Jack Curry is known to Yankee fans as one of the faces of the YES Network’s Yankees reporting team, but he wasn’t always a “TV guy.” Prior to joining YES in 2010, Jack enjoyed a decorated career as a sportswriter, most notably at the New York Times. He forged his path without having to go to smaller markets and work his way back east, a rarity for those who work in media, particularly in New York. His full bio can be found here. You can follow him on Twitter @JackCurryYES.

Jack was a staple on the Yankees beat when I covered the Yankees from 2002 through 2006 for yesnetwork.com. At that point of his career, he was one of the Times’s National Baseball Reporters and I was a punk trying to figure out how to become a better reporter and writer, assignment editor, and do all of it without getting in anyone’s way. I recall that Jack was a pillar of professionalism; someone not only I, but also every other writer respected and liked. He’s the same person on camera as he is off camera.

Over a series of conversations and e-mails, Jack and I discussed a number of topics, ranging from what inspired his career choice to the move from print to TV and Internet, and more.

Bronx Banter: At what point did you “know” that you wanted to become a sportswriter? Was there a “eureka” moment while you were at Fordham?

Jack Curry: When I was in the seventh grade, I started a newspaper at my elementary school. It was only two or four pages. But I remember the jolt I felt when everyone at the school was commenting on my articles. It was the first time I had a byline and I loved how that felt. Writers like to know what people think of their writing so I grew to love the idea of being a sportswriter. I hung on to the dream of being a major league player through high school, but that faded. I played high school baseball, but I was a much better writer. I went to one baseball practice at Fordham under coach Paul Blair. It lasted four and a half hours and I missed dinner that night. Even if I had made the team, I would’ve been a backup. So that one practice told me it was time to stop playing baseball and start covering baseball (and other sports). I funneled all of my energy into journalism and broadcasting after that.

BB: Who were the writers that you admired growing up, and how did they influence your reporting / storytelling style?

JC: I grew up in Jersey City, NJ, and the Jersey Journal was the first newspaper I remember reading. They syndicated Jim Murray’s column so it always had a prominent spot in the sports section. But, since I didn’t know anything about syndication as a kid, I just thought Jim Murray was some guy from Jersey City who had the greatest job in the world. He covered all of the biggest sporting events and, man, he could write. I wanted that job. When I finally realize who Jim Murray really was, it didn’t change my thoughts. I still wanted that job. I got the chance to meet Jim Murray at a college football game, which was an absolute thrill. My regret is I didn’t tell him my “connection” to him. I’m guessing he would’ve thought it was pretty cool.

BB: How did you get from the Jersey Journal to the New York Times?

JC: I worked for the Jersey Journal for three summers while I was in college. I’m going to bet that I covered more Little League baseball in those summers than anyone in the state of New Jersey. But I loved it. I loved going to the games and watching which kids cared and which kids were coached well and which kids were so much better or, unfortunately, so much worse than the other players on the field. Trying to get decent quotes out of 11- and 12-year-olds can be more challenging than trying to get decent quotes out of some major leaguers.

After I graduated from Fordham, I worked at the Star Ledger of Newark for about a year. I covered high school sports there, but I wanted to do more than that. I applied for a position in the New York Times’s Writing Program. Basically, the Times hired you to be a clerk for 35 hours a week and then you could use your days off or your hours off to pitch story ideas and to volunteer to cover events, etc. When I was hired as a “writing clerk,” I wrote a lot of stories that appeared without bylines. The Times had some arcane rules about not giving the clerks a byline, which I always thought was nonsensical. When you were hired as a writing clerk, you were told that there was no guarantee you’d ever be a reporter at the Times.

Anyway, once I got my foot in the door, I was on a mission to do anything and everything to stay there. I wanted to do enough so that they had to keep me. I needed to prove to them that I could be a sports reporter there. It took about three years, but I was finally hired as a reporter.

BB: So many sportswriters jump from sport to sport now. I can think of a number of current beat writers from several of the area papers who have shuttled back and forth. What drew you specifically to covering baseball and keeping yourself on that beat?

JC: I covered college basketball and football and the New Jersey Nets at the Times before I started covering baseball in 1990. I wanted to cover baseball. To me, there was no other sport to cover. I was fortunate that the Times recognized that and trusted me with covering a baseball beat. I took over the Yankees beat at the All-Star break of 1991 and have essentially only covered baseball since then. I like basketball and I’ll watch some football, but I would have never been as happy covering those sports as I was in covering baseball.

BB: When I started at YES and began setting the editorial direction of the website, we were trying to do something completely different in our coverage of the Yankees. Our goal wasn’t to compete with the papers, but to be considered legitimate. How did you view YESNetwork.com’s presence on-site in those first few years?

JC: In the early years, I viewed YESNetwork.com’s presence as another entity that was immersed in covering the Yankees. When I first started as a beat writer, you were concerned about the other beat writers and what they were doing. But, with each year, more and more outlets began to cover the team and you had to pay attention to them, too, and see what they were producing.

BB: What struck you about the way YESNetwork.com covered the team, and the games? How, if at all, has that changed since you became a YES Network employee and contributor to the dot.com?

I think YESNetwork.com has tried to be different than the traditional newspaper sports website, as it should be. The Yankees are the brand and there’s obviously an attempt provide as much Yankee content as possible. I think there’s more interaction with the fans, which is another positive. What I’ve tried to do is use the 20-plus years of experience that I have covering this team to offer analysis on players and trends, develop feature stories and, obviously, push to break news.

BB: Describe the events that led YES to call you and offer you the YES job, and what drew you to make the jump to TV on a full-time basis.

JC: After 22 years at the Times, I decided to take the buyout and pursue other opportunities. The timing was good for me. I felt confident about making a career switch in my 40s. I’m not sure if a person can do that in his 50s. I had always had a good relationship with John Filippelli of YES because I had been a guest on “Yankees Hot Stove” since 2005.

Before I even took the buyout, YES was the place where I hoped I would land. Shortly after my departure from the Times became official, I heard from YES. There was mutual interest and I was excited about the chance to transition from print to broadcast. My colleagues at YES, people like Flip, Michael Kay, Bob Lorenz, Ken Singleton, Jared Boshnack, Bill Boland, Mike Cooney, John Flaherty and so many others, all welcomed me and helped make that transition a smooth one for me. I work with a lot of very cool and very talented people.

It’s rewarding to work for and with people you admire and respect and people that you consider your friends.

BB: Peter Gammons and Jayson Stark were among the first two prominent baseball writers who became “multimedia” guys. Later, your former colleague Buster Olney, Ken Rosenthal and Tom Verducci followed. Did it just make sense for you to do the same?

JC: You forgot to mention Michael Kay. Michael had worked for the Post and the News and did clubhouse reporting for MSG. Obviously, he also was a radio announcer before moving to YES. He was the one person who implored me to give TV a try. I will admit that I was resistant. I liked being a baseball writer. There were times where I thought I would end my career as a newspaperman. But I’m very happy to have made the switch. I love what I’m doing at YES. They have given me terrific opportunities in the studio with Bob Lorenz, who is as selfless as any co-worker I’ve ever had. Flip has also trusted me with chances to do work in the booth during games, which have been great experiences.

BB: In the last 10 years — heck, the last five even — so much has changed in how sports are covered on a daily basis. Responsibilities include blogging and tweeting, in some cases web-exclusive video reporting. The beat writer/columnist’s audience is broader than ever. Has that caused you to change your journalistic approach?

JC: My journalistic approach hasn’t changed. I’m trying to find insightful and interesting stories and tell them as adeptly as I can. I’m trying to dig up timely and pertinent information and deliver it as quickly and as accurately as I can. That’s the way I did the job at the Times. That’s the way I do the job at YES. But I am moving faster in telling those stories and chasing that information. Because of Twitter and blogging, we’re all doing that. When I was a beat writer in the early 1990′s, my world revolved around deadlines: 7 PM, 11 PM, 1 AM, etc. I’m on TV now, but, when I write for the website or I tweet, it’s usually about getting it done as quickly as I can, not about getting it done by 7 PM.

BB: Speaking of journalism, you broke the story of Andy Pettitte returning to the Yankees. What was the internal reaction to your scoop?

JC: My bosses at YES were elated that we broke the Pettitte story. I first tweeted about it and wrote a news story that was up on our website five minutes later. About 25 minutes after that, we led our spring training broadcast with the news about Pettitte’s return. Since that story came out of left field, they were thrilled that we led the way.

BB: What was the reaction to the Twitter war that ensued due to ESPN claiming credit for the story?

JC: It doesn’t behoove me to revisit what happened on Twitter after the Pettitte story broke. From a journalistic perspective, that was a very good day for YES. That’s what’s most important.

BB: Is the rapport with former players you used to cover, like Paul O’Neill, John Flaherty, David Cone, and Al Leiter, any different now that you’re on TV, considered an “analyst” like them?

JC: What’s interesting about all of those guys is that I had a great relationship with all of them when they were players, so those relationships have simply carried over. I liked talking baseball with all of those guys when I was a writer. I like talking baseball with all of them now that we’re colleagues.

BB: Which part of your career was, or has been, the most challenging?

JC: The most challenging part of my career were the earliest days at the Times, but, to be honest, those were also some of the most enjoyable days. Like I said, when I first started there, I wasn’t guaranteed anything other than a future of answering phones. I had to show a lot of different editors that I could write and report.

At first, I was going to answer this by saying the most challenging time was being a new beat writer on the Yankees. But, by that point in my career, at least I had become a reporter at the Times. I knew I had made the staff. In the early days, I didn’t know if that would ever happen. I’m glad it did.

[Photo Credits: YESNetwork.com, New York Times, Twitter]

Babe Ruth was clearly the best player in Yankees history, Yogi Berra earned the most World Series rings, and Joe DiMaggio was, well, Joe DiMaggio, but somehow Mickey Mantle still stands apart. He came of age along with millions of baby boomers who curled the brims of their hats to match Mantle’s, imitated his swing, and even limped like he did.

Quite simply, he was the Mick.  Jane Leavy explores the man and the legend in her recent book, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood.  Ms. Leavy was generous enough to talk with me about her book and a few other topics.

Enjoy…

Bronx Banter: Behind every good baseball book, you can usually find an author who grew up loving the game, who grew up playing catch with his father…

Jane Leavy: Ah, ah, ah… Watch that “his,” watch that “his,” Hank!

BB: But I think that’s what I want to get at, the fact that typically most of these writers are men who were boys growing up wanting to be baseball players and then settled for being writers. I was just wondering how much of that was true of you as a child?

JL: Well, I don’t think past the age of probably five I really thought there was much prayer I was going to be a baseball player. I think the inheritance of a passion for a game, whether it’s baseball, since baseball claims a supremacy in that, though certainly I know people whose devotion to the New York Football Giants or the Jets or even, God help us, the Redskins, is handed down along with the season tickets the same way. But baseball certainly has a claim on that matter of inheritance, and yes, I inherited my love of the game from my dad. I don’t think I had any illusion that I was going to be out there on the field with the guys, and that was pretty sad. I could dream, but that’s different. And I do think that that makes a big difference in the way that women write about sports. I’ve often said, and I really do believe this, reporters are supposed to be outsiders. There’s always been a little bit of a competitive thing going on when the guys who wish they could’ve been the second baseman for the New York Yankees are trying, almost, in their question to prove to the interview subject that they know as much and they could’ve been out there with them and the whole nine yards. I don’t think any woman is going to go into a locker room with that same notion. Reporters are supposed to be outsiders, that’s what we are. When you’re a woman in a locker room, that’s what you are. You’re an outsider.

BB: It reminds me of something that I heard Suzyn Waldman once talk about. She said that when a player is traded, a male reporter will immediately think about how it impacts a team, whereas she would always realize that behind that player there’s a family that’s being uprooted, and she felt like her female perspective allowed her to see more of a situation than just what was going on on the surface. It seems like you’re kind of saying the same type of thing, I suppose.

JL:  Well, I don’t think you can make the acute generalization that every male reporter is gonna not wonder about how somebody’s nursery school age kids are gonna feel, or how every baseball wife is going to deal with yet another relocation. Not every guy is an insensitive boob, and not every woman is an empathic shoulder to cry on. As a reporter, it’s partly determined not just by personality, but by assignment. If you’re just out there to write the game, whether you’re male or female, it doesn’t matter. For a while, once in a while I would trade bylines with a male friend just to see if anybody noticed. I think I wrote this actually once. When I first started sports writing, the gig was can you write so that nobody could tell you were a girl. You had to prove that it was an okay thing to be. I do believe, and this is what I was saying, there are advantages, though it’s certainly a double-edged sword, particularly early on – but there are advantages to being a woman in a locker room. There are things that guys tell women that are different than what they tell other guys. And there are questions that women may ask that are different than what a guy may first ask. I always use this example. I’ve heard countless numbers of men say to a player, “Well, that slider didn’t do much, did it?” The question presumes that they know exactly what the pitch was. Well, maybe they don’t. Half the time the hitters don’t. But a woman, certainly this woman, would presume nothing. I would say, “What was the pitch? Do you know what that pitch was? And where was it? Where did it go? What was it supposed to do?” That’s what I meant about the competitiveness. I didn’t feel the need to show my bona fides in that way.

BB: My ten-year-old daughter recently learned how to keep score, can identify most of the Yankee players, she loves to play catch with me…

JL:  My kinda girl!

BB: Exactly. And even though that’s not typical of most girls, she certainly isn’t seen as odd. How were your feelings about baseball viewed when you were growing up?

JL:  I measure the change, which I think is profound and which you’re seeing in your daughter, with a story I’ll tell you in a second. Certainly as I approached that tender age, at least growing up in Long Island, you’re supposed to be thinking about what you’re going to wear to all the bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah parties, and not whether the first baseman is in a slump. My particular infatuation for baseball, and more particular for the Yankees, did not serve me exactly well. I’m old enough that it was the era of tom boys, and girls were supposed to like boys more than they liked baseball, and I was a girl who liked the things that little boys got to do. And that was not a popular way to go in 1950s Long Island. As a young girl I was, I’m sure, pretty unaware of whatever may have been swirling around me, but as I got older it became more uncomfortable, and for period of time I suppressed the Yankees.

BB: What a terrible thing.

JL:  Terrible! But I have a daughter who’s twenty-two, and one day when she was somewhere around eight, at the age when little girls like to wear make up and those stick-on earrings that come in little packages, so maybe seven or eight years old, something like that. I have a painting in the front hall of my house, a floor painting, that’s almost a perfect square, but it’s all painted florals. It’s almost like a mural on the floor, but Emma decided one day that it made for a perfect boxing ring. And down she comes dressed in a red sweatsuit with lots of appliqué butterflies and flowers, wearing her brother’s Michael Jordan hightops, a tutu over the sweatpants, her father’s boxing clubs from when he was a kid, forty-seven different shades of lipstick covering her face…

BB: She was covering all the bases, basically.

JL:  You got it. Seven or eight pairs of those stick-on earrings, and she comes downstairs and plops down in the funny boxing ring she imagined, and she says, “Put ‘em up!” Now, what that said to me was, this is a new generation. This is not a case of having to choose between either or. Emma felt perfectly comfortable, and still does at age twenty-two, getting rotty and sweaty and being competitive and being, in my opinion, the most gorgeous twenty-two year-old young woman on the face of the earth, who has successfully, finally, taught this tom boy mom how to put on makeup correctly. So I think that that schism that used to exist for young girls in this culture, doesn’t anymore, and I think that’s the best measurement I can give for how different it is for my daughter, your daughter, compared to how it was for me.

BB: That’s interesting to hear that perspective. All of which leads us to Mickey Mantle. What did Mickey mean to you as a fan of the game?

JL:  Ah, the Mick. Well I don’t think he meant anything particular to me as a fan of the game, it was a far more personal relationship. I think that these relationships that existed then between kid and player or grownup and player had a really proprietary quality to them. When you used that phrase, “He was my guy,” it’s possessive. It’s in the language and the structure of the sentence, a kind of possessiveness. We belonged to each other. He was my guy, I was a Mickey guy. So this didn’t have so much to do with being a fan of the game – though I was also that and remain also that – this was about a particular attachment to a public figure who touched something – obviously metaphorically – in me, just as Willie Mays did for other kids and Duke did for kids in Brooklyn or Michael Jordan or Larry Bird or Magic Johnson did for other kids. There was a part of the book that got sort of crunched down. I suppose it was the right decision, though it pained me. I went to Columbia, and there was a teacher there back in the day, Ethel Person, a very prominent psychiatrist who taught a class in human development, and I just thought she was the coolest thing ever. She wore all these swanky, black chemise dresses and smoked cigarettes through a cigarette holder. Whoa! This class was odd because it featured a lot of Columbia football players because they thought this would be an easy grade. Anyway, she wrote this book called Feeling Strong: How Power Issues Affect Our Ability to Direct Our Own Lives. Ethel knew nothing about sports, which is part of what made the whole class so funny back in the day. And in the middle of this book she suddenly does this weird digression into what the whole psychoanalytic underpinnings of the who’s better debate is all about. Her whole argument is that these fierce debates that continue into late middle age about who’s better are basically for young boys a way of trying on the vestments of adulthood and what kind of man they want to be, under the guise of it being an objective conversation with all these statistics. You’re investing this power in this person because you’re trying on different ways of being man. Am I gonna be a Mickey kind of man? Am I gonna be a Willie kind of man? The fierceness of those debates is what that is about. So I thought that was brilliant. I thought, “Oh, my god, that explains it – of course!”

BB: That’s why people are so passionate.

JL:  The only place I would disagree with Ethel – and I never disagree with Ethel – is that I don’t think it’s exclusive to boys. [Laughing] It certainly wasn’t for me. That’s a long way around to your answer, and I apologize…

BB: That’s okay.

JL:  What I’m saying is that everybody remembers the news conference, Mickey’s last news conference, when he got up and pointed that withered thumb at his caved in chest and said, “I’m not a hero. Don’t be like me.” Well, I did want to be like him, and not just ‘cause I wanted to be able to go up to the plate and pop one over the fence, but because I had – and I couldn’t have articulated this at that age – I had physical problems dating from my premature birth. I have this very inchoate sense of myself as being, for lack of a better way to put it, half-baked because I was born two months prematurely. So I was, kind of, not fully baked, and I had things that weren’t even diagnosed until later. I didn’t understand them, but I had a real sense that something wasn’t right and I had to cope with it. And Mickey did, too. I knew that, we all knew that. So my identification with him had to do with the way he carried himself. I couldn’t explain it at that age. It was a way of learning how to carry myself despite a sense that I had of being physically… I hate challenged… I don’t want to say challenged…

BB: Fragile or vulnerable…

JL:  Yeah, right. Thank you. Exactly right. So he really did help in that way. And the other thing, of course, was the proximity of my grandmother’s house and Yankee Stadium. To me, going to see her was the same as going to see him, and vice versa. In the weird elixir of childhood and imagination and a grandmother who was willing and able to give me permission to be exactly who I wanted to be, whether or not it comported with notions of fifties girliness, in my mind the two of them are inseparable. When I got to think about it more later, I realized that in some ways they were more alike than I realized and I think I wrote about it a little in the book. I said something to the effect that, how different is it really, my grandmother’s determination to fast on Yom Kippur despite her diabetes, and Mickey’s willingness to play hurt. They were both taking one for the team! And it represented the same kind of bravery to me, and the same kind of grace. To watch my grandmother shoot her thigh with the insulin that she kept in the refrigerator was to me an incredible act of heroism. I was in awe. And again, how different was it, really, than what Mickey could do? So they were just all mushed up in my mind.

BB: You talked earlier about how you felt like you were able to be objective as a reporter. How difficult was it to be objective as you were writing a biography of your guy?

JL:  Impossible. Which is why I wrote it the why I did. I’m not sure any of us is ever really objective, Hank. I think that’s a faux objectivity that we like to affect. Even if you allegedly start out objective, I’m not sure you end up there. Certainly in this particular case I could not pretend to be dispassionate. There was just no way. And so the only way, I concluded pretty fast, that I could write this book – other people could do it differently – but the only way I could write this book was the way I did, by acknowledging what he had meant to me, acknowledging the fierce disappointment that therefore ensued upon being confronted with what and who he really was.

BB: Talking about Mantle the player, one thing that I feel like we’ve lost in this internet age is that sense of mystery and excitement that comes along with a hot new prospect. I think we got a little taste of that this past summer when Stephen Strasburg made his debut with the Nationals, but even with Strasburg, we still knew an awful lot about him by the time he arrived. What was it like when Mantle made his debut in 1951? What were the expectations?

JL:  Well, I think it was an understated set of expectations. I think by the time he had been the MVP of the Western League as he was the year before, it was pretty clear that he could hit. What was it .353 or something like that? But still, nobody expected him to be in the major leagues the next year. Nobody. And he wanted to go back down and play for Harry Craft again. He really did. So the effect of him blowing through that thin air out there in Arizona was extraordinary. Of course, as Red Smith used to always say and Stanley Woodward would write, “Quit godding up those ballplayers!” But you don’t really realize you’re doing it when you’ve spent that much time in the sun, and there isn’t much incentive for doing it either. So the gushing of column inches had as much to do with the astonishing demonstration and breadth of his talent as the sun, the air, and the desert. Mickey would often laugh about it later about how thin the air was in Arizona. It’s not like he wasn’t doing what he was doing, but he certainly wasn’t really an outfielder, was he? One of things that puzzled me, and I still can’t figure out, is how come in 1950 Casey says, “I don’t wanna see him at shortstop ever again,” and yet he plays another whole season at shortstop for the Joplin Miners. One possible scenario, what that tells you is that they really didn’t expect him to be in the major leagues in ’51 and they thought he was gonna have another season to learn how to play outfield.

BB: I can’t quite imagine a bigger move than going from Commerce, Oklahoma, to the Yankees and New York City. How was that transition for Mantle, in terms of both baseball and culture?

JL:  Well, I’m sure he would’ve done his best to hide whatever fears were there. His father obviously knew enough to go to Red Patterson and say, “I want you to look out for this kid.” And for Red Patterson to turn around and say, “That’s not really my job, I can’t be his agent…”

BB: Yeah, I was struck by that. I can’t imagine something like that happening today.

JL:  Right. So his father clearly intuited, maybe because of his role in producing this particular phenomenon, physically and emotionally, that he was ill-prepared to negotiate this. After all, how could Mutt Mantle really know what it meant? He couldn’t. He could have a sense of it. He’d taken him to St. Louis and seen Stan Musial in an elevator, but he couldn’t have an idea of what it was like to come to New York with all of that potential. The fact is, I’m sure Mickey was terrified. Red Smith wrote that fabulous column about him going out and playing in a pair of spikes with the soles flapping like radio announcers mouth. What does that tell you about how prepared he was?

BB: One thing that really caught my interest was your description of the rivalry between Mantle and Joe DiMaggio. Can you talk about that a little bit? That tension?

JL:  Picture little Mickey Mantle in study hall looking at a Life Magazine spread about Joe DiMaggio. He’s sitting there with his pals saying, “I’m gonna be Joe DiMaggio one day.” Well, how many people around the country have done that, sitting at kitchen tables or in study halls? A zillion. Do they really think they’re gonna become Joe DiMaggio? Do they possibly, in their wildest imaginations, think that they’re gonna end up playing beside him in right field as he tries to figure out a way to retire as gracefully as he had played? I don’t think so. And then you have Casey Stengel who has his own ambitions. Jerry Coleman has said to me, “Joe coulda kept playing. He didn’t need to quit.” That’s the only person I ever heard say that, but I put a lot of credence in Jerry Coleman’s statements. Stengel clearly wanted to get the process of being in the second half of the twentieth century under way. And in his view, clearly DiMaggio was the first half of the twentieth century, and I don’t think you can underestimate how much Stengel wanted to be able to mold someone and to be known as the Ol’ Professor who really could teach and tutor and shape the career that would then reflect back on him. So with all that and DiMaggio, who may not be, after reading Richard Ben Cramer’s unbelievable book, anybody’s idea of the best human being on the planet, but the fact is it’s not easy to seize center stage than it is to let go of it. And you can certainly have compassion for anybody, any of these athletes, who having been Joe DiMaggio, having been Mickey Mantle, have to figure out a way, not just to leave it, but to go on.

BB: Right, right.

JL:  That Joe DiMaggio would have ankle spurs – an Achilles Heal – doesn’t really, metaphorically, surprise me. And here comes this young kid, who for that very brief moment in time, really can do anything. Now, could he do it for eighteen years? Look at your analogy to Stephen Strasburg, which is fabulous. My publisher was inundated after Strasburg’s fourteen K game with proposals – the greatest pitcher who ever lived! Well, wait a minute. How many games has he pitched? There’s a rush to judgment in the making of daily history. You don’t know how it’s gonna come out, and it’s really hard to remind yourself that before Mickey Mantle got hurt, before the whole process of physical deterioration set in, before Mutt died, before Mickey started carousing with grieving Billy Martin, you didn’t know what he was really gonna become. Merlyn would say later that she regretted naming their first boy Mickey Junior because of the burden it was. Well, my thought was, she didn’t know what the burden was gonna be then, because Mickey Mantle…

BB: Wasn’t Mickey Mantle.

JL:  How did you know what this little baby was gonna have to be carrying around with him? But I think that that’s what’s so amazing about that moment. Talk about what if. That was the moment, before the knee, those seven months, one of which he spent in Kansas City wearing #35 for the Blues, where you really could allow your imagination to run wild and imagine not what he could have done, but what he might do.

BB: When Mantle arrived in the early 50s it was kind of a golden age of New York City baseball, with Duke Snider and Willie Mays leading competitive teams in Brooklyn and Manhattan while Mickey did his thing in the Bronx. What was that rivalry like? Did those three men have a sense of what was going on, or is this something that’s been created in retrospect?

JL:  I said something to Duke about ’51, and he said, “No, it really started in ’54.” Mantle had been injured in the Series, then Mays left for the Army in ’52 and ’53, so ’54, he’s right, was the first time that they were really, metaphorically and literally, together on the big stage. So that’s when it really all dates back to. The “who’s better” thing didn’t really begin until ’54, because that was the first time they really all played a season on that center stage. I think it certainly gained force over the next couple of years with Duke continuing to hit his forty home runs a year and the Dodgers and the Yankees being in the two World Series. And Willie faded, of course. He didn’t have those great years. All things you read about Mantle, how he’s not fulfilling his potential, there were stories like that about Mays.

BB: It’s surprising. I recently read the Mays biography, and it’s kind of amazing to read what people were writing about him at the time.

JL:  Duke was really great on this subject. I think he certainly resented it, and Carl Erskine described this to me how O’Malley exaggerated the pressure by putting all the averages up on the scoreboard. All through ’54 you had the head-to-head things with Mays and Mueller and Snider. Duke didn’t like that at all, and he felt it was counter to the Branch Rickey way he had been schooled in: if the team wins, the individual numbers will be there. But it really was the old ethos. That’s what they cared about then. Not just because they were selfish, but because that was how they were gonna make the money, if they played in the World Series. Scott Boras wasn’t around to count the base hits and the stolen bases. It didn’t really matter. Duke said that he and Willie would kibitz behind the batting cage – Oh, I got you today, blah, blah, blah – but they weren’t close friends by any stretch of the imagination. I love the story about Willie hitting two home runs in Ebbetts Field and coming out to the parking lot to find all four of his tires slashed and having to take the subway back to Harlem. This was personal. When people say it took a lot of guts to be a Mickey fan in Brooklyn, it really did! I think Duke and Mickey overlapped a lot in the World Series, obviously, but a lot of it is retrospective. Right at the opening of the ’57 season Stan Isaacs had a piece in Newsday about who’s better, saying we’re starting to see it now, but we’ll know in fifteen years when all the statistics are dry. Well, we don’t know, because we’ve just invented more statistics to keep the debate going. The debate’s just relocated from the street corner to cyberspace.

BB: It didn’t take long, of course, for Mantle to grow into – and even exceed – the expectations that he first brought to the big leagues. But while he was winning multiple World Series and winning the hearts of America, he was also spending time off the field with people like Billy Martin and Whitey Ford. How serious was all this debauchery? How much did it affect Mantle’s performance on the field, both the next day and the long term?

JL:  I think that is impossible to answer. When people like Ralph Houk said to me, “That’s all exaggerated, he didn’t drink that much.” When Moose Skowron said, “He didn’t drink that much, he didn’t hurt nobody,” they’re talking from a very different perspective.

BB: And aren’t they in a sense kind of defending him?

JL:  Yeah, but let me see if I can explain it. We need some perspective. It was a culture in which that was the norm. So how much he was doing…There’s good evidence that with Billy Martin around, particularly with Billy being as emotionally distraught as he was in ’53 when his wife left and took the baby, and Mickey still not over his father’s death, that they hit it pretty good. But what Sam McDowell said to me is the thing that’s most persuasive. I don’t think Houk was lying when he said he didn’t drink that much, it’s just that the standards of how much was “that much” are different. I don’t think he came to the ballpark in the ’50s hung over. I don’t think he probably got drunk every night. But what Sam McDowell said, and what is true, is that the seeds of his alcoholism would’ve been invisible. You just would’ve thought he was being irresponsible, because he wasn’t doing anything that was much different from anybody else. What you couldn’t see was that the effect on his biochemistry was different from everybody else.

BB: It wasn’t just a guy going out drinking.

JL:  No. He didn’t know it, and they didn’t know it. There was just no way to know that.

BB: I wanted to also ask you about 1961. So much has been written about that and movies have been made. What kind of relationship did Mantle and Maris have?

JL:  I really think the stuff about them hating each other was untrue. It really was one of those reporter created…

BB: It made for a good story.

JL:  Yeah. Now do I think that Mickey didn’t care about not winning the home run race? No, I think he cared. To the point where he hated Roger Maris’s guts or anything? No, of course not. I think he would’ve liked to have broken that record, but I think this is one of those cases when ballplayers say, “Do you know how much time we were out there together?” And it was true. At least for part of the summer, it was true.

BB: And what about the end? There are a lot of contradictions in the Mantle story, especially when we look at his final days. He’s every woman’s dream, but he’s juggling two different…

JL:  Whoa, whoa, whoa. Why do you say that?

BB: That’s part of the contradiction, I think.

JL:  No, I think that is a male fantasy.

BB: Well, let me tell you what I think, and then you tell me why I’m wrong. The next part of the question is that he’s every man’s hero, so maybe I’m just assuming that if I love him, then every woman must love him, too.

JL:  It depends on when you’re talking about.

BB: Over the course of his career. Because what I’m thinking about is this contradiction that he’s a hero, but in the end he’s juggling two different women during his final hours, and he essentially drank himself to death. During those days I remember a lot of people being very conflicted, going through two different types of mourning: the death of the man, and the death of the legend, I suppose. But the legend survived all of that. Am I making any kind of sense? Does any of that make sense to you?

JL:  No. I think that in his youth, the Mickey Mantle whom you see on the cover of the book was an incredibly gorgeous, magnetic figure, and that men and women were infatuated with him. I think it’s an erroneous supposition to assume that he was later every woman’s dream. I don’t buy that at all. I think he became more every man’s dream: what you can get away with, how many women you can have, how you can do all this and get drunk every night. I think it became more a male fantasy than a female fantasy. But does that mean that there weren’t women ready and willing and available? No, of course it doesn’t mean that. But you know, that’s true for baseball players pretty much across the board. There are always the baseball Annies.

BB: So how did you reconcile your feelings about him as you grew older and grew more to understand what was going on?

JL:  I’m not sure what you mean.

BB: For instance, when you talk about how important he was to you as a child, and even looking back how intertwined his memory is with your memories of your grandmother. I think it’s interesting how we can still separate, how we can accept one part of a person without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

JL:  Isn’t that just being a grown-up? That’s probably the answer to your question. Grown-ups are capable, allegedly, of holding more than one idea in their heads. That’s what the subtitle means. He can be as magnificent an athlete, compromised as he was by circumstance and disability, and he can be not somebody you would’ve wanted to have passed out in your lap. Just because things are opposite doesn’t mean they’re mutually exclusive. To me, that’s what it means to be a grown-up. It means you don’t need to see things or people as one-dimensional. You can see that it’s complex. There was good and there was bad. It literally isn’t all black and white.

BB: I think that sums up Mickey, and a lot of people.

JL:  I think the part that I care about most, Hank, I think maybe I said it better in the book, is that Mickey forced me to grow up. He forced me to see him as he was and not as I wanted to see him. I think that the thing that he has in common and the unshakeable bond with his legions of Mantleologists, the fan boys, is the refusal to grow up, the refusal to abandon their fond illusions of childhood. And Mickey, I think to his credit, was trying over and over and over in so many ways with so many ridiculous excesses to say, “Look at me!” – just like he said “Don’t look at me” at the end – he said, “Look at me! Look at me!” I think a lot of his behavior was a cry for help. And nobody could see it or could hear it over the roar of the crowd.

[Photo Credits: Bob Olen and John Dominis]

Also, for all you NYC heads, I’ll be at the Gelf Varsity Letters series in Brooklyn next Thursday, October 7th. If you are around and available, represent, represent!

To celebrate the publication of the 20th edition of The Best American Sports Writing, I sat down with series editor Glenn Stout. Dig our chat.

Bronx Banter: How many pieces do you read each year, and how do you find all the stuff?

Glenn Stout: I can’t answer this any more specifically than to say “many thousands.”  I don’t waste time counting. But understand, a lot of what I read I only read until I say to myself “This is not going to make the book,” so I stop. Suffice to say that I read enough of every submission, and enough of every significant story in every publication I receive, that I don’t stay up nights worrying if I read enough. Almost without even thinking about it anymore, I read a couple hours a day. It’s like feeding the dogs or working out – part of the fabric of the day.

I find things by looking and by being easy to find myself and by trying to make it clear to every writer that he or she is encouraged to submit material. Several hundred magazines and newspapers are sent requests for submissions and/or complimentary subscriptions.  I subscribe to a healthy number of publications myself, a few good friends, like yourself, and even readers, recommend stories to me, and I send out a mass e-mail request to a mailing list I’ve put together over the years. I also read some blogs and check some message boards to see if there are any stories people are talking about. But most importantly, I just keep my eyes open. A story like one by Pam Belluck in the New York Times a few years ago – “How to Catch Fish in Vermont,” wasn’t a submission, and didn’t appear in the sports section of the Times. I stumbled upon Belluck’s story while looking for something else. The same thing happened this year when I found Eric Nusbaum’s story “Death of Pitcher” from his blog, pitchersandpoets.com. I was looking for something for Fenway 1912, my book on the first season of Fenway Park which will come out next year, and I stumbled on his story. There are probably eight or ten stories each year that get sent to the Guest Editor that I “find” accidentally. But they are “on purpose accidental” because I leave myself open to finding them. I’ll steal a magazine from a doctor’s office if there is a story in it that might be good for the book.

BB: Has the process changed at all over the years?

GS: The biggest change is that 20 years ago all my browsing took place in hard copy. I worked at the Boston Public Library then and had access to where the past years’ magazines and newspapers were kept. I’d go in the occasional Saturday and spend the whole day reading. Now, with the internet, coupled with the fact I no longer have direct access to what, until recently, was one of the world’s greatest public libraries, means I spend much more time online. But I don’t think the flow rate of the word river has changed all that much.

