A Reverse Interview with Michael Rosenberg

Posted: September 10th, 2008 | Filed under: Interviews | 121 Comments »

So, here’s what happened: I asked Michael Rosenberg, star writer for the Detroit Free Press, weekly columnist for Fox Sports, and author of the outstanding book War As They Knew It* to do a reverse interview. In this interview, I had him send a long series of answers, and I told him I would provide the questions. I’m not sure how this will come out, but frankly I don’t care, this format is a whole lot easier on the interviewer. From now on I would like to do nothing but reverse interviews. I hope this can be arranged with most college football coaches, who don’t answer the questions you ask anyway.

*He is also owner of this outstanding Web site, which coincidentally was designed by my wife. I say “coincidentally” because I would say it was an outstanding Web site even if it was designed by your spouse or, if you don’t have a spouse, your significant other, or if you don’t have one of those, your third cousin.

* * *

Question: OK, well, first of all, loved the book — “War As They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler and America in a Time of Unrest,” you already know that, I finished reading it over the weekend and I just thought you did a fabulous job capturing the essence of two complicated men and intertwining their story with what was going on in America during those Vietnam and post-Vietnam years. So tell me, why in the heck did your Detroit Tigers suck this year?

Michael: When I started, I knew a few nuggets that piqued my interest: Woody Hayes …

Question: DAMN IT! I asked the wrong question right off the bat. OK, let me try this again what did you know about Woody and Bo when you first started this project?

Michael: When I started, I knew a few nuggets that piqued my interest: Woody Hayes turned down pay raises; visited the troops in Vietnam four times; walked to work to reduce American reliance on foreign oil; and was friends with Richard Nixon going back to the 1950s. I knew Ann Arbor was a radical hotbed in the late ’60s and early ’70s, like Berkeley or Madison. I knew Michigan football was not terribly popular when Bo arrived in 1969 and that the athletic director, Don Canham, filled Michigan Stadium for the 1969 Ohio State game by selling a third of his seats to OSU fans.
 
That was all interesting stuff. But on its own, what does any of that mean? Was Woody just quirky or did all those traits fit together? Why wasn’t Michigan football more popular among students? How did Bo – who I had always thought of as an outspoken conservative – feel about what was happening on campus? For that matter, what exactly was happening on campus?
 
I had a lot of questions, and the more answers I got, the more questions I had. I felt early on that there was an untold story there, partly because when I explained my general concept to Bo, he said he thought the real story of his rivalry with Woody was the times in which they faced each other, and it had never been told.

Question: That’s interesting. So I guess trading for Gary Sheffield wasn’t really as good an idea as everyone in Detroit though, eh?

Michael: I discovered a story that has a real arc to it …

Question: Oh, you still want to talk about the book. OK, fine, what did you discover once you started getting into the research and writing of War As They Knew It?

Michael: . I discovered a story that has a real arc to it. There is a lot of forgotten history in this book, and I hope people enjoy that aspect of it, but it’s not a textbook; I’m trying to tell a story, first and foremost. Woody saw his program as a model for the country, and when the country dismissed that model he really struggled to cope with it. You talk about the game passing a coach by; that happened with Woody, but more than that, the world was passing him by.
 
Bo didn’t care if his program was a model for anything, at least in the ’70s. He wanted to run the best football program in the country, just because that was what he always wanted to do. Woody’s approach was admirable in its own way, but Bo’s was much better for the coach’s sanity.
 
Now pit those two coaches against each other in 1969 and watch them go at it for 10 years while the country is swirling around them.
 
Question: That’s awesome. It really is a great book. So OK, explain to me this Matt Millen situation. I mean, seriously, at this point could this guy get fired by the Detroit Lions or does he have the letters of transit from Casablanca and now cannot be rescinded, not even questioned?

Michael: I told my wife early in the process that I wanted this book to be suspenseful …

Question: Oh, OK, more book stuff. I get it. Hey, I understand. I know what it’s like to try and sell a book. OK, so what are you trying to accomplish with this book?

Michael: I told my wife early in the process that I wanted this book to be suspenseful – and not just the suspense of a football game, where you wonder who will win, but the suspense of a novel, where you wonder what happens to the characters. From there, I decided I’d try to make it read like a novel, as much as possible – I wanted it to read like a novel consisting entirely of facts.
 
There is a line in the book that is relevant to your question: “Other teams knew what Ohio State did, but Schembechler knew how the Old Man thought.” That is how I define success for this book: I wanted readers to understand how Woody thought and how Bo thought. I wanted them inside the heads of secondary characters like Don Canham, the legendary Michigan athletic director who pioneered collegiate sports marketing; Mike Lantry, who begins the book as a soldier in Vietnam and then plays a pivotal role in the rivalry; and radicals like Bill Ayers, Pun Plamondon and John Sinclair.
 
QUESTION: So where do you …

There is no judgment in this book. I don’t get on a soapbox and say Woody Hayes was wrong or John Sinclair got a raw deal or The Weathermen were horrible Americans. I was not all that worried with whether you like the characters. I just want you to feel like you know them. I want them to stay in your head after the book is closed. I don’t know if I succeeded or not – that’s not for me to say. But I was lucky to be writing about such fascinating people, and I hope that comes through.
 
QUESTION: Oh, OK, sorry, you weren’t finished there. I grew up with Woody Hayes … I don’t even know if “fan” is the right word because Woody was like television in Ohio, it didn’t matter if you liked or hated, he still had a deep effect on your life. I always sensed that Woody lived as close to the surface as anyone who ever dominated American sports, you know what I mean? He was just entirely real, as Ohio as Lake Erie, the Mudhens, Skyline Chili and Bob Evans (down on the farm!), as combustible as Patton, as caring as your grandfather, as mean as your cranky old neighbor.

MICHAEL: Great question.
 
QUESTION: Wait. I didn’t ask the question yet. That’s how I view Woody — an American original. Bo, though, I just saw him as a really good football coach. Maybe that’s just The Ohio State in my background. How do you think Woody and Bo were different?

MICHAEL: Great question.

QUESTION: Thanks!

MICHAEL: Bo could have coached 21 years in Columbus as happily as he coached 21 years in Ann Arbor. Woody would not have lasted 10 minutes in Ann Arbor.
 
I’m getting away from what Ohio State and Michigan fans think here and talking about the general public. Woody has become a two-dimensional figure to a lot of people: of all the crazy, obsessed football coaches in the world, he was the craziest and most obsessed. If nothing else, I hope this book rescues Woody Hayes from caricature. Nobody can possibly read this book and think he was simply a nut and that’s that. (They might think the author is a nut, but that’s a whole other conversation.) When Woody died in 1987, the obits were largely about his temper. The headlines might as well have been “Relic Dies.”
 
Bo, meanwhile, is probably as beloved as any coach of the last half century in almost any sport. That might be hyperbole, I don’t know – you could probably come up with a few others who are as beloved, but not many. When he died ESPN did wall-to-wall coverage – which was largely because Ohio State and Michigan were playing in a 1-2 battle the next day, but I think also because of what Bo meant to people. Bo, in the last 25 years of his life, made people think of what they loved about their grandfather.
 
Yet paradoxically, people also think of Bo and Woody as one and the same. A good chunk of my time was spent figuring out how they were alike and how they were different, and why these two men who genuinely loved each other evoked such different reactions in people. Why do people think of them as a two peas in a pod – but love one pea and not the other?
 
QUESTION: Funny, I read the book cover to cover, and went back and checked again. Did you or did you not mention Duane Kuiper in this book?
 
MICHAEL: No, I’m sorry. I know this was his era, but he does not appear anywhere in the text. I suppose I could have found a way, since Bo was a Cleveland Indians fan as a kid. But it just didn’t fit, and besides Woody was a Reds fan. Hey, did you mention that you’re writing a book …
 
QUESTION: Well, now that you mention it … no, the idea (today and today only) is for people to buy YOUR book and this is not the right time at all to say that I am writing a book about the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, the Big Red Machine, coming to a store near you March 2009, maybe, assuming I finish this interview at some point and get back to writing it. This is your first book …when did you start working on it?

MICHAEL: Spring of 2005. So it’s been a long time. I interviewed almost 200 people for the book, read all or part of 50 books and put together 13 looseleaf binders filled with newspaper and magazine clips (thanks partly to my wonderful researcher at Ohio State, Kevin Bruffy). One reason it took so long is that my professional metabolism is not as fast as I would like it to be. The other reason is that I didn’t really know what the book was when I started. When we were lucky enough to sell it to a publisher, I thought “Great! Wait, what the hell am I writing?”
 
What I love most about writing – and what made writing a book so gratifying – is the chance to deconstruct the world and put it back together in a way that has greater meaning and makes more sense to me. Choosing what to leave in and what to leave out – that is writing to me. There are dozens of choices in every sentence. I could have written 100 different books about Woody and Bo, and maybe some of them would have turned out better. But for better or worse, this was the story I chose to tell.
 
