So I became a very good outliner out of necessity because there wasn't time for me to write my way t

In his 1973 book "No Cheering in the Press Box ," author albany ny miami florida plane tickets Jerome Holtzman chronicled albany ny miami florida plane tickets the lives of the greatest sports journalists of his generation. Four decades later, students albany ny miami florida plane tickets at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism albany ny miami florida plane tickets are updating his work with a series of interviews with the best sports journalists of the last 40 years.
I delivered albany ny miami florida plane tickets newspapers when I was eight. I read a book called North Toward Home by Willie Morris. I read that and after I finished I was like ‘Okay, I would like to do that.’ He was the editor of Harper’s, albany ny miami florida plane tickets one of the big inventors of new journalism, whatever you want to call it. So I mean, I wanted to write magazine stories – those kinds of stories. Sports was an accident. I was randomly assigned to sports by the college paper.
I have an extraordinary amount of freedom and I work with really smart people. So I don’t-I feel no urge to go anywhere else. I don’t feel stifled by sports. I don’t feel like there’s a ton of stories that I’d like to tell that I don’t have the opportunity to tell. I just never felt restrained or stifled at all. I love these stories that we’re doing. albany ny miami florida plane tickets There’s nowhere else I would ever want to go do it.
I get very selfish at times. I write about things that are interesting to me. Which are often very different. All of these stories, the thing they have in common is that they were somehow interesting. I feel like they’re all dispatches from a worldview.
Not to sort of cop out about it, but I don’t know how other people see stuff. I feel like most of sports writing is just sort of confirmation of a narrative. I feel like most of it is just the narrative. I don’t like that.
When you talk to someone who really knows about football, you realize that almost no one that covers albany ny miami florida plane tickets football albany ny miami florida plane tickets really understands what’s happening on the field. Every time you read a book, it’s behind the scenes. I recently read a book by a friend of mine, Nick Dawidoff, called Collision Low Crossers albany ny miami florida plane tickets . Basically for a year and a half inside the NFL, he was just totally embedded with the Jets. If you read the coverage of that team, and then that read that book, it’s like the thing being covered is totally separate from the thing happening. You always want to write what’s really happening. Not sort of what it looks like from the outside.
Also, to be fair and honest about it, I write six to eight stories albany ny miami florida plane tickets a year, and get to spend an extraordinary amount of time on them, and get to keep digging until I find that level of depth, or if it isn’t achievable, to kill the story.
And if you’re covering a team, you’re writing every day. Like in some ways, it’s not the person; it’s the structure of the job. If you took the New York Yankees albany ny miami florida plane tickets beat writer albany ny miami florida plane tickets and put him in my job, his stories would read with more depth and if I had to go cover the beat mine wouldn’t. Some of it’s the function of the job.
I wish you could listen to the interview tape. I mean, it’s not even an interview, I just hung out with him all day. He met me in the driveway of his house, and was talking about Texas A&M before we got in the house. I didn’t ask him a single question. He had something (to say) and I was the one who came.
I went to the journalism school at the University of Missouri. albany ny miami florida plane tickets The best part about it was that we had a group of people there at that time, who were all very talented and ambitious. There was a bunch of people there who pushed each other. So I was very lucky to fall in with that sort of thing.
I was the football beat writer and LSU beat writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. And I felt completely prepared to do that job because I had been the Missouri football beat writer at Missouri, and I felt totally albany ny miami florida plane tickets prepared. I felt ready to go do it.
I wanted to go to the journalism school there. I didn’t want to go to Northwestern or Columbia because I thought it’d be too cold. And, it was really between the journalism school at Missouri or going and getting a liberal arts degree albany ny miami florida plane tickets at University of Virginia. Willie Morris, who wrote that book, was friends with my Dad. Willie pushed hard for Missouri.
There are two reporting classes (at Missouri): intro reporting, and everybody covered either albany ny miami florida plane tickets a minor Missouri sport or high schools. I covered Missouri baseball. I was a grinder. Still am. I sort of worked my way onto the beat.
The only job I got (after graduation) was because the sports editor was a Mizzou grad. Absolutely true. I applied to every single internship albany ny miami florida plane tickets in the country after my sophomore year, and didn’t get any of them. And then I applied to every single one in the country after my junior year, and got one — at the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The sports editor was a Mizzou grad. And then he hired me. I’m certain that’s why.