BB: Are there certain kinds of stories that are more likely to make it? Magazine profiles, newspaper columns?

GS: I don’t think so, but other people do. I’ve gone back and checked and the stories I set aside each year for further reading break down about 60% – 40% between magazines and other long form formats and newspapers (which includes weeklies and the handful of Sunday supplements still published). Although these days, of course, with so many newspapers cutting space, cutting back, and/or closing, I’ve noticed a drop in submissions from newspapers and their writers, and there are clearly fewer “take-outs” being written. Since it is impossible to browse hundreds of daily newspapers, newspaper writing is probably more dependent on submissions than work from magazines that can send me subscriptions. And I have to say, newspapers and newspaper writers are, for some reason I’ve never been able to figure out, hesitant to make submissions. There are some major, major newspapers that have never responded to a request for material. I can’t consider what I don’t see. And even when papers do make submissions, there have been times we’ve picked a story that the writer submitted and the paper did not. What they submit is often very telling. One very well thought of sports editor at a major paper never sent me material from his staff – but submitted his own very pedestrian work every year.

I’ll admit that longer form pieces probably have a bit of an edge – extra space is a gift to a writer — but that’s also part of the media of putting a book together. Longer form stories hold together better in a book. Obviously, there are some kinds of stories that I personally don’t care for, but in every batch of material I send to the Guest Editor, I always include a few stories that I might not like at all, but understand that someone else might.

BB: There aren’t very many accounts of single games or events. Is that by design? Do you find that the art–and of necessity–of game recaps has been devalued with the rise of technology?

GS: Very few games stories and column – I find – provide the information needed to stand alone a year or more later when the book comes out. Often there just isn’t enough context in the story, and they often depend on a great deal of assumed knowledge. That may be understandable when the story was first written, but can no longer be assumed a year or more later. And some are just plain dated. This isn’t a contest for the writers, but a book for the readers, and if a story doesn’t give the reader enough, or is dated by changing events, it’s not going in the book no matter how well written it might be. And stylistically, few game stories or columns today are written with much real form – there is a lot of radio banter and one-liners masquerading as writing. I’m not sure that technology is the reason for that, but when considering game stories, I think that when the computer allowed writers the freedom to do constant updates and re-writes, and writers became accustomed to doing so, many stopped writing stories that actually told a story.

BB: Are there any stories that you selected but weren’t selected by the guest editor that stand out?

GS: There are always a couple each year that I wish the Guest Editor would have picked, but that has always been the case. In BASW of the Century I really wish we would have included a story by A.J. Leibling, for instance, and there are a few other writers I wish we would have included, but you have to put a back cover on the book at some point. Some GE’s have asked for my input, and when I feel really strongly about a story I might mention it, and I think on one or two occasions it has resulted in a story making the book that otherwise might not have. But can I pick out examples? That wouldn’t be fair to the writer. After I turn the submissions over to the GE, I always make my own picks and compare them with mine. Almost without fail we overlap about 60-75% of the time. That seems about right.

BB: Other than David Halberstam, who you’ve written about before, were there any relationships you had with guest editors that stand our as enjoyable or remarkable?

GS: Well, although David was the best, most have been enjoyable and all have tried to make a good book. Although a few GE’s have preferred to do everything by mail and e-mail, I’ve had some great conversations with the GE’s – and occasionally from writers who are appearing in the book, although I won’t critique anyone’s work, since I don’t think that’s appropriate. I get nice letters too… and few crazy ones. The mail is always an adventure.

BB: Do you ever hear from writers who are mad that they aren’t in the book?

GS: Kinda sorta indirectly, but not aggressively so. Precisely what makes the book is not really my decision anyway – the guest editor chooses and can always add any story not submitted by me. I’m a gatekeeper but there are other ways around the gate. A few writers have taken snipes at the book that I suspect are because they are not in it. Some of these writers have made it clear to me, privately, that they would like to be in the book. I understand that, and don’t hold it against them. I have had family members that have gotten mad at me. You have to be careful of daughters defending their dads.

BB: How do you keep up with all the material that is on the Internet? I know there have been a few blog posts that have qualified, though Internet writers like Bill Simmons or Rob Neyer have never been selected. Is there a built in prejudice against Internet-based writers, or do you see the quality of that writing as being less than because most bloggers don’t have editors (of course Neyer and Simmons do).

GS: You can’t. No one can, not even if you do it all day, every day. It’s as impossible as reading 300 daily newspapers a day. Now obviously, there are a handful of sites that are must reads, but the volume is overwhelming. Everybody has a blog – even me ( verbplow.blogspot.com ). In this climate, anybody writing online, or writing anywhere for that matter, who assumes that I must be reading them because of their name or their publisher or their profile or their website is mistaken. I might be, and I try to, but it cannot be done. The best way to get a story in the book is to make sure I see it, and the only foolproof way to do that is to send it to me in the mail.

There isn’t any prejudice against Internet writers, but I have say they have been far less aggressive making submissions than writers from other sources, as have online publications. You’ve got to print it out, and you’ve got to put it in the mail. I don’t accept submissions by e-mail, because some people would forward everything they write to me, and it would be overwhelming. Hell, some people do that now (and some by mail, too). You do what you can to be fair to everybody, but in this case it comes down to the mechanics of the process. It’s got to get in my hands.

As far as the issue of blogs and editing, there are obviously some people who spend more time on their work than others, same as in print, but often there are not very many other eyes between the writer and the page online, and it sometimes shows. One very prominent blogger sent me a long and very well received, at the time, blog post last year that was built around an anecdote that was apocryphal and demonstrably incorrect. But when he revisited the topic in print form a year later, it was corrected.

In some online contexts I think writers find it easier to be conversational rather than work with form and pace and other strategies like they would in print.

It reminds me of something I learned when writing a lot of poetry. When something is typed rather than handwritten, a transformation takes place and a certain objective distance is created. Writing on the internet goes through a transformation when it appears in print, and work in print is transformed when it appears online. Not better, not worse, but just different. No matter the format or medium, I just try to find writing that matters, without regard to its source or subject, work that can stand by itself in a book with twenty-five other pieces or so, and not be drowned out.

Just write something so good that I want to read it again. That’s all any of us are trying to do.

You can buy The Best American Sports Writing 2010, here. Also, check out Stout’s blog and his website.

Every so often, you run into a kindred spirit, a guy you aren’t envious of, just proud to know. Todd Drew was like that, and so is Josh Wilker (pictured above on the left with his brother Ian). When I first read Josh’s work at Cardboard Gods, I was thrilled. He had a strong voice, wonderful sensitivity, an unassuming sense of humor, and the courage to dig deep, way below the surface. I’d want to belong to the kind of club that would have a misfit like that as a member. And I’m not alone. Josh’s long-awaited memoir, The Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards, has generated some great buzz and strong reviews. Josh hits the Big Apple tonight–he’ll be at the Nike Store in Soho from 7:30 to 9:30. He’s here through early next week and we’re happy to have him.

I got a chance to chat with Josh recently and here is our conversation. Enjoy.

Bronx Banter: Dude, first thing, what were your favorite kinds of packs to get when you were a kid? The single pack? Remember those triple packs that would be clear packaging with three little sets side-by-side?

Josh Wilker: I’m a single wax pack guy. The clear packaging ruined some essential part of the fun for me, since you could see the top and the bottom card in the stack. It was better that it was a total mystery.

BB: Bro, how deep does your nerdiness run? Do you carry a card around with you in your wallet?

JW: I don’t, but I usually have a card that I’m working up an essay on in the pocket of the nap sack that I lug to and from work. And a couple summers ago when I came to New York to–among other things–go to Shea Stadium for the last time, I made a point of carrying an Ed Kranepool in my pocket every day of the trip.

BB: Nice. Do you ever feel any attraction to modern baseball cards?

JW: I just wrote a piece for GQ.com, of all places, considering my unstudliness, on the 2010 Topps cards. I bought a couple packs for the piece, and got a charge out of it, and though the cards mostly left me cold for being too slick, I admired the high quality of them. The photos and the back of the card text is light years advanced beyond the rudimentary nature of the 1970s cards, which may be why the new cards leave me cold. There’s no homely humanity in them.

BB: Can you at all relate to the generation of kids who bought cards for what they might be worth one day, instead of being important for more personal reasons, or just cause they were the things to have, trade and flip?

JW: I can relate, I guess. I mean, when I was a kid, I fantasized that one day my Butch Hobson and Frank Tanana cards would be worth millions, so it’s not like the idea of the cards being “investments” was completely foreign to me. I was just too lazy to actually pursue that angle. I did feel like things were taking a wrong turn when I noticed, in the late 1980s, that the cards my younger cousin was collecting were going immediately into protective plastic. You have to be able to touch the cards, otherwise what’s the point?

BB: When you started the Cardboard Gods blog did you have it in your mind to write a book? Or did that develop later?

JW: My first intention was to play around and to keep writing and to maybe connect with some readers. I’d been working on a novel for several years previous to starting the blog, and I wasn’t able to sell it, and I was wary of signing on for another several years of solitary toil only to have the end product of the work end up at the bottom of a drawer. But I also thought it could be a book, too, from very early on. It was not unlike the first time I saw my future wife: a feeling like, “Hm, I think there might be something here.” I held off for quite awhile on trying to start shaping the material into a book, a tendency that has in the past had a way of crushing the life out things before they have a chance to grow. Instead I just tried to keep having fun and churning out material. After a while, I knew I had enough stuff for a book, if I could ever pull it all together into something coherent.

BB: So, let me get this straight, you only write about cards from your collection, not the cards you missed from those eras, right? Excuse me if I haven’t caught it, but have you written much about cards you coveted but never actually got?

JW: That’s the idea, though I have also occasionally written about cards that have come to me since childhood, most often cards that I find on the street, which I seem to have a gift for. My collection of cards from the 1970s has not grown since I was a kid except for when a friend sent me a 1979 Mark Fidrych card and when a kindly reader sent me a Rowland Office card after I complained in a post that I was convinced I once owned it.

BB: So were you just riffing on topics as cards came to mind or did you know that certain stories were going to be attached to specific cards?

JW: At first the idea was to reach in and pick a card at random and then try to start writing about it, about the details of the card and about whatever memories or fantasies it happened to suggest. I actually pulled all my cards out of the rubber band team-stacks I’d had them in since childhood and shuffled them all together to promote this randomness. But then I started getting ideas about certain cards or players and seeing ways in which certain cards or players connected to my life, and I ended up sorting all the cards back into their stacks so that I could find something when I needed to. My wife helped me sort them, which was a highlight of my life…I could feel the lonely pubescent kid inside me screaming: “A real live girl is helping you sort your cards!” I still periodically draw a card at random, especially if I’m feeling like I have nothing left to say.

BB: Your wife helped sort your cards? Did you touch yourself while she was doing it? Did she have her own system of cataloging or did she follow what you told her to do? The erotic possibilities of your wife touching your Pete LaCock is almost too much to bear.

JW: It didn’t really go in that direction, except in my fantasies. My wife likes organizing things–which is good for our life together, since I am a slob–and so when I tried to grab her as she was dutifully helping me divide all my cards into teams, she shrugged me off and said what I would have said as a kid if someone had tried to grab me during that process: “Not now, I’m sorting.”

BB: You mentioned the desire to interact with an audience instead of being locked in a room with your thoughts. How quickly did you develop a readership and what effect did they have on your writing?

JW: For a while, I didn’t even tell anyone about the blog. Then, after I got a few posts up I sent an email to some friends and family. Somehow, Darren Viola at the Baseball Think Factory found one of my posts a couple months in (a Mario Guerrero essay that alluded to a Twilight Zone episode about a town called Willoughby) and put up a link to it, and a few more people started visiting. Several months after that, a move of Cardboard Gods to the late, great Baseball Toaster group blog site upped the readership, thanks to all the fans at the other blogs there, including, of course, Bronx Banter. Being on Baseball Toaster was my favorite time so far in the life of my blog, because of the feeling of being in a fairly tight-knit community of smart, literate baseball fans. Having those kinds of readers paying attention and chiming in with their own great stories about growing up with the game, as well as correcting or expanding upon any factual errors or slights, definitely inspired me to work harder on the stories I was trying to tell. But I also found I had to learn to forget any potential readers, too, and write like I had just pulled the first card from the shoebox and was starting brand new in my room alone.

BB: Interesting. It can be a trap to be overly influenced by the awareness that you’ve got an audience. Did you ever find that a particular post or story got positive attention and that became, not something you didn’t appreciate, but something that you were cautious about in terms of repeating yourself?

JW: I can’t remember if I’ve ever felt that way about repeating a post that got a positive reaction, but I worry about repeating myself all the time. I used to worry about that more, actually, wondering if I was telling anecdotes that I’d already told, but after a while I decided to follow in the footsteps of one of my storytelling heroes, Howard Stern, who has been circling back around to his childhood and adolescence on a daily basis for decades, and just try to keep telling stories about the past that seem to have some vividness and sincerity in the present. I also lean on a supposedly more highbrow influence in the constant return to my past–the poet Rilke once said something like the world of one’s childhood is something a writer can take an entire lifetime to explore.

BB: Do you ever worry about running out of stories about your childhood or that there are finite amount of cards in your collection from which to choose? Or like the quote from Rilke suggests, do you think this is a topic that you won’t exhaust for a long time?

JW: I think I’m actually in a state of constant near-exhaustion, and I’ve felt that way since about a week into the whole endeavor. No joke, I remember writing about Otto Velez after about only three or four posts on the first location of my blog and thinking “That’s it, I’m completely out of things to say about baseball cards and my life.” But I kept trying and will continue to keep trying to show up and see what’s there. I don’t have a huge collection of cards, compared to a “real” collector, but I still have enough cards to last me for years to come, maybe all the way to the graveyard. So I’ll keep trying to come up with some bullshit or other to say. And the past is a fiction anyway that we all keep creating and recreating, so you can never come to the end of it.

BB: Did you have any stories thought-out in your head about a card before you picked it out or did they all pretty much start as an improv of sorts?

JW: I wouldn’t say I had anything completely thought out, but sometimes, since my mind is once again intertwined with my cards, I can be thinking of a story and see how a card or a player might fit into that story.

BB: What, if any, baseball card books did you read either as a kid or then later on?

JW: I read a lot of baseball books as a kid, but no baseball card books. Later, in my twenties, a friend clued me in to the classic baseball card book, and one of the best baseball books of any kind, The Great American Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris. The authors riff hilariously, nostalgically, and lyrically on the cards they collected in the 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a big inspiration for my own writing on my site and in my book, probably the biggest direct influence along with Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes.

BB: When you read the Flipping, Trading card book did that help cement the idea that cards were not only a worthy subject for a book but that it could be done in weird and original ways?

JW: When I first read it I just remember laughing a lot. But certainly it helped open up some thought that the cards could be a jumping off point for all manner of pontification and elegy and celebration.

BB: Tell me more about Exley’s influence. Is a matter of theme–the obsessed sports nut–or his gonzo prose style?

JW: In terms of influence, not really either of those things, primarily, though they’re definitely part of it, but rather his ability to expand the art of narration to include something that looked in some ways like my world. Other writers I loved expanded the possibilities for me in other ways, but they didn’t let me know as strongly as Exley did that it might be possible to tell a story about my own stupid life without distorting it to resemble the narrative worlds of Kerouac or Salinger or Raymond Carver.

BB: Did you know ahead of time that you wanted to revise card posts you wrote on-line for the book?

JW: I knew that I wouldn’t be able to touch anything I’d already written without testing it and pounding on it and reworking it, just because I’m always revising everything, and I also knew that I had a distinctly different purpose with the book than I had with the blog. While the blog allows me to riff whichever way the wind blows, in the book I wanted to build a long narrative with at least some semblance of a propulsive momentum from start to finish. I knew that the raw material for the latter was in the blog, but that I’d have to wrestle it all into a new shape.

BB: Was it difficult for you to structure a narrative around the fragmented concept of individual card chapters? At any point did you have to drastically cut things down, because they were too tangential?

JW: I’m tangential by nature as a writer and as a relatively adrift human being, so the cards at the head of each chapter actually helped anchor the story with a concrete reality that my aimless life lacks. But yes, I did have to make some tough final cuts of baseball cards and baseball card tangents. Sometimes I had to make a cut to adhere to one of a couple formalistic rules I set up for the book–four packs, fifteen cards a pack, at least one card for every one of the teams that were around when I was a kid–and sometimes I had to make a cut because the riff at hand did not offer a way to circle back toward the overarching narrative of the book–my life.

BB: Did you ever feel self-conscious about the memoir as a genre?

JW: I don’t know if this answer relates to the question, but not too long ago I heard Natalie Goldberg, who is a great and inspiring teacher of writing through her books, so I hope this doesn’t come off too harsh, on an interview show pronouncing that word as “mem-waah,” and it really grated on me. She kept doing it again and again, mem-waah, mem-waah, and it reminded me of a person I was once at a writing retreat with who kept talking about her “mentor.” “You mean your teacher?” I said. “My mentor,” she said, giving each syllable of the word an overheated gravity. Anyway, I guess I’ve got issues. But to me a teacher is a teacher, and a book is a book. I was writing a book that I wanted to be like the books I have loved the most and that have meant the most to me in my life, which were all close-, single- P.O.V. books and–except for the work of Kafka and Bruce Jay Friedman–all first person narratives. Some of them have been classified as nonfiction and some as fiction, but the lines between the two in many cases are blurry. Basically they are all stories of narrators hanging on for dear life.

BB: That’s a classic. I can’t help but think of John Malkovich in Burn After Reading talking about writing a “mem-waah.” Part of me feels that there is something so self-indulgent about the genre that there is something really distasteful about it. But that’s just my own self-consciousness  because I’ve read some great memoirs like “Half  the Way Home“ by Adam Hochschild or “North Toward Home” by Willie Morris to name just two. And you are right, in the long run, a novel can be a thinly-veiled memoir just like memoirs can contain a lot of fiction.

JW: I’ll have to check out those books you mention. As for the thought about memoirs and novels bleeding into one another, I just want to add that all memoirs contain fiction because of their reliance on memory, which is a creative mental faculty, rather than, as it is sometimes imagined, some kind of mechanical receptacle of unchanging data. Also, I find it interesting that in some other artistic mediums there’s not the same compulsion to designate one type of the product of the medium into fact and another type into fiction. But it seems very important in the book world these days, as evidenced by all the hysterical furor over that Oprah book club guy whose memoir was revealed to include some tall tales. I never read that book, but my thought on it is to imagine it as a painting or a song. If it was a painting, and it moved you, it wouldn’t make a difference what kind of a painting it was. Same with a song: did you find your ass shaking to the beat? Did you find yourself humming the melody? Then it doesn’t matter if it was “made up” or “true.” It is a song, and you liked it. That said, given the popularity of memoirs these days, I just want to say that my book is a memoir and that everything in my memoir is a completely accurate reproduction of past events. Just kidding, such a thing is impossible, but I did try to tell the truth as I feel it and as I could best remember it, more or less.

BB: Other than a “Fan’s Notes” did you read any other memoirs that you enjoyed?

JW: I should point out that “A Fan’s Notes”, a first-person account of a man with the same name as the author, was classified by its author as a novel, or more specifically as “a fictional memoir.” He starts the book with a note to the reader that ends, “I ask to be judged as a writer of fantasy.” He’s a bullshitter! As are many of the authors who I have loved in my life and who I could feel helping me along as I tried to inch through the darkness with my book. Another novelist and obvious favorite of mine, Jack Kerouac, imagined that when he was telling his thinly-veiled fictionalized accounts of his life that he was spinning out a yarn in a barroom, and the barroom tale would certainly be a genre to allow in some bullshit. Frank Conroy and Tobias Wolff were another pair of fiction writers who wrote works that were classified as memoirs–they read as fiction, with scenes including dialogue that had, considering the frailty of memory, to have been partially invented–that had a tremendous impact on me (“Stop Time” and “This Boy’s Life“, respectively). When I was a kid I read “The Basketball Diaries” by Jim Carroll because I thought it’d be about basketball, and because of the diary form and the author referring to himself as “Jim Carroll” I took every word as absolute fact. Later I came to realize that it was indeed the truth, but that he was getting at that truth not by reporting “facts” but by letting loose with a voice expansive enough to include the tall-tale yarn-spinning that has been a central vein in American literature since the time of Mark Twain. He was like The Beastie Boys in Paul’s Boutique, another influence on my book for both the way it embraced the genre of first-person bullshitting and for the way it incorporated an avalanche of pop culture references into a Whitmanesque Song of Myself. So music was helping me along, too. I got the final push to write the last section by blasting Fun House by the Stooges. Movies, too, like Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, the best digression-embracing memoir you could ever hope for. And I wouldn’t be a good son of an art historian if art wasn’t helping, too: I wanted the book to have some of the mystery, or at least the sense of care and love, that Joseph Cornell gave to his boxes. I love the way he elevated being a fan, most notably of ballerinas, not ballplayers, though he does have a baseball-themed box at The Baseball Reliquary, into an art form all its own.

BB: Funny that you mention Cornell who is one of my favorite artists. In a way, the digressions are part of what your story is all about. It’s all of a piece, the idea of a narrative told through the fragmented memories of the cards. Did you ever find you were straying too far from the narrative?

JW: The process wasn’t so much one where I felt I was either on the right path or straying from that path but instead like I was trying to wrestle a big amorphous blob to a draw. My life has been pretty aimless. So what’s the narrative? In that question is the wrestling match and the blob. The cards helped me deal with the blob, so in a weird way the digressions about the cards were actually vital in helping me make some kind of sense of my meandering life.

BB: Do you still find yourself attracted to stories about narrators hanging on for dear life? Is that the major theme in your life? And has it changed at all?

JW: I do still like those kinds of stories, but it’s hard, perhaps harder than it used to be, to find those stories that speak to me as strongly as the ones that are in my personal book Hall of Fame. I think it’s a little like how I am with music–when I was younger I devoured music and was often discovering new artists that spoke directly to some fresh wound on my psyche. Now I pretty much stick to my favorites, which with a few exceptions all first got into my head over 20 years ago. The difference between music and books is that I still read constantly and widely and curiously, whereas with music I really have stopped growing for the most part, though I still love music. I just don’t experience very often that rare and beautiful feeling that an author is speaking directly to the center of my being.

BB: Have your tastes changed? Are there writers that you’ve outgrown in a sense of how directly they speak to you?

JW: I have become more appreciative of writers with quieter skills, for example short story masters like Chekhov and Alice Munro.These writers would not have been able to grab me when, for example, I was 17 years old and high on bong hits, but I am blown away by them now, the way they can suggest the deepest and most solid realities on the page without any self-indulgence or even any apparent effort. A contemporary of Chekhov’s once wrote to the Russian master that Chekhov’s writing made the contemporary feel like his own stories had been written not in pen but with a charred log. But my personal favorites are still my favorites. I reread them religiously.

BB: Were you ever concerned about how you portrayed yourself as a character? As either too self-pitying or unsympathetic? Or did you exaggerate those qualities? I remember Pat Jordan once saying that he was extra hard on himself in “A False Spring” because otherwise he didn’t feel he’d have any credibility being critical of anyone else.

JW: Pat Jordan is a master at presenting himself “warts and all.” Tobias Wolfe, too. I guess I just wanted to be as honest as possible. I do have a propensity for self-pity, which probably comes through loud and clear in the book. It would have been even louder, but my heroic editor, Pete Fornatale, had a good feel for when I was dipping too deeply into that well, and with his suggestions I cut back here and there on the “woe is me” editorializing and tried to just let the reimagined moments do the talking.

BB: My taste in writers has changed like yours too. I’m more inclined to read Flannery O’Connor now than William Faulkner. Have your tastes in other mediums, music, movies, changed in a similar vain?

JW: Music, not so much. As I mentioned earlier, I pretty much stick to the stuff that grabbed me back when I was a young and open-hearted, drug-doing lad, or possibly I augment those preferences by delving further back in history into the influences on the artists I like. My passion for movies peaked in my twenties, when I saw them constantly, especially movies from the 1970s, especially ones that happen to end with a bullet in the head. This is not why I was drawn to them, I don’t think, but there really were a lot of great movies from that decade that ended more or less that way: The Deer Hunter, Nashville, Serpico, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets–sort of–The Wild Bunch, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, etc., etc.

I still love those movies, but I’m not racing out to rent them constantly and reveling in their life-affirming sacrificial splendor, or even thirsting for new movies that might hit on that same note of violent hyper-realism–or however you want to designate the brilliant era of movies in the 1970s. But I still love movies from that decade the most, and when I find a good one that I hadn’t seen before, I’m happy. The two most recent “finds” along those lines were Two-Lane Blacktop, a Monte Hellman film from the early 1970s that starred two musicians, James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, and Over the Edge, Matt Dillon’s first movie.

BB: Faulkner felt that The Sound and the Fury was a failure. He tried to tell it through the eyes of an idiot and having failed he wrote it through the eyes of his brother, and that was a failure for him so he wrote the two other sections. Years later when Malcolm Cowley was putting together the Portable Faulkner, Faulkner wrote an appendix. Cowley noticed factual discrepancies in what appeared in the book and the appendix and Faulkner said ‘Go with the Appendix.’ In other words, he was still writing the story, still trying to get it right. I use this as an example not to compare you to Faulkner but you mention how you’ve honed the essays from what might have been a first draft on-line. Do you feel like the story is complete, to your liking or if you had to write it again now or in five years, they’d keep changing?

JW: I don’t see the stuff that I’ve done on line as a first draft, in part because I often write several drafts of a given piece before posting it but also because it is its own thing, an open conversation with anyone who wants to join in. But just like that conversation is ongoing, my understanding of “my story” and how best to tell it will always be changing. My writing is either dead to me or a work in progress–I most recently noticed this when I got the hardcopy of my book and could not get a single flicker of feeling from it until I started preparing for a reading at a bookstore and decided to start condensing a couple of the posts. Once I started working on the book again, it opened up to me and came alive again. But I wouldn’t rewrite this book, because it’s true for me at this time in my life. It may not be true later, but I’ll write a different book. I think writers who tamper too much with earlier stuff often risk carving the heart out of it. Example: George Lucas redid the scene in Star Wars when Han Solo offed a guy in the bar scene so that it was clear in the revision that Han Solo was not the first to draw his gun. He wanted Han Solo to be beyond the shadow of a doubt a hero, instead of the more ambiguous character in the original version of the movie. When I read about this revision it made me sad.

BB: Over the Edge is really good. I think Dillon was fantastic in Tex too, which to my mind is the best, most natural of the S.E. Hinton adaptations. I was so offended by the idea of Lucas reworking Star Wars. Then when I finally saw it I actually liked most of the changes, the visual stuff. But the change in tone–in the Han Solo scene–and then the addition of a scene that featured Joba the Hutt, I thought were awful because they changed the emotional tenor of the movie.

JW: Yup, a bad move. Why is it that decisions involving guys named Joba always invite so much controversy?

BB: Well, at least that dildo in the movie didn’t wear those pretentious eye glasses that Chamberlain rocks, or his 37-IQ flat-brimmed lid.

JW: Ha!

BB: So were there any specific card/chapters that were especially difficult to realize? Any that you felt, not precious about, but that you didn’t exactly nail?

JW: In general, the cards in the last section were harder to pin down, in part because I had to collapse many years of my life into short spaces, and in part because I hadn’t previously paid as much attention in my writing to those years of my life as I had to my childhood years, which I’d been writing about for years and years, getting the story straight, like Mr. Orange practicing his tale in Reservoir Dogs–the last of the great movies that end with a bullet in the head? As far as what chapters don’t feel to me as if I nailed them: that’s a very difficult question for me right now. I don’t ever really feel like I nailed anything, anyway. How can you know? I remember when I was a young writer, in college, and the poet Mark Cox came to give a reading, which was great, and then afterward stuck around to answer some questions. He was talking about his process, specifically revising, and I asked him, “How do you know when a poem’s done?” He heaved a sigh and said, “When you can’t bear to even look at it anymore.” Anyway, right now, like I said, the book is inaccessible to me. It’s not really mine anymore. I know that certain sections came about differently, some in a rush of inspiration, others more methodically, but I don’t think the “making of” tale is ever a guide to what writing ends up connecting more strongly with a given reader. I’m sorry to be so vague about all this, but I really find that I can’t differentiate the bad from the good in the book right now.

BB: Which ones do you feel closest to? And, which ones do you think are the most successful?

JW: I think the question of closeness, since it’s a feeling, has got to be answered subjectively. The first one that comes to mind is the Nolan Ryan chapter, the section where I describe going swimming at a nearby pond with my brother, right on the cusp of him going away to school. That one moved me as I was working on it. They all did, one way or another, but that one happened to come out in a fairly unbroken rush, so it probably impacted me more than the ones that came together more slowly. I’m not sure if it’s successful. I hope so.

BB: The Garvey card is one of my favorite chapters in the entire book. Can you explain how this one came together?

JW: That one is a real Frankenstein’s monster, in the sense that it draws on stuff from a couple different Garvey posts I did on the blog as well as on various “fictional” attempts to address the “chimney in the van” element of my childhood, attempts that began maybe fifteen years ago. I was trying to cobble all these things together and in the end I think I had to just kind of write the whole thing as if from scratch with all those earlier efforts in my head. At that point, the Garvey stuff began playing more strongly off the scenes of me and my family.

BB: What do you make of what happened to Garvey later on?

JW: The stuff about Garvey’s money troubles that came out a few years ago, I honestly don’t recall even registering it. I’m sure I must have heard about it, and I probably shrugged. You know, new day, new tarnishing of a sports icon. Of course, Garvey had already fallen off his pedestal years earlier, at the end of his playing career, when all that stuff about his “extracurricular” activities started coming out. That was right around the time when my baseball fandom was at its lowest–after the bloom of childhood love and before the adult realization that it was like family: something in the middle of my life for good. So I wasn’t paying much attention, and even if I had been I don’t think I would have been particularly staggered by the revelations, since I didn’t idolize him to begin with. History has been cruel to Steve Garvey, and not just via the gossip pages. Has anyone ever fallen farther under the scrutiny of the newer, more sophisticated statistics? He was a huge star in his day with his seasons of 200 hits and 100 RBI and .300 batting average, and then after he retired those statistics lost their luster as overrated “counting stats,” so much so that I think it’s possible that Steve Garvey is now a little underrated. Good glove, good power, excellent durability. You could do worse.

BB:I know that’s like when a guy like Jered Weaver is called an innings-eater. It seems like such a putdown but he doesn’t exactly suck.

JW: I think games played is a huge stat. I leaned on it heavily one time to make a consciously hysterical devil’s-advocate case on my blog for Pete Rose as the best player of the 1970s. I didn’t really believe that he was, but I wanted to make the case for him so as to make the case for durability itself. On a given day, he can’t really hold a candle to Joe Morgan, but over the course of 162 games he is there every day, while Joe Morgan’s value is diminished somewhat in the same span by his being replaced in the lineup for 20 or so games by the likes of Darrel Chaney.

BB: What did Ian and Tom and your mom and dad think of the book?

JW: The response from the family has been great. I am lucky to have a great family. Some of the stuff was pretty painful for them to read, I think. They’ve had some preparation in the matter of seeing subjectively-viewed portions of their lives put into my writing. I’ve written a lot of fiction that covered similar terrain, and have explored a lot of the material on my blog, so it wasn’t as if this was their first dose of my propensity to talk about intimate family details. I think this might have helped. Just before the book was going to come out, I was talking to my dad about how I was worried about how he might respond to the book, and he assured me that he understood it was my perspective on things, not some kind of objective “truth”, and then he gave me a very rousing speech about how I should never worry about how other people might react to my creative efforts. Everyone else in my family has always been just as supportive, all my meandering life. I didn’t show them drafts, but they read the proof copy of the book. I hope that they, and that everyone, sees that they are the heroes of the book, the people who have helped me along all the way.

BB: So do you feel like the book is now, not dead to you, but outside of you, now that it is published and out there in the world? And do you feel that the stuff you are writing on the blog was molded by the book, or how you developed as a writer with the book? Or is it more of a give-and-take experience with the readers?

JW: The book is definitely “not mine” anymore, which feels weird, especially since it contains personal stuff that I’m not even really comfortable talking about in a regular conversation. I’m not sure how the book and my work on the book is affecting the continuing work on the blog, except to say that at first I found it hard to write anything because I felt depleted, but that eventually went away and I got back to doing it because it helps keep me out of trouble.

BB: Loved your piece on Wrigley the other day. The Copa reference from Good Fellas is spot on, exactly how I felt when I was at Yankee Stadium with Ray Negron on several occasions. I don’t mean to be obvious, but are you enjoying promoting the book?

JW: As far as the one reading, so far, and the radio interviews and the one TV spot with the Marlins guys at Wrigley, I enjoy most of the during and I enjoy the after, but the before turns my stomach into knots. The guest articles and written interviews are mostly fun, too, and I’m glad to have the chance to do them, but I’ve noticed that they have been eating up a lot of my writing time.

BB: Have you been able to soak in the critical success of the book or does it make you uneasy?

JW: It’s been really gratifying to read good reviews, but I’m waiting for a piano to fall on my head.

BB: Schmuck, just make sure to wear a helmet. Anything else memorable happen yet?

JW: It’s mostly been “from the comfort of my own home” stuff, so nothing too interesting yet, besides the Wrigley Field visit you mentioned earlier. But I’m scheduled to appear at a signing in Boston with Bill Lee, so that might change.

BB: Might want to have a chin strap on that helmet. Okay, last thing, I know it may be too early to ask, but have you considered what you’d like to do next?

JW: I’m working on a little book for a series of books on film. My assignment: The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. After that, I’m not sure, but I’m feeling pretty ready to leap off into some unknown.

BB: Why sequel? Why not the original? Because it’s already been written about? I love the choice. It’s so particular and scrubby.

JW: It was never even a question for me between the two. I could (and will) write a whole book about why, but I guess the short answer is the sequel means more to me. Nothing against the first movie, which is great and ground-breaking and has the trump card of Matthau, but the second movie–which I saw first–was everything a nine-year-old baseball nut could want in a movie. Plus, Kelly Leak goes from side story to Great American Hero in the sequel, in the process leading the Bears into the great American medium’s greatest genre: the Road Movie.

BB: Bro, to be continued for sure…

I don’t remember the first time I met Dayn Perry but it must have been about five years ago now. This was back when he was writing for Baseball Prospectus in addition to Fox Sports. We hit it off immediately and have remained pals ever since. Dayn’s got that easy Southern charm that makes for wonderful company. When he told me that he was writing a book about my boyhood hero Reggie Jackson I was more than somewhat eager to see what he’d come up with. We spoke about Reggie and the writing process often while he was working on the book and Dayn went so far as to mention me in the acknowledgements.

The book, Reggie Jackson: The Life and Thunderous Career of Baseball’s Mr. October, drops today. Dayn and I caught up recently to chat about all things Reggie and what it was like writing a biography.

Dig:

Bronx Banter: There are two big biographies out this spring, one of Willie Mays and the other on Hank Aaron. Both books are well over 500 pages and aim to be the definitive work on their subjects. Your book is leaner at 300 pages. What was behind your thinking in making this a trimmer rather than an exhaustive narrative?