One example of those choices: I knew Woody was a big Ralph Waldo Emerson fan. This had been written, and several people mentioned it in my early interviews. But I needed to figure out why he loved Emerson so much. That meant reading 500 pages of Emerson. At times, reading essays like “Compensation” or “Heroism,” I felt like I could hear Woody’s voice in the words. I could really see how much he had influenced by Emerson. So I decided to sprinkle Emerson quotes throughout the book.
 
QUESTION: That’s great. Really. It’s a great book. OK, can we start talking about other stuff now? Like, OK, what’s your favorite Pixifood?
 
MICHAEL: On one of my many drives back from Columbus, I suddenly found myself in the mood for Combos – those pretzels with cheese filling – for the first time in 15 or 20 years. So when I stopped for gas, I bought a little bag, because I figured if I bought a BIG bag I’d eat them all on the ride home and feel sick. I ate the first one and thought, “Why the hell did they wrap a pretzel around a piece of poisonous chalk?” It was beyond awful. I had a similar, though not as brutal, experience recently with a Charleston Chew.
 
QUESTION: Charleston Chew! You know that in my latest Pixifoods post, I confused Charleston Chew with a Marathon Bar. Do you think anyone noticed that?

MICHAEL: Your friends, your neighbors, your friends’ neighbors, your neighbors’ friends.
 
QUESTION: Thanks. Your next answer is obviously a trick answer — you are trying to get me to guess who you are talking about. And I have absolutely no idea … I’m guessing you are talking about John SInclair, the poet and one-time leader of the White Panther party, who played a beautiful role in your final section of the book. So, that’s my guess. Did you talk to John Sinclair?
 
I only interviewed him on the phone, never in person – though these days, with his name in the news again …

QUESTION: Oh wait. Name in the news again. Sorry, it’s not John Sinclair is it? He’s not in the news. Let’s try again. Bill Ayers, the University of Chicago professor who founded the radical Weatherman back in the 1960s, plays a big role in your book. He’s obviously in the news again because Barack Obama knows him. Did you talk to Bill Ayers?

MICHAEL: I only interviewed him on the phone, never in person – though these days, with his name in the news again …I don’t think he is even giving phone interviews. So I was lucky I talked to him when I did. He was engaging and passionate; his politics have evolved, but he is still planted firmly on the end of the spectrum where he stood during the era in my book.
 
At one point I mentioned that we always think of the current time as an endpoint, that we have gone through this journey over the years and landed permanently wherever we are right now. I remember his response almost word for word: “Absolutely! But the current moment in history is by definition as alive with possibility as any moment that came before it.” The difference in the late 1960s and early 1970’s is that everybody knew it. There was a genuine fear (or hope, depending on your politics) that the future of the United States was in limbo. That’s true now too, I think, but there was even more uncertainty then.
 
QUESTION: Well, I hope that was Bill Ayers you were talking about. OK, now — since you are one of about 28 people in my life who keep trying to convince me of the brilliance of the band Wilco, go ahead and take your best shot.
 
Finally! The question you should have been asking me for years. There have been several incarnations of the band, but at their best, they explore that area between passion and numbness, between love and hate, desire and fear – and show that the gap between those states of emotion is really tiny. You can get from one to another in an instant. These lyrics come from one of their best songs and show what I’m talking about:
 
I know I’ll make it back
One of these days
And turn on your TV
To watch a man
With a face like mine
Being chased down a busy street

When he gets caught, I won’t get up
And I won’t go to sleep
I’m coming home
I’m coming home
Via Chicago
 
Meanwhile, the music goes from pure rock n’ roll riff to somber ballad to heavy distortion – amplifying the sense that these seemingly disparate states are often one and the same. The result, needless to day, is the greatest music ever produced in the history of this world.
 
QUESTION: Yeah, OK. I mean, the beautiful thing about music is that everyone responds differently to it, and it doesn’t really matter if it’s Abba that gets you going or Springsteen or Beethoven or George Jones or Public Enemy or even Wilco. But I still don’t get it. Their stuff just doesn’t do anything for me. I mean, hey, it’s fine. But I don’t even get those lyrics. Why is he coming home Via Chicago? Is he flying American? I hate flying through Chicago … the weather there always sucks. Maybe that’s what he’s saying. That it sucks to fly through Chicago. You think?

MICHAEL: I don’t agree with that at all.
 
QUESTION: No, I guess not. OK, final question … seriously, the Detroit Lions? What’s going on there. I mean, Detroit’s a good town, good people, good sports fans, how in the heck are they allowing this travesty to continue?

MICHAEL: Yes, it is true. That story is usually told to show how much Woody hated Michigan …

QUESTION: OK, wait, I asked the wrong question again. Man, this is harder than I thought. All right, let’s see, do you think that the Michigan football team will ever win its first game of the season again?

MICHAEL: Yes, it is true. That story is usually told to show how much Woody hated Michigan …

QUESTION: Nope, that’s not it. OK, how badly do you think Southern Cal will beat Ohio State this week? And did you know that people at Southern Cal HATE being called Southern Cal, that they get all huffy about it? I guess they don’t want to be confused with other California Schools so they want USC, though I lived in South Carolina for a few years and so when I see USC I think about the Gamecocks. I’m sticking with Southern Cal. What do you think?

MICHAEL: Yes, it is true. That story is usually told to show how much Woody hated Michigan …

QUESTION: All right. Fine. There’s a great story about how Woody always refused to fill up gas in Michigan. The guy really hated Michigan, didn’t he? That was no act at all.

MICHAEL: Yes, it is true. That story is usually told to show how much Woody hated Michigan, which I understand. But I think the full story is more interesting on several levels.
 
The assistant coach was a terrific guy named Ed Ferkany. Woody had never really recruited in Michigan before – he assumed That State Up North felt the same way about him that he felt about it. But his coaches finally convinced him to look at a couple of prospects, so in the winter of 1972, he and Ferkany traveled north to recruit. It was a snowy night.
 
Ferkany and a couple of other people casually mentioned that Woody never let them have the radio on in the car. Tidbits like this are the fun of reporting a book – without them, the narrative has no life. So they’re in the car, and the radio is off, and it’s dark and snowy, and the visibility is made even worse because Woody has the overhead light on so he can read one of his military history books. Picture that in your mind for a moment. I think it says a lot about Woody’s total lack of fear, his determination to be engaged in something serious at all times, and the distance he was capable of creating, almost accidentally, between himself and somebody sitting right next to him.
 
So Ferkany notices they are low on gas and will have to stop. Woody’s reply (pardon the language): “Bullshit. Keep going.”
 
Now, forget about football for a moment. Forget that Woody Hayes is probably the most famous man in Ohio. Ed Ferkany had been on the job for all of three weeks. He has not come close to understanding his new boss; all he knows is the guy is unusual and has a temper and is inexplicably telling him not to stop for gas when they need it. At night. In a snowstorm.
 
Ferkany asks again, and Woody says no, and he asks again, and finally Woody erupts:  “We’re not stopping in this goddamn state and paying taxes in the state of Michigan!” They made it over the border and stopped at the first exit, Alexis Road.
 
QUESTION: OK, I want to thank Michael for being such a good sport and allowing me to turn this interview into one of those beer commercials where goofballs ask fake questions of vintage football coach video. This really is a fabulous book … I mean, I would not have dedicated a whole week of blog posts for “1,000 More George Bush Jokes.”

Here’s the deal: We have one more Michael answer. The people who post the five best questions in the comments section will get a free book delivered to their homes. They’re not just free books, they are SIGNED free books! OK? You ready? Here’s Michael’s final answer. Have fun.

MICHAEL: He would have said “Hell no” and asked for the check.

The Jordan Chronicles … Director’s Cut

Posted: May 11th, 2008 | Filed under: Interviews | 11 Comments »

We’ve had a lot here from the eminent and brilliantly profane Pat Jordan … but then we sort of got off track with the swear-off and everything else. I’ve never had a chance to publish the entire interview.

The White Rat tells jokes. Sexist jokes about the spinster and the foul-mouthed parrot. Racist jokes about the black dude in the elevator. Redneck jokes about the gay cowboy in the bar. He sits there, in the dugout, chewing tobacco, spitting into a plastic bottle, talking. He is surrounded by younger baseball players. They look down at him and smile. He is sixty-years old, a pugnacious-looking man from another time and place. He has a bristly, rust-colored crewcut; a bullet-shaped head; a jutting jaw; a big hard belly; and, curiously, a child’s bottled up energy. He rocks back and forth as he talks. He reaches out to touch a player on the arm, the shoulder, anywhere, just to make contact, to draw them closer. “And so,” he says, “this cowboy looks up from the bar and says, ‘Moo moo, Buckaroo!” The players laugh, shake their heads, “That’s funny, Rat.” Then they trot off to batting practice.

