – she let in this animal pack and regrets it in hindsight. Her house became the Times-Pic Katrina bureau for the next month. We slept on the floors and had fans powered by generators. We developed an efficient system. Walt Philbin, a police reporter, became the courier – he called every morning and asked what supplies we needed – fuel, ice, beer, food – he brought it in every day and took stuff back to Baton Rouge.

James O’Byrne, the features editor, had set up a (Baton Rouge) newsroom within 24 hours with laptops and a computer network and editors and started putting out a newspaper. For reporters and editors there was no difference in the work we were doing – the deadlines were different but the journalism performed was essentially the same – although it was more difficult because of the 24-hour news cycle. We were filing at 3 a.m. and blogging constantly on the website.

It was a fluid situation. The Times-Pic and (owner) Newhouse were wonderful in how they treated the situation. They announced to us that we could work if we wanted but we didn’t have to, we could take time off – whatever we felt was best. Some people evacuated before the storm and stayed at different spots around the country. October 10 was the day we had to be back at work and they would pay us for that time. People came and went in the newsroom and the bureau.

We had a core of six to twelve in the bureau the whole time. Once you were there it was a hassle getting back out of town – it was better just to stay there. You had food and water and you knew what was at stake – the story was unfolding before our eyes. For a journalist it was such a rich environment you were compelled to stay – nothing would pull you out of there.

After 10 days I went back to Baton Rouge for a few days. A colleague was kind enough to put me up. I had to take care of personal things – bills and insurance claims – once I got that under control I felt better about focusing on the story. Luckily I was able to break away and check on my house and see that it was fine – there was no looting. Early on all standards had broken down – there was no law enforcement in the neighborhoods – police and military were concerned with saving lives. It was a very dangerous environment early on. I distinctly remember the fear in the early days until the National Guard got in. We were armed – we had weapons in our bureau that our photographer, Alex Brandon, brought in, just because there was nobody to protect you.

Q. Were you at any point in a life-threatening situation?

A. No. I never felt like my life was in danger. I did feel some fear for my security in reporting some stories. We had a pact – reporters would travel in pairs or with photographers. We did some reporting on holdouts – stragglers who refused to evacuate. These people formed mini-societies, congregated and looked out for one another. There are going to be some bad people in that kind of crowd – you could see them watching you. I found myself interviewing them and being asked to go into out-of-the-way areas to see something – that’s when I felt a little fear because I was back there by myself.

(SMG thanks Jeff Duncan for his cooperation)