Dayn Perry: Part of it was that the publisher wanted me to stay as close as possible to 100,000 words. The initial manuscript I submitted was about 20,000 words longer than the final product, so I undertook some heavy editing toward the end of the process. On another level, though, I wanted a brisk, readable book that included all the important events in Reggie’s life and aspects of his character. My hope is that we’ve achieved that.

BB: You wrote this book without Reggie’s participation. Was that because he didn’t want to talk with you?

DP: On a couple of occasions, I spoke with Reggie’s business manager and requested an interview, but I never received a response. My understanding is that he didn’t want his cooperation to detract from the book he was working on at the time with Bob Gibson and Lonnie Wheeler. That’s understandable, of course.

BB: What, if any, obstacles did it present?

DP: It made it easier because I much enjoy the solitary aspect of writing, and the more of that I’m allowed the better my work is going to be. I still conducted 50 or so interviews for the book, and they made it a better work, I think. But I think of myself more as a writer than a reporter, so the nuts-and-bolts writing–the craft aspect–is the most fulfilling part of the job. Also, I think cooperation with the subject can sometimes lead to a varnishing or leavening of the work, even if it happens unconsciously. Obviously, I had no such concerns. It’s an honest, fact-based account, but I didn’t have to worry about satisfying him at every turn.

BB: Did Reggie prevent anyone from speaking to you?

DP: Not to my knowledge. A number of former teammates of his declined to speak with me once they learned Reggie wasn’t cooperating with the project, but so far as I know he didn’t actively work to undermine my efforts.

BB: There has been so much written about Reggie, particularly during his years in New York. What does your book offer that is new?

DP: My book sheds new light on the Mets’ decision not to draft him and covers his Angels years and retirement for the first time. Some people are going to be familiar with his Oakland years, and even more people are going to be familiar with his New York years. But so much of that time is forgotten or neglected by history. I think the totality of his life–the scope of his life–is something most people haven’t grasped yet.

BB: Other than reading about Reggie were there any biographies–sports bios or any bios for that matter–that you read before you started writing? Were there any that had a particular impact on you?

DP: I love “Clemente” by David Maraniss, which captured what a complicated figure Clemente was. “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro, although it doesn’t deal with sports, remains one of the five or so best books I’ve ever read. It’s been just a few years since I read it, so it’s still with me. “Luckiest Man” was another recent bio that made an impression in its simple elegance and graceful treatment of its subject.

BB: How was Reggie different from the other black stars of the ‘60s like Jim Brown, Kareem and Bill Russell?

DP: I’d say his swagger on the field. All of those men were pioneers and intellects, and all were great at their chosen sports. But Reggie, with those home run trots and his unimaginable candor with the media, seems a breed apart in comparison. I’d attribute those differences to Brown’s and Russell’s being of a prior generation and Kareem’s being a more muted personality.

BB: The other thing that seems to be different from Reggie and those other ‘60s guys is that Reggie wasn’t a Black Power guy, or overtly political. And yet, his attitude on the field was a political thing in a way. I know he was raised in a predominantly white community. Can you talk about his relationship with race?

DP: Reggie had an incredibly complicated relationship with race, and in the full light of his early life that’s understandable. He grew up around whites, and it’s clear that he prefers to surround himself with whites to this day. Still, he made a difference in terms of race. I interviewed Dr. Harry Edwards early in the process, and he told me something to the effect of, “Reggie wasn’t a guy you’d call on to march on the front lines, but he had immense credibility in the black community because he didn’t take any shit. He was a bad dude.” That’s true, I think. Reggie was at times cynical when it came to race (i.e., he would wield it when it was beneficial to him), but he was uncompromising. That made him a powerful figure. He at once uplifted and liberated black ballplayers to be themselves and break from the old passive models, but Reggie wasn’t on a mission of conscience. He did it because that’s who he was.

BB: What it was like for you, a white southerner, to write about race?

DP: I was born and raised in Mississippi and lived there until I was 29 years old. Any white Southerner who’s honest and morally centered will admit there’s much to be ashamed of in the past. You can’t be from the South and read about Bull Connor or Ross Barnett or George Wallace or Strom Thurmond or Byron De LaBeckwith and not feel a sense of lacerating regret. As for how my upbringing informed my work in this book, it’s a bit painful for me to observe Reggie’s occasionally self-serving use of race. I’d ask myself: who the hell am I to be commenting upon this? But the facts demanded it, I think. It’s not a character judgment, though. My parents have been married more than 50 years, and I grew up in a stable middle-class home as part of the majority population. Give me an upbringing like Reggie’s–racially isolated, broken home, erratic male role models, money and fame at an early age–and I’m sure I’d be far more outrageous and maladjusted than he is even in his worst moments. I tell some uncomfortable truths about him in this book, but it’s not because I think I’m somehow a better man.

BB: Was there anything you learned about Reggie that surprised you?

DP: Going in, I didn’t remember much about his season in Baltimore. I also didn’t realize just how dysfunctional his time in Oakland and New York really was. On a more internal level, I was surprised that his need for acceptance so often conflicted with his tendency to cling to affronts. His personality was even more complicated than I realized.

BB: I know the Orioles fans gave Reggie a hard time because he held out for the start of the ’76 season and then had a slow start. But he played well one he got it going. What was the relationship like between Reggie and Earl Weaver?

DP: Strained, I’d say, but nothing like the relationship he’d have with Martin. Reggie obviously wasn’t in the proper state of mind when he arrived in Baltimore. He was mourning his departure from Oakland, and he envied those who had cashed in during the early days of free agency. A number of his new teammates–Jim Palmer, in particular–seemed to blame Reggie for not reporting on time. I think it was a lonely time for Reggie, and Weaver was never one to coddle and tend to emotions.

BB: Weaver was as volatile as Billy Martin in some ways, though he wasn’t as emotionally unstable in his personal life–at least from what I can tell. How were Weaver and Martin different in terms of how they treated Reggie?

DP: Weaver understood Reggie’s game better than Martin did. Weaver, of course, cherished the three-run homer and generally didn’t worry about bunting ability or high strikeout totals. In those ways, he was well suited to manage a player like Reggie. Martin, though, was tactically involved and didn’t always appreciate Reggie’s “feast or famine” approach. “Billy Ball” and all that. As well, Weaver wanted Reggie on his team, and Martin manifestly did not. In many ways, Martin resented Reggie before he even put on the Yankee uniform.

BB: Did you come away from this experience liking him? Or did your opinion change about him?

DP: It’s strange–like or dislike isn’t something I think about with regard to Reggie. I feel I understand him and recognize there are reasons for his outrageous moments. I admire many things about him and–I’ll use the word again–understand the things I don’t like about him.

BB: I could be wrong here, coming from New York, but it seems that Reggie is best remembered as a Yankee even though he spent less than half of his career here. Can you think of any other athlete that is associated with a team that he didn’t spend that much time with?

DP: I think you’re right, and that’s an interesting question. Mark McGwire with the Cardinals comes immediately to mind. Patrick Roy and the Avalanche? Fred McGriff as a Brave? Moses Malone as a 76er? Maybe Garnett as a Celtic by the time he’s done?

BB: When Reggie got to New York, he wasn’t a great fielder, and Billy Martin hated him for his flaws. Talk about Reggie’s game when he was on the A’s. What was he like as a younger player?

DP: I think a lot of people our age remember Reggie as the fairly one-dimensional guy he was in New York and beyond. But in his Oakland days he was a true five-tool player who spent a lot of time in center field, ran the bases well, and threw like a cannon. That’s of course to say nothing of his hitting. He’s not a Matt Stairs. Reggie was an athlete. He was a heavily recruited high school football player (despite once breaking his neck on the field), and a number of big-time schools in the South were willing to integrate their programs for him.

BB: You mentioned the classic Welch encounter. Was there any star of this time–or even of any other eras–that was equally as thrilling in defeat as he was when he succeeded?

DP: This is a great question. For some reason, pitchers are coming to mind. Juan Marichal in Reggie’s day? The crazy leg kick, the fastball, his willingness to brush back hitters. In Reggie you had those violent swings and corkscrew strikeouts. In terms of personality during failure, maybe Pedro? Remember when Pedro cracked that smile after getting knocked out against the Yankees last World Series? That’s the kind of bravado and zeal, even in failure, that Reggie had. In other sports, maybe Brett Favre?

BB: What have been Reggie’s post-career highlights for you? I think it’s amusing that he’s become this elder statesman of calm and reason, especially counseling Alex Rodriguez.

DP: I’d say his dogged pursuit of ownership. This is the guy who tried to buy the A’s while he still played for them, so it’s impressive that he adhered to that goal for so long. It’s also telling that his relationship with Steinbrenner, even in retirement, remained so complicated. As for his “voice of reason” role, that’s in part why the A’s brought him back for the ’87 season, so it’s natural that he would go on to counsel players who seemed uncomfortable with the glare.

BB: This is your second book but your first biography. How different was this book from your first one?

DP: First and foremost, I actually like this book. My first book was a “get your foot in the door” sort of project that was brought to me. It was statistically oriented, and while I’m a bit of stat geek at heart I was out of my element to an extent. This project was much more gratifying, and I think the book reflects that. This is the kind of project I always wanted to undertake.

BB: You mentioned that the book was significantly longer in your first draft. What did you cut? Or, more to the point, did you ever find in your research that you had too much information? Did you ever feel a prisoner of the research?

DP: A lot of what I cut was the “throat clearing” kind of prose that tends to pop up in chapter beginnings while I’m in the early drafting process. Basically, I made sure I got straight to the point when I started a new chapter. My editor also wanted me to get to his baseball career as quickly as possible, so I cut a number of scenes from his early life and college years that turned out to be not so illuminating. Cutting can be painful for a writer–I certainly don’t need to tell you this–but it’s always good to make a work leaner and a bit less gilded. “Kill your darlings,” as Faulkner once said. As for overload, yes, when you’re poring through years and years of game stories it’s easy to get caught up in the mindset of wanting to include every single cool or striking thing that happened on the field. At same time, you want a balance of the familiar–Game 6 of the ’77 World Series and the ’71 All-Star Game, for instance–and the games that, while they typified him in some way, aren’t as widely remembered. That was a challenge, but for a baseball fan it was also a hell of a lot of fun.

BB: By the time you got to the editing stage, did you feel any sense of remove from your earlier drafts, which made it easier to kill your darlings? I mean, did you get to a point where you weren’t necessarily attached to stuff and just focused on doing whatever you could do to tell the story?

DP: Yeah, definitely. You’re a writer, and you know how important it is to have some kind of remove from your work. Let it sit for a while, re-read it, and things will jump out at you that didn’t in previous readings. Give yourself enough time, and you’ll realize what belongs and what doesn’t. That’s what I believe, anyway. That break between early draft and serious revision is essential to the writing process. It’s almost as though you grow a new pair of eyes and ears during that time. Things need to strike the ear as though you’ve never heard them before.

BB: Are you going to continue writing biographies?

DP: This book, since it’s driven by a narrative, was much more enjoyable for me to write than the first one. I have no interest in doing anything of a statistical nature again, at least as book-length projects go. I’d love to explore an individual season and how the teams in question overlay changes in society at large. That’s a vague summary of what I hope turns out to be my next project. Otherwise, I’ve had an urge to start writing bad poetry again, but I won’t inflict that upon anyone.

BB: Are there any other sports that you’d like to write about or do you see yourself mostly attracted to baseball?

DP: Baseball is far and away my favorite sport–my favorite human endeavor, in many ways–so nothing will engage me like writing about baseball. With that said, I’m open to exploring other sports through a historical scrim. I’m fascinated by the 1972 summer Olympics and by Mississippi high-school football, for instance. For me, though, there’s nothing like baseball. I don’t know what I’d do without it.

BB: Other than bad poetry, has there been anything outside of baseball that you’d like to write about?

DP: If I had the talent and standing, I’d imitate Mark Kurlansky’s career and write books about almost anything that struck me. Dogs, Chicago, a bio of Robert Pollard, gang culture, stories of people suffering from ALS … it’s a long list. Chances are, though, anything I write will at least be tinged with baseball.

BB: Ever thought about writing a memoir?

DP: I have not. I haven’t had anything like a traumatic existence. There’d be too little conflict. I really don’t know what anyone would learn from reading about my life. I would, however, like to write something about my paternal grandparents. My grandfather was a bootlegger in Etowah County, Alabama, and the local draft board thought him such a bad seed that they conscripted him into WWII at the age of 30 and with six young children at home. He saw a lot of combat in the Pacific Theater. My grandmother, meanwhile, was one of the toughest women I’ve ever known. She was bitten by rattlesnake once, she punched out a rich lady who lived down the road from her, she took up smoking in her 60s after her teeth rotted out from too much snuff. Things like that. It took a certain kind of woman to marry a bootlegger, after all. Their lives were much more interesting than mine.

BB: Coming from the South, are you self-conscious of the great literary tradition and style down there? Especially being from Mississippi, home of the great Faulkner and all.

DP: Definitely. It’s said that more people in Mississippi can write than read. It’s a point of pride for a state that doesn’t have much else going for it. I was never much of a Faulkner devotee–he’s too florid for me–but I certainly appreciate his importance. Barry Hannah, who died recently, went to my alma mater and served as something of a model during my college years. Richard Ford remains a favorite. James Whitehead’s poem titles are the greatest ever. Eudora Welty lived a few streets north of me when I lived for years in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson, Mississippi. She was a bit of a recluse and later an invalid, so I never saw her in person.

BB: You once told me about knowing Willie Morris a little bit. What was it like rubbing elbows with him?

DP: I also worked at a great Indy bookstore in Jackson called Lemuria, and all kinds of writers would drop by. Willie Morris was one of those. He was full of life. One night, some of us ended up back at his house drinking and listening to all these different versions of “Danny Boy” on his stereo. He was a very nice, very grounded man in person and a fool for a good time. Another time, I dropped some books off at his house to sign, and his wife showed me his workspace. It was, as I recall, two picnic tables placed end to end and all these handwritten pages spread all over the place. She told me it was for a “Vanity Fair” piece. It seemed a very chaotic way to work, but there’s no doubting his final products. My aunt, who was from Willie’s hometown of Yazoo City and knew his family, once told me, “Willie was a good boy, but he broke his mama’s heart when he went off to New York.” Anyhow, the Mississippi literary tradition means a lot to me, and I’m honored to be a microscopically small part of it.

I met Pete Dexter last fall when he was in New York promoting his seventh novel, Spooner. Dexter was a wonderful newspaper columnist and is now one of our greatest novelists. First thing I noticed about him was that he was wearing a pink Yankees cap. So when I had a chance to interview him the Yankees were the first thing we talked about.

Here is our chat, which covers a lot more than the Bombers.

Enjoy.

Bronx Banter: I had no idea you were a Yankees fan.

Pete Dexter: No, it’s true. I’m a big Yankee fan. It started out as a way to irritate Mrs. Dexter who is a Yankee fan from way back. And so when they’d win I’d get into it just because it irritated her so damn bad, but then I started to look at them and–

BB: When was this, during the ’90s?

PD: Yeah. So when I found out that it irritated Mrs. Dexter I did it more and more. There have been a lot of teams in my life that I’ve rooted against, but I have never rooted for a team in my life before I rooted for the Yankees, including teams I played on.

BB: And the Yankees of all teams.

PD: Yeah, strangely enough. I didn’t even like baseball until the mid-’90s. And I enjoy it more every year. We get all the games on the cable. It’s the only thing that’s worth all the money I spend on cable.

BB: So can you deal with Michael Kay?

PD: Is he the “See Ya” guy?

BB: Yup.

PD: He’s okay, it’s the other two guys from ESPN that drive me crazy.

BB: Joe Morgan and Jon Miller.

PD: Jesus, the go on for hours and hours. Morgan was one of the most exciting players I ever saw and just absolutely the most boring human being on the face of the earth.

BB: Just goes to show there’s no correlation.

PD: Yeah, none at all.

BB: So, did you want to be a writer when you were growing up?

PD: No, never. I took two writing classes at the University of South Dakota but it was just because I found out that I didn’t want to be a mathematician. I started looking through the student book there and saw Creative Writing and figured if I can’t bullshit my way through that then I don’t deserve to graduate, even from the University of South Dakota. But I never took it even semi-seriously. I mean I didn’t read anything until…it’s a true story than when I wrote Deadwood [Dexter’s second novel], my brother Tom called me up and said, “You’ve now written a book longer than any book you’ve ever read.” And that was absolutely true. I stumbled into a newspaper office in Fort Lauderdale. I was 26 or 27 years old and in those days you could actually stumble into a newspaper office and get hired as a reporter. But I don’t have to tell you what it’s like now.

BB: Did you take to reporting pretty quickly or was it just another job?

PD: I hated it. They had me doing–I thought it was a joke actually at first–they came over the first day and gave me a list of seven or eight things and said, “These are your beats.” And I thought it was some kind of initiation rite. You know, juvenile court, the hospital district, poverty programs and tomatoes. There was agricultural products—tomatoes was a separate category. But there were literally seven or eight of them, none of which interested me even remotely. Hell, they gave me a county health thing and there was a doctor who ran the county health department. He was a nice guy and I’d call him up every Sunday night when I came in and ask him if he could stretch something into an epidemic. And he’d say, “Well, we’ve got four cases of measles…you could call that an epidemic.” So every Monday I’d have a story in the paper about a new epidemic. The bigger paper down there was the Fort Lauderdale News. It got the big guy there fired because I kept coming up with new epidemics and he couldn’t come up with any.

BB: Were you still a reporter when you got to Philadelphia?

PD: I went to West Palm as a reporter and then became a kind of feature writer sort of guy. And I didn’t like that very much. I liked it better though because they let me go do some things. I wasn’t sitting in meetings or pretending to. Then I came to the Philly Daily News as a reporter and that was going nowhere. And I was hard enough to have around and a new boss came in and he promoted a guy from within to be the new city editor and then made him the new managing editor/city editor.

BB: This is Gil Spencer?

PD: Yeah. And Spencer called me in…well, first the old city editor went in and tried to have me fired for insubordination and shit and Spencer fired him. Then he called me in and gave me the column. And that was the first time I remember liking being a newspaper guy. And that was probably the best place to write a column in the world. They just left me completely alone. There was no kind of behavior that they wouldn’t tolerate.

BB: So you didn’t have to write off the news then?

PD: No. Just whatever was there, on my mind. Spencer and [Zach] Stalberg. You could work in the newspaper business for a thousand years and not find one editor that was as good as either one of those guys to work for, and I fell into it. I mean I had to wait around for a year-and-a-half for it to happen. When Spencer left, Stallberg took over. And I was about through with it then but you just couldn’t beat those guys.

BB: Did they work closely with you on the text, line editing, or did they give you the freedom to do whatever you wanted to do?

PD: Oh yeah…I’ve never had anybody text edit me in my life. [Laughs] I probably should’ve. No, they just left me alone. And when things got wayout of hand we’d have these little talks. Spencer…well, it’s like in Spooner, he’d lie on that couch with a white cloth over his eyes, smoking two cigarettes at once setting the couch on fire. I’m thinking now of the time with another columnist Larry Fields. Like the guy in the book that I first saw laying there on the sheet with a butcher knife. Fields had a radio show—you probably heard about this. He had a talk show and he invited me in. He’d been there about a month. I brought a bartender and some stuff to drink. And he’d been on one of those liquid protein diets for about three months and he’s a little bitty guy and he’d blown up to about 220 pounds, not an ounce of muscle in his entire body. He’d gotten down to a 150 or something just by drinking liquid protein for months. And he had no tolerance for alcohol it turned out. That was the night, amongst other things, Spencer was accused of having served time in Joliet State Prison for child molestation. It just went from there. We put a chair against the door so that they couldn’t come in and stop the program. The next day Spencer pulls us into the office and he starts this big lecture and he just falls apart. He can’t do it. He was getting calls from Miami to fire both of us. He would never do it. And that’s the kind of guy he was. If you’d put a gun to his head that day and said, “You either fire Dexter and Fields or you’re gone he’d say I’m gone.” That’s just who he was. And you don’t find, especially now—Jesus, you would never find an editor like that. I met Ben Bradlee once and I thought he was an awfully nice guy and probably that kind of person that if you worked for him…

BB: He’d go to bat for you no matter what.

PD: Yeah. But I don’t think there’s very many of them.

BB: What was it like for you when you started writing columns?

PD: The size of it and the shape of it came naturally. I look back the very early stuff and some of it is okay and some of its not. But I look back and see myself learning things as I was going along. It probably would have been a lot harder if someone was telling me “You don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do that.” But like I said I was left alone and pretty soon being left alone and finding out what people like and what they don’t and what I like and what I didn’t gradually…it wasn’t hard but the reason it wasn’t hard at first was because I didn’t have any idea of what was good and what was bad and then as I did start to realize it, it sort of…as it came to me what I wanted to do, I sort of did it.

BB: Did you sense yourself building towards a novel while you were writing the column?

PD: No. Nothing like that. I don’t have any long-range plans even now. I just always assumed what was going to happen. I’m not a fatalist or anything, but I just assumed things would go some interesting way. And they did. But there was no plan or anything.

BB: So you never felt a desire to be a novelist?

PD: No, not really. I’m sure it went through my head. Like everyone is always saying they want to do that, they sit around bars talking about it, “I’d like to write a novel.” I didn’t even do too much of that. The column was enough for a while. It made me really happy. Christ, it was so much fun. Like I said I was being left alone. Then I did a little magazine stuff, enough to know that I didn’t want to do that.

BB: Was this the stuff you did for Inside Sports?

PD: Yeah and Esquire and Playboy, I think.

BB: Did fiction ever creep into your journalism? Because some of your columns almost read like short stories.

PD: They were certainly framed like that. Nothing was ever made up whole cloth but the quotes and stuff…if someone said something to me and it could be said better by half, I’d clean it up, instead of writing the whole thing. I’d do that without any sense of guilt or anything. To answer your question, yeah, I wasn’t exactly writing fiction but I was using those techniques, or some of the techniques that I know about now. I just felt like I was writing newspaper columns. I didn’t really know about newspaper columns until I came to Philadelphia. I never saw Royko’s stuff, or [Jimmy] Breslin’s, or Pete’s [Hamill], or anybody, even when I was working in the Florida papers.

BB: So you didn’t model yourself after any particular columnist?

PD: I didn’t know about any of ‘em. When I came to Philly there was a columnist named Tom Fox who went around saying he was the best columnist in America. Someone had once said that about him. There’s a lot of these guys…a guy like Royko didn’t brag, neither did Hamill. Breslin did, Tom Fox did. Fox wasn’t even the best columnist at our newspaper. That was a guy named Larry McMullen, who was just starting out. He’d been a columnist maybe two-or three years when I got there and I noticed what he was doing. When he was good he was just telling stories, stories about South Philly. And he really was good. I’ve never seen a better fit for a columnist, a city and a newspaper than Larry McMullen at the Philadelphia Daily News. I didn’t copy him or anything but if anyone woke me up to the fact that this kind of writing was going on in the world, of what was possible, it was McMullen. When I saw it, I immediately wanted to do that. And for a long time, or what seemed like a long time to me, it wasn’t really that long, it seemed that nobody was going to give me a shot to at anything like that. I couldn’t stand the city editor. And there was just a series of guys, these ambitious cocksuckers that you find everywhere who don’t really know what they are doing. They’re everywhere. Those guys are generally, it’s part of their protective mechanism, they’re not going to give anybody with more talent than they have a shot at being something that they can’t control. They’re just not. On the few occasions that I went out and did something before I became a columnist…you always hear newspaper guys sitting around bars complaining about their leads being cut and shit, but they’d take a piece and cripple it and I guess they’d feel good about it without knowing what they had done. So there it was.

BB: Did you ever feel constrained by the 800-count word count for a column?

PD: No, because if I wanted to go 2,000 words, they’d run that. The 800-word column is a natural space for telling a little story.

BB: So when you started God’s Pocket, your first novel—while you were recuperating from the fight you got into along with Tex Cobb down in South Philly—was it is a difficult adjustment, going from writing a column to a book? Did you just sit down and start writing or did you plan the novel and outline it?

PD: No, God, I’ve never outlined a book in my life. You know, I had my brains scrambled pretty good and one of the results was that it changed the way things tasted for me. And one of those things was alcohol. I got to the point where I just couldn’t put it in my mouth. Pretty soon, as much time as I’d spent in bars, and as many great stories as I saw happen in bars, if you’re sitting there not drinking, by 11:00 it gets pretty old, sloppy people hanging on you. So I started writing about being in the gym more. Not that I was a barroom columnist but on average there was one good funny story a week in those bars. But there was also one funny story a week at Rosati’s Gym too. I can’t even remember deliberately starting a novel I just remember one day before work playing around with it and the next thing I knew something was published and I’d read it and got horrified just before it came out. I thought it was way worse than it actually was. But I was like, “I just embarrassed myself.” It was nothing great but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought. The harder one to do was Deadwood. The first one, you are not a novelist, just because you wrote one novel. But I set out deliberately to write the second one and had in mind that this is what I was going to do, for a little while anyway. All of a sudden I had to take it more seriously because I was going to spend the time. I’ve never had writer’s block or anything but I took it more seriously the second time.

BB: Did you feel like you hit a stride when you wrote Paris Trout?

PD: No. There was no feeling from one book to another that I’d hit my stride. Something in me doesn’t think that way. None of the novels I’ve written matter. What matters is what I write today and tomorrow. When something’s done, it’s done. I’m removed from it. I have a real rooting interest how the books sells any everything and how it’s treated critically, but the truth is I’m not with it anymore, it’s out there by itself. My focus is on the next thing. I just started writing a book about elephants so that’s what I’m thinking about right now, elephants. I’m not thinking about Spooner. I’m not with Spooner anymore.

BB: So did the success of Paris Trout get in your head at all, in terms of feeling pressure to have the next book meet a certain standard, either critically or financially?

PD: It wasn’t that successful until it won a prize. What I couldn’t believe, they gave me the book award and the next year they gave the award to somebody else. I said, “Wait a minute.”

BB: You thought you had the patent on it?

PD: Well, I didn’t know. I couldn’t believe they gave it away. I didn’t say it was okay. The book did me some good economically. I couldn’t tell you in a hundred years what I got for Paris Trout, probably something like $35,000 I’m guessing. I know I got $8,000 for God’s Pocket, and Deadwood I did for so little that Random House felt guilty and gave me a little extra money when I turned it in. After Paris Trout, after winning the National Book Award, all of sudden you are in a different world. Not that it’s independently rich money or anything but…I didn’t quit newspaper writing because of money but at that point I could have. That was the first movie I ever wrote too.

BB: What was that like?

PD: Strangely enough—I understood this right off—a movie and a novel are two entirely different things. There is no way for a novel to be accurately represented on the screen. That just can’t happen. You can make real good movies out of novels but you can’t reproduce a novel. And I didn’t have to have that beaten over my head, I got that going in. When an agent first called and asked, “How’d you feel about adapting your book for the screen?” I remember I said, “I’ll take the money but I don’t know why they don’t just use the book.” I had some idea that they could just agree to a scene out of the book, memorize the lines in it and go do it. I know it sounds kind of naïve but I was a long, slow time coming into each one of these stages of a career writing. Realizing what they involved. The movie stuff still kind of surprises me. Essentially, a script is 120 pages, most of it white space, and the writing doesn’t really matter except the dialogue. That’s the opposite of writing a novel. I knew writing the script wasn’t going to take as long as writing a book or be as much work.

BB: Do you enjoy the process of writing a book?

PD: No. But I did with Spooner and that’s the first time I can say that. Especially the last year. Most people who tell you that they love to write, right away that tells you that they can’t. Then there are people who like it some days and don’t like it others, there’s a chance for them. But if you’re doing it, it’s really hard. I mean, if you are doing it well, you’re occupying a part of your brain that doesn’t want to be occupied. The best lines that you write, at least sometimes, are the truest lines, and they’ll sometimes startle you when they come out. And to get at that place, where things are really true, is often uncomfortable. At least for me. Maybe if I’d lived a nicer life it wouldn’t be. And the work part is not like going into a room that’s too warm for three hours and I’m going to be uncomfortable in it. It’s finding your way there, for me. The hard part is the work part. And you have to do that again and again. You write two or three good sentences and then you have to get it all cranked up again.

BB: Do you work in a linear fashion so that if you write a page one day, that you go over what you’ve written the next day before you continue?

PD: Yeah.

BB: And you don’t know where you’re going?

PD: No. Once I get about two-thirds of the way through I’ll begin to sense it. I know there are writers who outline and there are a hundred ways to do it so I’m not trying to say that my way is any better but to me it’s kind of self-defeating to try and lead this thing around because the interesting thing about it is the characters and where they are taking you. There was a line that Padgett Powell suggested to me about the accidental nature of true things. That’s really true. And it’s not just the accidental nature of incidents but the accidental nature of true sentences and the accidental nature of true pages and chapters and books. And that doesn’t come if you try to work it all out ahead of time like you would with a movie script.

BB: If you are too deliberate you are hemming yourself in.

PD: To me you should be letting it go where it wants to. I used to try and write movie scripts that way. Now you work on a movie and have a meeting with a studio head and tell him you don’t know what the story is going to be but he should trust you…well, you can get away with that for a little while, but then one of your scripts doesn’t get made for some reason, or somebody doesn’t like it for some reason, and word goes out, and then nobody wants to hear that. Especially these days, nobody wants to hear that. They don’t want to put all this money in and take a chance on that.

BB: When you started Spooner, why did you choose to write a novel and not a memoir?

PD: Well, first of because I don’t like the whole memoir craze.

BB: Too self-indulgent?

PD: It’s self-indulgent and largely false. And the truth is I have huge gaps…I have no faith that I could write an accurate memoir. But more to the point, I wouldn’t want to. I’m just not a…I mean, I want to be able to write the story the way…and in a funny way, even though this Spooner character follows a lot of the things I did and goes to a lot of the places I did, I gave him some room. I let him do what he wanted to do. It’s not a memoir at all, it’s a novel. There is as much incorrect in there as there is correct.

BB: In terms of how much he’s like you?

PD: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of things that happened to me that aren’t in Spooner and there are things in there that are intentionally not the way they happened to me. At the end of the day, this character Spooner is going to end up a lot like me but the way we get there in real life and the way we get there in the novel are sometimes the same way and sometimes completely different.

BB: One of the things that really struck me about the book is how much empathy you had for Spooner. For all the characters really but especially for Spooner. Was he a character that you particularly enjoyed?

PD: You mean Spooner or Calmer?

BB: Spooner.

PD: Oh.

BB: Calmer, I think goes without saying. I think the affection that Spooner has for him and that you, as the writer, have for him, comes across vividly. But I also thought you presented Spooner with a great deal of empathy.

PD: That’s true. I had a lot of empathy for Spooner and a lot of forgiveness for him. There was one other character named Charlie Utter in Deadwood that maybe spoke more directly for me, but Spooner ends up doing things and looking at things a lot the way I do.

BB: He’s not self-reflective either. I thought it was interesting that Spooner has siblings who are so accomplished academically and he doesn’t seem to share their interests or talents in that regard, and yet he winds up as a writer.

PD: That’s one of those places where if I was writing a biography or a memoir, that’s exactly true. Without ever setting out to, a series of circumstances presented themselves, to allow him to become a writer. And that was exactly how it happened for me. I was never any great self-starter or anything. I wasn’t going to be one of those guys who worked 70-hour weeks and then woke up a five o’clock in the morning to work on some secret novel. I never was that guy.

BB: But you did have an ego enough to want to put yourself out there and do it.

PD: I had something. Before I started the first novel I got a called from an agent in New York named Artie Pine who wanted to represent me if I ever wrote something book-length. He was a nice old guy. I ended up with his son, this little dickhead who thought he was important. I fired him for Deadwood. Well, I didn’t fire him exactly, I told him I did the negotiations for Deadwood myself and if he was going to be my agent I had to trust the guy and I didn’t. I said, “I’ll give you ten percent of what I got for this but I want it understood you’re not my agent until I trust you.” He didn’t say anything. I went up to New York and told him this and then he sent me a letter saying he’d invested too much time and trouble and work in his career to put up with that from a first-time novelist. So, shit, that was great. I didn’t really have to fire him. At any rate, it was his father who’d sent me a note about representing me, so I had a pretty good idea that if I did write a book somebody would publish it. And I hope that if I’d gotten halfway through it and realized I couldn’t do it, or that I couldn’t do it well, that I would have known enough to not do it at all.

BB: In the afterward of Spooner you write about how much time you spent cutting stuff out. Was it really hard to you to make those choices and cut it down or was that actually enjoyable?

PD: I didn’t dislike the process. Two hundred and fifty pages were cut and most of it was culling sections, cutting them down. There’s probably 50 pages I cut from the high school section, and 50 pages out of the Philadelphia section. I guess I did sort of enjoy it because as I was doing it I could see I was making it better, and that’s not always the case.There are times I’ll spend a whole night re-writing and cutting stuff and the next day I’ll go in and look at it and could see I’ve uh…I might as well of just died a day earlier because this is worthless. But with Spooner I had the whole book lying there, and I had perspective. I knew where the story was going and what it was about. I always had the feeling that every day it was getting better. I did more than just tighten it. It’s the first book I’ve done where you can see the final version was really a full second draft. It was marketedly different, certainly marketedly shorter.

BB: You also mentioned that you had a group of friends who read versions of the book. Is that something you do with each book or do you generally have a firm sense of what is working by yourself?

PD: I give a copy to [former Esquire and SI senior editor] Rob Fleder because I really trust his instincts. The only thing wrong with Rob as a reader is, he’s such a good guy and an enthusiastic guy, and he’s such a decent human being, if I sent him something he didn’t like…

BB: He’s too gentlemanly to tell you?

PD: He would let me know in some way but he wouldn’t let me know how bad it was. But I really trust his eye. He’s a really smart guy and a really good, experienced reader and you don’t run into those too often. I trust him and listen to what he says. Of course the book editor looks at it and I pay attention to that. My agent, Esther Newberg gets it.

BB: What about Mrs. Dexter?

PD: Mrs. Dexter doesn’t read anything until it comes out. But no, we don’t…I don’t have any idea what that would be like living with somebody who had some opinion of my work, a literary opinion.

BB: That sounds like a relief in a way.

PD: Yeah, if I asked her to do it, she’d do it but it would be reluctantly. One of the nice things about Mrs. Dexter is that she has…I can’t say that she knows what she’s talking about. Nah, I can’t think of anything nice about her. [Laughs]

BB: Pete, you have this incredible eye for detail. Do you find that you notice things in daily life that you’ll later incorporate into something? Do you keep a note pad or scribble down observations?

PD: No, but you do that unconsciously all the time and then when you are trying to draw something out it comes to you that way. And I think that’s better too because if you have some great image and great sentence in your mind you’re going to plug it in when it’s not time to do it. You’re going to plug it in when it doesn’t quite fit. That’s one of the things I learned early on writing columns. You don’t do that.