* * *
I hate the start of interviews. I find myself asking some absurdly obvious question — “How’s the season going so far” — just to get into things. Sometimes, this works. More of often it doesn’t. But it’s not like I can change. You seem a lot more direct. How do you like to begin interviews?

It depends on the kind of piece I’m doing. If it’s a profile I’ll want to get to know the person so I’ll talk about myself, find something that we have in common. For example, John Kruk was a legendary beer drinker. When I first met him in Bristol, Connecticut, I had just stopped drinking two or three months before. But I told my wife, Susan, “I’m going to have to go out drinking with this guy if he goes out drinking.” So John and I go out to a Mexican restaurant. So I go, “You want a drink, John?” And he says, “No, I gave up drinking.” I said, “You did? Me too.” And we started talking about how we both gave up drinking.
 
OK, now that awkward moment is out of the way … let’s start with Jose Canseco. I really did love the Canseco story. I loved it because to me it got us readers close to Canseco without even getting us anywhere near the guy. In your mind is there anything Canseco himself could have said that would have made the story more intimate?

Speaking to Jose would have made the story less interesting.  Most of the time, athletes’ responses make a story duller, but magazines insist on having athletes talk, say, about their view of the greenhouse effect, which they think is where you go to buy a corsage for your latest girlfriend.  In a small way, the Jose story was like my version of Gay Talese’s great Esquire piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Talese couldn’t get a one-on-one with Sinatra but hung around him and his entourage long enough that he got an ever better story than if he had spoken to Sinatra.  I recently re-read that story, and the entire “Fame and Obscurity” collection, and am still amazed by what a wonderful reporter Talese was.  I do think he was too easy on Sinatra and DiMaggio though. He was hard on Plimpton instead. Actually, in reading Talese, and W.C. Heinz lately, I didn’t realize how hard I am in comparison at times.

For that matter, it seems that mainstream sportswriting can get overly obsessed with quotes and access and the often inane cliches that people utter about themselves. Do you see it that way?

Today writers look for the pull quote — “Jose claims Deadspin writer was on deca durabolin when he wrote Chasing Jose” — and not the fuller story. People aren’t just the sum of their outrageous quotes.  There’s more subtlety involved but writers are either too lazy or too ill-equipped to search it out.

I saw an interview with you and Alex where you both talked about preferring “A Nice Tuesday” to “A False Spring,” in part because it felt more authentic. I completely agree. I think A Nice Tuesday feels more complete and real and true, you know? But A False Spring is so much fun.

“A False Spring” was a good book, but “A Nice Tuesday” was better, fuller, more mature, with more edges and nuance, which can be attributed to the writer’s maturity. Any writer’s life makes a better story once it has played out longer. But it was also less of a baseball book and some of the critics didn’t like all of the stuff about my dogs. They wanted ant to be “A False Spring” redux. but I was no longer that person. “A False Spring” was all of a piece, about a career of failure in the minor leagues. It was very structured and ordered. “A Nice Tuesday” was more open to mystery, to where life takes you—my dogs, for instance.  

Do people prefer to read about youth and invulnerability then they do about the tender and bittersweet way people get old?

I like to read about older people talking about their youth.  At that point, they have a deeper understanding of it, and their old age, too. 

Let’s talk a little bit about your start as a writer. The thing that interests me is that most young, star athletes, at least in my experience, do not seem to have the sort of introspection and heightened sense of experience that you might expect from writers. I get the sense that this is because the experiences in their lives are already so heightened, that it would be like turning up the sound on a Metallica concert or something. When were you first drawn to words and stories and why do you think you were, at least as far as I can tell, different than other star athletes?

I had a scattered attention span as a kid, which was death for an athlete, but a gift for a writer.  As for sensitivity, well, I got fired from every job I ever had when I had to work with people.  Being a writer, alone, constitutionally is the only job I can do. 

What was the first story you wrote?

It was a short story for Ingenue magazine based on my experiences as a teacher at an all-girls catholic high school. I got a check made out to Miss Pat Jordan which was a compliment since i told the story through the eyes of a 16 year old girl. The first sports piece was on Muhammad Ali that I sold to Lew Eskin at Boxing Illustrated. After I left baseball, or baseball left me, as I used to say, I wanted to write a book about my minor league career. At first I wanted to write a book out of spite, about how the Braves had done me wrong. That changed over time, but it is what gave me the idea to write in the first place.

I started small, writing for a local newspaper. I wrote a couple of funny columns about my experiences playing minor league baseball in McCook, Nebraska and I bundled them together and sent them to Al Silverman at Sport. He told me to put them together into what we call “a string of pearls.” String of Pearls means that the columns were only connected tangentially, like, “I remember one day this happened, and another day this happened.” There wasn’t an organized story. It was like the Ten Funniest Moments of my minor league career. Sent it to him, and he bought it. I was shocked. He never ran it, but said, “You’re a pitcher, maybe we’ll have you do a story on a pitcher.”

My first major piece was in ’69, for True on Phil Niekro, whom I’d played with in the minor leagues. After that piece, the editor said he’d give me four stories a year at $2,500 a pop. That’s ten grand. I was making $8,800 as a school teacher, so I quit my job. Then in June I went to the editor’s office and he was gone. Nobody at the magazine knew anything about me. I had no money, only $3,000 in the bank. Then Al Silverman called me back, I don’t know, maybe six months after we first spoke, and said, “I want you to go to Montreal and do a story on Jim Maloney, the Cincinnati Reds’pitcher.” I didn’t know how to get on the plane, practically. This was a period, in the late sixties, when people didn’t fly regularly. Flying was still a little bit novel unless you were a business man. I said, “What hotel should I stay at?” He said, “I don’t know. The team is staying at the Queen Elizabeth.” I couldn’t get in the Queen Elizabeth but right next door was a Hotel Champlain. I was really disappointed because I wanted to be where the Reds were. I get to Montreal and the Queen Elizabeth is this old, rundown mausoleum of a hotel with a coffee shop. And the Hotel Champlain was a new skyscraper. The maids in the room were gorgeous. I’m in a fantasy world. I got a note on the pillow when I came back to the room one morning in lilac ink in French. I thought the maid was interested in me. So I brought it down to a cab driver and asked him what it said and he said, “If Monsieur wants his laundry done, leave it out in the hallway.”

Your first book, which I have just read, is called “Black Coach.” It’s really terrific. Can you talk about that?

When I got my first book contract it was so I could ostensibly write “A False Spring.” I gave them “Suitors of Spring,” a collection of my early Sports Illustrated pieces on pitchers, and then was assigned to do “Black Coach,” too, which I wrote before “A False Spring.” “Black Coach” was the first time I ever attempted anything that long. It was reporting-heavy book about a black coach becoming head football coach in an all white school in North Carolina in the late sixties, early seventies. There was lots of below the surface tension but no cross burnings. Ironically, another writer turned the idea down because there was no conflict, i.e. cross burnings. 

Another favorite story of mine was your story about Meg Ryan, who is of course the daughter of your wife Susan. They have, over the years, had a strained relationship. How difficult was it for you to write that piece?

Easy. Meg was trashing my wife, her mother, in the press every week. This was after she had become “America’s Sweeheart.” She and her mother had a falling out because her mother was concerned that Meg’s fiancé at the time was a cokehead, which he was. Meg, who was in high school when her parents split, went on and on to the media about how her mother had abandoned her. It became so painful for my wife that I wrote the story to stop Meg, to let her know that her mother, through me, could fight back. 

There’s a lot of personal feeling in your work. I think all writers think about where they fit in the story, of where they do not fit. Do you think about these things specifically or do you write and let these things work themselves out?

I let the story and the act of writing bring out any personal stuff of mine that might relate to the subject.  I don’t interject my personal stuff into the story unless it makes sense. Which doesn’t mean I don’t have a personal take. My writing style is understated, I want to let the story tell itself and not get in the way of that, but I always have a take on what I’m writing about. Years ago, I was at lunch with Pat Ryan and Ray Cave, my editors at Sports Illustrated. They used to take me to lunch and I’d have too many bloody Mary’s and start pontificating about who knows what. One time, Pat Ryan got pissed with me, “Why do you always have to be right?” And Ray said, “It’s not that, it’s just that Pat is a moralist.” Which isn’t strictly a “right” or “wrong” thing. I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but when I do a subject, I have a basic feeling, a judgement, if you will, if the person is a good person or not. And again, it’s not “good” in the sense that they are pious or anything like that. It’s more about whether or not the subject is an authentic person. Because I can admire someone even if I don’t share their same values, so long as they aren’t a phony. I can’t tolerate phonies.

I guess it comes down to a confidence issue. Are you a confident writer?