We were very very lucky. We all got the Kansas City Star, so we all read Joe Posnanski almost every day. So we were all involved in sort of a low level Joe Posnanski impersonation all the time. I read old Sports Illustrateds. I’d go to the library and read old Sports Illustrateds. That’s what we did.
We’d read all of the Best American Sports Writing, we’d go read all of the SIs. We had free Lexis-Nexis. So we’d go and find all of the classic stories. And the internet existed in a way, and we could also do Lexis-Nexis searches, so we’d read like a week of (Los Angeles Times) Bill Plaschke.
We just read classics. It was sort of wonderful. We had plenty to read. The most important thing was to break news, break news, break news. That’s how I got jobs. I got an internship because I was breaking news on the Missouri football beat against major dailies.
Kansas City was incredible because I wrote 3,000 to 3,600 words for Sunday’s newspaper every single week. For five years. I wrote most of them live (on deadline). I’d wake up Saturday morning and write it. And [I] just did it over and over and over again. And it’s just the best possible school in the world. I didn’t write a story longer than 4,000 words until I got to ESPN. I had 3,600 words down to a science.
I did big events and I was the takeout writer. We’d have a meeting albany ny miami florida plane tickets on Monday. We usually would go have lunch at a place called Manny’s in Kansas City. It’d be me and Holly Lawton and [Mike] Fannin. And we would figure out what we wanted for that Sunday.
Fannin was huge on the Sunday centerpiece. Almost like in his head it was like the old Sports Illustrated bonus piece. Sort of like what was going to be the anchor of the Sunday paper was his obsession. And so [we’d] sit there Monday and figure albany ny miami florida plane tickets it out.
We were flush with money then. It seems nostalgic now, but I’d usually be out on the road Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, come home Friday, wake up Saturday and write. I still smoked then, so I worked at a coffee shop across the street from my apartment, Rivermarket. I’d go there super super early, write, and then I’d take my laptop out to Fannin's house.
He’d edit the story and we’d cook big steaks and I’d usually just crash in his guest room, wake up the next day, barbeque all day, and watch football. And then we’d have lunch on Monday and do it again. We did that week after week after week for years.
I completely trust myself. I can make a decision and just do it. And I’m not scared to completely change gears in the middle of reporting, or to follow it down a rabbit hole. I feel I have a pretty good sense of what will and what won’t work.
It was awesome. It was very, very difficult, but it was the best possible training to write these stories I’m writing now. You have to make it work every week, so you have to learn how to find a story quickly, and trust yourself, and what to do, and what not do, and how not to waste motion.
So I became a very good outliner out of necessity because there wasn’t time for me to write my way through a story. If I messed it up, there wasn’t time to go back and do it again. So it all became about how to do it under the set of circumstances.
I completely trust myself. I can make a decision and just do it. And I’m not scared to completely change gears in the middle of reporting, or to follow it down a rabbit hole. I feel I have a pretty good sense of what will and what won’t work.
I remember the profiles. Like go do Peyton Manning better than anyone else is doing. Go do Steve McNair. I spent a week with an 8-man football team in Hope, Kansas, for a district playoff game and I lived in the house with the quarterback who knew that the rest of his life in this little town was going to be defined by this week.
A horse race track burned down in Eureka, Kansas, and it was this story about this town that was dying, and that the racetrack was the perfect metaphor for it because the highest attendance albany ny miami florida plane tickets ever was on the day they opened. It’s been declining since literally the moment they opened albany ny miami florida plane tickets the doors.
I got assigned to drive John Walsh around when I was in college because he received this award, and I just kissed his ass shamelessly, albany ny miami florida plane tickets and then kept in touch. He’s a Mizzou albany ny miami florida plane tickets guy, likes Mizzou people, so that helped.
They had an opening at ESPN and it worked out. I turned down some other jobs, like one or two columnist jobs. Essentially the thing that everyone wanted to be was a sports columnist. And I just sort of didn’t. It’s just boring to me. So this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to work at ESPN (The) Magazine or Sports Illustrated.
I love to write about place. The most important class I had in college was an English class. I actually went and found the teacher a couple years ago, just to thank her. It was ‘Place and the Character in 19th century American literature.’ We read Wizard of Oz, we read Huckleberry albany ny miami florida plane tickets Finn. Those kinds of classes were very important.
I had an unbelievably great editor [at the Kansas City Star] in Mike Fannin. He really deserves the lion’s share of the credit. One of his great catchphrases was ‘Be literary, but hurry.’ I remember I was in Cuba trying to find Jose Contreras’ family and I was doing a bunch of other stories down there too since I was there, and it was just a bang for your b