BB: That requires a lot of discipline. I used to paint a lot and I remember I’d fall in love with a part of the painting but have to have the balls to paint over it if it wasn’t serving the picture as a whole.

PD: Aw, shit, it kills you.

BB: Murder your darlings, isn’t that the phrase?

PD: I hadn’t heard that but it’s true.

BB: Since you’ve been primarily a novelist over the past 25 some odd years have you become a more voracious reader as well?

PD: I’ve become more of a reader, yeah. I was never, and I’m still not voracious. But I read more now. I’ve never really asked my brothers and sister about it specifically but I can’t believe that as smart as they were that when they were fifteen-sixteen and required to read the classics they really understood what they meant. All of them have great memories and all of them were great students and everything but I think there are some things that you just can’t understand when you are fifteen.

BB: Ulysses wasn’t meant to be read by a high school…or college kid, even.

PD: …Yeah, or…

BB: A fifty-year old kid.

PD: [Laughs] Yeah, the second you said that I got a headache, right down the front of my head.

BB: Have there been writers over the years that you’ve read and said, “Oh yeah, this is it, I really like this.”

PD: The first person that I read and understood this is what writing is was Robert Frost. And then the first person I read in terms of reading everything somebody has ever written, and not only having read it but really understand it and love it was Flannery O’Connor. I’ve probably read all of Hemingway. I started in my thirties and my opinion never changed on that stuff and that was his short stories were awful good sometimes. I still think the novels are pretty much unreadable. I’ve read most of the twentieth century Americans probably and a lot of contemporary people. I’ve poked around that stuff enough to know what it’s about and in some cases be really entertained by it.

BB: When you are reading do you find that you are involved in the story first, or are you more absorbed by the craft of it all?

PD: I want the story first but if the craft is bad it’ll get in the way and pretty soon I’ll just put it aside, depending on how bad it is.

BB: And what turns you off? Florid writing?

PD: That and self-important stuff.

BB: So are you of the school that the story is the most important thing and everything that gets in the way is just that, distraction.

PD: Yeah, that’s true if the craft if part of the story. I don’t want to read somebody who goes on for 200 pages beautifully and at the end of 200 pages nothing has happened. I just don’t, whether it’s non-fiction writers or writers of fiction. Then, there’s a guy like Richard Russo. About a year ago the New York Times called me and they wanted to know what was the best novel of the last 25 years. So I stared to think what I’ve really enjoyed. Entertainment is a really important part of a book for me and I was really entertained by Richard Russo’s Straight Man and Nobody’s Fool. All those novels. And there’s a guy—he really is a storyteller. He’s a very competent writer, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not…a great stylist. You are never going to confuse his stuff with Updike but on the other hand, he’s exactly good enough to carry those great stories and those great characters and that warmth that he has about the places and people that he writes about. He’s exactly good enough to do what he does and to me that’s the definition of what it is to be a serious writer. Which is to be good enough to talk about what you’re talking about without being so good that it’s all about your brilliance.

BB: Showing off.

PD: Right, exactly.

BB: So that the style is supposed to serve the story and not the other way around.

PD: I think so. And if you start noticing style, you can sort of admire it, but if you’re stopping every now and then to look at a sentence—unless you are doing it because you love it so much—it gets in the way.

[photo credit: Stuart Isett for the New York Times]

People talk about the electricity of a heavyweight title bout, the spectacle of the Super Bowl, or the madness of the NCAA basketball tournament, but for my money there is no greater championship than baseball’s World Series. In those years when we’re lucky enough to see the game’s two best teams engaged in a closely fought series, we witness a battle which stretches out over more than a week as the Series lives and breathes with context and texture unmatched by any other sport’s championship. Because of this, the greatest of these Series live etched in our memory, and even those which were merely good become the subjects of books.

We all remember the ecstasy and the agony (not to mention the Mystique and Aura) of the 2001 World Series; we know the significance of Burt Hooton, Elias Sosa, and Charlie Hough; we’ve mimicked Carlton Fisk’s frantic waving from 1975; and we’ve seen the grainy newsreel footage of Mazeroski’s clinching home run in 1960. Because we are fans of the Game, we feel like we know all there is to know – or at least all we’re supposed to know.

But what if we don’t? Enter Mike Vaccaro and his latest book, The First Fall Classic: The Red Sox, the Giants and the Cast of Players, Pugs and Politicos Who Re-Invented the World Series in 1912, an engaging look at a World Series you’ve never heard of. As he describes the Hall of Fame players and personalities on both sides, as well as politicians and gamblers lurking on the sidelines, Vaccaro argues that this was the series that gave the World Series its place in our national psyche. He was kind enough to talk with me about it for a bit recently. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. (Note: As I opened the book, I had no idea of how the Series eventually turned out, and I enjoyed this added suspense. In order to preserve this for any readers who might like a similar experience, the author and I did not discuss the outcome. Where indicated, some of the links will give the result.)

Bronx Banter:  Have you always been a baseball fan? Did you play as a kid?

Mike Vaccaro:  Yeah, absolutely. Baseball was always a pretty important part of my childhood, and now it’s an important part of my adulthood. I played through high school and was never terrible, but never terribly good. Always just enjoyed it. I like to stay close to the game.

BB:  So what teams and players did you follow as a kid?

MV:  I was a Mets fan growing up. Most of my childhood they were awful and then later on they kinda gave us a nice shining moment in ’86, so that was my team growing up, for sure. I was a big Tom Seaver fan, as I’m sure almost all kids of my age were.

BB:  I suppose for a lot of your life you were probably hoping for a career playing baseball. At what point did you decide on a career in journalism?

MV:  When I realized that I not only couldn’t hit the curveball, I couldn’t throw the curveball, I could barely identify a curveball. If I was gonna do anything at all in terms of professional experience, it would have to be from the sidelines in some regard. Writing was something that I enjoyed, so it was a natural marriage.

BB:  Here’s a question that I always look forward to asking journalists: are you still a fan? Can you be a fan – not just of the game, but of the Mets, for example – and a journalist at the same time?

MV:  I’m a fan of the Mets in the sense that when they play well it’s a lot more interesting story to cover, I think. I do think that the occasional train wreck is also an enjoyable story for people to read, but let’s face it – Mets fans would prefer to read stories that have to do with the Mets doing well, just as Yankees fans do also. So I do think that it’s probably fair that when you’re working the press box you root for good stories first before you root for teams or anybody, but I do think they go hand in hand. And I do try to look a little bit through the prism of a sports fan, even though that’s hard to do. You do obviously have access fans don’t have, and so therefore you have to take advantage of that telling your own stories, but I like to think I understand what sports fans bring to the game. I try and have that color my writing. I don’t believe in the complete detachment of emotion when it comes to writing. I know a lot of people like to say, “I hate the games, I don’t like the games, I don’t care about the games,” but I think if you do that, that really informs your writing and I think it really lessens it as well.

BB:  I think I’d agree with that. So with this book, what was your research process like? Where did you get your information, how long were you researching, and when did you sit down to write?

MV:  It was actually a fairly swift process. I suppose one of the good things about writing a book in which all the characters are dead, is that you’re kind of on your own schedule, not anybody else’s schedule. (Laughing.) So it was just a matter of getting my butt to the library, to the archives, to the Hall of Fame, and all these places where you could find the information that I wanted to find. It’s interesting. In a lot of ways it was easier to write a book about that era than it even would be about the 50s or certainly today, because there were so many newspapers, there were so many stories written, there were so many of these players that were first-person reporters in their own right for all these newspapers. It was almost… I won’t say there was too much information, but there was certainly enough there to be able to weave a tale out of it. From the first moment I arrived in the library with a blank notebook trying to start taking notes, to turning in the final manuscript was probably about nine months, start to finish. And the funny part about book publishing is that it actually was longer between turning in the final manuscript and publication than the actual book itself. That’s partly because instead of having a release date earlier in the year they decided on one to coincide with the playoffs, which was a smart marketing decision, I think.

BB:  Something you just mentioned I wanted to ask you about. We have this idea today that there’s media saturation with all of the TV networks and ESPN and sports radio…

MV:  I would agree with that.

BB:  But whenever I read something from this era, or maybe the first half of the last century, like you mentioned, the newspapers, there are just so many newspapers. What was that like with all the papers in that era?

MV:  It was like going to a buffet table with a bottomless appetite. There were fourteen newspapers in New York and six in Boston, and you have access nowadays to the archives of a lot of papers from around the country to get a gauge of what it was like outside of the two primary cities. It was fascinating. There were two corresponding big stories going on at that time. The World Series, and the big murder trial with Charlie Becker, the rogue cop. In New York, at least, it was essentially a split front page. You had baseball at the top, and the trial at the bottom, and the next day they would flip-flop. There’s a newfangled TV expression, “If it bleeds, it leads,” but I think that in those days newspaper sales were based in large part on the two Bs: blood and baseball. And certainly with those two stories you had a little bit of both, and it was the heart of the Pulitzer and Hearst war, so you had the World and you had the Journal American and it was as fierce a battle as today with the Post and the Daily News. We like to think we go at each other in a cutthroat manner, but really comparatively speaking, it’s relatively tame compared to the way it was back in those days. Hearst and Pulitzer were kind of playing varsity ball back in those days. As a result of that intense competition, it’s incredible what you had there. When you think of the writers who were actually filing the copy for these stories, you had Damon Runyan, you had Grantland Rice, you had Fred Lead, you had all these famous writing names. It was really kind of fascinating to think that every day, the days I was reading, I was reading Damon Runyon, you know? You kind of think of him as being something of a mythic figure and then you see him with his byline in a newspaper, so that was kind of cool. My problem is that I happen to be a guy who loves to do this kind of research, so my problem, if I had a problem at all, was that I would go there and I would get too lost in those papers. I would want to read more about what was happening in Persia at the time, what was happening on Wall Street, and I kind of had to discipline myself to stay with the matter at hand because there was so much information that I had to get to.

BB: I consider myself a huge baseball fan, a fan of baseball history. But I have to admit that before opening your book I knew nothing about the (spoiler alert) 1912 World Series. So tell me what drew you to this in the first place. What did you know about this series, going in, that made you want to start this project?

MV:  I swear, the only thing I knew about 1912 at all was the idea of the Snodgrass muff, and I didn’t even know any of the details about that. It was just one of these things. You can be a big, big, big baseball historian, but I think it’s sometimes hard to have a completely encyclopedic appreciation, understanding, or even a desire to know… I think if we consider ourselves big historians, we know a lot about the 40s and the 50s and the 60s, which in some ways is ancient history, but in some ways happened yesterday. You know, I was lucky. My editor at Doubleday, Jason Kauffman, when we were thinking about my next project he said, “Why don’t you see if you can find a World Series you think would be interesting enough to write a book about, but one that hasn’t been done to death.” Just about every World Series since the 30s, if you want to know something about it, somebody has either written about it, or there’s newsreel footage about it, so you really have to go back to the real black and white era. The first superstar team is the ’27 Yankees, so you have to use that almost as the delineation point between quasi-modern understanding of the World Series. And when I did that I boiled it down to two. One was the ’26 World Series, which was the Yankees and the Cardinals and was most famous for Grover Cleveland Alexander walking in, reportedly hung over, in the seventh inning and striking out Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded. And on top of that, the series ended in the bottom of the ninth when Babe Ruth was thrown out trying to steal second base, which I’ve always found fascinating. I try to bring that forward and think about what the uproar would be like if that was Alex Rodríguez ending the World Series in 2010. Just imagine what that would be like! But you know what, the more I looked at that, it was more of a baseball series. People have read a million books about Babe Ruth, and a million books about Lou Gehrig, and there’s been a movie made about Grover Cleveland Alexander, so you really weren’t going to be touching new ground. The more I looked at 1912, though, the more I realized the characters involved were tremendous: John McGraw, Christy Matthewson, Tris Speaker – these are historic names. And the more I looked at the World Series itself, the more I realized this was a great World Series. Not only did it go the distance, it went beyond the distance because there was a tie game so there was an extra game. And then the last game goes extra innings, which has only happened one other time before, in ’97. So that interested me. And I had done a book previously about sports in 1941, and the reason I liked doing that book so much is because I was able to use sports as kind of a window into what was happening in the world, and I liked that. To me, if you’re gonna tell a story about history, it can’t just be about your own subject. You’ve gotta give context and tell what the world was like, what it was like to live back then, what people were doing back then, which is why I enjoyed doing that book. So I was kind of hoping to present that alongside the main story in this book, and was fortunate enough to have the trial. Probably until the O.J. trial came along, it was probably still considered the trial of the century in many ways, because it was that important. And beyond that you had a presidential race, and beyond that you had Teddy Roosevelt getting shot during the World Series. You had all these other ancillary issues which to me just made the story more potentially rich. Because it wasn’t necessarily a book that was born in my brain, I went into it thinking it was a good subject, and as I went on I realized it was a great subject, and I was lucky in that regard. Because the last thing you want to do when you’re investing as much time as you need to invest in writing a book is to fall less in love with the product as you go along. I was lucky enough to fall more in love as I went along.

BB:  What’s interesting is that my experience as a reader was really similar. My first thought was, oh, the 1912 World Series, what’s this? And as I started out, it was, okay, this is kind of interesting, and then by the end I really couldn’t put it down.

MV:  That’s great to hear, and that’s interesting. I’ve been really lucky. Word of mouth is a wonderful thing. This is by no means The DaVinci Code, but it has sold beyond expectations, because when people read it, they like it. Books are funny, even more so than movies or record albums – oh, my god, I’m aging myself, calling them record albums – you get word of mouth on a book. People who are inclined to read, want to be told, yes, this is something you want to read. It’s a real fortunate thing that’s gone on with this book.

BB:  Very often when you read about baseball during this era, the main thing you come away with is how different everything was – the fields were awful, the ball was heavy, the gloves were terrible, etc. – but it seemed like you made a conscious choice keep the game as a constant. Is that accurate, or did I make that up?

MV:  It is. It’s a very basic tenth grade history credo, but I really believe that the more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s what makes history fascinating, is finding out that things that happened in the 1500s weren’t, but for the way things were done, the modern advancement, weren’t that different than they are now. And the same thing applies with baseball. It really is the same game. And like you said, there have obviously been improvements that have helped beautify it a little bit, and certainly people hit more homeruns now than they ever did and so forth, but in terms of how the game is played, it’s interesting. People tend to think that in the good old days people played for the love of the game and getting paid was secondary. That couldn’t be further from the truth. If anything, these guys were more obsessed with money than today’s athletes are. Partly because they weren’t getting as much of it, and partly because everything was more accessible. You know from reading the book that gamblers and bookmakers were as omnipresent as peanut venders in stadiums there, so if you ever wanted to supplement your income it was fairly easy to do. Things like winner’s shares and how much that winner’s share would be were taken very seriously by these guys because nowadays a guy wins the World Series, he gets a $300,000 share and it’s equivalent to the money he finds in his couch. In those days you won $4,000 in the World Series, and a lot of times it was more than you made in the whole season. These guys really cared about money, and that really kind of made them more accessible human beings because you’re able to see them less as these demigods and more as regular people who easily could’ve played today if they’d only been born eighty years later.

BB:  That kind of leads into my next question a bit. It seems like things were so different off the field than they are today, and one of the things you mentioned was the gambling. How prevalent was gambling, and how prominent were the big gamblers and bookmakers?

MV:  They were incredibly prominent. What’s interesting is John McGraw was business partners with Arnold Rothstein, which is a little tidbit I didn’t know until I started researching this book. Arnold Rothstein, of course, is the guy who masterminded the 1919 fix. They owned pool halls together, and you gotta figure that people discussed more than 8-ball in those establishments back in the day. I’ve always been fascinated by the Black Sox also. Obviously the great Eliot Asinof book and the movie was tremendous, the subject matter was great. But in doing the work for the this book, it was obvious that it wasn’t only understandable why that happened, but it was almost inevitable that something was going to happen in that regards. When it’s that accessible, when it’s that easy, when you have so much hubris among owners… You know, Charlie Comiskey is the guy who goes down in history as the guy who kind of inspired the Black Sox scandal, but really any owner could’ve qualified. Just the hassle and the haggle over the extra game they had in this World Series with the National Commission. It was everywhere, it really was. And it wasn’t just that the bookmakers were in the stands and prominent. During batting practice, if you wanted to you could find a floating crap game in the stands, or a poker game. It really was as much a part of day to day life in most big league cities as anything else, and like I said it almost makes it inevitable that something was gonna happen, and it just so happened that it was 1919 and it happened to the White Sox. Even among these games, as you know from having read the book, as great as the games were, they weren’t always played on the level, for different and various reasons.

BB:  With all of this gambling out in the open, and players openly talking about betting on games that they were playing in and even mentioning it in the newspaper columns they were wrting, how did the public perceive this?

MV:  The public wasn’t affected by it at all because they took part as much as anybody else did. That’s the funny part of the way things progressed through history. The headline anticipating the World Series wouldn’t say “Matthewson to Face Off Against Smokey Joe Wood” it was “Sox the 8 to 5 Choice.” Christy Matthewson, who was as much a paragon of virtue as any ballplayer ever has been, in his own column would talk about who the gambling favorite was and who the underdog was, and those weren’t just terms. It was a part of the culture in the same way that gambling is at a racetrack. I suppose there is a small element of people who go the racetrack because they like to see the horses run around, but 98% of the people who go there, go there with the idea that it’s a place where money is exchanged. I get the sense it was the same way that people approached going to ballparks in those days, that it was as much a sport among the players in the stands as it was among the players on the field.

BB:  So at this point in 1912, baseball seemed to hold a powerful grip on the public, through the game itself and the gambling opportunity it provided. How did the people of Boston, New York, and the rest of the country view baseball in 1912, and how excited were they for this series?

MV:  It’s a great question, because certainly in New York and Boston baseball was king, it really was. It was unrivalled in terms of sporting passion, for sure. What’s interesting about this World Series, and the reason why I came to the title that I came to, is from ’03 to ’11, for the most part, the World Series was something that people around the country would read about in the newspaper and there would be some interest in it. In the cities where the games took place it was over the top excitement, if it was in Pittsburgh or Chicago or wherever else it was. It was a very parochial event. 1911 kind of changed it a little bit. The Giants and the A’s were both recognizable teams with recognizable names, but 1912 really kind of brought it to another level. For one thing, these were probably the two best teams ever assembled at that point, and it was pretty obvious they were gonna play each other from early September on. There were a lot of personalities people knew about, there was a lot of advance hype as a result, and really the excitement about the series was everywhere. One of the neat things that they had in those days was that outside newspaper buildings they would have these pitch-by-pitch updates with little figurines going around the basepaths.

BB:  That was one of my favorite things about the book.

MV:  Yeah, you could understand certainly how that could become exciting in New York and in Boston, and in fact it was over the top. In Harold Square there would be 40,000 people a day in New York, on newspaper row there would be 50,000 people a day, and it’s hard to even fathom that. In Boston it was the same way in the Common. Now we have PDAs and you can look at updates every fifteen seconds, and it’s staggering to think that it’s essentially what these people were doing. They didn’t have, obviously, a Blackberry to look at, but they did have that ability to get updates as quickly as they did, which is really kind of incredible. But it wasn’t just New York and Boston, though. They had the same availability in other cities starting in 1911, in 1912 it became even bigger. In fact, the story that I really like, at the very end of the book it comes, is outside the L.A. Times office there are a couple thousand people watching this. They hear about Fred Snodgrass dropping a ball, and a woman faints in the crowd and it’s Fred Snodgrass’s mother. So I think that really just kind of shows you how much of a grip the series had on the country. Before that series it was referred to the world series, lower-case w, lower-case s, and this series kind of capitalized it to where we know it now as the World Series, capital W, capital S.

BB:  The narrative in your story was obviously driven by the ebb and flow of the series, but there some pretty interesting personalities, too. The Giants, of course, were led by the largest personality of all, John McGraw. What was he like?

MV:  In the deepest chamber of my heart, I wish I could have covered John McGraw, because he would’ve been great copy. He’s undisputed as being a great baseball mind, certainly ahead of his time in a lot of ways. He was an umpire baiter, he was an opponent baiter. He was not afraid to speak his mind about anything and everything. In a lot of ways he was kind of like Billy Martin, only without the sociopathic tendencies. And a guy with a lot of layers. People think of him as being this fiery, ornery guy, and he was. And yet Snodgrass drops that ball, and the next year he gives him a thousand dollar raise, which is a huge, huge statement in those days. Players alternately loved playing for him and loathed playing for him, alternately loved him and despised him. Just an incredibly rich character who was really in the prime of his career in 1912. He was the kind of guy who’s got an awfully long lineage. One of his protégés was Casey Stengel, who begat Billy Martin, who begat Willie Randolph. In a lot of ways, the John McGraw legacy still continues to this day even though many people don’t know that that’s really where it is.

BB:  He was paired with Christy Matthewson, who had kind of transcended the game, hadn’t he?

MV:  Yeah, he was without doubt the most famous American athlete at the time, and the most beloved, held up as this paragon of virtue, and even to that point was considered one of the best pitchers who ever lived. Even though he was kind of on the downward cycle of his career, he was still pretty good, winning twenty games a year. He just wasn’t what he had been seven or eight years earlier when he was just unhittable. And the two of them were a wonderful contrast. For a while they actually lived together. But even at this point they were great friends and had an inordinate amount of respect for each other that really kind of manifested itself in the way they both wanted so badly to win another World Series. They had gone seven years at that point without winning a World Series even though they fancied themselves the flag bearers for the entire sport.

BB:  And what about the Red Sox, with Smokey Joe Wood and Tris Speaker. How good were they?

MV:  People think of one-year pitching wonders like Dwight Gooden in 1985, but there’s never been a pitcher who had a better single year than Joe Wood: 34-5, 1.90 ERA. At a time when nobody struck out, when it was considered a mortal sin to strikeout, he struck out almost 250 people. Even Walter Johnson, who was renowned as the flamethrower of his era, said there was nobody in the world who threw harder than Smokey Joe Wood, hence the name. It’s really kind of an interesting story, because the next spring he breaks his thumb in spring training, and he’s literally never the same, and he hurts his arm. And while he reinvents himself later on as an everyday player – as a hitter he’s a very good hitter – but he could well have been a historic and legendary pitcher if his arm hadn’t given out. But for that year he was untouchable. And Tris Speaker, I think Tris Speaker is probably the most underappreciated all-time player ever. I think people have heard of the name and they have a hard time placing where he played or what he did. The guy had 3,700 hits and not only played on three World Series winners but managed one in Cleveland. (And also was himself involved in a gambling scandal towards the latter end of his career.) It’s interesting too, because the Red Sox in a lot of ways could be likened to the Bronx Zoo Yankees and the ’72-’74 A’s in that they didn’t really like each other very much. It was definitely split into factions between Catholics and non-Catholics, and there two best players Wood and Speaker were non-Catholics, one from Kansas City, one from Texas, who were perceived from day one there as outsiders, not only by the team but also by the fans. But because they were so good and because they were so successful, they were obviously adopted and for the most part kept something of an uneasy peace among the people on the team, which obviously exploded briefly during the World Series and subtly other times during the year. That also makes this fascinating. We tend to think of old time guys as being one for all and all for one, but these guys were every bit as contentious as the Yankees were in the 70s.

BB:  That’s interesting, because that was going to be my next question. Now you hear about clubhouse that are divided along racial lines sometimes, and you think that these were all a bunch of white guys in 1912 so they probably got along well, but there were divisions – cultural divisions between Northern players and Southern players. Could you talk about that a bit?

MV:  Certainly in Boston, which was a hotbed, even in those days, of Irish Catholicism, of liberalism, a real Northern bastion, and had been the seat of patriotism not so long before, a hundred and forty years earlier. Tris Speaker’s uncles both fought in the Civil War. Smokey Joe Wood was literally raised in the wild west, with stagecoaches and sheriffs and stuff. That’s where these guys are coming from, and this is obviously an era where who you worshipped and how you worshipped was not a secret. People knew if you were Catholic, they knew if you were Baptist, they knew if you were Methodist, they knew if you were Episcopalian, and it mattered to people. To come to Boston, which was as I said, an Irish Catholic hotbed, you had these two Protestants. That was one of the main things that divided people in those days, especially in baseball in 1912. Unfortunately it’s not a subject that I delve into a great deal, but certainly 1912 was very much in the middle of the Gentlemen’s Agreement. It was an all-white sport, so there certainly wasn’t going to be any racial divides in any clubhouses, because everybody looked exactly the same. So I suppose if you look for things that divide you, religion is probably the next best thing to race, and certainly that was there. Probably on almost every team, because that was so prevalent in society, but on that team especially, it became a big deal.

BB:  There’s a lot of drama throughout this World Series, most of it surrounding the players, managers, and even owners. You do a great job of illuminating all the controversies and personalities, most notably through conversations between the principle characters. I read recently a suggestion that you had manufactured these conversations. I read what you wrote about this in your introduction, but I was wondering if you could explain this.

MV:  Yeah, I’d like to, because look, the fact that I was compelled to write an author’s note, that was my idea. I wanted to do that because I wanted to be completely transparent. I mean, look, we are dealing with things that happened almost a hundred years ago, so it was amazing to me what I was actually able to get in terms of verbatim conversations. But you can’t get everything. And to me, the choice was it was either going to be completely written in a narrative or it wasn’t. If it’s not, it becomes a recitation of facts, it’s a textbook, and it’s impossible to read. I would be very comfortable to say that probably ninety percent of the stuff that’s in that book, was stuff that was actually in between quotation marks elsewhere, whether it was in a newspaper story, a magazine story, an archive, someone’s diary, what have you. So that’s ninety percent. In order to complete the narrative, I felt there were certain aspects where you just didn’t have that, where you just didn’t have the actual quotes, where I kind of gave myself license since I knew these characters as well as anybody could, having spent nine months with them. Certainly I wasn’t going to invent the kind of conversation where Smokey Joe Wood, for instance, turns to Tris Speaker and says, “Yeah, I threw that game!” That certainly wasn’t going to happen. To me, it was more to augment conversation, to help move the story along in a way that just wasn’t otherwise available. And I understood that when I wrote that that people were gonna look at that, and certainly I didn’t put that I think that ninety percent of the conversations were accurately recreated because there’s no way of actually putting a number on it. So I know that opens it up to anybody who want to think, well, maybe he invented the whole thing. And they’re welcome to think that if they want. To me, it’s like when you watch a movie. A movie is always based on real life. I wasn’t there in 1912, so everything that I do about the book is necessarily going to be second-hand. So to me, I think what you have to do, is you have to make a choice when you read the book: do I trust this author or don’t I? I would hope that if you read the book, you understand that I not only know these characters, but I happen to like them, and I appreciate them, and I want to try and portray them as accurately as possible, so whatever I augmented was done in the idea of moving the story along. That’s frankly bothered some people who’ve reviewed the book, and I certainly respect that. It’s a worthy and worthwhile subject for discussion. I just chose to do it that way because I think it made for a better book. I don’t think I sacrificed any integrity. Like I said, if I invented conversations to invent new plotlines, I think that would have been unforgivable and I wouldn’t even have considered doing that. But to me it was more of a device that helped to kind of close the circle. If you look at it as a circle and if there are a couple of segments of the circle that are missing, you’re not going to be able to complete the circle. This allowed me to complete the circle. Most of the circle was already drawn based upon legitimate quotes that I drew from other places, but the small aspects that I needed to close the circle I did on my own, believing that I had the license to do that. That’s a long and very windy way of explaining that, but I do think it’s a worthwhile subject. Like I said, I brought it up myself. I wouldn’t have wanted to misrepresent how that came to be.

BB:  At any point in your process did you consider footnoting so that people could see which conversations were quoted elsewhere and which were not?

MV:  I did. In fact, I do have a set of footnotes that I wrote. It was a decision between myself and the editors at Doubleday that it was more appropriate to be specific with bibliography, which I kind of have in my acknowledgements later toward the end, and more of a blanket explanation of how you did it than it was to footnote. That was just a decision that was made. I actually do, in my personal archives, have what would have been the footnotes, but it was just an editorial decision that was made higher than me.

BB:  I think I do agree with your response to this, because nothing seemed disingenuous to me as I was reading.

MV:  I suppose if my intention with the book had been to show how the 1912 World Series was thrown, it would’ve been a little bit harder to do what I did and just dismiss it as something that was a literary device. Even when it comes to the potential shadiness of some of the games, I think I do leave it open ended and open to interpretation. I don’t say that Smokey Joe Woods threw the game, I say this is what happened, what do you think?

BB:  Right, right. I think that was interesting. You just kind of present it as here are the facts, and here’s how he felt going in, and here’s the season that he had, and here’s how he pitched on this day. I think it was even better, because I read it, my first thought was, how come I haven’t heard of this before? This is a pretty big deal, where you’ve got arguably the best pitcher in the game, who’s pissed off at his manager and his owner, and he’s throwing a World Series game.

MV:  Right. We could argue the merits of whether it was justified or not, but I’m asked all the time, do you think he threw the game? I absolutely think he threw the game. Here’s a guy who’s the best pitcher of his day in that year, he’s already stuck it up their ass two times easily in the World Series and the very next day he would come back and do the same thing basically, and here he is throwing thirteen batting practice fastballs. So if you’re asking me, as an expert witness, do I think that he did it? I say yes. Do I think he would’ve been convicted of it? No, because I think the entirety of the case against him was circumstantial.

Here’s a little something in case you can’t make it out to Brooklyn tonight to hear Larry Tye talk about his new book, Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend. Larry was good enough to spend part of his morning last week talking to me about Satchel Paige and Negro League baseball. Enjoy…

BronxBanter:  Your previous four books dealt with public relations, the Jewish diaspora, Pullman porters, and shock therapy. How did you get from there to Satchel Paige?

Larry Tye:  When I was writing the Pullman porter book, the porters told that of all the extraordinary characters that they had carried on the trains, from Joe Louis to Louie Armstrong to Paul Robeson, their favorite was Satchel Paige. And I had grown up hearing wonderful stories about Satchel as being the guy that every pitcher was compared to, and yet nobody really knew much about Satchel. So the porters really reignited my childhood interest in Satchel, and it seemed like a great time to do it.

BB:  Were you a baseball fan growing up?

LT:  I was. I was a huge Red Sox fan growing up, and every time I would go to a ballgame, my dad, any time there was a great pitcher, would always compare him to Satchel. But when I would ask, “What about Satchel Paige?” nobody really seemed to know much because he had played so much of his career in a shadow world.

BB:  Right, he seems almost like a legend as opposed to a real man with real statistics and real information behind him.

LT:  He did, and sort of every journalist or author out there sort of trying to understand how much of every legend is real, and Satchel seemed a wonderful way to do that.

BB:  I wonder if you could walk me through your process a bit. What kind of research was involved, and at one point did you sit down and start wrting?

LT:  I spent more than a year reading everything that had ever been written about Satchel, which meant looking at references to him or entire books. Probably a hundred books about Satchel or the Negro Leagues or some mention. Tens of thousands of articles from African-American and mainstream newspapers, loads of magazine pieces done over the years, and most importantly interviewing. I interviewed more than two hundred old major leagues and Negro leaguers. So it was partly trying to see what was there in terms of the written evidence, and partly trying to fill in the blanks with first-hand recollections of people who had been there with him, playing with him or against him. It was only after that work was well along, after about a year, that I started writing.

BB: We think of Mobile, Alabama, as the birthplace of baseball greats like Hank Aaron and Willie McCovey, but they came a generation later than Paige. What was Mobile like during the beginning of the century when young Satchel was growing up?

LT:  There are two ways to look at what Mobile was like then. One, is what was it like generally in terms of society then for a young, black kid like Satchel to come into the world? And the answer was that at the very moment that he was born, the Jim Crow segregation system was coming into force in the South generally, and in Mobile specifically. Mobile had been one of the more tolerant deep South cities when it came to race, but starting in Satchel’s birth year of 1906, there were lynchings and other things that suggested tolerance was out the window, and segregation and violence were the order of the day. So it’s not an easy time for a young black kid to come into the world, it was not an easy time to come in with what became a family of twelve kids. So he was born into poverty, he was born into a racially hostile environment, and in the baseball world then, he was born into a strictly segregated world that had him prepared for the wider segregated situation in terms of the Negro Leagues and the major leagues. It was a time like in the later generation when guys like Hank Aaron came along. It was a time where baseball was as important in black America as it was in white. There were just fewer opportunities, particularly in a place like Mobile.

BB:  That kind of moves me right to my next question…

LT:  Actually, one last thing I had to say about that. The good news for him was that Mobile was an extraordinary baseball city, and it’s not accidental that all these great players came out of Mobile. Baseball was everything there.

BB:  Once he did discover his baseball skill, what kind of options were available to him at this time?

LT:  The options were to play semi-pro baseball in Mobile and make no money and have to look for another way to earn his living, or in case he was lucky and the manager of the Chattanooga White Sox, an old black team, came in and scouted him and brought him to Chattanooga to play in these lower levels of the black professional leagues. The good news is he got out of Mobile, the bad news is if he had stayed in Mobile he would have ended up probably like his brother Wilson, who may have been as good or better a baseball player but ended up having to dig graves for a living and died an early death.

BB:  What was it like, not necessarily for a star like Satchel Paige, but just in general, what was it like to play in the Negro Leagues? How different was that from major league baseball?

LT:  It was different in that players made less money, played to smaller crowds, the teams were precariously financed, and every season teams would come and go. It was a world more on the edge. It was like every black institution in the era of Jim Crow. They all shared a lot with the parallel white universe, whether it was schools or busses or whatever. They were generally not nearly as well financed. The good news in terms of black baseball, again like other Negro institutions of that era, is it was an extraordinarily exciting game. On a Sunday afternoon, the activity in black America was to go watch the local Negro League baseball team. Ministers would let churches out early, women would don their best mink stoles and high heels and hats, men would go out there and for one time in the week not have to worry about any racial insults or any hostility. They would go out there in what was an almost entirely black world, and they’d watch players play an incredibly hard-driving brand of baseball. It was a lot like what we would call “small ball” today. There was a lot of bunting, there was a lot of base stealing, there was a much more hard edged, and I think, exciting brand of baseball to watch. And one thing we can say definitively, the best Negro League ball players were as good as the best of the white majors.

BB:  It’s always tempting to compare the Negro Leagues to the major leagues for a lot of the reasons that you just mentioned. For one thing, Paige’s white contemporaries were bound to their teams, and the best players often remained with one team throughout their careers, but this was hardly true for Satchel, was it?

LT:  No. Satchel was a free agent fifty years before we knew what free agency was, which meant that he would sign a contract and honor that signature only as long as it suited him, and when he’d get a better offer he’d jump from one team to another. He said he played for two hundred and fifty teams during his career. That’s kind of high, but I’d say he probably played for more teams than any player in the history of black or white baseball. Teams would rent him out for one or two games because he was guaranteed to draw a big crowd, and contracts were only as good as he wanted to make them.

BB:  Satchel Paige is often paired with Josh Gibson in stories and memories of the Negro Leagues. What was their relationship like?