Now, maybe. I’ve been doing this for so long that I am a confident craftsman. If I give a piece to Alex to take a look at before I send it to my editor, I’ll ask him something specific. Like in the case of the Canseco piece, I gave it to Al and asked, “Tell me if it’s funny.” That’s all I wanted to know. I don’t need help with line-editing so to speak at this point. But still, I’m terrified of that blank piece of paper and that first sentence. It takes me days sometimes to get that first sentence. I’m obsessive in how I approach each story—reading clips on the subject, then writing out my questions, then doing the interviews, and then transcribing them, organizing the quotes and my other notes, musings, into themes, creating outlines, revising the outlines, before I ever start to actually write. Once I get that first sentence then the writing takes on a life of its own. 

Here’s an odd question: Do you have your wife read your stories after you finish them? I do that.

My wife doesn’t read my stories, necessarily, but sometimes I’ll read a scene to her while I’m writing and ask what she thinks. Or a sentence, or an image. But by now I pretty much know whether what I’m doing is good or not. If it isn’t I can’t go on until I unravel it. Susie used to come with me when I went to do a story. All the time in the mid, late eighties, before we got dogs. You know, I’d be in a hotel for a week and it’d be like a vacation for her, fun. And since Susie is an actress she was able to give me insights into that profession that would help me when I approached an actor for a profile. Cause what did I know about acting, I was a jock. She’d tell me, so-and-so has a hard time with comedy, so I might mention that in a question, “It’s been said that you have a hard time with comedy,” to see what kind of reaction I’ll get.

Susie was with me at Cyndi Garvey’s house the day she spilled her guts about her marriage. In the car when we left, Susan and I were going back-and-forth, we were both charged up. Here’s the other thing with Susie. If she’s gone with me on the interview, when I’m writing the story, she will add things to it that I might have missed. I’ll tell her, “I’m writing the scene where we’re in the house with Steve and Cyndi,” and she’ll say, “Well, did you write about the Leroy Neiman paintings?” And I’ll say, “Oh shit, I forgot them.” She’s a second set of eyes.
 
What was the experience like for you and Alex putting all these stories together for the book?

Great experience. Al’s a great reader. There were some stories I remembered as being great and when Al didn’t like them I re-read them and most often found he was right. Then, there were some he liked and I didn’t and when I re-read them I found they were better than I’d remembered. Sometimes as a writer, you remember a story based on how much you enjoyed writing it which doesn’t necessarily make it a great story, and vice versa.  I’m an egomaniac but I’m not overly sensitive when it comes to criticism of my work. You have to have the skin of a rhino in this business. I don’t take that stuff personally.

You wrote a very insightful piece on Roger Clemens for my friend Rich at the beginning of this whole Clemens-McNamee massacre. Has it surprised you at all the way Roger has handled all this?

No. That’s the only way Roger knows how to deal with things. Dig in like a pitt bull. That’s they way he pitched. No change ups just throw harder and harder.
 
And one of the great questions seems to be how this whole steroid thing will shake out — how people will remember this era in baseball. What do you think?

I don’t care. I’m not and never have been a fan of any sport. just ask Alex. I watch sports as a jock not as a fan. The only team I care about is University of Miami, college football.

OK, a few quick questions:

Mantle or Mays?

Mantle, though Mays was a better all around player. 

Do you listen to music when you write? What music do you listen to in general?

Only the music in my head: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, Ersel Hickey.  The radio in the car when I’m driving across alligator alley is tuned to 102.7 FM, oldies, nothing after 1960. That’s the only time I listen to music.

I love the different ways you imagine Canseco writing his “Vindicated” masterpiece. How do you write? (I was reading that Gay Talese writes a single sentence, puts it on a board, stares at it for hours, moves around the words, reworks the sentence, stares at THAT for hours and so on. Seems like this might make things tough on deadline).

I write on typewriter on yellow second sheets. I bought the last seven cartons of yellow second sheets available in the country, and have them stored in my attic. It’s enough to last me the rest of my lifetime. One of my old editors called me a troglodyte. I take it as a complement. I use scissors, cut and paste, corrective pencils, white out, and even yellow white out for the second sheets, and that white out isn’t even made anymore. I do what Talese does but on paper. I’ll re-write first sentence on a sheet 20 times till it’s right, then cut it out and paste it following the next sentence. I use a lot of glue. 

Why won’t Tom Seaver concede you threw harder than him?

Jealous. 

You write so well about your comeback in “A Nice Tuesday.” Was it hard to let go of your career? Did that help?

It was hard at 21. Now, it’s not so hard. What was hard was discovering I fucked up my own career, God’s gift. I hope God isn’t still mad at me for that. Which is why when I became a writer I was determined to be as methodical, disciplined and orderly as possible. I was determined not to squander the talent I had at writing magazine profiles. Not only that but in writing about people about learning how to engage them and be empathetic, I became a nicer person, less egocentric.

Alex came up with a list of essential baseball books. What are your five essential books — not baseball, just books? Not including your own, of course.

True Confessions. Exiles by Michael Arlen, Fame and Obscurity by Talese, anything by Hemmingway, most things by Elmore Leonard.

Hillary or Barack?

Neither. McCain. Am an NRA member. Nuff said. 

Yankees or Red Sox this year? I ask that knowing that you are a Yankees guy.

Red Sox. I’m no longer a Yankee fan. Too much money and too little thought spent on building that club.

Is there any must-watch TV for you?

Been watching the John Adams saga. Love that. Sense and Sensibility. I watch all kinds of British Crime Serials, Foils War, House of Eliot. I saw the four seasons of Hustle which I thought was a lot of fun. I watch Lifetime. Take Home Chef with Curtis Stone. And then MSNBC for news, especially with anything that has Tucker Carlson on it.

I’m at Augusta now … you wrote a wonderful story about a couple of young golfing prodigies, the Howard sisters. What do you think about golf?

I think it’s pool on a big table. 

Sports or Hollywood?

Neither. It depends entirely on the person. People are fun, like Marilyn Chambers, the ex-porn star, and Bob Miles, a deceased neo Nazi, and some are boring like Jose and Clemens. I’m more drawn to people who are not celebrities, athletes or actors. Car runners in Florida; coal miners in West Virginia; a 911 dispatcher in Portland, Maine, a female bodyguard. I did the St. Paul Saints in the mid-nineties. Mike Veeck always interested me, partly because his father—whom I had never met—wrote something nice about “A False Spring” in one of his books. So I wanted to do the St. Paul Saints, heard funny things about them. I love minor league stories because nobody wants to do them. Mike wanted to meet me. So I go out there, get my press pass and I never went to see Mike, I just hung around the Stadium that first night ‘cause I didn’t want a guided tour. I wanted to see what was going on myself. So I hung around, sat in different sections, talked to people, and then the next day I went to Mike. He said, “Pat, where were you I was looking for you?” ‘Cause he didn’t know what I looked like. I said, “Oh, I just wanted to check it out myself.” He said, “You’re the only guy who ever came and did that. They all come to me, ask me 20 questions and then leave.” I said, “Well, the story is not only about you it’s about what’s going on here.”

So I’m still writing the story a few months later. I had to call up Veeck to check a couple of facts and I see in the paper, in The Miami Herald, that Veeck has invited Charlie Sheen, the actor, to pitch for him. I call Veeck up and kiddingly, I said to him, “What’s the story, you invite that fucking actor to pitch for you? I’ll get in shape and I’ll pitch for you.” He said, “Okay, get in shape, I’ll pitch you.” So I hang up and Susan says, “What’s wrong? Your face looks white.” I said, “I just told Veeck I was going to pitch for him next summer.” She says, “You put your foot in your mouth, but it’s not my business.”

I was 56-years old. I hadn’t thrown a baseball in thirty-thirty-five years. Oh, I had a catch here and there with my ten-year old son, but I mean THROW a baseball. So I go to the park. I’m standing on the mound and the first pitch I throw, I fall down. I couldn’t even stand upright. So I had to get closer to the plate, start with lobbing the ball. To make a long story short, it took me six months to get in pitching shape. By the time I was ready to pitch for Veeck, he had hired a girl to pitch for him. I called him up and told him I was ready to pitch and he said, “I can’t. I’ve got a girl pitching for me. If I have an old man too, it’ll be a freak show.” It was a freak show anyway, but I guess a woman and an old man was over the top even for him.

So he sends me to Miles Wolff of the Northern League. Great guy. Real baseball fan. Miles hooked me up with another team in Waterbury, Connecticut and I went and pitched an inning for them. Did well, and wrote a book about it called “A Nice Tuesday.” All because of my involvement with Mike Veeck.

All Hail Patty, the King of them All (Y’All)

Posted: April 21st, 2008 | Filed under: Interviews, Media | 4 Comments »

Scott Raab’s concession speech came in at roughly Midnight Central Time, a few hours after his beloved Cleveland Indians bullpen blew another game. This time it was Raffy Perez giving up the game-losing single to Justin Morneau. Of course, you cannot blame pitching when you lose 2-1 to the Minnesota Twins and manage just six hits against Scott Baker et. al.

In any case, he wrote:

I’ve bowed to vox populi and conceded the contest. I’m grateful to you for the fun (and the book link) — and to Pat for bothering to get lit up. I count it as a privilege and a thrill, and I hope you’ll tell him so.