LT:  They were on the one hand as different as two ballplayers could be. Satchel loved to be in the center of attention, Josh hated the spotlight. Satchel was brilliant at squeezing every nickel he could from owners, and Josh was a laidback guy who just didn’t do that kind of thing. Josh was somebody who was adored by his teammates, and Satchel was often resented by his teammates. On the other hand, the two of them had this special interaction. They knew that they were black baseball’s two biggest starts, they knew that their facing off against one another was going to get more attention than anything else that happened in the ballgame they were playing in, and they each had enough pride that they thought that they could get the better of it. So it was this wonderful drama every time that they played

BB:  In the thirties and forties Satchel Paige was more than just a pitcher, more than just a baseball player. He was a cultural icon in Black America. How was he able to transcend baseball the way he did?

LT:  Because he was such a natural showman. He would go out there before a game and do things that nobody else would ever dare to do. He’d put a matchbook on home plate and go back sixty feet six inches to the pitchers mound and throw nine out of ten balls over home plate. What he was doing was proving to any fans who were out there early to watch him – and fans were always out there early to watch him – proving that he could do extraordinary things. He was intimidating the heck out of any opponents who were out there watching what he was doing, and he had this innate understanding of what it took to make it worth somebody’s while to come and flop down the money to watch him play a ballgame. And he gave them a show. He never made a spectacle of himself, and he understood the way that great entertainers did, the way that Louie Armstrong did, the way that Joe Louis did. Satchel understood even better just what it was like to go out and really give fans more than their money’s worth by dazzling them as well as winning the ballgame.

BB:  Satchel’s story can be seen as tragic, not just because he spent his prime in the shadows, but also because he wasn’t the player chosen to break the color line. I thought it was interesting to read about the tension between Paige and Jackie Robinson. Can you talk about that a bit?

LT:  Sure. They were from two different generations, and they reflected the generational tension. Jackie never quite understood, I think, the fact that it was Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson and all the great ballplayers of their generation upon whose shoulders he, Jackie, was standing when he broke the color barrier. He saw what he did, he saw the abuse that he, Jackie, took, and he never quite understood that people had been going through that in the Negro Leagues for fifty years before him, and he saw Satchel and many of his fellow Negro Leaguers as an embarrassment. Jackie never had much use for the Negro Leagues; he only played there for a year. And yet it was only because of Satchel that Branch Rickey knew about the Negro Leagues, and he knew about the all-black Kansas City Monarchs, and he knew about a guy who started out that season as a second-string second baseman, namely Jackie Robinson. So Satchel thought that he deserved, if not to be first, then at least be worthy of credit by the guy who was first, and Jackie never gave him that credit.

BB:  I thought that was really interesting because we know that in Jackie’s later years he often complained that modern-day black players didn’t appreciate what he and others had done for them, so I thought it was ironic to read that he had fallen into the same generational trap. I guess we never appreciate what our predecessors have done for us, do we?

LT:  It’s true, and it’s the same thing in the Civil Rights movement. If you ask kids today who study on Martin Luther King’s birthday or in Black History Month, the Civil Rights movement, you would think that the movement began and ended with Martin Luther King, Jr. They don’t acknowledge the history and the Pullman porters and guys like A. Phillip Randolph who really set the stage for King, the same way we don’t acknowledge that anything came before Jackie. We don’t also acknowledge that professional baseball at the highest levels was integrated in the 1800s. What Jackie did was not integrate baseball, he reintegrated it.

BB:  Exactly, exactly. What about when the major leagues finally came calling for Satchel? How good was he at the age of forty-two?

LT:  He was good enough that at the end of that first half-season with the Cleveland Indians he notched a 6-1 record, he had the second-lowest ERA in the American League. And my favorite is that twelve sportswriters in voting for the AP Rookie of the Year, twelve of them voted for Satchel, to which he replied, “I’m honored, but I’m not quite sure what year the gentlemen were talking about.”

BB:  I wanted to back up a little bit. It seemed like throughout his story there are incidents where various major leaguers would come to the fore and say, “These other pitchers that we’re facing every day are great, but there’s also this guy Satchel Paige who’s even better.” Who were some of those major leaguers that were kind of instrumental in spreading the word about Satchel Paige. Dizzy Dean, sure, and some of these others. Who were the main ones?

LT:  Well, Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller saw it firsthand, but I think lots of people were out there doing it. Ted Williams absolutely understood just how great they were, and he spread the word in his early years and later on ended up taking time out from his induction ceremony at the Hall of Fame to call for the induction of Satchel and others. Joe DiMaggio did it in a dramatic way. It was a face-off against Satchel in California before DiMaggio was with the Yankees that convinced the Yankee scouts who watched him that day to sign DiMaggio. DiMaggio said repeatedly that Satchel was the best pitcher he ever faced. My favorite DiMaggio expression was he said that Satchel’s curve ball gave him optical indigestion. Lots of guys were doing it. Jimmy Foxx was doing it. All the old great ballplayers who barnstormed against Satchel in California and Latin America and across this country came back raving about him, and that was from the 1920s through the 1940s. Just about every great major league saw Satchel, and they just couldn’t help but talk about it.

BB:  You mentioned barnstorming. I wanted to ask you about that real quickly. Can you explain what that environment was like, because you had black and white ballplayers on different teams, sometimes on the same team. What was the barnstorming culture like?

LT:  It was basically a case where Negro Leaguers couldn’t come close to earning a living just by playing in their official Negro League games. So in between games they would go to any town anywhere nearby that could come up with enough money to bring them to town with a team to field against them. So it was in towns with more barns than streetlights with teams that ranged from really good semi-pro teams to a bunch of farmers who knew nothing about baseball other than that they loved it. It was a way for small town America to get really good baseball, and it was a way for Negro Leaguers and major leaguers to earn critical extra money when their families were sufficiently small.

BB:  What about the legend of Satchel Paige? My favorite story was always the one where he was facing his buddy Josh Gibson and pulls his fielders off the diamond before striking him out. Did you have a favorite? Did you find a new one through this process?

LT:  First of all I’ve got to say that in checking all the legend against the facts I found that about eighty percent of the things that Satchel claimed he did, he did. And that’s pretty extraordinary considering what his claims were. And that raises the question, why embellish the other twenty percent if all that would do is potentially call into question the eighty percent? And I think it was partly that Satchel was such a good story teller that he couldn’t resist, and partly that while the white legends, the Babe Ruths and Joe DiMaggios, had reporters there fanning their legend, Satchel was playing in this shadow world of the Negro Leagues and had to be out there telling his own story. It was a great story, and at times with each new telling he’d realize reporters needed something a little new to spice it up, and he’d give ‘em something a little new. My favorite stories were when he was out there in his later years. We all know the stories of his calling in his fielders, of his going out and performing all these stunts, having his teammates stand there with lit cigarettes in their mouths and he’d throw a hardball at their face at ninety miles an hour and they had enough confidence that he would knock it out and knock them out – and he did it. My favorites are what he did in his later years. I love the notion that he set a record that will never be broken in the major leagues in 1965 by going out and pitching three shutout innings against the Boston Red Sox. He was 59 years, two months, and eight days old, and his catcher that night was thirty years younger. I talked to a bunch of the ballplayers from the Red Sox and had them actually at my opening kickoff party for the book. The guy who pitched against him that night, Bill Momboquette and a bunch of others. And I talked to Carl Yastrzemski about what it was like facing off against Satchel that night. The only guy to get a hit off him in those three innings was Yastrzemski, he got a double. And what I loved was after the game, Yastrzemski went up to him and gave him a bear hug. And Yastrzemski, anybody who knew him in Boston knows that the last guy who’s ever played in the city that you would expect to give anybody a bear hug was the relatively cold, reserved Carl Yastrzemski. And he did it because a full generation before Yaz’s dad had faced off against Satchel in a semi-pro game on Long Island. I love that story because Satchel was the only guy in the history of baseball who pitched against fathers and sons and even grandsons. He lasted so long, he was so durable, that he was out there dazzling generations of fans. And this perpetual argument, as you well know, of who was the greatest pitcher of all times. What we can say without any argument is there’s no pitcher in the history of baseball who ever pitched at a higher level for longer than Satchel Paige.

BB:  So finally, where do you rank Satchel amongst the all-time greats?

LT:  I rank him as the most durable of the greats, and I would say that he did it longer than anybody, and I’d say that at his peak he would match up against Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Sandy Koufax, or Roger Clemens in terms of speed, in terms of accuracy, and he would top all of them in terms of putting on a show when he was out there. He went out and he could get out batters as easily as anyone ever in the history of baseball, but he did it with style and grace that nobody ever showed that I’m familiar with.

Bronx Banter:  A Day in the Bleachers. I just read this book for the first time, I want to say about six months ago. I think one of my favorite things about it – obviously I knew about the game, and I knew about The Catch and the other things that come to mind – but I think one of my favorite things was your description of the atmosphere of the game. Looking back fifty years ago, what was it like seeing a game in the Polo Grounds in the ’40s or ’50s?

Arnold Hano:  Well, what it was like seeing a game in the bleachers was the camaraderie. [Showing the covers of three different editions of the book.] When the book first came out, it was a book for fans, about fans. And then the next edition, it’s Willie Mays and fans. And then the next edition it’s just The Catch. But the cover of the first one is truer. This is truly what the book is about.

BB:  Right, right, definitely. It almost seemed like the book was about the fans, and, by the way, Willie Mays made a nice catch.

AH:  That catch, which I spent a lot of time on, took up nine pages in a hundred and sixty page book. And I don’t know if you know about the $700 edition of the book…

BB:  Yes, I read something about that. There was a limited print, and you had signed them all.

AH:  Four hundred copies.

BB:  The other thing, too, about this book is that now, that device that you used, using the game kind of as a prism through which to illuminate either a season or an era or a career, that’s a fairly common device now. But then, I don’t think so, is that right?

AH:  You’re telling me about devices. I wrote a book. I wrote a book about a day, and this is the day.

BB:  What I love about this book is that you’re writing the book and you’re telling what’s happening on the field, and Vic Wertz comes up to bat, and then suddenly you have a two-page segue on Vic Wertz.

AH:  Or on home runs hit by other people for long distances.

BB:  Exactly, exactly.

AH:  Well, I had to fill some space!

BB:  I think that now that’s pretty common. A lot of people use that.

AH:  Part of what E.L. Doctorow said yesterday on television is that writers don’t really realize what it is they’ve written. Critics tell them what they’ve written, but he said, “The result is I never read critics. They tell me things about the book…”

BB:  That perhaps aren’t there, or aren’t intended to be there.

AH:  So when you ask me about a device, I don’t know from the device in this case. I wrote a book about a day, and I filled it in with background stuff. I had to establish myself as writing a book with some reason, so I established myself as somebody who’d seen all these other things. And to that degree, I was an historian of this… thing. But that’s getting beyond where I wanted to go with it. I think of this as a nice little book. Other people think it was something else, but I think it was a nice little book.

BB:  Well, like I said, I don’t know if this was your intention as you wrote it – and it doesn’t sound like you had big intentions – but what I got from it is, I know about that catch, and I knew about that before I picked up the book. But your description of the fans in the bleachers, of what it was like on the field, in the stadium, that’s what I got out of it.

AH:  When I used to go to ballgames, of course, you don’t do this anymore, I used to go very early so I could watch fielding practice. And until a few years ago, I did not know they had suspended fielding practice. I bet the players’ union has done that because they don’t want somebody to break a finger.

BB:  Sometimes you hear people complain about that. You’ll be watching a game and someone will throw to the wrong base and someone will say, “Oh, well, they don’t have fielding practice anymore, and the only time they do that is in spring training…”

AH:  Although when you see a guy like Omar Vizquel pull a backdoor double play. Do you know about that at all? Kenny Lofton was at bat when he was with the Dodgers. Men on first and second and I think there was nobody out. They sent the runners and Lofton hit a one-bouncer to second base. Well, Lofton is about as fast going down from the plate to first base as almost anybody. So when Ray Durham fed Vizquel for the force play, Vizquel had Lofton in his sights, and he knew that he was not gonna throw out Lofton. So he whirled and he threw to third. The guy who had been on second base was playing his first game in the major leagues. He rounded third and goes two or three steps and there’s Pedro Felíz with the ball. The most embarrassed baserunner in the history of baseball – who was sent back to the minors that night! A backdoor double play! It was a 4-6-5 double play. I had never seen it before, and apparently he’s done it more than once. And apparently before that play, a few days before, he had reminded Felíz that this was something he might do. Television followed Vizquel off the field at the end of the half inning, and as he reached the first baseline he broke into laughter. He was so pleased and charmed with what he had just done. It was just a great moment. Now there’s somebody who didn’t need fielding practice.

BB:  You know what, I remember when I was a kid I would always make my dad take me to the game when they opened the gates because I wanted to watch batting practice.

AH:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BB:  But I do remember watching a version of fielding practice with Ozzie Smith. It was towards the end of his career, and I don’t think he even ended up playing in the game that night. But I’ll never forget this. He was taking balls at short and throwing to second base, never once looking at second base.

AH:  He knows where it is!

BB:  It’s like Casey Stengel said about Joe DiMaggio, I think maybe you quoted this in your book, “Mr. DiMaggio does not look down at second base as he rounds the bag because Mr. DiMaggio knows that second base has not moved in forty years.”

AH:  I didn’t write that, I wish I had. Yeah, yeah, but there are only a handful of Vizquels and Ozzie Smiths. In fact, Vizquel and Ozzie Smith are together as the greatest shortstops I have ever seen play that game. And to do it for all those years and all those plays and to always know where second base was without even looking… They used to say that Vizquel didn’t have much of an arm, well he never needed much of an arm because he had hands like Bill Mazeroski…

BB:  In and out.

AH:  The ball was in and out and gone. But when he turned and whirled he threw a bullet. He could throw the ball, he just didn’t have to throw the ball. It’s a lovely sport. It’s still the greatest game.

BB:  Why do you think that?

AH:  Well, because it has an elegance that football doesn’t have. My wife Bonnie describes football. She says one man bends down and passes the ball between his legs to another man, and twenty-two men fall down. That’s her description of what a football play looks like. And other people have pointed out that after every football play, they have a conference. Baseball proceeds the way soccer proceeds, with a flow about it. Of course it breaks up every half inning, which soccer doesn’t do. Soccer is much underrated because of that ongoing flow that it has. Baseball has that flow, but it also great individual moments. It’s a game where pitcher-batter still is the game, so there is that. I don’t know. Ninety feet was such a glorious invention. Ninety feet. They didn’t miss by an inch one way or the other. It was exactly right. Today still, a ball hit to shortstop, the throw to first base will get the guy by only this much every time. It’s a wonderfully measured and calculated game. It’s timeless; it can last four hours. One of the greatest days in baseball history in 1933 when Hubbell went eighteen innings and shut out the Cardinals 1-0, six hits. Like having two three-hit shutouts, one on top of the other, and it was the first game of a doubleheader, and during daytime. And then Parmalee goes against Dizzy Dean in the second game, and it’s starting to get dark, and that game lasted one hour and thirty-two minutes. The umpires were in a rush. And Parmalee won his game 1-0. Pitching never had a better day than that. Pitching today is ignored. It’s not ignored, but it’s a homerun hitter’s game, and that has lowered the quality of the game for me. They’ve brought in the fences, they’ve lowered the mound. The strike zone – you played ball as a kid?

BB:  Yeah.

AH:  Shoulders to knees was the strike zone. Now it’s the size of a car.

BB:  I remember vividly as a kid when I was just starting to play baseball and starting to learn the game and watching it on TV, at that time letters to the knees was the strike zone I was taught.

AH:  Okay, ours was shoulders to the knees.

BB:  I remember watching it on TV and seeing balls come across the chest and they were called balls, and it was confusing to me.

AH:  It is confusing. I don’t know what goes at umpire school, but what goes on is something that’s arcane. It’s a strange world where the strike zone is now like this. Wow! What pressure that puts on pitchers! Okay, so where were we?

BB:  Back to A Day in the Bleachers. I read something that you wrote recently for the LA Times, you wrote that you went to the game that day and it wasn’t until a few hours later after you got home that you thought you could write a book.

AH:  Actually, I thought I could write a magazine article. I wrote a magazine article. I expanded the ballgame into ten thousand words. The only magazine that published stuff like that was the New Yorker. They would run important tennis matches, the whole match. John McPhee would cover it. So I brought it down to the New Yorker and some kid came out. I said, “Here’s an article, it’s about a baseball game that took place, and if you publish it you’ll have to publish it right away.” The kid listened, and he said, “Okay, I’ll have them read it.” He went upstairs, an hour later he comes back to me and says they liked it, but it wasn’t right. I took it home and I read it, and it wasn’t right. They were absolutely right that it wasn’t right. So I decided, what the hell, I’ll make it a book. So then I made it a book. My agent Sterling Law thought it was wonderful and knew that Hiram Hayden over at Crown Publishing would publish it in a minute because Hiram Hayden was a Giants fan. Well, Hiram Hayden turned out to be a Cleveland fan, and he turned out to be absolutely right when he said, “I don’t know how to sell this book. There’s no place to sell it. If I put in the sports section, that’s where fathers go to buy books for little boys. If I put it in the nonfiction section it’s lost, it’s swallowed up. I cannot sell this book.” Colliers did not know that. They did not know the book couldn’t be sold until they published it and they found out that Hiram Hayden was right, it couldn’t be sold. It sold, as I tell people, like coldcakes.  We were driving across the country, we’d left New York in July of ’55, Bonnie and I and our daughter and our beagle puppy. We were going across the country and we got to Sioux City, Iowa, where Bonnie’s mother lives, and there’s a telegram from a friend of ours: “Congratulations, rave reviews in Times and Tribune, blah, blah, blah…” So suddenly I was famous, to twelve people.

BB:  One thing that I was thinking about as I was talking to a friend of mine this morning. You went to this game, just to go to a game. There’s a lot of luck involved here.

AH:  I’m the luckiest fan in the history of the world. When I was a copy boy at the Daily News, I was sitting in the Ebbetts Field press box when that ball got away from Mickey Owen. I won a limerick contest and I sat in right field and watched Don Larsen pitch his perfect game. Now, I had to be smart to write the limerick, but Larsen had been bombed in the previous outing in that series, he could’ve been bombed again. It could’ve been an 11-9 ballgame. I went with a bunch of kids to a football game in ’34-’35, the Giants against the Bears for the national championship. We sat in the lower left field seats, it was four degrees above zero, and we stood. We didn’t sit because it was so cold, and we shook our feet. The sound was like thunder. The Bears pushed the Giants all over the field in the first half, and Wellington Mara ordered an underling to go to Manhattan College and steal some basketball shoes. During halftime the Giants changed into sneakers and they pushed the Bears all over the field and they won 30-13. Now that game could’ve been any kind of game, but it turned out to be the Sneaker Game. I am lucky. I go to a ballgame, it was Giants-Dodgers. It was Pee Wee Reese’s first time in the Polo Grounds. Mel Ott was on first base and they fed Reese for a force play and he went up in the air to throw to first for the double play and Ott hit him. Ott’s body was a horizontal blade, and he hit him right around the waist. Ott was not a fast man, but he was built like a small football player, and the cap went one way, the ball went one way, Reese went another way. Years later I ran into Reese and asked if he still remembered the first game he played in the Polo Grounds. “Well, yeah,” he said. When Ott leveled you. He said, “It still hurts. I wonder why he did that.” I said I think he was saying “Welcome to the rivalry, Pee Wee.” And he said, “That’s what he was saying.” I was lucky that I was there to see that. So I have lucked my way through fandom. I’m the luckiest fan that ever lived. There are more, but…

BB:  And didn’t you see Koufax’s first no-hitter as well?

AH:  Bonnie and I. It was an anniversary. I went to the Dodgers and said give me a couple freebies. They sort of owed me. They winked because it was the Mets, they said they always sold out the Mets. I said, oh, you’ll make some room. So we went there and Koufax pitched a no-hitter. Wow! And of course, Willie Mays making his catch. That ball could’ve landed beyond him, or Wertz could’ve popped up.

BB:  So what about Willie Mays? What are your memories of watching him as a player?

AH:  What are my memories of him? Watching him as a player, there was this wild exuberance in the beginning, that “Say, Hey” kind of quality, that gleeful quality that he brought to the field. And then that gradually disappeared as he got older and more mature and more serious about what was going on and he realized that he wasn’t making the kind of money that he should’ve been making. He became an embittered young man, and then an embittered old man. He remained, for the years that I saw him, the greatest player that I had ever seen for that period of time. I saw him make some catches, not the Wertz catch, which was a good catch, it was not a great catch. He outran the ball, I mean that’s what it amounted to. In fact, I write in the book that he started to look over his shoulder and then thought better of it. I think what he did, he probably had great peripheral vision. He probably looked over his shoulder just to make sure the ball was where it should be. I think that’s what happened, now that I think back on it. I saw him make two other catches, maybe I described them elsewhere, one against Bobby Tolan…

BB:  I think you did.

AH:  Anyway, he was great. He hates me.

BB:  Why is that?

AH:  In ’64 I went back to cover the Phillies down the stretch. They were gonna win the pennant by ten games, that sort of thing. Sport Magazine sent me to cover them for eight games, early in the month. Giants came in. Meanwhile I get a phone call from Doubleday, they want me to do a biography of Willie Mays, they’ll pay $250,000, which was then a lot of money. So I said to Willie, and at this time I think he wasn’t very happy with me because I had turned some of our magazine interviews into paperback books. But that’s okay, that happens. I said, Doubleday wants me to do a biography of you. Eyes glitter. I said, they want to pay $250,000, and I’m guessing that’s their first offer, therefore I think we can go higher. Glitter, glitter. And then he said to me, 90-10. I said, what? He said, “Ninety for me, ten for you.” I said, fifty-fifty, that’s the way it is. “Not with me. With me, it’s 90-10.” Charlie Einstein must have had one thing with him, maybe they did a 90-10, I don’t know. I said, “I’m sorry, Willie, it’s 50-50.” Later on, he ran into Al Silverman and he said, “Does that guy Hano still write for you?” Al said, yes. “Well, tell him to kiss my ass.” And then two or three years later he saw Al Silverman, he said, “Does that guy Hano still write for you?” And Al said, yes, he does. His repertoire was limited. He said, “Well, tell him to kiss my ass.” It seemed that his anatomy and his cursing was limited. So he doesn’t like me, but I think there’s good reason. He sees today what’s happened. He sees people in their first year of play, utility second basemen, who appear maybe thirty times in a season as baserunners, make $400,00 a year. He never made $400,000 in a year, even with throwing in all the commercials and everything else. I think that pisses him off. But he was great. He played with a wonderful freedom. The only guy who came close to playing with that same sort of talent on the field was Roberto Clemente. He had that same… lacking the exuberance, he just happened to have the natural grace and ability that Mays had. I liked all those Latin ballplayers. Felipe Alou said on the phone to me, not long ago, “You did more for the Latin American ballplayer than anybody in baseball. I wrote about them. I treated them as though they were human beings. I guess nobody else did.

BB:  I know from reading a Clemente biography a few years ago, David Maraniss’s book that came out about three or four years ago. He talked a lot about that, about how in the ‘60s, the Latino players that were coming in, the press really treated them poorly.

AH:  Terribly, terribly.

BB:  Made fun of them, made fun of their speech…

AH:  Myron Cope, who’s a very good writer and a bright guy, he did that piece for Sports Illustrated. He said to Clemente, “How are you?” And Clemente went through this litany of things, so they ran a skeleton and they labeled all his injuries…

BB:  Yeah, yeah…

AH:  Yeah, you remember that. Cope didn’t understand. Bonnie and I lived for a while in Costa Rica, we were in the peace corps. You and I pass on the street, we say, “Hi, how are you? Good, how are you? Fine.” Neither one of us means what we say, it’s a courtesy. When you say to a Latino, how are you, they think you’re interested, and you stand still for thirty minutes because they go through from top to toe with a special interest in bowel movements. Cope did not realize it. When you ask Clemente how he feels, when Pittsburgh manager Danny Murtaugh asked him how he felt when he got to the stadium and he would shrug and say, “Oh, my shoulder hurts,” he would scratch him. He’d say, well, I can’t play Clemente today, his shoulder’s hurting him. Well, everybody’s shoulder hurts in baseball.

BB:  But he didn’t know not to talk about it.

AH:  He didn’t know not to talk about it. So I guess I didn’t do that. Cepeda loved me. He would bring me around and introduce me to Pagan and Marichal and those guys. They just loved me. And Alou did. I didn’t know that Alou has been married five times and has nine children. I didn’t know that. Ah, the things you learn. Anyway, what else?

BB:  After I read A Day in the Bleachers I jumped ahead a decade or two and read a lot of your Sport Magazine profiles. I love to read about sports – I mean, I love to read in general, but I think I love to read because when I was a kid I read a lot of sports books.

AH:  Sure.

BB:  And so I’ve read a lot of sports stuff, but what I read today is so different from what you were writing then. I was just wondering whom you read that influenced you.

AH:  Well, don’t forget I began reading Bill Heinz way back when he broke in, and he was one of the original “new journalism” sports writers. Nobody even talks about that. But he would talk about it, he would find out what made a guy tick, they’d have a conversation, and then he’d repeat the conversation in print. And nobody did that. And he used the word “I”. So I read him, I read everybody. I read Tom Meany, Tom Meany did a biography of Babe Ruth, and I liked it…

BB:  You quoted him in your Ruth piece, I remember that.

AH:  And Meany would go around saying nice things about me as a result. Dick Young used to say nice things about me when he was doing stuff for the Daily News, he was a beat reporter. I didn’t really know him, I saw him around, but he would say nice things about me. Heinz and I went together to cover the last day that Musial played with the Cardinals. He was doing it for Look, and I was doing it for Sport, so his piece would be coming out first. So I fed him things I had learned. When I went to Musial’s restaurant that night after the game, there was a guy, built a bit like you, and he waited the table and we talked. He had played ball with Musial as a kid. It added an extra little thing to the story, and I gave it to Heinz. He said, “You shouldn’t do that.” But his piece was coming out first. Of course I read everybody. I read Tom Wolfe, and I read Thomas Wolfe, and I read Hemingway, and I read Tolstoy. I read everything. I’m a reader. I have wet macular degeneration and I can’t read. It is the great loss of my life. It’s very difficult for me to write. I’m trying to write a book on pitching because I want to do an antidote to home run hitting. I want to talk about it, I’ll even throw in my own bit about pitching. You know I pitched a little. Shall I tell you about my walk-on?

BB:  You tell me about anything that you want to tell me about.

AH:  I was throwing a baseball around during lunch hour at LIU. A little factory in Brooklyn was where the campus was. A guy came up to me. I knew him by sight, he played on the varsity team. He said, “I’m gonna bring a glove tomorrow, would you throw to me?” I said, sure. So he brought a glove the next day and I threw to him. And then I said to him, after about five or six pitches, “I wanna throw you a screwball.” And so I threw him a screwball and he went crazy, because it was a good one. He said, “You come out Saturday, I want to introduce you to the coach.” So I went out Saturday. The coach, his name was Al Caruso, but he was only known as “All-American Al,” because Parade magazine or someplace had listed him as an Honorable Mention. They had done the first team, they had done the second team, and then there he was down there someplace. So we called him All-American Al, or Triple-A. So he looked me over. I was five-eleven, three quarters and two dimes by that time, I was just shy of six feet. Later on in the army I got run over by a truck, etc., etc., but anyway. So he grabbed a bat and he said, “Okay, Lefty, show me your best stuff.” So I threw him this screwball, and it happened to have been the best screwball I would ever throw in my entire life. It began a little bit around the waist, a little bit outside – on the plate, but a little bit outside – but he lunged, and it broke, and he looked so… he looked terrible! He missed it by this much. And the guys behind me started to chatter. “Attababy, Lefty! You got him, he’s your meat, Lefty!” So I threw him another one. I got this one up a little bit high, and it broke and he hit a one-bouncer back to the box. I mean, a little tapper. I slapped it down with my bare hand. He came running out, he said, “Never do that! You’ll break your finger!” If he had hit it straight back to the box, I could’ve caught it with my teeth, it was so soft. Anyway, so I’m starting to throw the third ball, I’m 0 and 2 on this guy, and I’m trying to make the squad…

BB:  You have to strike him out.

AH:  No, I think if I strike him out, if I do this again, he’s gonna come up to me and say, “You know, Lefty, you already have an academic scholarship, you’re gonna take space and we won’t be able to fill it with some kid coming out of Wilkesborough, blah, blah, blah…” He’ll make a reason. I don’t wanna embarrass him. So in the middle of my third windup, I threw him a fastball, and he hit it four hundred feet. And he ran around with a good baseball smirk on his face, and I made the squad! All I did was pitch batting practice, but still, it’s a good story. All-American Al. So what else?

BB:  I had a question about Sport Magazine in general. Were you assigned to things geographically? Because sometimes it appeared that you were.

AH:  When I was back in New York I did whatever was around there. But when I was on the west coast, you know, that’s an insular attitude. I was sent from Laguna Beach to Seattle to cover a basketball scandal at Seattle University!

BB:  Because it’s the west coast, it’s all the west coast.

AH:  “Oh, Hano’s out there. He’s on the west coast, he can do that.” They would never send anybody from New York to Cleveland, but this is a greater distance, much greater distance. So yeah, you’re right. It was geographic. It was wonderful. There were very few well-known writers out here at that time.

BB:  I bet.

AH:  You had some newspaper people. You had Charlie Einstein up there, me down here, down in this area. So I covered all the Dodgers, and I covered the Angels, and I covered the Giants, and I covered the Warriors when they were playing in San Francisco. The New York Times was as bad about it as anybody. They would send me to places…

BB:  So you were writing out here in the 50s and 60s. How did things change, I guess, in the “journalism game.” I know that in the East there were the Chipmonks, these young, college-educated guys.

AH:  Al Silverman told me about that. I had never heard of these Chipmunks. You’re the second person that’s ever mentioned Chipmunks to me, but Al mentioned it. I didn’t know much about that. I thought we had some pretty good writers there. I thought that Roger Kahn was good, and Roger Angell was a wonderful writer. He didn’t do much for Sport, but he was a great writer. And Ed Lynn was a very good writer. So we had good writers back there. I don’t know. Today’s writers are like Bill Plaschke doing his one-sentence paragraph. Plaschke was invited to speak at the Festival of Books that the Times puts on with UCLA, but he had to cover a Laker game up in Denver because it was getting to be that time of year, playoff time. The LA Times book editor called me and asked me whether I could fill in. So I filled in for Plaschke, and people were delighted because it was sort of a different kind of approach to the world. And I talked about what you and I are talking about, and it was good, it worked out very well as a result. I hope they invite me back again, this time for real and not as a sub. I’m going to Tucson, SABR puts on a thing every year, and I’m the speaker this year. That’ll be fun. I guess it was different then. Sports Illustrated hasn’t changed much. They’re still flashy and splashy. They catered then to a yachting crowd.

BB:  More like a sporting life than a sports magazine.

AH:  Yeah, yeah. But they did some wonderful pieces, wonderful people.

BB:  A lot of the things that you were writing about, whether you were writing about Deacon Jones or Lew Alcindor…

AH:  He was the worst interview I ever did.

BB:  Why do say that? I mean, I would guess that, because that’s his reputation.

AH:  He was, “No comment.” He showed up forty minutes late, he wouldn’t give me any time, he refused to engage me. I did my best, and I’m pretty good at getting people to engage. Impossible. Impossible.

BB:  You interviewed him when he was in college, right?

AH:  Sophomore year. I was the first person to interview him. He was off-limits his freshman year, which was ridiculous. What are they doing? Anyway, sophomore year, I was allowed. But under all these watchful eyes. What was I going to do?

BB:  Now did you come across him later, did you ever have occasion to interview him again, or the desire?

AH:  No, I didn’t, but he’s better. He’s improved considerably. But I’ll tell you a funny story. I was speaking at some writers conference and there was a fairly good-looking, beautifully formed young woman sitting in the front row there. She’s eyeing me, and I’m going along, and she’s ogling me. And I’m thinking, oh, wow! So when it’s over, I went up to her and said, “What was that all about?” She told me exactly what it was all about. She wanted Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s phone number because she wanted to lay him. She knew I had done a piece on him and a book on him, so I must know it. I said I don’t know that, and I don’t pimp for these guys anyway. But I said to her, “If I were in your place, and I wanted to do that, I would just find out where they travel and I’d meet him for breakfast one morning.” She did, and it worked.

BB:  It seemed like these pieces that you did, they were true profiles in the sense that they were more about the men than the games that they played or the numbers they had accrued.

AH:  I hope.

BB:  So that was by design when you went in?

AH:  Well it was by design that I always want to know what you do and where you do it and what else do you do? In fact, editors were pretty good about that. If I would do a one-interview story you’ve done there, and then I’d have to go and flush it out. Today it’s really like a thirty-second interview to me. Sound bites, is all it is.

BB:  It seems like if they’re doing a profile about someone, they talk to him, but it’s mostly about things that you already know.

AH:  Or they find one thing that’s sort of hot. They’re friends with Tom Hanks and they go to the same bar. That sort of stuff. And they hit on that for the first ten minutes.

BB:  Another thing, going back to your writing style again. There was a time when journalists were taught to stay out of their own stories, but you’re clearly present in all your pieces, whether just as a witness or offering opinions about what’s going on. Why did you decide to do that? I love that.

AH:  I think I began doing it when I was doing the first pieces that I did for TV Guide. Ray Robinson, who’s a very dear friend, asked me to do a piece years and years ago on Jayne Mansfield. I don’t do that kind of stuff. So he said, how about one on Mickey Rooney. I said fine, so I did a piece on Mickey Rooney. I found myself engaged with him, and it worked well. So then I did a piece on the actor Paul Douglas. You don’t remember the actor Paul Douglas. Anyway, he was very good. He had been a sports announcer and then an actor. Anyway, we had a couple drinks together, we went to his house together, it was loose. So I treated it loose, the way Tom Wolfe would have, or Hunter Thompson or people like that. I was influenced by New Journalism. I helped create New Journalism, but I was also influenced by New Journalism. Better than who, what, where, when, and why.

BB:  We talked a little about this with Kareem and your memories of that, but what makes for a good interview subject? How did you choose? Were they always assigned to you, or did you say, hey, I wanna go talk to this guy?

AH:  Usually assigned. Somebody like Al Silverman would say, do Bill Freehan. Well, I didn’t know Bill Freehan from Bill Gates. I immerse myself in all the stuff I could find about the guy. I go to the library, I read all the clips, I talk to people so I know something going in. I write a query sheet. You have notes, I would have a whole query sheet. I don’t necessarily follow it, but I wanted to have it there as a backup. I want to know as much as I can about this guy and his life. I’ll give you an example. Did you ever hear of the magazine Pageant?

BB:  No.

AH:  Okay. Pageant was a Reader’s Digest-size magazine. Took no ads. It was the writers’ magazine, that writers loved. Ray worked there for a while, Ray Robinson. Ray asked me to do a piece on Robert Ryan, the actor. He said he’s the last liberal in Hollywood. To me, that’s about a paragraph. In two thousand words, that’s a paragraph. So I went to see him. I did all the work before and I found out everything I could about him. So we’re talking, but we’re missing. And said to him, Bob, something’s going on. I’ve got you heavyweight champion of Dartmouth College at the age of fifteen, and that doesn’t work. He stopped and said, “My agent won’t let me be fifty years old. I’m fifty-three.” So he was being forty-nine for me, but his real age was fifty-three. And having said that, I guess he felt that I knew everything about him, so he started telling me about his drinking problem, and that became the story. If you do enough homework, you often find something like that will happen. The story will change on you, and you change with it. It became a very good piece. He died a few months after the piece appeared. I was killing a lot of people for a while. Killing ‘em off. John Wayne was an excellent interview, by the way. We’re one-eighty apart on almost everything, except that he not only was a great interview he also wrote nice letters back to me after the story would appear. Nobody does that. He did. Anyway, what were we talking about?

BB:  Something that you mentioned struck me. You talked about how doing a good interview changed you. How do you think you’ve been affected by interviewing all these people? Are there certain interviews, maybe, that stand out even after all these years?

AH:  Some do. Bill Holden. He was making The Horse Soldiers with John Wayne and some woman. He said, “I’ll give you an hour between twelve and one.” At twelve I went to his dressing room and we started the kind of interview that we’ve been talking about. At five minutes to one I said, “I should tell you we have only five minutes left.” He said, “You know more about me than I do. Keep going.” So we went another two hours. People don’t do that kind of work anymore when they do an interview. It’s on the spot. I will spend four or five days getting everything ready for that interview, for the major interview. Because I don’t think of it as an interview story, I think of it as a profile. A biography boiled down to two thousand words. I did a story on Jackie Coogan, who had been the kid when he was four years old in a movie with Charlie Chaplin, and then he ended up as Uncle Fester in the Addams Family. Fifty years. His life was the history of Hollywood. And so I did this story. They wanted two thousand words. I wrote sixteen thousand words and then I started boiling it down and boiling it down and boiling it down. I got it down to twenty-four hundred words and I sent it in. I can’t cut another word of this. And they loved it. He told about how after World War II he couldn’t get any jobs anywhere. He went to the Charlie Chaplin studio, Chaplin had a studio then, and Chaplin was so delighted to see him, he replayed the movie The Kid, and he played the piano to supply the music, and they both cried. It’s things like that, if you work hard enough you can get this sort of stuff out of people, but nobody works hard enough anymore. That’s a statement about society. This is a disposable society, a lazy, laid-back society, and that’s not how I grew up. My old man was out work in 1934 for six months, and every day, seven days a week, he’d put his feet up on a wooden chair and he’d block his shoes, and he’d go out into that jungle. Every day for six months until he found a job. Today this is the bailout time. What else you got?

BB:  A lot of what I was reading was stuff that you had written in the ’60s, which was obviously a real turbulent time. You were writing about people who were kind of going against the establishment, whether it was someone like Bob Gibson or Joe Namath or whoever. How did you see the sporting world kind of reflecting what was going on in general society?

AH:  I think exactly the way you described. I think there were the establishment folks and there were the anti-establishment folks. There’s Ron Fairly – he’ll do everything to please the boss, and there’s Bob Gibson who won’t do a thing to please the boss. One makes a much better interview than the other, I discovered that. And it fits more with my attitude towards life. I don’t know which came first, but I’m a non-establishment person. As I get older I get more mellow, by the way, so I can’t even say that anymore.

BB:  There was one quote I wanted to read to you from A Day in the Bleachers. You were talking about Sal Maglie.

AH:  Yeah.

BB:  He had been removed from the game, and as he was walking off the people were cheering for him. And you were talking about how he had failed.

AH:  And the best thing in life is failure.

BB:  Let me read it to you. “All the great people and great things in life are failures. It is in doing what we cannot do but must try to do that humans rise to their exalted fulfillment. Maglie had tried to do with an old man’s arm and back what a young man might not have been able to do as well. Of such failures is greatness made.”

AH:  Yeah. I’d like to believe that. Whether I truly believe it or not, I don’t know. And I don’t think it’s fair to say that all great things in life are failures. I like to think that people should try more than they can accomplish and reach for the stars and then, if satisfied, grab a cloud and fly. I don’t think people try hard enough. That’s certainly been true in the last eight years in this country and that administration. That was a laid-back, lousy, lewd eight years that we had. I think Obama’s gonna be okay. I think he’s gonna try. I hope he stiffens his back a little bit more than he’s doing. I think he’s gonna be okay. Thank you for quoting that. It’s a nice quote.

BB:  It was something that really jumped out at me when I read the book the first time. I think that sometimes you can learn more about yourself when you fail than when you succeed. I mentioned to you before that I’m a teacher, and I coach the basketball team at our school also. I always think that I can give my players more when we lose than when we win. When we win, it’s just, “Good job.”

AH:  Do you know Murry Kempton, the writer, at all? He was a New York Post writer. He covered the Don Larsen perfect game, but he covered it by talking only about Sal Maglie. Each inning he would describe what Maglie was doing. You know, Maglie went, again, eight innings. The same way. And this time he struck out the side in his last inning, but Larsen decided to pitch a perfect game that day. But it made for a wonderful column. So here’s a guy fails in ’54, and then in ’56 he’s pitching an even better game against a better team…

BB:  On a bigger stage.

AH:  People didn’t like Maglie. A lot of people discovered he was a very nice man, besides that snarling, hard-bitten, brush-‘em-back kind of pitcher.

BB:  You know, it’s funny, because you talked about him very sympathetically, or heroically even. I always loved reading baseball biographies, and that’s a big reason why I’m a Yankee fan, because I read about Ruth and DiMaggio and Gehrig and all the rest. So Sal Maglie, in my head, was always the villain.

AH:  The bad guy.

BB:  They talked about his thick beard, and he was always the bad guy. So it was really interesting to read him cast in a different light.

AH:  And then he joins the Dodgers. Carl Furrillo probably hated him more than anybody in the world, and he had to change his whole attitude toward him.

BB:  I don’t want to take up too much of your Sunday, but a couple of other things. We talked about “A Day in the Bleachers,” for instance, as being incredibly lucky that things kind of happened the way that they did. Do you feel like there are other things that you’ve written that people don’t know about that maybe we should? Maybe things didn’t break the way they should’ve.

AH:  Well, I wrote the first western novel with a black protagonist. Don Meade, when they received the manuscript, said, “We like this, and we’re gonna run it, and we’ll pay you your advance, but you’re gonna have to change the race of your protagonist because there are no black cowboys.” And I said, well, beginning with this book there will be one. Grudgingly, and nicely, they okayed it. Then about a month before the book came out, a nonfiction work came out called The Black Cowboy. Turned out that seventy percent of all cowboys after the Civil War were black. In that case I forced my hand. I’ve written some other things that people don’t know about because I wrote under a series of pseudonyms. I wrote a short story, a suspense story set far in the future, and it deals with book burning. Radio Free Europe broadcast it. It’s appeared in at least fifteen foreign languages, it’s been anthologized maybe twenty times. And that’s a short story other people don’t know about.

BB:  Is it under your name?

AH:  It’s under the name Matthew Gant. It’s called “The Crate at Outpost 1.” When a library closed in south Laguna, they read this short story aloud because it has to do with book burning. Unbeknownst to them, the writer was present!

BB:  Did you raise your hand?

AH:  Actually, I only heard about from somebody. The writer was present in the town, but not in the building. When we went to the Alamo, I said to the librarian there, I said, “Do you have a copy of “The Raven and the Sword,” by Matthew Gant?” And she said, “Oh, yeah, we have that.” I said, “I wrote it,” and they almost died. They brought it out and had me sign it. So I’ve done some other things. And the fact that that Mineral King story was quoted in a Supreme Court decision. That’s good stuff. Very heady. A lawyer calls and says you’re part of a Supreme Court decision. Wow. So anyway, I’ve had a wonderful and lucky life.

BB:  So as you look back on that wonderful and lucky life, you said to me early on that you didn’t think of yourself as a sportswriter but as a writer. What’s your legacy?

AH:  My legacy here in town is that I worked my ass off to keep Laguna Beach, Laguna Beach.

BB:  Oh, yeah? Tell me about that.

AH:  We have a low-profile town because of me. The city council back in 1970 wanted to pass a zoning law…

BB:  You’re talking about the height of the buildings?

AH:  Right. To build a string of high-rise hotels from Broadway to Bluebird Canyon, about a mile and an eighth. A string of ten-story, hundred-foot tall hotels. I started a movement against it and we brought out an initiative to make a building height limit in the city of Laguna Beach so this could never happen again. We were the first city in America to use the initiative process to establish a city-wide building height limit, and it passed. Thirty-six feet, three stories. Nothing ever taller will be built in Laguna, because of me. So that’s how they know me here. And I write a column that appears in an environmental organization every month. I write a monthly column for them, and some of that stuff is as good as anything I’ve ever done. I don’t know. Bonnie keeps saying I have to write out our obituaries so somebody will know what to publish. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to write my obituary. I don’t want to close the door yet. If I ever get back to writing that pitching book, then I want to do another book about my brother who was killed in WWII. A book called, “How Am I Doing, Big Brother?”

BB:  Have you ever thought about writing your personal memoirs?

AH:  I tried. At six hundred pages it was already much, much, much too meaty and much too long and not very good and I didn’t like it. It never went anywhere. I might figure out a way to do it in three hundred pages instead of six hundred pages. I’m getting old. I’m getting tired.

[Painting by Mark Ulriksen]

By Hank Waddles

For Yankee fans, Roger Clemens is a difficult case — even before all his recent steroid trouble. If you’re of my generation, you grew up despising him. Even though he pitched for Boston during an era when we all knew the Red Sox would never win anything, he was still a fearsome enemy. He was the gunslinger who stole your girlfriend before shooting the sheriff right between the eyes on his way out of town. There was some pleasure to be had when his skills began to decline during his twilight years in Boston, but it wasn’t too much of a surprise when he became great again — if irrelevant — during his time in Toronto. And when he came to New York in 1999, if all wasn’t forgotten, at least it was put aside. First of all, the Yanks were adding the best pitcher in the game; second, they were twisting the knife in the heart of Red Sox Nation. It was a win-win.

Roger helped the Yankees to a couple more championships, won his 300th game, endeared himself to the Boss and legions of fans, and said all the right things about wearing a Yankee cap into the Hall of Fame. But then came the defection to Houston, the self-serving Stadium announcement of his return to New York, and, finally, the steroid allegations. There was an embarrassment that we had once embraced him, and the ashes in our mouths were there to remind us that we had gotten exactly what we deserved.

But there is more to Roger Clemens. Sure, he cut corners, but he also worked harder than any of his teammates. Yes, he is hopelessly selfish and egotistical, but he’d be the first player to volunteer for visits to children’s hospitals. Whether you loved him once or never at all, whether you think he deserves a plaque in Cooperstown or a spot in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, you have to admit that Roger Clemens matters. In Jeff Pearlman’s latest book, The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality, he does his typically thorough job of cutting through the Roger Clemens mythology and getting to the heart of the man who was once considered one of the five greatest pitchers of all time. A few weeks ago Jeff was generous enough to spend part of his morning talking with me about the book, the steroid era, and a few other topics. Enjoy…

BronxBanter:  You’ve said that you love writing books, but when I spoke to you a while back while you were deep in this one, you described it as hell. How do those two things go together?

Pearlman:  The only thing I can really compare it to is running marathons. I run a lot of marathons. When I first start running a marathon, I’m really excited, and I love the first thirteen miles, and then the next four miles I sort of start feeling it, and then once you hit the twenties you start thinking, “I’m never gonna do this again. I’m neeeever doing this again.” And when you cross the finish line your first thought is, “Thank god this is over so I never have to do it again.” And then ten minutes later you’re thinking about the next marathon. And that’s how I feel about writing books. It’s nightmarish. It’s hellish. You’re solely focused — usually for a year and a half or two years — on one person, one subject, for all that time. You’re looking for these little details that seem insignificant to someone who doesn’t do it for a living, I would guess, but they become these gold nuggets for you. Finding out what someone used to drink for breakfast in the morning, silly little things like that that you think mean nothing, but they mean everything when you’re working on a book. Detail is what counts. When I was a kid I read every book imaginable, every sports book I could find, and I didn’t really differentiate between the good ones and the bad ones and the mediocre ones because I didn’t know any better. But now, when I’m reading someone else’s book, I really am looking for the details. If you’re writing a book about Reggie Jackson, everybody knows all there is to know about his three home run game in the World Series, but when you learn what sort of glasses he was wearing or where he got his hair cut or what he was saying to Mickey Rivers right before the game, that’s interesting.

BB:  How does that compare to writing feature articles? You used the marathon analogy; are these just sprints if you’re writing a piece for SI or some other magazine?

JP:  One of the best pieces of advice I got for writing a book was when I was doing my first book, which was about the Mets. Jon Wertheim, who is a friend of mine and writes for SI, said to me, the best thing you can do is think of each chapter as an article, as a lengthy article. So I would compare an article, if it’s long, to writing a chapter. And a book is just like a big monsoon.

BB:  I heard David Maraniss say once that it was much easier to write about dead people. If he was writing a biography about a living subject – and I think he was referring to his Clinton book – he would just pretend that the person was dead. Did you seek out Clemens at all, or did you pretend he was dead?

JP:  Well, I did reach out, and it was made clear he wouldn’t talk. Hence, it really was as if he was dead to me. I didn’t think of it in Maraniss’s terms, but he’s 100% right. And it’s definitely easier to write about a deceased person, because:
A. He won’t come back and say, “That’s not right.”
B. You don’t waste all that time trying to get him to talk.
C. People are more open when they know the person won’t get mad.
D. He can’t sue you for anything.

BB:  Just a few years ago it seemed like Clemens was on his way to becoming Ted Williams – a phenomenally great player whose career resume obscured some serious character flaws, but then everything changed. Is that what attracted you to this story?

JP:  Just being blunt here, the first and foremost thing when you’re trying to figure out who to write about, is you have to think, who will people possibly be interested in reading? You never know for sure if a book is gonna sell, but I know for sure that the Mike Mussina biography is not gonna sell. The Mike Pagliarulo Story. The Jeff Kent Story. Not gonna sell. There are certain guys you know aren’t gonna sell, and you’re doing this for a living, so you do have to think, who’s someone who at least has a ballpark chance of intriguing people enough on a national scale. And then you think, who are guys who are intriguing to me that fit that criteria.

BB:  When we think of professional athletes — especially the great ones — we usually imagine them as being absolutely dominant in their youth, but that wasn’t exactly true of Clemens, was it?

JP:  Nope, he was a fat little dough boy from Ohio. Loved sports, but was merely good, not even close to great. Throughout Little League he tossed the ball; could spot his pitches, so that was good. But no velocity, no second pitch. He was probably a bit better at football, because he had the size. But until he reached junior college, there was nothing remarkable about the guy. Nothing at all.

BB:  What about his twilight years in Boston? Even though Clemens went on to win another 150 games after leaving the Red Sox, you make it clear that Duquette made the right decision in letting him go, right?

JP:  Of course he did. Who signs a 30-year-old declining pitching to a long-term deal? It’d be very, very stupid, and Duquette’s judgment was right. He didn’t know what Clemens would soon be up to. Not his fault at all.

BB:  It seems he was up to steroids. What is the steroid timeline for Clemens? When did it start and what led him down that road?

JP:  Well, he started when he got to Toronto. And the turning point is pretty clear: His last four years with Boston he was 40-39, oft-injured, overweight and down in velocity. He was approaching his mid-30s, and clearly on the decline. Dan Duquette, the GM, said so much—that Clemens was in his “twilight.” Well, Clemens had two choices: Try and hold on as long as possible, or turn to PEDs. We know which decision he made.

BB:  So what was it like when Clemens walked into the Yankee clubhouse? He had been universally hated, I think, by the Yankees. In fact, I love that you wrote about the Matt Nokes beaning. I remember watching that game and cheering as Nokes fired the ball back at him. So with all that history, how was he able to fit in?

JP:  Well, baseball players have short memories. If a guy comes along who helps your team, helps you win, that’s pretty much good enough, and that’s the truth. You know, he showed up, the guy could throw hard, he’s got this legacy… It’s one thing to hate a guy from afar, but when he’s right in front of you, it’s “Hey, Roger! Good to see you!”

BB:  One aspect of this whole thing that’s actually kind of confusing is that Clemens can’t be easily defined. On the one hand, he’s the stereotypical self-centered jock – cheats on his wife, pitches the day after his mother dies, misses the birth of a child, makes excuses for poor performance – but on the other, he actually does a lot of really good things.

JP:  Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting. It’s funny. When you write a book like this, it’s very tempting to kind of play amateur psychologist and read into a guy’s actions. But I actually try to be as objective as I can, because I’m not a psychologist. So I just sort of lay it out. But I do think it’s interesting that he’s sort of a yin and yang sort of guy. He’s surly, but he’d show up at children’s hospitals regularly, especially in Boston with the Jimmy Fund. Cheap, known to be cheap, but took teammates out to dinner. Family man, great family man, but had an affair with a seventeen-year-old singer.

BB:  When we spoke about your Bonds book, I offered the idea that I could understand how an elite athlete might see no difference between steroids, even though they’re illegal, and getting Lasik surgery, for example. In both situations they’re looking for an edge. Even if I agree with you that steroid use is bad for the game, bad for the individual, isn’t it possible that I just have no idea what it’s like to be an athlete at that level? Without making excuses for them – which, I guess, it sounds like I’m doing – the culture – and I include teammates, coaches, media, and fans – the culture demands that these guys do whatever it takes to get on the field and perform at their highest level. Isn’t there a double standard in there someplace?

JP:  No, because I think we all have that expectation, I really do. Jason Blair, the New York Times reporter, was under pressure to write to a certain standard to write these colorful, well-crafted stories with insight into America. When he wasn’t quite good enough, he cheated and he plagiarized. Well, there’s no excuse for that. I know what you’re saying, I know what you’re saying. To me it comes down to, if you’re not good enough… And they’ll say, Oh, I just need it stay healthy, or, I just need that little edge, or, I was languishing at triple A. Well, maybe some people were meant to languish at triple A. Maybe Jason Blair wasn’t a good enough writer to write for the New York Times. For years I wanted to write for GQ. I could never get a bite from GQ. I’m not gonna plagiarize to write for GQ. Maybe they just don’t think I’m good enough. That’s fine, I’ll go write somewhere else or I’ll go do something else with my career if I have to. So I don’t buy it. I hate when people say you have no idea what it’s like to be a professional athlete. I know what it’s like to be a school teacher. I know what it’s like to be a journalist. I know what it’s like to be a plumber. I know what it’s like to be a welder. It’s not so different. There’s private pressure with all these jobs. There’s a lot more pressure when you’re making thirty thousand dollars a year than when you’re making thirty million. I just disagree with you, buddy.

BB:  That’s okay. To be honest with you, I’ve gone different ways on this issue. There are times when I’ve thought I totally get it, I totally see why they’re doing it, and there are times when I agree with what you’re saying, that people should just accept what their abilities are. So what about the legacies of these players? Do we throw out this whole era? After all, we still don’t know who those other 103 names are. We’re only twenty-four hours into the fall of Manny Ramírez, but what do you make of Manny specifically? Are you surprized? And what about all these guys?

JP:  I was a little surprised with Manny. You can’t be totally shocked by anybody, but I did find Manny a bit surprising. I always saw Manny as sort of an idiot…

BB:  Yeah, a friend of mine said something similar to me in an email. He felt like it would just take too much work for Manny to do all that.

JP:  Right! The guy just seems like he walks up, “I’ll just swing this bat at the ball and I’ll hit it.” And then he goes back to thinking about breasts.

BB:  Right.

JP:  I sort of feel like with this era it reminds me of those movies about reform schools. There’s always some scene where someone in the class cheats, and the strict professor says, “Either we find out who cheated or the entire class fails.” You know, it’s one of those things. What was that movie? Carpe Diem? You know what I’m talking about?

BB: Dead Poets Society.

JP:  Yeah, Dead Poets. I think that happened in Dead Poets Society. I kind of feel like that about this whole era. I hate it, because I covered it. You guys all cheated. No one stepped up, so to hell with your era. You deserve nothing. No one said anything. I never heard it. I never heard a manager sit down and say in spring training, if any of you guys are using, we don’t want that here. I never heard a GM say that. So to hell with ‘em.

BB:  That reminds of something from the book. When the Yankees signed Jason Giambi, I remember as a Yankee fan really wishing that they hadn’t. Because to me it seemed like he was the steroid poster child, even more than Barry Bonds at the time. I thought that if baseball ever got around to doing something about this that he would be one who would suffer. So I felt like if I had that feeling, surely there must be people in baseball who had that feeling. But I was really surprised by the scene that you painted with Brian Cashman watching him on TV and saying, “Whatever you were on in Oakland, get back on it.” What can you tell me about that?

JP:  Well, I think what you said is true. You sit there and watch, and you think – well that guy must be using, that guy’s probably using, that guy’s using. And then these executives come along and say we had no idea. And the GMs come along and say we had no idea, and the managers come along and say we had no idea. Well I was a twenty-four year old freakin’ dill weed who had no idea about anything, and I knew these guys were using, so you sure as hell must have know something, had some suspicion. So I’m kind of with you with a lot of these guys. It doesn’t make any sense to me. You had no idea? None of you had any idea? You had absolutely no idea that Ken Caminiti, or that José Canseco – who the fans were chanting “Steroids! Steroids!” in Fenway? You had no idea these guys were losing? So, I’m with you.

BB:  Okay, so what do we do about this era, the Steroid Era? I suppose we can probably never be sure who’s guilty and who isn’t, so what happens to Griffey, Jeter, Frank Thomas — people that we still presume to be innocent? Are they innocent until proven guilty, or the other way around?

JP:  It sucks. It really, really, really sucks. As far as I’m concerned, this whole era is tainted. It’s unfair to the non-users, and yet, it’s not really unfair, because where were these guys when it counted? Let’s say Jeter, for example, has never used. Well, why wasn’t he speaking out against the destruction of his beloved game? Who would be a more powerful mouthpiece? Same with Junior and Thomas? Where were their voices? So it’s like that Bill Joel song—we’ll all go down together. Not 100% fair, but true.

BB:  If you’ve got a Hall of Ballot in your hands ten or fifteen years from now, what do you with those names? If we’re going to exclude Bonds, McGwire, and the other “known” offenders, what about Jeter and Griffey? If they’re all guilty, either by association or through their silent complicity, do they get in, or do you shut out this entire era?

JP:  No, I vote for Jeter and Griffey. I vote with hope.

BB:  Another thing. What attracts you to stories like Bonds and Clemens? You mentioned that obviously you need to write about something that has some sort of universal appeal, but also these are guys who have damaged their public image pretty seriously. So I’m wondering, would it be interesting to you at all to write about somebody who hasn’t, like Derek Jeter or Tiger Woods or somebody like that?

JP:  I would love to write about a non-jerk, or a guy who’s not perceived as a jerk. I can’t explain it… It’s not that I’m looking for it. I don’t like writing about steroids, I really don’t. But I do think sometimes characters kind of come in controversial packages.

BB: Well, the two guys I mentioned, Jeter and Tiger, a lot of people are interested in them, and they have really high profiles…

JP:  But they don’t interest me though.

BB:  I think that people may want to know about them, but there’s the feeling that there may not be anything there to know.

JP:  Right. The one thing you don’t want to write a book about is a guy who is all about the game, a hundred percent about the game. Jeter, it just seems like he’s a hundred percent about baseball. Tiger Woods is all about golf. If you’re writing a biography about Tiger Woods it would be all about his golf greatness and how he’s kind of ignored all other areas of his life. Well, that doesn’t sound fun to me – as far as a writer. He may be a fascinating guy within the framework or the parameters of his sport, but I don’t write that book. It’s like the guy you went to high school with who was really good at math and his whole life was math. I don’t wanna hang out with that guy. Or even the football player who was great at football and all he wanted to do was talk about football. Those guys bore the hell out of me. I want guys who are well-rounded and had interesting lives and dynamic lives and had big events happen in their lives. Derek Jeter, he has an African-American father and a white mother, he’s from Kalamazoo, he was a first-round draft pick, and he really has great bat control. The drama in his career: he dated Mariah Carey for a little while, and now that he’s getting older people say he can’t field the position. There better be a lot more than that, or it’s just not that interesting. It’ll sell, because it’s Derek Jeter, but the be-all end-all isn’t selling, the be-all end-all is I’m gonna devote a year and a half, two years, two and a half years of my life to this guy. He better be interesting.

Our old pal Allen Barra sat down with me recently to talk about his new book, Yogi: Eternal Yankee.

Bronx Banter: You make the argument that Yogi was a better catcher than Johnny Bench. How close was Roy Campanella to Yogi during the Fifties? Was there any catcher even close to these two at the time?

Allen Barra: In Rio Bravo, Walter Brennan asks John Wayne if Ricky Nelson is faster than Dean Martin. “I’d hate to have to live on the difference,” says Duke. The real truth is that if you take Campanella at this peak, there’s probably very little difference between Berra, Bench and Campy. The only thing I might add to that is that it’s possible that, if given the same material to work with, Johnny and Roy could have gotten as much out of as many mediocre pitchers as well as Yogi did. But Yogi did do it, and that has to give him the edge.

BB: Did Yogi really deserve the 1954 and ‘55 MVP awards? In ‘54 the Indians won and Bobby Avila had a big year, also playing a key defensive position, and Mickey Mantle had a monstrous year. And in ’55 Mantle again had another ridiculous year.

AB: That’s a tough question. I don’t know if anyone’s done a “Value over Replacement Factor” kind of analysis for those years, but it’s arguable that Yogi might have had the highest value over anyone who could have replaced him at that position. In 1954 my guess is that the difference between Mantle and Berra wasn’t that great. Avila played a key defensive position, but not more key than Yogi’s. It probably should have been Mantle in ’55, but then I think there’s an equally good case that it probably should have been Yogi in 1950 instead of Phil Rizzuto. What’s interesting is that so many people thought that it should have been Yogi those years. I think that tells us something very important about him.

BB. Was there any year that Yogi should have won an MVP when he didn’t?

AB: Well, as I just mentioned, there was 1950. And you could turn the ’54 argument on its head and ask why Al Rosen, an Indian, wins the MVP [in 1953] when Yogi’s team won the pennant. I’m not saying Rosen didn’t deserve it, I’m just saying that if Yogi had won it, nobody would have gone to the barricades to say he didn’t deserve it, and I’d argue that he was also one of the top five players in the league in 1952. It’s more difficult to figure the value of a top-flight catcher. He did so many things to hold his pitching staffs together back then, I just don’t know if you can figure his worth compared to payers at other positions.

BB: It ‘s well known that Yogi helped Elston Howard when he joined the team but did Yogi ever question or go on the record about the Yankees’ institutional racism?

AB: No, I’m not aware that anyone in that period did. For one thing, when you talked to the players of that era, they all say, “Well, every year we heard that they were brining black players up through the minor league system, and we thought each year would be the next year.” I think there’s something to that – Gil McDougald told me something to that effect. I mean, the Yankee players were ready for it. They had no objections at all to integrating the team. It was only after a few seasons of George Weiss signing a black player for the minor league system and then trading him that they began to catch on. I’d have to say, though, that while the Yankees front office was as racist in its policies as the Boston Red Sox, the Yankees themselves got good marks from Elston and Arlene Howard and Larry Doby for their overall attitudes. Both the Howards and Doby put Yogi at the top of their list of good guys. Arlene Howard told me that Yogi and Elston “hit it off right away.”

BB. I know that walk rates were up in the Fifties and comparatively Yogi didn’t walk that much. But he was contact hitter and it’s hard to point this out as a major flaw. That said, were there any noticeable holes in his game, either offensively or in the field?

AB: No, none, and it ought to be mentioned that though Yogi didn’t walk that much, his on-base average was actually six points better than Johnny Bench’s in about the same number of games, and that’s what’s important. No, Yogi had no flaws. We all know he wasn’t much of a catcher until Bill Dickey learned him all of his experience, but by 1949 he was a very good catcher, and by 1950 the Yankee staff was pretty much relying on him to call their pitches. Or rather, he knew them well enough to call their pitches for them – did I just make some kind of Yogiism? Anyway, all that crap in David Halberstam’s The Summer of ’49 about Allie [Reynolds] and Yogi not getting along is fiction. All the Yankees told me so.

BB: I remember the The Summer of ’49 being criticized in one of the Bill James books.

AB: The errors and misrepresentations I found in both Halberstam’s baseball books, The Summer of ’49 and October ’64, made me call into question his entire reputation. If I had time, I’d go check out some of his other books and see if they are as sloppily written and reported. I found dozens of mistakes, but far worse, some stories that just seemed to have been invented. I’ll confine myself to just one. Halberstam seems to have thought that Allie Reynolds was pissed off at Yogi for trying to call his pitches and threatened to cross him up and hit him in the chest with a ball. Where he got this story was not explained. Reynolds never said anything like that, and all the Yankees I talked to said it was nonsense. Phil Rizzuto was actually angry about it. “It couldn’t have happened without me knowing about it,” he said, “and I never saw or heard anything like it.” In truth, all the Yankee pitchers understood that the pitcher always calls his own pitches and the catcher is merely suggesting. But after about a year of working with Reynolds, Ed Lopat, and Vic Raschi, and I guess you have to include the architect of the Yankees pitching staff, Jim “Milkman” Turner, Yogi had won everyone’s confidence, and they all agreed that Yogi knew their stuff well enough to call it right. They almost never shook him off. But I’m getting ahead of the question. Halberstam included several stories like the Reynolds-Berra thing and never said where he got them. I think they are nonsense and he invented them because they sounded good.

BB: Speaking of Reynolds, tell us the story about Yogi famously dropping a pop up in one of Allie’s 1951 no-hitters?

AB: The story is more intriguing than I had originally heard. It’s September 28, 1951. Ted Williams – Yogi’s pal – is at the plate: one out left to go for the no-hitter and, of course, Ted Williams is the batter. Who else? That’s the way they’d do it in a movie, right? Reynolds had already pitched a no-hitter that year, so this would have given his a record no-hitter. Yogi tells Reynolds he wants a fast ball up and in. Allie obliges. Williams pops it up. Reynolds immediately perceived that it was going to be a tough play: the wind was blowing the ball away from Yogi. Reynolds, who was running in from the mound, later recalled. “I hope to make a grab for it. I was afraid I spiked Yogi on the hand when I jumped over him. Yogi dropped it.” Settling back behind the plate, Yogi called for the same pitch to Williams in the exact same spot – how much guts did that take? Williams popped it up again, Yogi battled the swirling winds again and made a snow cone catch. There are two other stories connected to this. Carmen Berra was in a New Jersey hospital recovering from having given birth to their son, Tim. She was listening on the radio, and when Yogi dropped the first pop-up, she screamed “Yoggeeeee!” and nurses came running down the corridor. She told them, “My husband dropped the ball!” The second story is that a year later Yogi, the American League’s MVP, was working in men and boys’ clothing in a Newark department store to help support his family. A smart-ass kid tells him not to misjudge the sleeve length, “Like you misjudged the pop-up in that Allie Reynolds game.” Yogi politely reminded that he had held on to the second one, and Yogi said later, “He wasn’t a bad kid.”

BB: If Yogi didn’t actually say half of the things he is quoted as having said, is he really as funny as he appears? I have read accounts that Yogi wasn’t nearly the wit that Casey was, and in fact, his persona was created largely by Joe Garagiola on the banquet circuit.

AB: Casey was a wit. He prepared things to say to the press. Yogi was never intentionally funny. Yogiisms – the real Yogiisms – tend to fall into two categories: the malapropisms (like in 1947 at Yogi Berra Day in St Louis, when he got tongue-tied and said, “I’d like to thank everyone for making this day necessary”) and the little bits of Zen wisdom (like “When you come to the fork in the road, take it,” which is simply quick and accurate directions on how to get to his house – he lives on the top of a circle). Joe Garagiola didn’t invent Yogi, though he did broaden him a bit. Yogi invented Yogi – no one else could have.

BB: Yogi has benefited from his public image greatly over the years, as a spokesman for Yoo-Hoo and more recently Aflac. How shrewd a businessman is he?

AB: You just answered your own question. He was shrewd enough to exploit his own image – he couldn’t beat him, so he joined him. Something momentous in the history of commercials came about in 1960 when Yogi hooked up with advertising genius George Lois, who would later go on to fame as the creator of the MTV logo and his “In Your Face!” campaign for ESPN. Lois shrewdly perceived that Yogi’s real appeal was not as a straight pitchman, so he came up with a commercial for Puss’n’Boots that had Yogi talking to a cat. People loved it. His teammates kidded him about it, but Yogi’s response was “Did you ever get paid for talking to a cat?” By the way, the voice of the cat was Whitey Ford’s, which Yogi didn’t recognize.

BB: Did your feelings about Yogi change dramatically during the writing of the book?

AB: Nope, he was Yogi when I started and Yogi when I finished. But to know him more was to love him more.

BB: What did you learn about him during your research that came as a surprise to you?

AB: Well, I didn’t really get this until I finished the book, and I rewrote the introduction to accommodate this insight. Basically, it’s this – what did Jacques Barzun say about those who would earn the hearts and minds of Americans had better learn baseball? Well, if there is one life you would study to understand baseball, it would be Yogi Berra’s. From hitting the first pinch-hit home run in World Series history in 1947 to coaching with the Houston Astros in that great series with the Mets four decades later, Yogi Berra was involved in more great baseball moments than any player or possibly two players you could name. When I finally realized at the end is that Yogi’s life is a cutaway view of baseball in the 20th century.

BB: Yogi was clearly respected by the writers. Was the same universally true amongst the players? The reason I ask is because I know he came up against some attitudes, the famous harmonica incident comes to mind, when he took over as the Yankee skipper in ’64.

AB: Actually, I’d say it was the other way around. The players had complete respect for Yogi. I’d say it was the writers, especially the younger sportswriters who grew up with stories about what a joker and clown Yogi was and were disappointed to find out that he wasn’t very quotable. The harmonica incident was nothing. The problem may actually have been the older players, Yogi’s former teammates – particularly Mantle. After the Yankees lost the doubleheader to Chicago, Phil Linz was noodling with a harmonica on the team bus and Yogi told him to stop. Linz didn’t hear him and asked the guys around him “What did he say?” Instead of showing a little maturity, Mantle said “He said ‘Play it louder.’” If Mantle had told Linz “he said shut the f___ up,” the whole thing wouldn’t have happened and the press would have had nothing to harp on later.

BB: How would you evaluate Yogi as a manager?

AB: Well, Billy Martin said Yogi was too nice a guy to be a good manager, but Yogi won two pennants – same as Billy. If he’d had Ford available after the first game in the ’64 Series, Yogi probably would have won as many World Series as Martin. I’d have to say on that evidence that Yogi was a pretty good manager.

BB: Did you seek Yogi’s participation in this book? If not, what are the benefits of not collaborating directly with a subject?

AB: Well, in this case the truth is the benefits were that Yogi’s memory isn’t quite what it once was, so it was much more reliable to quote from interviews given many years ago – I mean, how many times did Yogi need to be asked about his relationship with Mickey Mantle or about what happened in the Copa incident? The truth is that I between materials that were made available to me, people I needed to talk to, and questions I was able to ask Yogi at Museum events. I got everything I wanted.