Patty responded as a Swear-Off champion should.

Polski. Tell Scottie that was a lovely concession speech, and I’m looking forward to taking a shower with him. He can call or email anytime. i will supply the soap. i just won’t drop it.

And we all can go back to everyday life.

Jordan Leads Swear-Off: Who’s the Better Bowler?

Posted: April 20th, 2008 | Filed under: Interviews, Media | 19 Comments »

We will repeat the warning: The following has LOTS of swearing. Lots. Really. Swearing and some rather unappealing imagery and swearing and … really. I’m telling you. We are proudly (and somewhat bizarrely) refereeing a swear-off battle between two of America’s great writers, Scott Raab and Pat Jordan. If you are offended by profanity, notably personal insults or men hitting other men with metal folding chairs, I strongly suggest that you skip this post and all other Swear-Off posts, as they only figure to devolve from here. Mom, stop reading. Thank you.

* * *

You would never believe, when you’re just a clueless a kid in a Cleveland bowling alley getting cursed at for bringing a guy brown coffee with a side of cream (“WHY THE $*#@%# WOULDN’T YOU #*$&%#^ BRING ME #$%*#&@* BLACK COFFEE WHEN I $#*%$#@# ASKED YOU FOR @#%#$@ CREAM?” — Well, hell, what the $*#*%$& did I know about coffee? I was $*#&%$* 8 years old) that someday you would be in the big leagues, and you would find yourself mediating a mild disagreement of blasphemy between the two greatest swearers in American letters today.

At this juncture, Pat Jordan has a commanding lead in the Swear-Off popular vote and also in delegates. This isn’t all that surprising; Pat is legend of expletive. He’s an old ballplayer — he began as a young pitcher with a better fastball than Tom Seaver if you believe Patty, which I always do — and the last batter he faced was Pete Rose, a great swearer in his own right. Later, Pat wrote a ferocious and remarkable story about Rose.

I have a long interview with Pat that I was supposed to post on this site, that is until this honorable contest began. We’ll get to it. In the meantime, let me post a couple of my favorite Pat Jordan answers:

Question: Has it surprised you the way Roger Clemens has acted with this whole steroid mess?

Pat: No. That’s the only way Roger knows how to deal with things. Dig in like a pit bull. That’s they way he pitched. No change ups just throw harder and harder.

Question: One of my favorite stories of yours was about Meg Ryan, who is the daughter of your wife Susan. They have, over the years, had a strained relationship. How difficult was it for you to write that piece?

Pat: Easy. Meg was trashing my wife, her mother, in the press every week. This was after she had become “America’s Sweeheart.” She and her mother had a falling out because her mother was concerned that Meg’s fiancé at the time was a coke head, which he was. Meg, who was in high school when her parents split, went on and on to the media about how her mother had abandoned her. It became so painful for my wife that I wrote the story to stop Meg, to let her know that her mother, through me, could fight back.

Question: Was it hard to let go of your baseball career?

Pat: It was hard at 21. Now, it’s not so hard. What was hard was discovering I fucked up my own career, God’s gift. I hope God isn’t still mad at me for that.

* * *

The first Scott Raab story I read, I believe, was about the old Cleveland State coach Kevin Mackey. That was 1993 in GQ, Asphalt Jungle, and it was, uh, what’s the word I’m looking for here? Jarring? Well, yes, that’s a word, but not the right word. Home. Yes, that’s it.

I did not grow up on the hard streets of Cleveland — I grew up in a pretty tame working-class neighborhood of butchers, factory workers and bowling league teammates, a street lined by telephone wires and stamped with tiny front lawns that owners would treat like the 10th green at Augusta. I did get my bicycle stolen there, and I had rocks thrown at me a time or two, and I once got robbed of my newspaper delivery change by some bigger and older kids who seemed impossibly tougher and more worldly. Still. I did not go anywhere near the crackhouse on Edmonton Avenue where Mackey passed out; the closest I ever got to that world was the day my father took a wrong turn in the rain on the way back from our family vacation to Cedar Point (the Amazement Park!) and we ended up on the very wrong side of town. He drove our rusted Chevy Nova over a puddle, and this somehow triggered the “Fasten Your Seatbelt” buzzer, and it buzzed loudly while I watched two men beat up a third out the rain-streaked window.

In any case, I can only tell you there’s something indefinable about the place where you grow up, something familiar beyond words, something I feel every time I get back to Cleveland. And it’s something I read in everything Scott writes. It’s funny (and ironic) that because of the excerpt I posted on the last Swear-Off, that people got the impression that Scott is from New Jersey. He’s Cleveland, entirely, completely, something I just felt to my core when I read that Mackey piece, and especially this paragraph about Mackey foiling the cops after his crack bust:

At Sixth District headquarters, Mackey fakes two puffs into the Breathalyzer, reaches into his pocket and fires a hit of Binaca into his mouth, ruining any accurate breath analysis. Perfect. The defining moment, the sum and essence of Kevin Mackey, distilled into one Homeric act — Mackey the Gamin from Boston’s Summerville, Mackey the Spewer of Blarney, the Comber of Projects and Savior of Ghetto Youth, Mackey the bottom-line, ninety-four foot, balls-out, how-many-fucking-games-have-YOU-won Motherfucker.

I can’t tell you WHY that reads like Cleveland to me, but it always did. There’s a beautiful Cleveland rhythm to the words. Scott became my hero that day and forever after, especially when he wrote his own incredible piece about Pete Rose (“that brick-bodied motherfucker would haunt me forever”) that probably is a big reason why I am writing a book about the 1975 Reds in the first place.

* * *

Link to Pat’s book: The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan.
Link to Scott’s book: Real Hollywood Stories.

So, as you can see here: We have two titans. Two of the best writers around, two of the most honest writers around — I really think Patty (he has encouraged me to call him Patty!) hit it perfectly when I asked him if he prefers to write about athletes or Hollywood figures. He wrote “Neither.” And then he said this: “It’s more about whether or not the subject is an authentic person. Because I can admire someone even if I don’t share their same values, so long as they aren’t a phony. I can’t tolerate phonies.”

Yes, two writers who expose phonies and seek what’s real. I love it. And now they are bashing each other relentlessly with curse words. Thanks to me! Oh my mother would be proud (I sincerely hope Mom took my advice and isn’t reading).

Pat, as mentioned, has a commanding lead in the Swear-Off. But he’s not resting. In 1984, Ronald Reagan apparently spent his last day of campaigning in Minnesota, the home state of his impossibly overmatched opponent Walter Mondale.*

*To give you an idea what that election meant, “Reagan” does not show up as a misspelled word in spell-check. “Mondale” does. That’s the will of the people.

Why was Reagan in Minnesota? The guy wanted the clean sweep. Now that’s ballsy. And that’s what Pat is going for based on the email he sent:

Polski, I trust the controversy between myself and this Mr. Raab has been settled to your readers’ satisfaction. I will not deign to lower myself in commenting further on Mr. Raab’s use of profanity (in his diatribe against me), in comparison to my own more nuanced use of profanity, other than to say that I heard through the grapevine that the editor of Mr. Raab’s esteemed publication, Esquire, one Mr. David Granger, is in the habit of referring to his writers as “my bitches”. No wonder then that Mr. Raab, when not quaking with fear in Mr. Granger’s presence, must resort to profanity away from the office to blow off frustrations he can’t release in Mr. Granger’s presence. i have no such inhibitions, however, which is why, I’m sure, Mr. Granger doesn’t dare let me write for his esteemed magazine. If he did, and he referred to me as one of “my bitches, I’d tear his fucking, bald head off his sloped shoulders.

Respectfully,
Your red-assed Guinea

PS. Dear Scottie. You made a big mistake, huge, HUGE, as Julia Roberts would say, in trying to mix it up with Patty. You’re in the big leagues now, son, and you’re ill-equipped. Stop spluttering invective like Uriah Heap and try to write something clever. Even i’m rooting for you now, dear boy.

Scott has not had a chance to respond directly to these ferocious body blows. But he did manage write a comment where he came back at both disapproving readers and Pat — it’s tough to fight a two-front war, but people should never underestimate a Cleveland guy like Scott.

Let me begin by clearing up an apparent misunderstanding: I’m not from New Jersey. I was born and raised in Posnanski country — Cleveland, Ohio.

Not that it makes any fucking difference — because you asslicking buffoons wouldn’t last ten minutes in either place.

(Oh, and Chuck D: Spelling ‘douchebag’ as two words is a sure sign you need to yank the strap-on out of your crack and go fix yourself another estrogen smoothie.)

As for Jordan, I’m a fan. Pat Jordan can write, and Pat Jordan can swear — and he also gets full credit for the seven decades he has spent milking his stunted minor-league career. The pride he takes in having learned to swear before, during, and after showering with other men is well-earned, and I have no doubt that, despite the homoerotic yearning at the heart of his oeuvre, his own sphincter, like the rest of his muscles, is still as supple as his prose.

You know, a wise person would — at this point — put an end to this because, well, I believe we passed “nasty” about three bus stops ago. But … I kind of want to see how this turns out.

Not Especially Safe For Work (or anywhere else)

Posted: April 18th, 2008 | Filed under: Interviews, Media | 51 Comments »

I can only warn you once here … the following has LOTS of swearing. It’s rated R. Not PG-13. If you are offended by such things, I don’t blame you, and I promise we’ll have a lovely G-rated post soon on Brian Bannister. One last time SKIP THIS IF YOU ARE OFFENDED BY SWEARING. Thank you.

* * *

People often ask why I do this blog. I’ve never really had a good answer for that. The original reason was, of course, to sell THIS BOOK, winner of the 2007 Casey Award, listed among Booklist’s Top 10 sports books of the year, called “very funny” by Dave Barry, called “a piece of baseball jazz” by USA Today and called “a good Christmas present” by a woman who was debating whether or not to buy it at a book signing once. Unfortunately the signing was in March, which meant that she did not buy it then and probably did not buy it later, much like (I imagine) many of the freeloaders who read this blog.

So, once I realized that I was not going to get to Da Vinci Code numbers on this book no matter how many blog posts I wrote about Chief Wahoo and Wynona Ryder, it might have made sense to stop. I even did stop. And then I came back, and people have continued to ask me why, and I have continued to fumble hopelessly for a reason.

Now, I can tell you, I have a reason.

I have been writing this blog so I could referee the official Scott Raab vs. Pat Jordan Swear-Off.

Now is the time when you can hide the kids. As you may have noticed on the last blog, I wrote that some people are good at swearing and some people, like myself, are not. In there, I wrote that Pat Jordan was the best swearer in journalism today. And I wrote that my good friend, Esquire’s Scott Raab, was second best. I will admit now that I did not really consider the ramifications of that statement — in other words, I badly, badly underestimated Scott’s singular pride for the expletive.

He wrote this comment, which I’m sure you have already seen:

“All due respect, but I’d kick Jordan’s ancient, bony, hairless ass in a curse-off any day of the fucking week (Except on Shabbat, when I go to synagogue and pray for Joe Borowski’s piece of shit right arm to fall off.“

At this point, as you have no doubt guessed, it was only a matter of time before Pat Jordan responded:

”Polski, tell Raab i got more muscles in my fucking hair than he has in his fucking body. Also, i stopped shaving my body when i stopped competing in bodybuilding contests when I was 53. I’ll bury the fucking wimp in a curse-off. i got mine the old fashioned way, in the locker room. Where’d he get his, the fucking press box?“

So it goes. Here we are: It’s titantic. A Pat Jordan vs. Scott Raab curse-off. I finally have found my place in the blogosphere. I had started a Godfather I vs. Godfather II WB poll — and we’ll get back to that question in a bit — but we now have a new purpose. The question posed to you, dear readers, is simple: Who do you like, Jordan or Raab for the heavyweight fucking championship of the world. Or is it the fucking heavyweight championship of the world? Or the heavyweight championship of the fucking world? I told you … I’m terrible at this stuff.

You can vote on the side there. I suspect the combatants may weigh in over the next few days (and you never know what other big name writer will try to horn in), but for now I start with a representative two paragraphs from the works of the two great men.

Scott Raab endorsing rage in Esquire:

”FUCK YOU. That’s right-fuck you. I’ve got your anger-management technique right here, dangling. Check it out-and while you’re down there, kiss my crack.

I’m sorry-did I say that out loud? Really loud? Tough shit, dickweed. I do a lot of screaming, mostly profane. First off, I live and drive in north Jersey. Number two, my wife’s a woman. Three, my idiot dog barks if a squirrel farts. Plus-I gotta tell ya-rage makes me feel so alive.”

Pat Jordan on Jose Canseco in “Chasing Jose” on Deadspin.

At first, Jessica loved being Jose’s “road beef” and then his “import,” because he spent a lot of time buying her clothes she couldn’t afford on her Hooters salary. Then they set up housekeeping at Jose’s Coral Gables mansion with its rock waterfall pool and its cougars and giant Iguanas roaming the grounds and, sadly, Jessica discovering that living her life with Jose was “a total fucking bore.” Her daily calendar of their activities reads something like this: sleep, wake, fuck, eat, lay by the pool, find Iguana, eat, fuck, shop, watch TV, fuck, sleep (for Jose, anyway), and masturbate, all, of course, without Jose ever speaking. This last activity on Jessica’s daily to-do list, she was forced to resort to because Jose’s sexual performance left a lot to be desired, at least, by Jessica. The way it worked was, Jose had sex with Jessica in front of a mirror until he had an orgasm, then spilled off her and went to sleep. While her big Lug snoozed, Jessica slipped out of bed and repaired to the bathroom where she made love to herself. Jessica claimed she didn’t have an orgasm with Jose during their first two years of sex. She wrote, “If he noticed, he didn’t care.” So, she began faking orgasms, “but I can’t honestly say he noticed that either.”

Yes. Quite. May the best man win.

Pat Jordan: A Preview

Posted: April 15th, 2008 | Filed under: Interviews | 19 Comments »

Some people can swear. And some people cannot. It’s important in life, I think, to know where you stand. For instance, I cannot swear. It’s isn’t a choice. It isn’t because I’m in any way offended by curses or troubled by foul language or any of that — quite the opposite. I’m more than willing to play my role in the David Mamet play of life. It’s just that whenever I swear I feel a little bit like Willis from The Jeffersons when he tries to “get down.” My Buddy Vac is a good swearer. I like to say that when he curses, he sounds like Tony Soprano. And when I curse, I sound like Tony Orlando.

Writer Pat Jordan is one of the world’s great cursers. There are eight Fs, two As, one S and a rather specific breakdown of the sex machine in Pat’s already classic tale of Jose Canseco. And they are all perfectly placed. Maybe it’s because Pat began this crazy writing journey as a ballplayer, a pitcher with great stuff. That will give a guy some effing perspective. I would say that Pat Jordan is the best curser going in journalism today, and I say that with great esteem because I think the second best is my friend and hero Scott Raab.

Read the rest of this entry »

Arnie, Jack and Hank S. … with Ian O’Connor

Posted: April 10th, 2008 | Filed under: Interviews | 19 Comments »

Well, I did make it to Augusta for my 17th Masters. I know you were concerned. American Airlines decided that while they’re not necessarily experts at handling those big planes, they can maneuver the smaller ones and with some luck direct people to destinations somewhere in the general vicinity of their original choice. Of course, they cannot do that and also handle the complexities of luggage, which is why my bag is vacationing in Bermuda or somewhere. I had to go crazy at a 60% off sale at a Texas outlet store. I’m not sure, but I think I may have bought some Garanimals.*

*Did you see The Office where Michael ends up wearing a women’s suit. Yeah. That could happen before the week’s out.

Anyway, we’ve broken through to the other side. Today, to kick off the best golf tournament in the world, here’s another our patented long, rambling interviews — this one with my friend Ian O’Connor, terrific columnist at the Bergen Record and Fox Sports, lifelong Yankees fan, creator of the nickname “Davis Love the Nerd,” guy who predicted that the New York Knicks would make the playoffs this year and lover of Chicken Parmigiana no matter where we happen to be. Ian is also the author of the fabulous book “Arnie & Jack: Palmer, Nicklaus and Golf’s Greatest Rivarly,” which is selling like mad and will soon make Ian famous enough that he will never have to talk to me again. He might be there already.

Read the rest of this entry »

Boss, Mean Streets, Earnhardt … with Liz Clarke

Posted: April 3rd, 2008 | Filed under: Interviews | 27 Comments »

We have a couple of author interviews coming up in the next few days. So get out your cash. These are good reads.

* * *

I first met Liz Clarke about 20 years ago, when I had just gotten my first job as a clerk at The Charlotte Observer. She was a new reporter there, hired in part to write about a future Charlotte NFL team (that would not arrive for another decade). I was still in college then; and she was the coolest person I had met in my young life. It wouldn’t even be fair to say that I had a crush on her, because her coolness quotient daunted college crushes. She had lived in New York, she had chased Bruce Springsteen concerts around the New Jersey shores, she loved Martin Scorcese movies and Woody Allen movies, she told me about the bottle of beer that Bruce bought her years before.

In other words, LIz was the last person in the entire world I ever would have expected to become fascinated with NASCAR. I have my own love-hate relationship with Auto Racing — I hate the races themselves, would rather watch fantasy baseball drafts involving people I don’t know. But I do love the characters, the drivers, two or three of my favorite stories are about race car drivers, one of them about Junior Johnson, another about this guy.*

*I appreciate that it’s tacky as hell to link to an award page, but this is the first place I saw that column posted.