BB: You don’t dig into his personal life too deeply. I know his son Dale had a lot of troubles. Why did you choose to steer clear of a thorough examination of his personal life like Richard Ben Cramer did with his DiMaggio book?

AB: First of all, I loathed Cramer’s book. He dug into DiMaggio’s personal life to such a degree that he fantasized about Joe and Marilyn Monroe in the shower. Exactly whose fantasies were we reading about – DiMaggio’s or Cramer’s? Second, I don’t know why you think that I didn’t look into Yogi’s personal life. I would argue that I got as deep into Yogi’s life as Cramer did into Joe’s. As for Dale’s brief drug problem, I gave the basic facts and let it go. The book is about Yogi, not Dale. I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that because someone’s life is devoid of personal scandal that he didn’t have a “personal life.” For Mickey Mantle, a personal life was his relationship with his mistresses; for Yogi, it was carrying pictures of his mother in his wallet. Everyone’s life is personal in his own way.

BB: This is something that Jonathan Mahler mentioned in his review for the New York Times Book Review. How did you react to that piece?

BB: I call it what it was: negative. A lot of people say, Well, gee, you got a full page review in the New York Times. I say, Yeah, but it was really nasty – the only bad review the book has gotten. It is a really weird review. In one paragraph he’d say “Berra loves Yogi too much to be objective,” and in the next paragraph, “It’s like he’s holding him at arm’s length.” My reaction was “How can I be guilty of both at the same time?” Some of his criticism was bizarre. Talking about my account of Yogi’s experience during D-Day, he wrote, “Here and elsewhere, Barra sticks to the facts, relying on other writers, in this case Cornelius Ryan, to set the scene for him. The book suffers as a result.” Say what? The book suffers by sticking to the facts? Cornelius Ryan’s account of D-Day is definitive: why shouldn’t it be referred to? I mean, didn’t Mahler use many other writers to “set the scene” when he wrote The Bronx Is Burning? What really baffles me is that, if he had turned the page, which I guess he failed to do, he would have seen several paragraphs by Yogi, talking about D-Day and his war experiences. It’s all right there in Yogi’s voice. What is he complaining about? Mahler says things like “Barra never gets into Yogi’s inner life.” I shook my head at that. There are perhaps 100 pages devoted to Yogi’s home life, both in St. Louis and in New Jersey, including several scenes in their home. There are perhaps 30,000 of Yogi’s words from his own books, other interviews, and interviews I’ve done with him. If that doesn’t constitute “an inner life,” I’d say Yogi must not have one. I guess Mahler wanted me to dig up more dirt on Yogi than I was able to find and was upset that I didn’t find any.

BB: Do you know Mahler?

AB: Not exactly. Years ago when he was working on The Bronx is Burning he sent me some emails asking for advice on some background materials, which I was happy to offer. As I recall, I think I steered him towards some stuff that was in the Village Voice. He’s sent me several emails over the years, to which I replied. In the Times review, he acted as if he had never heard of me. In the review, he praised two books and stories I had written for the New York Times more than six years ago, as if I hadn’t written anything since then – as if I haven’t been writing for the Wall Street Journal over the last six years and didn’t write a best seller, The Last Coach, about Bear Bryant. He must have known that I had been writing for the Journal because he got my email and sent me copies of stories he had written, including one on the Steinbrenners he wrote for the New York Times last year. It was a pretty good piece, but I pointed out an error he had made on when George Steinbrenner bought the team. Maybe he was a little miffed at that? Anyway, I think he should have informed the Book Review editors that we had been in touch for several years and let them make up their own minds about that.

BB: Is there one aspect of Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee that you would have liked to have seen discussed more in the reviews?

AB: What I miss are the long, detailed reviews books used to get years ago, where a critic could devote some space to talking about something he particularly liked in a book that the average reader might regard as a bit tangential. In regard to Yogi Berra, I would have liked for someone to write about the atmosphere of certain places I described, for example, “Dago Hill” – if I may use the phrase – in St. Louis, where Yogi grew up. The descriptions of the sandlots and the games the kids played there. The scenes – and I apologize to Billy Joel for this – in Italian restaurants, where I took pains to describe the food, the smells , the feeling of being there. In the 1940s and 1950s the Yankee stayed in the Soreno Hotel in St. Petersburg, a huge old relic of a bygone era. Or Toots Shor’s saloon in New York, which was the ultimate sports hangout in the ‘50s. Also, the scenes in the Berras’ home in Montclair and the Berra-Rizutto bowling alley in Clifton, New Jersey – things like that. I find it very irritating to hear a criticism like I offered only “a superficial portrait of Berra off the field” when I wrote thousands of words describing the world Yogi grew up and lived in in such detail. I would have liked to see someone notice a little of that.

BB: You’ve written three biographies about iconic figures–Wyatt Earp, Bear Bryant and now Yogi. Is there any connection between these figures or what attracted you to them?

AB: Well, let me put it this way: I’ve always loved writing about people who everyone knows but about whom there has been no definitive biography. I like people around whom stories and legends build up, whether dark, like Earp, or light, such as Yogi. I like pealing away the layers of legend and finding not just the truth but how the legends originated and evolved.

BB: Who, pray tell, would you like to write about next?

AB: Next I’m probably going to do a book on three men – an Italian, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a Jew, Meyer Lansky, and an Irishman, Owney Madden. Three men from radically different backgrounds who attainted their version of the American dream, and in so doing established the modern crime syndicate.

What does this mean for baseball coverage? Russell Adams and Tim Marchman presented a telling look at the industry in an April 7 Wall Street Journal article. Being a baseball reporter for a newspaper used to be a job people would kill for. Now it’s likely a job that will be killed.

With that in mind, I’ve begun asking numerous questions of veteran baseball writers and columnists to get their respective takes on the industry. This series of Q&As will run periodically throughout the season and beyond, as trends develop. The first is with Newsday’s Kat O’Brien, a Yankees beat writer since 2007. Prior to moving to New York, O’Brien covered the Texas Rangers for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram from 2003-06.

In her short time on the beat, O’Brien has witnessed the sweeping changes and cutbacks in the industry firsthand, and has decided to leave the beat to go to graduate school. The following exchange was conducted over a series of e-mails last week.

Will Weiss: What made you want to be a sportswriter? Even more specifically, what made you want to be on a beat?

Kat O’Brien: I never really set out to be a sportswriter. I was interested in writing and journalism, and sort of wound up in sports. I went to Notre Dame, and initially worked on both sports and news on the daily (Mon-Fri) student newspaper. That was too time-consuming, so I focused on sports, as it was a lot more fun and more-read among the students. For a long time, I thought I would switch back to newswriting, but I kept having great opportunities on the sports side and I enjoyed it. Doing a beat was kind of the natural progression. Baseball made sense as it was one of my favorite sports, and I also speak Spanish, which is useful in covering baseball.

WW: When and how did you use your Spanish? I’m curious, because I speak the language also and have written several anecdotes through the years about my adventures in the Dominican Republic, and with various Latino players in the Yankee clubhouse.

KOB: I double majored in Spanish in college after studying abroad. I’ve gone to the Dominican Republic a few times to do some baseball stories. I use it more on a day-to-day basis, both in interviewing players whose English skills are minimal (i.e. Melky Cabrera) and in talking to players who are comfortable in both languages (i.e. Mariano Rivera and Bobby Abreu). Even with the latter, I often find it helps build a rapport with players when they know you speak their language. It was huge with Alfonso Soriano when he got traded over to the Rangers, who I was covering at the time.

WW: Did anything specific happen to make you thinking about changing your career path?

KOB: It wasn’t any one thing but a combination of things. The writing jobs I had aspired to long-term, like writing takeout features and so on, barely exist anymore. I feel that there are other jobs I would enjoy doing and would be good at, and that this would be a good time to move in that direction. I’ll miss a lot about writing and covering baseball, particularly the relationships you form on the job. But this is the best move for me long-term.

WW: What changes in the industry have you witnessed in your time on the beat?

KOB: Wow, so many, and that is in just a few years. The Internet was not even a shadow of what it is now when I began. Now the Internet is priority No. 1, and it should be. The blogs have become extremely important, and most of those did not even exist when I started.

I also think there is a tendency towards more negativity and sensationalism, not necessarily on the beat, but in the media in general. This may be at least in part due to trying to compete with Internet sites, some of which are more gossip than news, but it’s not a good change in my opinion.

WW: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said recently that newspapers should give up trying to compete (with Internet sites). In your opinion, are newspapers dead? If not, what would you do to try to revive them?

KOB: I really hope that newspapers are not dead or on life support. That said, things don’t look good for most papers at the moment. One thing that is crucial is finding a way to get revenue from the internet. One idea I like is that of getting as many papers as possible to join a consortium. Then a person could pay a subscription fee — say $10-20 per month — and get access to all those papers. Because it’s not realistic to think people are going to pay to read every paper they ever look at online, but papers need revenue.

But papers have to stop cutting costs so much that their best and brightest are either forced out or leave because they don’t think the quality of the product is worth sticking around and being a part of.

WW: You told me offline that given the current state of affairs, leaving the beat is the best decision for you and your future. Why?

KOB: Unfortunately, I am not at all confident about the future of newspapers. I’m sure there will always be some sort of journalism by which people get their news and information. But it’s been devastating to watch newspapers get torn apart in the last couple years, due partly to the failure of the industry to get on-board with the internet early and adapt, and partly to economic conditions.

I see so many colleagues who have been forced from their jobs, or who want to try something else but are constricted due to family considerations, children and mortgages. I am young enough that I can go back to school, so I am doing that while I can.

WW: While it may not be the case with the major New York papers, numerous papers around the country have cut costs by not sending writers to road games, etc., and in some cases local teams receive no hometown coverage at all. Is this a disservice?

KOB: It is a disservice, but unfortunately an unavoidable one right now. Many papers are barely surviving — slashing jobs and costs wherever they can. Local team coverage is one of those costs being cut.

WW: Is the philosophical divide between print and online generational?

KOB: I think there is somewhat of a generational divide between print and online. I see a bigger generational divide over blogging, though. That seems by and large to be more accepted among younger people.

WW: I remember that some of the beat writers who are staunch traditionalists resisted to the blog movement; not only that they were being required to post to blogs, but to the group of writers that has made a name through the blogosphere. What was your reaction to this, and what’s your opinion of baseball writing on the web? Who do you read now and how do you see baseball reporting growing?

KOB: I think there is a place for all sorts of baseball coverage, both traditional and of the blog variety. I think the web permits a much broader amount of coverage. There’s a long list of blogs that I follow. But an example of the different types of writing would be in three of the Yankees blogs I read most often: RiverAveBlues, BronxBanter and WasWatching. All three do a great job of keeping up with Yankees stuff, but each has a different slant/angle. Each site has its favorites and its least favorites on the team, and each provides a different writing style.

Still, there can be a danger in losing sight of the fact that the blogs don’t necessarily provide the same information as the traditional newspapers/sites since many are giving opinion or compiling information instead of doing reporting themselves. I am not saying this in any “anti-blog” fashion, just that I think both are necessary.

WW: Thanks for the compliments and for following us here at BB. What, if anything, could both the blog sites and the newspapers do better to coexist?

KOB: Probably give each other a little more credit where credit is due. Not in all cases, but there are definitely some snarky comments from one side to the other, and vice versa.

WW: What will you miss most about the beat? The least?

KOB: Most: A number of things. Being there to get the story firsthand, the story that people are talking about and reading about and you are giving it to them. Writing for a large and passionate audience. And I’ll especially miss the people — the other writers and the people I am writing about such as players, coaches, managers, GMs, and behind-the-scenes folks.

Least: Witnessing and worrying about the constant decline in the newspaper industry. And it might be nice to have a somewhat more normal schedule, with less travel and more nights and weekends off.

WW: What’s next for you? Do you see yourself eventually getting back into sport media, or editorial?

KOB: I’m going back to school. I start a dual degree program at the University of Pennsylvania next month, getting a Wharton MBA and a Masters of Arts in International Studies from the Lauder Institute. I don’t envision myself getting back into sports media or editorial on a full-time basis. I would love to keep my hand in by doing free-lance writing. After I graduate I might get involved in the business side of sports, but that’s yet to be determined. I’ll miss sportswriting and all my friends in the biz, though.

Imagine that it’s the spring of, say 1931, and you’re starting to think that Babe Ruth just might end up being one of the best players ever to grip a bat. The recent downturn in the economy has left you without a job, so you figure, hey, why not spend the year following the Babe – every game, every at bat, every swing. You drive to places like Boston and Philadelphia, take the train to Washington, and ride busses to Detroit and Chicago. Along the way, you make friends in the bleachers in Cleveland, catch a series with a cousin in St. Louis, and sleep on couches in all corners of the American League. Your bank account feels the bite of your mission, your wife and children become strangers, and close friends question your sanity, but somehow it’s still worth it. I mean, this is Babe Ruth we’re talking about, right? If you could, you’d go back in time and do it in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you?

Now flash forward to 2008 and the Babe Ruth of this generation, Tiger Woods. Writer Bob Smiley shadowed Tiger for every swing of every hole of every tournament in places like San Diego, Augusta, and Dubai, and the result is an extremely engaging book, Follow the Roar: Tailing Tiger for All 604 Holes of His Most Spectacular Season. Last week Bob was kind enough to spend some time talking about his journey. Check it out…

BronxBanter: One of my favorite aspects of the book was that it wasn’t just about Tiger Woods, it was secretly about you, so I thought we might start with Bob Smiley. How important was golf to you when you were growing up?

Bob Smiley: It was really important. It was the first and really only sport I could every really play with my dad. I mean, I played little league and basketball, but golf was something that he taught me how to do when I was eight years old. We would go out and he would try to teach me the point of the game, but I would purposely hit it in the sand trap so I could play in the sand. He really wanted me to embrace the fact that golf is fun and when you get older you’ll appreciate the challenge of it. So for me it was always just a great place, and I had so many memories with my father as I was growing up. When my parents split up when I was a teenager that sort of remained the one spot, even to this day, where he and I still see each other is on the golf course.

Banter: Do you remember the first time you beat your dad?

Smiley: I don’t. I think what’s sad is that I can tell you more about the first time Tiger Woods beat his dad. [Laughing.] But there was a stretch when I was in my teens when I went from breaking a hundred to breaking eighty in the course of a summer or four or five months. What’s cool is the memory I do have is how getting beaten by me, I’ve never seen him more proud.

Banter: So you golfed for a bit at Princeton, right?

Smiley: Yeah, I played all four years in high school and was captain of our golf team. I got to be pretty good, sort of a low single-digit handicap, and went off to Princeton. My freshman year I had no intention of playing golf, but the roommate that I was just randomly assigned with was one of the new freshmen recruited for the golf team. So sophomore year he said, look, you gotta try out. And if this is a Pac-10 school or something, no way I’d make it. But shooting in the 70s was good enough to make the Princeton team, and I had one not-so-glorious semester on the team that was a lot of fun. But it also sort of drove home the fact that, alright, I’m not gonna be going pro so I should focus more on writing and what my real passions are.

Banter: That was my next question. So what led you to writing? When did you make that realization?

Smiley: Definitely my sophomore year. When I went to school I majored in politics, and after a year and half or so of taking all sorts of classes, I realized, “Gosh, I hate this!” It was sort of these circular arguments that have been going on for two hundred years that no one really wins, except maybe every four years in an election when someone thinks they win for a few days until the arguments start up again. So I was looking at sort of what I was doing in school, and Princeton was home to the Princeton Tiger, which is the second oldest college humor magazine behind the Harvard Lampoon. I was really involved in that, and had more fun staying up all night with fifteen or twenty guys putting together a magazine and making each other laugh, and I realized, man, if there’s a way that I can make a living writing and making people laugh, how much cooler is that than sitting with a bunch of other politicians trying to hash out debates that you’ll never win?

Banter: So did you go directly to Hollywood?

Smiley: It’s funny. My sophomore year I switched from politics to English as my major and picked up a minor in theater and started doing a lot more writing and playwriting and got to take some great classes with guest playwrights and stuff like that. So by the time I graduated I knew that I wanted to return to Southern California where I grew up and pursue TV writing. So my first job was just a gopher/production assistant on a TV sitcom called “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.” There was no writing in my job at all. It was picking up lunch and coffee and trying to make the writers happy, but it gave me a chance to look in on that world and see how these guys structure a story and what makes one joke better than another. So I sort of worked my way up, and a few years later I was able to write a first-page script for a sitcom called “Yes, Dear” on CBS, and that led to a full-time staff job the next year.

Banter: So how long did you stick with that? That series was around for a few years, right?

Smiley: I came on that show in its third season, and it ran for six, so I was there for four years, the last two on the writing staff. My old boss used to refer to our show as toxic waste for CBS because the critics didn’t like us, but we were so cheap and our ratings were so good that they couldn’t find any justifiable way to cancel it. But it was a blast, and again, it was a dozen writers sitting around the table all day making each other laugh. It was so different compared to friends of mine who had gone the I-banking route after college. Sometimes the hours were the same, but the things we did at work were so bizarre. I remember one time we were sitting around trying to figure out a story, and one of the creators of “Yes, Dear,” a guy named Greg García, who went on and created the show “My Name is Earl,” we’re sort of just beating our heads against the wall trying to figure out the story, and finally Greg just looked up and said, “Does anybody wanna go bowling?” And so here it is at 11:30 in the morning, and we all get in our cars and drive to the bowling alley and go bowling for a couple hours, have lunch, come back, and resume our thoughts around the table. Doing stuff like that to sort of get yourself unstuck. But it was great. “Yes, Dear” went off the air at the end of ‘05. The demise of the sitcom had been coming for a while, so that was, to some degree, the end of that stage of my writing career.

Banter: I had another question about that actually. Listening to you talk, I was wondering something. As you’re sitting in this room with all the writers, what was that like for you? I don’t know what the lag time was, if it was a couple weeks later or a month later that you saw your actual script on TV. How rewarding is that as opposed to when you’re writing a book. This is months and months of your life, as opposed to that quick turnaround with the sitcom.

Smiley: Obviously when you’re writing a book, you’re writing the book by yourself. TV is so collaborative. I think a lot of people outside the TV world think that if your name’s on the script then you did one hundred percent of the work. The way it really works, usually you come up with story ideas as a group, and once the story gets approved, then usually you get assigned that story and your boss says, alright, go off and write an outline and write a forty-five or fifty-page script. So you write the script, but then of course it goes back to the same dozen writers. Now as a group you end up re-writing the script. And then comes shoot night and you end up pitching jokes on the fly. In an ideal situation, when your show that you wrote finally airs, you hope that you can see your stamp on it and your long list of jokes that were in your first draft and stayed all the way to the end, which is really cool, rewarding, and great to hear feedback from people. But a book, it’s all you. If people love it, it’s you. If people hate it, there’s nobody else to blame.

Banter: Which brings us to Tiger. I spent about two or three holes tailing Tiger at Riviera one year along with my pregnant wife – which I wouldn’t recommend, by the way – but it was enough to know how crazy it is in his gallery. What made you decide to spend even that first day with him, before you even had the idea for the book? Initially you went out to spend one day with him for an article on ESPN.com, is that correct?

Smiley: Yeah, every year during the off-season Tiger would come up to Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks for his annual invitational tournament, and I didn’t even know if I wanted to go – and that sort of goes back to a question I’ll get to later – but I was not necessarily a huge Tiger fan. But my wife said, “Look, we’re not doing anything today, you’re essentially still unemployed, just go have fun.” ESPN’s editor at the time, Jason Sobel, said, “Go along, take some notes, see if anything interesting happens.” So I did, and all Tiger did that day was shoot a 62, set a tournament record, flirted with 59, and this was on a Friday. By the end of Friday, after that 62 the tournament was over. He had built up such a huge lead. And I had a blast just meeting people outside the ropes and experiences like that that made me think, this is fun as a golfer, even though I’m not a huge Tiger fan. I knew this would be fun for a lot of readers to experience secondhand.

Banter: So then that article was well-received, but how did you then make the leap, or make the commitment, I guess, and convince someone to go along with that to do this for every hole for the whole season?

Smiley: Part of it was a few weeks later for Christmas I received the A.J. Jacobs book, The Year of Living Biblically. That’s the story of A.J.’s attempts to live an entire year living out the Bible as literally as possible. It’s sort of what’s called a “stunt book” in the publishing world. But based on the feedback I’d received from my first Tiger article, I thought, wow, what a great adventure it would be to do this all year. It really wasn’t until around Christmas time that I really put those pieces together. What happened from there was just a total fluke blessing. My TV agency that represents me for TV writing also has a book publishing wing. So they put me in touch with one of their book agents, I pitched him the idea over the phone, I had a proposal to him the next day, and two days after that the proposal was out to fourteen different publishing houses. So from me thinking, hey, this might be a funny idea, to having it in the hands of fourteen publishers, was about a week. It was sort of insane. And then there were no final deals in place leading up to Tiger’s season opener down at Torrey Pines, the Buick Invitational, but I figured I could drive to San Diego, I could do that one on my own and hope that a deal closes. The morning I was leaving to drive to San Diego, Harper Collins officially came on board and said, hey, we want you to do this, it would be fun.

Banter: In the beginning, you were not a Tiger fan. It seems like there a lot of people out there who are just kind of tired of him, I suppose. But the end result is that the book almost reads like a love letter to him.

Smiley:
[Laughter.]

Banter: Maybe that’s a little bit extreme, but talk about your conversion.

Smiley: Well, it’s funny you say that, because a buddy of mine who’s a screen writer gave me some advice. He said, “As absurd as this seems, think of this as a romantic comedy, on some level, between you and Tiger.”

Banter: Yeah, that’s kinda how it reads.

Smiley: You’re right, there’s an element of that. Starting off… To say that Tiger and I were competitors is a gigantic exaggeration. We just both grew up playing golf in Southern California. He was always far better than anybody else. So I knew of Tiger from when I was a teenager. He became inescapable. And then in college he started winning the U.S. Amateurs, and he was already at that age sort of seen as “The One.” To me, as a teenage guy, personally you get intimated by that and you find lots of reasons to dislike somebody. For me it was Tiger’s coldness and his dad, some of the crazy things his dad said about how Tiger would change the world. A lot of eye rolling, I think, by a lot of people. And just Tiger’s coldness on the course. You know, he wasn’t an Arnold Palmer kind of guy, waving to the crowds. And so for me what I sort of learned over the course of the year watching Tiger, among other things, was me kind of coming to respect and appreciate what Tiger’s doing as a golfer, and also understanding that the personality he needs to succeed is not Arnold Palmer high-fiving people. For Tiger, in his mind, to pull off his goal, which is to surpass Jack Nicklaus and be the greatest golfer ever, he needs to be serious and he needs to focus. Off the course he’s a different guy.

Banter: Going in, you obviously knew the same thing that I did, which was that Tiger is the best player in the world, but by the end you seemed to have an even deeper appreciation. By the end you were rooting for him, actively, but also it seemed like you had more of an appreciation for him, just as a player. What did you see up close that I might not see watching on TV?

Smiley: When you’re watching TV, they show Tiger hit a shot. You cut away to Phil Mickelson, you cut to this guy, cut to that guy, you come back. Tiger’s settling in over the putt, he hits it, and it goes in. And it all just seems far too easy and robotic and unrelatable. Unrelatable to us everyday hacks. And so one of the things I saw on a bunch of occasions was just the incredible thought and brainpower that goes into Tiger working his way around the golf course. It’s not just tee up the ball, rip it, it goes down the middle, it goes on the green, you make the putt. There’s a lot of strategy. There’s reading the wind, and almost even overanalyzing to the point where sometimes maybe he even overthinks a little too much. But appreciating the fact that how hard it is for him to really do what he does. It’s not as easy as he sometimes makes it look. It’s not easy, and it’s certainly not easy to do it as consistently as he did it in 2008.

Banter: This was a really great season for him, but probably for you it was good in some ways that his season was cut short, but did you ever think about what it would’ve meant had Tiger won the grand slam last year and you were there documenting every hole?

Smiley: Absolutely. Even though I wasn’t a Tiger fan when the year started, there were a lot of things I’d seen and heard and read that made me really convinced that before he ever started the year that he would have a great year. And it was the fact that ending the 2007 season, he’d won – and I might get this wrong – three out of his last four events. And I’d witnessed him pull away at the Tiger World Challenge in December, and his caddy had said he’d never seen Tiger play this well. And then looking at the four majors as they were set up in 2008, they were, for the most part, all on courses that Tiger’s had some success on. So all that put together made me think, man, if there were a year for this to happen this would be it. I was prepared for a good season. The grand slam would’ve been amazing, but what was funny was after Tiger won his four events in a row in ’08, the conversation changed from “Can Tiger win the grand slam?” to “Can Tiger win every tournament he plays?”

Banter: I remember that, yeah. Do you think we’ll see Tiger win a slam?

Smiley: Man… It’s hard. Just looking at how he’s already done in 2009 makes me appreciate even more what he was able to do in 2008. I’d love to see it happen, but it’s gonna have to happen in the next three or four years when he’s still sort of at the peak.

Banter: The last author I interviewed was a guy named Arnold Hano, who’s eighty-six years old. He wrote a relatively well-known book about the World Series game where Willie Mays made his over-the-shoulder catch. He’s old enough that when he was a kid he actually went to Yankee Stadium and watched Babe Ruth play. So we were talking about this, and he talked about how he was a Giants fan growing up in New York, but he was also a Babe Ruth fan. He would go see the Yankees because Babe Ruth was playing. What I said to was that I always tell people – and I love Tiger Woods, for a lot of reasons – but I tell people that you should watch him because this is Babe Ruth. We’re watching Babe Ruth. Is he that good? There’s all this debate: Is he the best golfer? Is he maybe even the best athlete? Where do you stand on that now?

Smiley: This might not be a unique statement, but what’s interesting about golf is that compared to other sports, it’s an individual sport. It’s so easy, obviously, to say he’s the best player now. But I think it’s not a stretch to say that he’s the most dominant golfer of all time, especially when you consider the field for events in this era are sometimes a hundred and fifty players. Back in the Bobby Jones era the fields were a lot smaller, and the number of golfers in the world that were actually talented enough to win regularly was pretty small too. Here, living in 2009, it’s not unusual for kids from age three to start being groomed to be top-tier athletes. So there certainly are plenty of people gunning for Tiger, gunning to be great, and the fact that he’s been able to continue being as dominant makes it all the more impressive, I think.

Banter: So what was it like following him at the Match Play?

Smiley: It was cool to be back, it was great to see him in action. He made his return by hitting his approach shot on the first hole to about five feet and making birdie. And then on the second hole he hits driver, iron to three feet for essentially a tap-in eagle. In that moment I was…

Banter: Were you surprised? Or were you just, okay, here he is, this is what he does?

Smiley: I was surprised that he started that hot. Let’s be honest. A lot of things Tiger says, intentionally there’s a lot of gamesmanship in a lot of things he says to intimidate his opponents. And that goes into his winning strategy of never, except for the U.S. Open last year, revealing a weakness. And so Tiger comes into the Match Play saying he’s great, everything feels great, and you sort of wonder if that’s true. So when he starts off birdie-eagle, all of a sudden there was this thought of, wow, he really is better than he was before. But then after walking eighteen holes, I sort of felt like, okay, I’ve seen his return, but I don’t need to do this again. I didn’t feel like I was learning any other great lessons or there was another adventure to be had. It kind of felt like, okay, I’ve done this, time to move on. So I left on Thursday. I left on Thursday morning before Tiger’s second round and driving home I got a call to say that he’d lost, so apparently I left at the right time.

Banter: Or maybe, the wrong time. Maybe you were the good luck charm.

Smiley: And now watching him struggle at Doral, I guess that argument could be made.

Banter: You mentioned the U.S. Open, and I couldn’t let you go without talking about that. I think it was one of the more phenomenal sporting events that I remember seeing, and that’s just from watching it on TV. What was it like for you being there? I know you were writing a book and you were kind of a reporter, but you still were pretty much a fan.

Smiley: By the time U.S. Open came around I was a fanatic, and I write about this in the book. Tiger actually seemed to be fine. He had actually seemed to be fine, because he had just come off his knee surgery at the Open, and he seemed to be fine all the way up until his tee shot at 18 on Thursday. I was with a guy named Craig Nelson whom I’d met at the Buick Invitational at the beginning of the year, and he came back and joined me for Tiger’s return at the Open. We were standing there behind the 18th tee and Tiger hits his tee shot and hits a nice beautiful high fade in the middle of the fairway, and yet Tiger didn’t bend down to pick up his tee, he didn’t twirl his club. He just sort of acted dead. He turned around and walked stiffly but normally back to his caddy. Just from watching him all year, I knew that something was wrong and knew in a second that his knee was bothering him, that something wasn’t right. What was cool for me as a Tiger fan and as a writer, is that the U.S. Open showed a lot of people, including me, that Tiger has real struggles, and kind of what I said earlier, that winning for him is not always easy and that he’s not invincible. So then to recognize that and then to see him still find a way to win anyway was the greatest U.S. Open in fifty years. And again, like golf can be, it all came down to a putt here, a putt there, that if they hadn’t gone in, nobody would be telling this story.

Banter: I think for me, the most amazing thing about that was the Monday playoff. I’m a school teacher, so I was at work teaching that day, and a friend of mine and I had gotten someone to pipe the broadcast into our rooms so we could watch, and we were calling back and forth after each hole. And what was amazing to me was as I’d be walking around in between classes or at lunchtime, how many people were talking about it, people who were not golf fans, not even sports fans. My wife was here at home with my parents, and they were watching. It just was amazing how many people were focused on this.

Smiley: Yeah, a buddy of mine works in Dallas, he works for a big hotel company. So many people in their corporate offices were trying to watch the streaming coverage on-line that it slowed down the internet for everybody in the entire building to the point where they had to send out a memo telling everybody: you can only watch the U.S. Open in the following four locations. I heard similar stories from a lot of people. Something about it resonated. It was the fact that it was the great Tiger Woods…

Banter: And Rocco!

Smiley: And Rocco! The underdog of all underdogs, and a guy who is the complete opposite to Tiger, personality-wise, on the course.

Banter: And don’t you think that he was really the perfect opponent? If that had been Mickelson it would’ve been big, because he’s the main rival…

Smiley: But I don’t think people in your school would’ve been quite as gripped by it. There was something about either Tiger or Rocco that would appeal to somebody.

Banter: And I think it would’ve been as big a story – maybe even a bigger story – if Rocco had won. I don’t know if it would’ve resonated…

Smiley: It certainly would’ve been the greatest defeat of Tiger’s career, just when you think of everything he did, to then come up short. That would’ve been going against the great Tiger legend. But the fact that he came into 18 again knowing he needed a birdie on Monday, and he did it again.

Banter: I really did enjoy this book. It was a lot of fun.

Smiley: Thanks. It’s sort of weird. It’s the kind of book that, to be fair, when people hear about the book they ask, tell me what it’s like to hang out with Tiger, tell me about all your personal moments together. When I pitched the book I knew that I was dealing with a guy who’s about as hard to get access to as anybody. So when I originally pitched the book, Harper Collins said, make this a memoir, make this about your journey. And then after Tiger’s year started taking shape and he won his first four events, it quickly became, “Well, also make this the definitive chronicle of Tiger’s year.”

Banter: Right.

Smiley: Obviously, who wouldn’t have loved to have Tiger come along and say, let me let you into the fold for this year? But I knew that was a low percentage possibility.

Banter: That was one interesting part of it, like I said at the very top of this. It was about you and your journey, and you were literally chasing Tiger, following him. Not that you were trying to get access to him all the time, but there was always that possibility out there.

Smiley: Yeah, in a perfect world the perfect Afterword for this book begins with me writing, “So I finally met Tiger Woods…” We’ll see. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibilities, so we’ll see.

“It bothers me to have been careless on some of these small details, especially when I was painstaking about most others…I trusted my notes and my memory on some smaller details, and there were obviously a few instances in which I didn’t have things quite right. That’s my fault, and I’ll take the blame…But if people are waiting for me to break down and confess that I made everything up, it’s not going to happen.”
—Matt McCarthy, USA Today

Mr. McCarthy has asserted that the Times has “crafted a chronology that simply doesn’t exist.” We did not create any chronology. The chronology already existed and we merely followed the chronology of the season that Mr. McCarthy claimed to be writing about. Obviously, some errors are endemic to publishing. No one understands that more than a daily newspaper such as ours. Rather, what we wrote about were events and quotations attributed to real people that could not possibly have taken place as Mr. McCarthy asserts. Given that many people to whom those events and quotes are ascribed are claiming that they didn’t happen, the examples that we found to be provably false lend credence to those concerns.

Alan Schwarz, New York Times

Last week, Benjamin Hill and Alan Schwarz wrote an article in the New York Times about Matt McCarthy’s recent memoir, Odd Man Out. The piece pointed out a series of factual errors made by McCarthy while calling into question the authenticy of the book.  A second article lists the errors that the Times reporters found.

I read Odd Man Out and enjoyed it.  I also interviewed McCarthy for this site.  Needless to say, I was disturbed when I read the two articles in the Times.  

If he was guilty of embellishing the truth or of flat-out lying, I reasoned, McCarthy deserved condemnation. That said, I was struck by how forcefully the Times went after McCarthy.  I thought it was a stretch on their part to associate McCarthy with James Frey, infamous for his memoir fraud in A Million Little Pieces.  Many of errors that were listed seemed innocuous to me, and suggested sloppiness on the part of McCarthy and Viking, his publisher.  I didn’t find anything malicious behind it.  On the other hand, the sheer amount of mistakes the Times brought to light was troubling.  They had McCarthy placing people in places where they were not, having conversations that could not have occured, at least not as how they have been presented in the book.  

I don’t think McCarthy was trying to be lurid necessarily, but the accumulation of so many errors led me to question his authority as a writer.  I was left wondering, “What was really true?” Whether McCarthy was being naive or arrogant, I can’t say.  But his carelessness, as reported by the Times, did not reflect well on either him or the book. 

As a writer, my greatest concern is how this could potentially make things more difficult on the rest of us, simply by creating a standard of excellence that can’t be met without stretching the truth.

McCarthy toured the country promoting the book last week.   He first responded to the Times’ articles in this piece for the USA Today.   Here is one TV interview McCarthy did later in the week, and another.

I conducted a second Q&A with McCarthy via e-mail this week, and I also spoke to Alan Schwarz.  McCarthy has been amiable and professional with me.  I know other journalists in the industry who think highly of him.  I also know he’s in the business of promoting his book.  I’ve known Schwarz for several years and think he is a first-class reporter, as well as an exceedingly ethical and even-handed journalist. 

I will leave it to you to decide what to make of this fine mess.

BB: Your book has achieved a good deal of early success, but that was marred last week by the New York Times article which reported many inaccuracies in your story.

MM: I stand by the contents of Odd Man Out. The journals I kept were very specific and extremely detailed with regards to dialogue. I was a ballplayer keeping a journal, not David Halberstam, and so I made several mistakes in chronology. But I can say this with absolute certainty: not a single one of them changes the tone or meaning of my story, or makes me doubt the truth of the experience as I wrote it down in the book. The lies James Frey and Herman Rosenblat told were fundamental to and pervasive in their narratives – to compare that with a mix-up here and there in dates in Odd Man Out, which has no true effect on the book’s nature, is at best grossly unfair and at worst sensationalistic on the part of a newspaper.