In any case, I can remember feeling astounded when Liz started writing about NASCAR. But the real surprise was … she LIKED it. You could see it in her writing. She was fascinated by the drivers, by the spectacle, by the danger, by the Americanness of it all. And, I have to say, that reading her stories about Dale Earnhardt and Tim Richmond and Junior Johnson and Richard Petty and all the rest made them seem — is this even possible? — cool. She wrote about racing in the same spirit that Tom Wolfe did.

Liz has since moved on — she’s a sportswriter now for The Washington Post, and she writes about lots of stuff, NFL, Olympics, tennis, colleges, you name it. And she still writes about NASCAR. Her new book is called: “One Heullva Ride: How NASCAR Swept the Nation” and of course it’s terrific and very cool and I highly recommend it if you:

1. Like NASCAR.
2. Are in any way curious why people like NASCAR.

Here is my Q&A with Liz, who is still in my mind as cool as ever:

* * *
First off, I have to say, that when I first met you Liz — that was when I was in college — you were so incredibly cool … it was shocking to me that you loved writing NASCAR. How did that happen?

Well first, let me swoon over the phrasing of your question, as I am feeling so far from cool at this stage in my life. I don’t have Tivo, an iPod or DVR. I do have a DVD player, digital tape recorder and digital camera, but all three are still in their box, as I am afraid to open them because I don’t know how they work. So I am feeling about as cool as a dinosaur.

As for NASCAR, it was not a sport I ever wanted to cover or ever expected to cover. But as you know, having worked at the Charlotte Observer, everyone in that sports department gets pulled into covering racing at least twice a year. And that was my fate as a young sports reporter there in 1991, hired to cover Charlotte’s quest for an NFL team, with lots of free time as the NFL dithered in its decision-making.

Once the book came out in February, I gagged when I saw the press release that the publicist came up with, dubbing “One Helluva Ride” as “Liz Clarke’s love-letter to NASCAR.” I honestly wanted to croak because I think the book — or certianly my feelings about the sport — are a lot more complicated and critical than that. I doubt seriously that the publicist read the book. If you read the book carefully at all, or if you get to the end, it’s as much a “Dear John letter” as a “love letter.” So that wording, “Liz CLarke’s love letter,” makes me nauseous.

Yet as a journalist/writer, I did come to enjoy writing about the sport– in a way I think anyone could understand. It was so wild — so visceral. so full of noise, and colors and smells — all of them brassy and noxious and over-bearing. I came to love listening to many of the racers talk, especially Junior Johnson, who was so wise and wiley and spoke is such an authentic way — a way that told you exactly where he was from, the hills of North Carolina, without apology or pretense. There were so many great story-tellers, guys like Rick Mast, Smokey Yunick, the King, Kyle Petty. And the tracks themselves were as singular as the people, quirky and reflecting a specific place and people in the South.

It just seemed like such a rich thing to cover–part sport, part county fair, part way of life. I didnt see how you could capture it fully. And it wasn’t over-run with sportswriters, either, which meant you could actually talk to people one-on-one and at length, if you were patient enough or showed up early enough. So in that sense, I guess I did fall in love with writing about it. Plus, so few editors knew anything about it that it gave you, as a reporter, enormous latitude to decide what the stories were. It’s far more common when covering major stick-and ball sports that an editor assigns every story, and as a reporter yo’re little more than a wind-up doll.

Who was the first NASCAR character to really capture your attention?

I wish I had one vivid answer. My first major profile was on Bill Elliott, who was huge at the time (early 90s), and I was struck by how dour and joyless he was. I wrote that and was stunned to find that people who knew him thought it was dead-on yet shocking because no one had exactly written that.

I was intrigued immediately by Junior Johnson, who had long since retired from racing and was a car owner when I met him, because he was obviously so bright and held a lot of stuff back. You had to work to get things out of him. He reminded me a lot of the late Sen. Sam Ervin from NC, who presided over the Watergate hearings. He spoke a beautiful form of English — “my mother tongue,” he declared it proudly during one testy exchange in the hearings. I digress. And Dale Earnhardt of course made a big impression. He was an enigma — a puzzle to be solved, as I was for him I think. But he ended up being a great ally, and there wasn’t a person in racing I admired more.

One of my favorite images in your writing — and you write about this the book as well — is the image of Dale Earnhardt staring down a highway patrolman. What was that moment like for you in the car — and did you think (as I sometimes do when writing) “Wow, this is the whole story right here.”

I wasnt thinking ahead to the way I would structure the story during that day I spent with him, which would have been really smart. I had met him at his shop very early that morning, and I rode with him in his truck to North Wilkesboro, followed him around all day, and rode home with him that evening. So it was a full day of scribbling down most everything that he said and did. So much of it was funny and touching and, at points, surprisingly frank. I got on his nerves a bit because I didn’t say much, and that made it hard for him to take control of the “interview,” if you will, because he couldn’t figure out what my angle was. The truth is, I didn’t have an angle; I just wanted to see what he was like. But it was a great day, and he ended up being incredibly cooperative.

We came upon the state trooper on the way home; he drove home on an interstate, but had taken back roads there. Anyway, it was obvious from the get-go that he was a fairly obnoxious driver; he yapped at every driver in front of him to “move it over.” he leaned so far to his left, always sizing up chances to pass, I thought he’d fall out the door. His eyes were darting all over the mirrors. Still, he’d answer my questions as he drove and yapped at cars. When we came upon the trooper, I thought he’d straighten up and drive normally. But he didn’t; he just closed right up on his bumper and stayed there, grinning in the mirror as the trooper looked back at him in his rear-view mirror.

It was a game to Earnhardt; and I suspect he thought it entertained me, which it did. But everything he did was a contest of some sort. He always had to establish the upper hand, even with crew guys and friends and reporters, for sure. It was a funny scene, and it’s a fond memory because it’s so clear in my mind how happy it made him.

OK, away from NASCAR from a moment: How many times have you seen Springsteen now? What number are we up to?

Well, there are two counts I keep, though I’m not 100 percent accurate with either one. The count for actual Bruce Springsteen concerts, for which I have ticket stubs or some evidence of admission, is in the low 100s right now–probably 110, 120.

Then there is the count that includes appearances in bars, mainly on the Jersey shore, for which I have no ticket stub or way of verifying. I lived in NY from 1978-84 and spent a good bit of time going down to the shore (Absury Park, Red Bank, Sea Bright, etc) when Bruce was around. He’d get into these patterns of showing up at bars like the Stone Pony and Big Man’s West, especially, and play with certain bands. It wasn’t hard to figure out when he’d show up. So if you add those in, it’s probably 200 or so.

Do you still have the beer bottle?

Oh yes, I do. In fact, it’s on the bookshelf of sports books right next to my home computer, and I am looking at its faded label now. It’s between “Figure Skating: A History” and “The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg.”

This beer bottle is a Heineken bottle with a very faded label that has been gouged out in one tiny spot. Bruce bought me this beer one night at Big Man’s in Red Bank, NJ, though it’s not as riveting a story as it sounds. I was sitting at a table with 5 or 6 other women (let’s say “babes,” to make the story better). Anyway, Bruce knew one of my friends, and he was sitting at the bar, alone. And the barmaid came over and said, “Bruce wants to buy everyone a drink. What are you having?” We were all in such a tizzy we couldn’t make a decision, so someone blurted out, “Heinekens all around.” That’s what we had. I was so nervous afterward I started clawing the label, then realized this would be a prized treasure, so I stopped tearing off the label. Luckily it was the dead of winter, and I had a giant down coat with me, which enabled me to smuggle the bottle out of the bar tucked inside my coat sleeve. I’ve taken good care of it since. Must have been 25 years ago, if not more.

It’s ridiculous to ask you this Springsteen question, but I remember a specific answer of yours when I asked you the first time 20 years ago, and I’m curious if your answer has changed: What is your favorite Bruce song? And how do you think he’s aged?

A: Oh my, I dont know what I said.* I probably said, “Thunder Road,” which has meant so much to me over the years. But I think, deep in my soul, it is “Incident on 57th Street.“ That’s what I would like played at my funeral, not to sound morbid.

As for how he has aged, this is complicated. If you mean physically, he looks remarkably fit, healthy and happy, so that is wonderful to see. The concerts are obviously shorter these days; not the marathons of old with an intermission in between. I don’t begrudge that one bit: Bruce and the E Street Band still give so very much to their audience. Fabulous to see in concert. As for how he has aged as a writer, I am less keen on that. In fact, I brood about this a good bit. I think his writing has fallen off, to be honest, and it pains me to say this.

*I remember precisely which song Liz told me was her favorite 20 years ago — I’m always fascinated by what real fans like. She said then that here favorite song was “She’s the One,” and I know this because I had never really listened to that song before she called it her favorite. I had heard the song lots of times — I was always someone who believed in playing entire albums and not just songs that I liked — but after Liz explained how “She’s the One” touched her, I listened to it and realized that it really is a great song. As another aside, I can also tell you that about 15 years ago, long before you could go on the Internet to find lyrics, I called Liz to ask her for a certain lyric in “Thunder Road.” I couldn’t get it exactly right in my head. The lyric was: “There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away.”

You were always someone who, I felt, looked at sports through a more global prism — don’t know if that makes any sense. But since you have spent so much of your time writing about NASCAR and professional football, I’m wondering: Which of those do you believe best represents America?

A: I love this question. First, thanks for the phrasing, which I take as a huge compliment and hope I am worthy of your generosity. But I do try to view things in broad strokes. And I do wonder about many of our obsessions — whether football, stock-car racing, rock& roll, and dreck like Britney Spears, “Survivor” and “American Idol” — what do they say about our country?

To your question, this may seem odd, but I’d say NASCAR represents America moreso than professional football. And I say this for two reasons. Mainly because NASCAR, to me, is rooted in the fundamental myth that it’s a sport in which everyday people compete in everyday cars. We know the cars aren’t ’stock’ of course; they aren’t really the kind in the American driveway or showroom floor. But it is largely true that anyone could do it — NOT that it’s so easy, because it’s not. But it’s true that you don’t need an obvious physical attribute to play, as you do to be an NBA power forward or NFL lineman. You don’t have to be 6-feet-10; you dont’ have to weigh 300 pounds. The cars are the equalizer, which makes it a sport, at least in theory, for everyman…or every woman, for that matter. This is very American, to me.

On a second point, there is something undeniably militaristic and hierarchical about the NFL and football in general. It is rooted in authority. Teams only succeeed if everyone — all the players on the team — follow the specific script and plays. All wisdom resides in the game plan; the best coaches are referred to “offensive geniuses” or “defensive wizards.” The players’ role is to essentially be obedient, precise, effective wind-up dolls. To execute the plan. Now, I’m not diminishing what NFL players do; I have great respect for NFL players. And certainly players like Brett Favre, who have exceptional improvisational ability, blow my theory to bits. But in general, football is about following a script. And I don’t think that’s very American at all. The American spirit is about creating something from nothing–it’s about finding a better way to build a country, even if it means breaking the rules. And NASCAR is more like that–constantly reinventing the car, the rules, what’s acceptable in order to get ahead, to get to the lead, to win.

Back to the book: One of the things I really, really like about this book is the way you paint portraits of the older drivers like Richard Petty and, especially, Bobby Allison. Do you feel that the younger drivers have the same, I don’t know, spirit as those older drivers?

I’m loathe to say younger drivers have no personality. I suspect they do, and a few people I respect insist that they do. But the point is, they don’t show their personalities. It’s a pity, and it’s one of the things that’s ruining the sport. It’s hard to tell one driver from another these days, with very few exceptions. Again, I’m not saying they have no personality. But it’s as if they are in a straight-jacket, so programmed to mention all of their sponsors’ names, to not offend, to not do this or that. Also, there is such a crush of media covering the sport, both print and broadcast, that reporters don’t have much access to drivers any more. So it’s rare to be able to spend enough time with a driver to even figure out what they’re about.

These issues are common in major stick-and-ball sports, too. But it’s particularly troublesome in NASCAR, I think. For all the talk and blather about the racecars, stock-car racing didn’t become popular because of sheet metal or engines. It captured people’s fancy becuase of the cult of personality that grew up around Richard Petty, Fireball Roberts, David Pearson, Cale Yarbrough, the Allisons, Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon. Each of these drivers stood for something in fans’ eyes–for specific values. And fans CHOSE them as their driver because of what they represented. I honestly can’t tell you what most of these guys racing today stand for or represent in a way that would compel a fan to climb on board. There are few drivers who are obvious jerks, and they’re easy to root against. But that’s not enough to build a sport around.

I’m a fan of Jeff Gordon. I mean, not as a driver — I know nothing about driving, as you know — but I like him a lot personally because I see him as a different entity. He’s a Yankee, loves New York, never seemed comfortable being painted into the Red State image that NASCAR drivers inevitably embrace. Should I like Jeff Gordon?

Absolutely yes, though you’ll wear yourself out trying to explain it to the non-believers. In every sport I’ve covered with any depth, I’ve been struck by athletes who are misperceived by the public. In lots of cases, fans get it right. In a few cases, they’re wildly off base. (Deion Sanders, for example, was a fabulous teammate in his time with the Washington Redskins–an absolutely hard worker in practice, a mentor to younger players, a great guy who put in lots of extra time building chemistry on a team of ‘me-first’ free agents. Now Deion’s public image was all “me-first;” but it was an image. He was a terrific teammate.*)

So, the rap against Jeff Gordon–that he’s a silver-spoon baby who had everything handed to him–is all wrong. He busted his tail to make his way in racing, and his parents did, too. He has not changed on iota from the person he was when he showed up in NASCAR at age 21, driving the NO.1 Baby Ruth car for Bill Davis. He is polite, hard-working, patient, thoughful, caring and an incredibly talented racer. And yes, I think he does have a pretty broad view of things; he takes interest in the world around him. But again, most fans have their minds made up about Jeff and don’t want to hear anything that doesn’t fit.

*Let me reiterate this about Deion Sanders … I have no idea what he was like when he was on the Cowboys or Yankees or 49ers or whatever. But I can tell you that when I wrote about him with the Cincinnati Reds, he was one of my absolute favorite people. He was probably the hardest worker on the team; he often talked about how he was just trying to catch up with the other players. He was respectful, thoughtful … it’s good to hear a football writer saw those same things.

There is talk — especially lately — that NASCAR’s popularity has crested and it will fall off. Do you buy it?

Yes, I do think its popularity has peaked. I think it peaked about two, three years ago. The question is, has it leveled off? Are the current TV ratings, attendance figures going to stabilize, or will they continue to erode? I’m less clear on that. Some of what lies ahead is in NASCAR’s control; some is not.

If I were NASCAR, I would do the following: Encourage drivers to show their personalities more; standardize the starting times for races; shorten some of the races; maybe shorten the schedule; reduce TV commercials; and re-consider this standardized race car, the so-called Car of Tomorrow. Its gains in driver safety are hugely commendable; that’s terrific and overdue. But it’s ugly, ungainly, and appears to have taken creativity out of the sport. And while NASCAR claims it’s producing more competitive racing, I don’t see it.

Now, other things that may hurt NASCAR’s popularity are out of the sport’s control, such as the cost of gas (many fans travel hundreds of miles to attend races); an economic downturn-bordering on recession. There’s also the fact that many track owners over-built their grandstands, and so many empty seats telegraph a slump in interest when they’re shown on TV. You never want to have more inventory than you can sell. That’s what NASCAR has now at several tracks.

For the non-NASCAR fan — and I imagine there are quite a few on this site — what would you say is the reasons NASCAR is so compelling to so many people?

Oh, I think it’s twofold: That bond between drivers and fans, which is unlike anything I’ve seen in sport. The loyalty and connection fans feel with a specific driver. NASCAR needs to take care of this, because those bonds are fraying. And that bedrock myth that YOU could do it, too. That sense that because we all drive cars, we ALL could race cars, too, given the opportunity. And the last 10, 20 laps of a NASCAR race is just a terrific show, to be honest. No matter how great the slam dunk in the NBA All Star Game, none of us can honestly picture ourselves doing THAT!

OK, just a couple of more quick ones and we’re done: Favorite Martin Scorcese movie?

“Mean Streets.”

What television show — if any — do you watch every week?

“Jeopardy”

What CD is in your CD player right now — or what song is playing on your iPod?

Johnny Cash, “American V: A Hundred Highways.” As stated above, I have no iPod. A tragic shortcoming.

Birds and Blue Note … with Rob Neyer

Posted: March 29th, 2008 | Filed under: Interviews | 26 Comments »

OK, yes, it’s another new look for the blog. I have an excuse this time … it’s sort of like the old look (with a new photo on top) and my understanding is this is a much more secure and functional template. And no, I cannot believe I just wrote the words “secure and functional template” like I know what I’m talking about.

So, this is a Q&A with my friend Rob Neyer, who has just written Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends, and yes, I’m jealous of anyone big enough to put his name in the title of all his books. To name drop for a moment, I count three such people as friends — Dave Barry, Bill James and Rob Neyer — and I’ve never asked any of them if they feel at all self-conscious about having their names on their books. I suspect excessive book sales help them overcome their demureness.*

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Morley, O.J. and Bill James’ Beard

Posted: March 15th, 2008 | Filed under: Interviews | 26 Comments »

Everyone who reads this already knows the story. But it’s always worth telling briefly again. Bill James was born in Holton, Kan. and grew up Mayetta., Kan. which is about 10 miles South of Holton on Kansas 75. If you kept going 35 or so miles South on 75 — past Hoyt and Elmont and places like that — you would run right into Topeka, which you probably know from grade school is the state capital of Kansas*.

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