BB: So do you believe this is an unfair attack on the part of the Times?

MM: It appears to me that Benjamin Hill and Alan Schwarz in the New York Times story are writing a partisan article and acting as advocates for Tom Kotchman et al., and using their lawyer’s letter as gospel truth and accepting their statements as fact. I find it interesting that Benjamin Hill and Alan Schwartz have constructed a detailed chronology of dates, which is 90% of their “error’ argument, when in Odd Man Out I do not use dates. I use only general references (a day later, two weeks earlier). Many of their claims to so called “errors” in the book have been created because Hill and Schwarz assign dates to events that I did not assign dates to. Each of the players and former players quoted in the New York Times piece are naturally nit-picking at minor details since they are not represented in a positive light. They are not going after the fundamental truths in Odd Man Out.

BB: I understand that you didn’t use dates, but since you are writing about a specific season it is easy enough to re-construct one. Why do you think the Times would want to pick on you?

MM: I don’t know if I should be the one to speculate about why the Times wrote their article. But I encourage your readers to check out my book and read the Times article and decide for themselves. I’ve received an overwhelmingly positive response from people who have read both.

BB: You mentioned that you were a ball player keeping journals and not David Halberstam. Still, you were writing a book for publication, and I’m sure that Halberstam, too, needed someone to double-check his reporting at times… Can you understand how people might feel that if the facts that can be checked don’t check out how it throws the rest of the material into doubt, lending credence to the criticisms by Kotchman, etc?

MM: My book contains tens of thousands of details that I recounted from journals I kept. For example, from pages 102-104 I recount my performance against the Ogden Raptors inning by inning (and pitch by pitch in some cases) and it was all accurate down to the type of pitch I was throwing. At one point I write that Manuel Melo popped out to end the inning when it turns out someone else popped out to end the inning. In no way does this oversight change anything material about the book.

BB: Based on the kinds of errors you admit to, why should readers not question the veracity of the remainder of the book?

MM: I have acknowledged several errors related to box scores and chronology. Not a single one of them changes the tone or meaning of my story.

BB: The Times pointed out dozens of errors in their piece. Were they in fact correct on the amount of errors?

MM: No. Numerous situations were taken out of context. Is it an error for me to write “Breslow had something like 9 scoreless innings” when in fact he had 12 scoreless innings? They also consider it an error for me to quote Jon Steitz as saying, “I’ve pitched in 11 games and lost all of them,” despite the fact that he went 0-11 that season. They say it’s an error for me to say Joe Saunders “made batters look silly” because he gave up four runs in a game even though batters were swinging at balls over their heads and in the dirt.

BB: I think it is understandable that you could make some of these errors. However, the more puzzling ones include the incident on Larry King night where a person is placed at a scene where, as the Times claims, he was not. Was the Times correct in pointing out this mistake? And if so, do you see how that could effectively undermine your credibility as an author?

MM: Regarding Larry King Night: I said that King’s kid went around punching a bunch of my teammates in the groin and I mistakenly included Matt Brown in this list. I regret including him in the list, but it doesn’t change the fact that King’s kids were in the clubhouse before the game wreaking havoc on our midsections.

BB: I thought the suggestion that your book was like A Million Little Pieces was a stretch. Still, while a fraud, Fray was writing about himself, while you are being accused of hurting other people’s reputations. Do you regret any misleading characterizations that were the result of an error on your part?

MM: No. This book wasn’t about the box scores. It was about brining people closer to the game and I’ve received countless emails from fans who now feel closer to the game. It’s a great feeling.

BB: Have you had any direct contact with the authors of the Times piece since it appeared?

MM: No. I offered to correct the errors they have attributed to me and the errors that appear in their own article, but they said it wasn’t necessary…

BB: Who at the Times did you contact to correct the errors? Did they give any reason why it wasn’t necessary?

MM: I created a point by point rebuttal and gave it to the head of publicity at Viking who was in frequent contact with the Times authors. She offered them my rebuttal but they said they were going ahead with their story and didn’t need my side.

BB: How did the writing process work with your publisher?

MM: I worked closely with my editor on the organization and the overall tone and message of the book and it went through copy-editing and was vetted by legal.

BB: Looking back on it now, would you have used a fact-checker? Or do you feel that the mistakes that have been publicized are essentially innocuous?

MM: I suppose the simple answer is that I would’ve used a fact-checker.

BB: SI ran an excerpt from the book. What involvement, if any, did they have with the publication of the book?

MM: SI read an early draft of the manuscript and requested the opportunity to excerpt a portion.

BB: I know you faced some criticism even before the Times article came out last week. An Angels blogger left a comment in the thread for our original interview. Still, what was your initial reaction when you read the article in the Times?

MM: There have been a wide range of responses to the book and at some level you prepare yourself for anything.

BB: But how did it make you feel? Angry? Do you feel that in essence, the Times’ article is making legitimate criticisms or do you feel that it is an unfair attack?

MM: You’re upset any time someone takes things out of context, but that’s to be expected and there’s nothing you can do about it but defend your work.

BB: You say that you stand by your book. Would you have changed anything in your process knowing what you do now? What has this taught you?

MM: In hindsight it would have been nice to have gone through the box scores from the 350 to 400 high school, college, and minor league games that I played in.

BB: I read that Viking is considering putting out a revised version of the book. Doesn’t that suggest that they are unhappy with the book, or that they could be facing a lawsuit?

MM: Viking was misquoted in the USA Today article when it says, “McCarthy’s publisher, Viking, said it’s likely a revised version of the book will be released…” There are no plans for a revised version at this time.

BB: How has this controversy impacted sales?

MM: Sales have remained strong- last week the book was number 21 on the New York Times Best Seller List.

* * * *

I contacted Schwarz to get his take on some of McCarthy’s responses. I have set up Schwarz’s answers in paragraph form for easier reading.

Mr. McCarthy’s claims that he was denied an opportunity to, in his words, ‘rebut’ his own errors are not only preposterous but adds to his growing list of outright falsehoods. Our interview spanned more than an hour and was comprised mostly of my describing to him every substantive error — sometimes literally showing him things like transaction logs that proved he had the wrong person involved in some distasteful scene, and a copy of his own original contract that proved one quote-laden episode with Tony Reagins to be completely fabricated — and explaining its relevance to the larger picture. He offered explanations for each of them (and I put the most relevant ones in the article so that his side was fairly represented). This went on for probably 10 or 12 of the most substantial errors, with my explaining at every juncture that, while some were clearly not that big of a deal, they called into question the veracity of many other, less provably false scenes that real people said had not happened as he described.

I said that I would be happy to quote portions of the journals he said corrorborated what he had written in the book; he declined to let me do so. I asked to speak with the teammates he claimed supported him; he declined to say who they were.

At the end of the interview, I asked Mr. McCarthy if there was anything he wanted to add, anything that was important given what the story was going to be about. He thought for a moment and said no. I then told him that if he realized there was anything he wanted to add or clarify, that he had my cell phone number and I would be available to him all day for as long as he wanted. He said OK. I have not heard from him since.

The only person I did hear from, in mid-afternoon, was a call back from the Viking publicist. She said that Matt had given her explanations for each error, and would I like to hear them? I said that, to be honest, I had already gone over the errors with Matt in great detail, and that the purpose of my call was to provide opportunity for Viking to comment itself on the situation, its vetting procedures, et cetera. With no objection or hesitation she continued the interview, answering a few questions and offering a few comments — the relevant ones of which I put in the article. She asked if I had talked to Craig Breslow to seek corroboration of McCarthy’s version of events; I explained that Mr. Breslow, McCarthy’s best friend from Yale, was not on the Provo team and could not possibly speak to what happened in 90 percent of the stories told in the book. I mentioned that I had asked McCarthy for the names of the Provo teammates he said supported him so that I could call them, and that he had declined. At the end, knowing that the story was running that evening, the Viking publicist said she wanted to check with Matt on some things and she would call me back. She never did, which is of course her prerogative.

Mr. McCarthy is now saying that the New York Times told him about his list of rebuttals, and I am quoting him here, “We don’t want to hear it. We’re running our story.” Once again, he is putting words into people’s mouths that are blatantly untrue only to further his distorted (and false) image of reality.

And once again, he has done so forgetting that there is 100 percent proof of his dishonesty — in the form of my recording of his interview and a transcript of my conversation with Viking, which I can make available to any interested party. Last I checked, he still has my number.

One enterprising Yankee fan is pursuing that desire in a unique way. Rick Kaplan, by day a mild-mannered CAD Systems Administrator, is in the midst of building a 3-D interactive recreation of the old Yankee Stadium, circa 1973.

Right field alley

Aerial view

I got the chance to interview Kaplan regarding his Yankee fandom, the reasons behind this audacious project and the challenges inherent in bringing the old Stadium “back to life”.

BB: How old were you on your first visit to the Stadium?

RK: Having grown up in the Bronx (Mosholu Pkwy), the Yankees were my home team. We used to get Yankee tickets through the PAL (Police Athletic League). I guess I went to my first Yankee game around 1965.

BB: Did you have any favorite players or memories of the Stadium?

RK: Most of the Yankee games I went to, we would be in the upper deck and I vividly remember how thrilling it was to walk out on the catwalks to get to our seats. You would be suspended above the mezzanine level – looking down on the crowd – and then emerge through the portal into the upper deck stands, which were impossibly steep. It was both thrilling and scary at the same time (I don’t think liability would permit such a design today).

I also remember being in the bleachers a few times (left field) and how far away from the field it seemed.

My favorite player as a kid was Horace Clarke.

I remember before the 1967 whitewash, the exterior concrete skin was badly cracked. It looked a bit tired. I really like the post-‘67 look, with the white paint on the outer walls and façade and the blue seats. That’s the time period my model represents.

BB: Did either of your parents get to the pre-renovated Stadium?

RK: Before my brothers and I started taking the subway on our own, my Mom would take us to Yankee Stadium. My dad, a Giant fan (and then a Met fan after the Giants left) would take us to Shea to see the Mets. I found out later that he and Uncle Fred never set foot in Yankee Stadium all the time they lived in New York (My uncle Fred still lives in Queens). I think they considered it enemy territory.

BB: Where did the inspiration come from for this project?

RK: I’ve always been interested in architecture and stadiums in particular. I worked as an usher at Giants Stadium (1978-79). The pre-renovated Yankee Stadium was such an interesting place. I wanted to recreate the feeling of being there again.

BB: What is the ultimate goal for this project?

RK: One idea is to have an interactive 3D website where people can experience the stadium. Maybe even have virtual events there. I’m in the process of researching the technical issues involved. Another thing I want to do is create several walk-through animations. Maybe something with a soundtrack of memorable events that took place there. I’ve even been approached by home run experts who want to plot the trajectories of famous home runs. The fact that it’s a virtual model – not constrained by physical limitations – makes the possibilities endless.

BB: I notice you’re a “doodler” and have a lot of your drawings on-line. Did you grow up also doing things like building model airplanes and the like?

RK: Oh yes. My brothers and I had entire armies and navies of model tanks, planes and ships. There was a sibling “balance of power” in models.

BB: What part of the pre-renovated Stadium’s architecture intrigues you the most, from both a fan’s perspective and a renderer’s perspective?

RK: From a fan’s perspective, the shear size of the place was impressive. The façade (frieze) added a touch of majesty to the place that you didn’t find in other stadiums. The other thing was the shape of the field/stand boundary. It was asymmetrical. The short right field porch, the sloping center field wall that dropped back as you went further toward left and then came back in again. It wasn’t a cookie cutter design.

From the perspective of a modeler – The utilitarian nature of stadium is something that fascinates me. There were few frills – unlike modern stadiums – yet it served as a great sports venue for over 80 years. It’s the Bronx equivalent of the Coliseum in Rome.

BB: For the technogeeks out there, please describe the hardware and software you are using for this project?

RK: For the 3D modeling, I’m using AutoCAD Map 5, a somewhat older, GIS version of AutoCAD. This is a very stable application for creating very large 3D models. I’m also an AutoCAD programmer and have written several applications that help to make 3D modeling in AutoCAD faster and easier.

For rendering and animation, I’m using 3D Studio Max 2009 (64bit). I also use Adobe Photoshop to build materials and texture maps.

BB: How many gigabytes of storage space do the renderings take up?

RK: So far, the renderings themselves are quite small, since they’re designed to show the progress of the model on the web. The AutoCAD model is around 140mb right now and the 3DS Max file is about 270mb. I have to use the 64bit version of 3D Studio because the model has outgrown the 32bit version.

BB: When did you start this project, and approximately how many hours have you put into it to date?

RK: I’ve wanted to do this project for many years, but didn’t have the drawings to get started till a little over a year ago. I guess I really started in June of 2007. I tend to do more work in the winter months. I haven’t set any kind of deadline. I would say I’ve put in around ten hours a week on average for about 17 months now.

BB: What percentage would you say you’ve completed of the project?

RK:  When you look at the model from the outside, it looks fairly complete, but because I want to put in as much internal detail as possible – concession stands, offices, the clubhouse, ramps and restrooms – I would say it’s about 60% done at this point.

BB: What is your estimated completion date for the project?

RK:  There’s no deadline, but it’s probably going to take at least another year.

BB: Do your family and friends understand this project … and support you (nonetheless)?

RK: It’s hard to say how much my family and friends understand the project. They are indeed quite supportive nonetheless.

BB: Have you seen the project in your sleep?

RK: No, I really haven’t. I’ve done an enormous amount of research, reading books, looking at hundreds and hundreds of photographs and films… but I can’t say that I’ve dreamt about it. I think about it a lot when I’m awake though.

BB: What attributes of the old Stadium have been the most difficult to research and/or to recreate?

RK: One of the biggest challenges in building this model is that there are so few architectural drawings available. I’ve had to rely on photographs for many parts of the model. This involves getting shots from different angles and deriving dimensions from known reference points. Complicating this process is the fact that stadium is somewhat of a moving target. There have been so many renovations, additions and deletions over the course of 50 years that it can be very hard to pin down what the stadium looked like at any given time.

BB: I notice you received a lot of help (and feedback) from the “Baseball Fever” website forums. Could you briefly describe some of the most helpful offers?

RK: Baseball-Fever has been an invaluable resource for me in research and feedback on the model. There are lots of knowledgeable people on the “Ballparks Stadiums and Green Diamonds” thread as well as the “Yankee Stadium Pre-Renovation” and “1973-76 renovation” threads to name a just a few. One of the many people who’ve helped me is Dennis Concepcion (BrooklynDodger14), who may well be the most knowledgeable person alive when it comes to the old Yankee Stadium. He worked at both the old and renovated stadiums as a concessionaire. He has done lots of research over the years and is responsible for the advertisements texture maps on the bleacher wall as well as the gate signage and message board on the model.

Baseball-Fever also functions as an audience. I get great feedback and encouragement from the people who participate in the site. It makes it almost feel like I’m doing performance art. It’s a great motivator.

BB: Besides that forum, can you briefly list what other source materials have you consulted?

RK: I’ve read several books. Among them “Yankee Stadium 75 Years of Drama, Glamour and Glory” (Ray Robinson and Christopher Jennison) and “Remembering Yankee Stadium” (Harvey Frommer). I’ve used photographic sources like Getty Images and Corbus.com. Old Yankee and New York football Giants yearbooks, recent publications from the New York Times, New York Post and Sports Illustrated on the demise of the current stadium, as well as others. I’ve researched movie footage of the stadium; “Bang the Drum Slowly” and “The FBI Story”. I’ve also acquired several drawings on eBay and other places.

BB: Has anyone from the Yankees organization read about your work and offered assistance?

RK: No they haven’t.

BB: When this project is finished, to whom would you like to make it available for use/perusal?

RK: If the interactive website idea is technically feasible I’d like to make it available to everybody that way. Anybody could walk around inside the stadium and experience it virtually.

BB: Anything you’d like to say to the readers out there who are just finding out about this absolute labor of love?

RK: If you were lucky enough to have experienced the old Yankee Stadium, I hope the model will bring back memories. If you came too late, I hope it can give you a sense of what it was like to have been there.

Even from just the work he’s done to this point, I’d say Mr. Kaplan’s hopes will be fulfilled. I urge you to explore his website, and tell me you don’t come away with a visceral reaction to the authenticity and realism shown.

It’s that time of year again, time for the new crop of baseball books to hit the shelves.  The Joe Torre/Tom Verducci book made a splash several weeks ago, and Selena Robert’s forthcoming biography of Alex Rodriguez is sure to make the best-seller list when it comes out in mid-April.  But there are a bunch of other interesting titles set to drop this spring as well, including “As I See ‘Em,” Bruce Weber’s book about professional umpires; “Heart of the Game,” S.L. Price’s account of Mike Coolbaugh, the minor league coach who was killed by a foul ball in 2007, and “Odd Man Out,” Matt McCarthy’s evocative and entertaining look back on his brief minor league career with the Angels.

McCarthy pitched at Yale, played for a year with the Angels, and then moved on to a career in medicine.  He’s now an intern at Columbia Pres uptown, just a stones throw from where the New York Highlanders once played.

Last week, Sports Illustrated ran a long excerpt from “Odd Man Out”, and on March 3rd at 6:00 p.m., Matt will  be at The Corner Bookstore (1313 Madison Avenue at 93rd street) to talk about the book.  I was fortunate enough to get together with Matt recently and talk about his life in professional baseball.

Enjoy.

BB: John Ed Bradley wrote a terrific memoir about playing football at LSU called “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium.” His experience might have been unique, but he describes the bond between his teammates almost like something soldiers feel. But I don’t get that same sense of being a team in baseball, even in college. Did you?

MM: Minor league baseball is a unique environment. It’s hard to be a good teammate when your primary goal is to leave the team- to be promoted to a higher level. And I was as guilty as anyone. If I pitched two scoreless innings and our team lost, I was relatively happy. No one makes the big leagues solely because they were on a winning minor league team. College baseball couldn’t be more different. We rooted for each other and still do. I still get a dozen texts every time Craig Breslow (my teammate at Yale who now pitches for the Twins) gets a big strikeout.

BB: Can you talk about the arrested development of the clubhouse culture. How do boys become men in that world?

MM: See: Kotchman, Tom. The Angels are very fortunate to have Kotchman. He could easily be a big league manager but instead he’s chosen to coach a rookie ball team. He’s able to influence players who’ve just signed very large (and very small) contracts and instill in them a culture of winning and for that the franchise owes him a large debt of gratitude. I don’t know if there are many guys like him still around, but I hope there are. That lucky charm of his- a large black dildo with two baseballs glued to the base- is something I’ll never forget. And the same is true of his Andrew Dice Clay impression. I’ve been out of baseball for six years and I still think about the Dice Man. He’s mentioned in recent interviews that he’s planning to retire from coaching sometime soon to become a full time scout. As I say in the book, I hope he reconsiders.

BB: Some of your teammates busted your chops about coming from Yale and assumed that you had a privileged life set up for yourself as a fallback in case baseball didn’t work. While they were wrong about you being on any kind of gravy train, you did have another career to turn to. How aware were you of that while you played?

MM: When you’re on the bottom rung of the minor league ladder, you can’t help but be aware of how expendable you are. That life after baseball is not just a possibility, but a reality. I was surrounded by guys who were coming to that realization and it was interesting to see how they responded. The realization came to me rather quickly- the first pitch I threw as a professional resulted in a bases-clearing double. I’m not sure if I ever recovered.

BB: Why is baseball culture, in particular, so anti-intellectual, at least in the clubhouse?

MM: I’m not sure I have a straightforward way of explaining the culture of baseball. There weren’t a lot of books floating around our locker room and a handful my teammates viewed my Yale degree with skepticism, but I think that’s because they equated the Ivy League with cut-and-run, blame-America-first, Taxachussets liberals. Others were glad to have me around because they thought I could help them figure out the stock market. They were sadly mistaken.

BB: Can you describe the machismo in the locker room. I’m thinking specifically of the Latin pitcher (Hector Astacio) who wouldn’t throw at a hitter and the quandary he found himself in because of it.

MM: We were thirty young guys who’d just been thrown into a very bizarre world- and we were all struggling to figure out how we fit into it. Astacio was asked to throw at a batter and he refused and was pulled from the game. He decided that baseball wasn’t going to change the way he lived his life. It would be an understatement to say that I was impressed.

BB: I’ve long felt that homosexuality is that great taboo in professional team sports. Reading your book just underscored how difficult it would be to come out as an active player. You’d have to be exceptional, both on the field, and as a personality. Do you ever see it changing in a game as conservative as baseball?

MM: It’s not going to happen any time soon. But one day it will, and we’ll laugh about the days when it was even an issue. I actually think professional baseball players deserve a bit more credit than they’ve traditionally been given. A few years ago an Indians minor league pitcher appeared in a gay porn video and the team supported him. Sabathia and Sizemore quickly came to his side and made an effort to deflate the notion that homosexuality is taboo in the clubhouse.

BB: The emotion involved is so tense at the minor league level. The scene with the farm director (Tony Reagins) when you are let go is incredible. Talk about how you ended up consoling him.

MM: There is so much emotion involved in this game and that’s why I felt compelled to write about it. It crushed Tony Reagins to tell me that the Angels no longer needed my services. He was destroying a dream of mine and robbing me of a sense of self, and he was acutely aware of that. He sobbed as he explained that I had failed to live up to his expectations, that an 85 mph fastball just wasn’t going to cut it. He also said he’d do anything to help me land on my feet. He cared about me as a person first and a player second. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to see him named General Manager a few years ago. And now I have just one message for him: Sign Manny!

BB: Can you explain your relationship with your pitching coaches. How much input did they give you? How much were you left to figure things out on your own? And were players in your position in a much different spot than say a top prospect?

MM: Minor league pitching coaches have a difficult job. They’re working with players who have been very successful doing things their own way, and many are hesitant to make major changes to their mechanics. I had a funky delivery and wasn’t particularly interested in trying out new deliveries against the best hitters I had ever faced. But I was fortunate to have an excellent pitching coach, Kernan Ronan, who went to great lengths to explain his pitching philosophy and I think it’s why he was able to connect with so many of his players. He was also wise enough to append any suggestion with the disclaimer that “ultimately this is your career, and you have to decide what’s right for you.”

BB: You were trying to make it as a left handed specialist, the baseball equivalent of a punter in a way. You don’t talk about lack of self confidence in the book, but considering what you signed for, did you ever think you’d make the big leagues?

MM: I was constantly doubting myself and its hard not to when you see the radar gun readings and the box scores every day. I often found myself rushing to the bathroom while warming up in the bullpen because I was so nervous. I’m pretty sure Prince Fielder was actually salivating when he stepped into the batters box to face me. But take a look at Breslow, we were thrown into very similar circumstances and he thrived while I floundered. We were both long shot lefties who had signed for the league minimum, but he was able to make it. I think what ultimately separated us was his composure- for example he wouldn’t mind being called baseball’s equivalent of a punter whereas I’d fall apart.

BB: You describe Joe Saunders and Bobby Jenks as having a real arrogance about them. And yet Casey Kotchman and Howie Kendrick went out of their way to be generous with you. Is that because the second two weren’t pitchers? Did you find that most of the really good players were jerks?

MM: It was a lot of fun being around Joe and Bobby. I met Saunders a few days after he had been given a check for close to $2 million and told that he was going to be the savior for the organization. That’s a lot for a 20-year-old and I can’t say I would’ve handled it any better than he did. He was the pitcher I wished I could be and as a result I paid closer attention to how he conducted himself. I came across Bobby when he was in a tailspin and everyone had written him off. He was frustrated and didn’t know how to right the ship. But I’m thrilled that he did. Kendrick and Kotchman were two of the kindest players I ever had the opportunity to meet. During Spring Training, both pulled me aside independently to give me tips on my delivery and my pick-off move. The Angels made a mistake trading Casey away.

BB: You are out of the game now. Are you worried at all about the responses the book might get from some of the players?

MM: I’m in touch with a handful of guys from the organization and several have said they are disappointed that they’re not featured more prominently in the book. I’m sure others won’t feel that way.

BB: Who do you think might be upset?

MM: It’s no secret that I’m most critical of other pitchers in the book- particularly the left-handed pitchers. If a position player hit a home run, my first thought was, “Hey, good for him,” but if a left-handed pitcher struck out the side, my first thought was, “what does this mean for my career?” We used to joke about the half-hearted high-fives that guys competing for the same position would give each other.

BB: Looking back, what stands out the most for you? The people that you met, or the crushing loneliness and anxiety of minor league life?

MM: For long bus rides, I used to listen to the Radiohead song, “Pact Like Sardines in Crushed Tin Box” because it really captured the way I felt at the time- like a nameless minor leaguer surrounded by two dozen others. But that time- on the bus and in the locker room allowed me to get to know some very special people- people that I’m still talking and writing about six years later. And because I spent so much time with them, I never felt lonely. There was always someone to talk to. As for the anxiety, I don’t miss it, but I’ve found a new line of work that causes me plenty of anxiety.

BB: When did you first get the idea to write this book? Two-thirds of the way into it you reveal that you had been taking notes, but you never mentioned specifically what your intentions were.

MM: The book came together gradually, and then all at once. I had toyed around with the idea of writing it for a few years, but it wasn’t until I saw Bobby Jenks record the final out in the 2005 World Series that I thought seriously about putting pen to paper. I think his is a great story- someone who was able to overcome a lot of adversity- much of it self-inflicted- to become one of the best pitchers in baseball. I still get excited every time he takes the mound.

BB: The book is a quick read, not too trim, not too fat. Did you cut a lot out? How much help did you get from your editors in shaping the narrative?

MM: I’ve had a number of people tell me that they’ve read the book in one sitting, which is a strange feeling because it took six years to write. The first two people to see a draft of the manuscript were two friends from college- Ben Reiter and Charlie Finch. Ben has written extensively about baseball for Sports Illustrated and Charlie has a great Victorian mystery series. They were able to give me comments from two very different vantage points. And I was lucky to have strong support from a number of enthusiastic editors at SI – Chris Stone, Rob Fleder and Terry McDonell, specifically. My editors at Viking- Kevin Doughten and Wendy Wolf- did a great job with the manuscript, particularly with the pacing of the story. They’re very good at saying things like “maybe a little less about what you had for dinner, and a little more about Weenie Wednesday.” I did cut a lot out, but it mostly related to things that happened at Yale that only a handful of Elis would’ve been interested in.

BB: You shared with me in a recent e-mail that you didn’t read “Ball Four” or “A False Spring” before writing your book. Did you model it on anything you’d read before?

MM: I haven’t read many sports books, so I can’t say I modeled it on anything in particular, but I’m a big fan of the way Jon Wertheim, Bill Simmons, and Chuck Klosterman write about sports. And you can add my name to the long list of aspiring southern writers who have had their mind warped by Faulkner. On draft day 2002, I was reading “As I Lay Dying”, which, now that I think of it, rather nicely summarizes my performance on the mound for the Angels organization.

Nack is a first-rate reporter, a dedicated craftsman, and a true storyteller.  He came up with Newsday in the late Sixties and wrote about horse racing.  His experience in the field culminated in the seminal book, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion.  In 1979, Nack joined Sports Illustrated where he excelled at the bonus, or take-out piece, writing beautifully about Willie Shoemaker, Keith Hernandez, Rick Pitino, Bobby Fischer, Rocky Marciano, and, of course, Secretariat, to name just a few. (Nack’s best work is compiled in the stellar collection, My Turf.)  

Nack now works for ESPN.com.  Roger Ebert, who has been friends with Nack since they went to college together, wrote a wonderful essay about his friend last week.  If you love words, and care about language, you must check this out.  It could be the highlight of your week. 

I recently caught up with Bill recently to chat about The Best American Sports Writing 2008.

Bronx Banter: As a writer, how do you approach a project like this?

Bill Nack: I just look for the stuff that I liked the most. The stuff that I thought was the best written and best told stories. I read 70-80 stories that Glenn Stout sent me. I got it down to 35-40 and then it became really tough to pair it down. The last ten were very difficult.

BB: Did you work with Glenn or alone?

BN:  I did it on my own. There were a couple of pieces that I had questions about but not many. He left it up to me totally. I trusted him to give me what he thought were the 70 best and after that I felt it was up to me to find the ones that I thought were the best. And occasionally, I’d call him up and say, “What do you think of this one?” Some to me were slam dunks, in fact most of them were. Jeanne Marie Laskas, SL Price. The only problem that I had was in trying to get a mix–of traditional sports with obscure sports. And I was very conscious of the mix.

BB: Did you also want to mix-up bonus pieces and newspaper stuff?

BN: Yeah I did actually. I wanted to make sure there was an adequate representation of newspaper columns which are a dying species. And when I read Rick Telander’s piece on Doug Atkins that was a no-brainer. Same thing on Rick Reilly’s piece. The piece on Bo Jackson, by Joe Posnanski, that was kind of a column, that to me was an easy one. That raised a problem because I wondered if we should have two Bo Jackson stories in one book. And I really liked the ESPN.com piece by Michael Weinreb. I loved both of them. And what I liked about them together is that they were completely different takes on the same guy. I think I did consult with Glenn on that one. I said, “Do you mind if we have two Bo Jackson stories?” And he said, “No, no, they are both very different.”

BB:  I actually like having them back-to-back for just that reason.

BN:  The one thing that I noticed in the first batch of stories that Glenn sent me was that there was no humor. It was very serious. The poor woman who was lost in the wilderness and saved by her dog, the Terry Fox run across Canada, the world’s tallest tree, Scott Price’s piece on the poor coach who died from a foul ball.  And I looked at it and thought, “God, some of this stuff is really gloomy.” I happened to be a subscriber to Golf Digest and Dan Jenkins is a regular contributor. I started looking through my old issues and ran across Dan’s piece about trying to play golf as you grow old. I started laughing as I read it, because he’s one of the funniest writers that’s ever written about sports. I finished it and thought this has got to go in there. So that’s the one humorous piece that I found. I also liked it because I’m 67 and play golf. And there are a lot of older men who still play, so I thought it had a wider appeal. It was not just funny, which I needed, but it was something that a lot of guys could relate to. You don’t have to be 67, all you have to do is be 50.

BB: Was there a sense with the Tom Boswell column on Clemens and the Hank Aaron story that you wanted to get in pieces that were timely?

BN: Oh, definitely. I did think of that. I thought people would like Tom Boswell’s piece because it is a comment on Clemens.

BB: I thought the Aaron piece was phenomenal.

BN: I showed some of the pieces around before I made my final choices. Some people loved the Tommy Craggs thing and other people said, “You can’t put this in there. Who is this guy?” I just laughed. But they were bent out-of-shape because Craggs is criticizing the press in his piece. Who is this guy to criticize the press? I said, “I have no idea and I don’t care who he is.” I thought he had a very interesting, sharp take. And when I read it I thought, you know there is a lot of truth in this. I might not agree with everything, but I thought there was a lot of truth in it. I had friends in the piece that he criticized but I ran it anyway.

BB: The collection has some good young talent, like Wright Thompson, who has made the series several times now.

BN: I thought that was a terrific piece he did on Beijing. Really well done. Almost personal in a way. He didn’t just write a piece. He got you into it with vivid imagery. I’ve never met Wright Thompson, I’ve only read a little bit by him but I thought, this is really good. I didn’t know anything about him, but like Tommy, I liked his work and was happy to put it in this book. If you want to know the bottom line, I didn’t consider personalities, I didn’t consider names, I just put in people who contributed to making this the best possible anthology I could put together.

BB: I liked how many different styles of writing you chose, not just ones that might reflect your own sensibilities.

BN: Oh yeah, I like all kinds of writing. I like Faulkner. I like Hemingway. I mean, how different can you be? I also like DeLillo who is lyrical, I like Fitzgerald who is also lyrical, I tend to like lyrical writers. But I also like the guys like WC Heinz and Hemingway. The guys who write this real straight, vivid stuff.

BB: And you also have breakaway talents like S.L. Price and Michael Lewis and JR Moehringer.

BN: People told me about the Moehringer piece ahead of time and said, “I don’t know whether you are going to like this.” So I approached it skeptically.

BB: There is a conceit to the piece—that the subject, USC football coach Pete Carroll, cannot be successfully profiled—that is very self-aware.

B N: Yeah but I thought he handled his conceit, or himself in the piece, very well. It didn’t bother me. I emerged from the story understanding who Carroll is and I’m not sure it is possible to understand him. And that was the whole purpose of the story. Who is this guy? But I did get a feeling for the strangeness of this guy because of the strangeness of the story. The approach was different and I think it was courageous. Gil Rogin, one of my first editors at Sports Illustrated, always said that he admired writers who took chances. Gil was one of the best, if not the very best, writers who ever wrote for Sports Illustrated. He was a major literary talent, so I always trusted his take on writing. He told me, “I like writers who take a chance. It might not always work, but try to be different, try to break away from the mold.” It takes a certain courage to be different. And I included the Moehringer piece in the anthology as an acknowledgment that he took a chance and it worked. Plus, I thought it accomplished what it set out to accomplish which was to do a portrait of this strange man who ran through your fingers like sand. To change metaphors, it’s hard to get your arms around Carroll…I thought the Jeanne Marie Laskas piece was the shocker of what I saw.

BB: I love that story. It blew me away. It was probably my favorite piece in the collection.

BN: It’s damn close to mine. I ended up putting Scott Price’s piece first but it was a toss up.

BB: It was written with such empathy.

BN: Yeah, that’s what I liked about it. When I approached that story, I rolled my eyes and went, uh-oh, what is she going to do with these girls? Because I’ve been around cheerleaders and they are very easily criticized as bimbos and as cupie dolls. I said to myself if she condescends to these girls or is critical or patronizing this has no chance, it’s too easy. And I started reading it and I said, “Oh, my god. This is wonderful.” She handled it beautifully. Made me like the girls. I could relate to the gal who is the construction worker, the single mom. They were all interesting. And they were real people. She made them into real people. She didn’t make them into cartoon characters which would have been very easy to do.

BB: And she didn’t shy away from their sexuality. When they get to wear the cat suit uniforms the cheerleaders get all excited because they like to look sexy.

BN: Yeah, they have this other life they live. On one hand, they’ve got jobs with kids at home, and on the hand they are kind of cupie dolls. Oh, look at this. But it’s really interesting how she brought those worlds together. It was the pleasant surprise of the whole batch. And it was not an easy story to write. The little mini-profiles, the description in the beginning, how she got into the story…that took some work. And you could see the originality and the reporting was excellent.

BB: Talking about easy. That was something that came to mind when I originally read the Franz Lidz story on Steinbrenner. About how he got in to see Steinbrenner. And I wondered if Lidz crossed some kind of ethical line insinuating himself into that situation. But after time, I wondered maybe it was fair game. How did you feel about that as a reader and how do you resolve that kind of thing as a journalist?

BN: One of my mentors, first at Newsday, then at Sports Illustrated, is Sandy Padwe. He’s now a professor of journalism at Columbia and has been for years. I called him up. I said, “I’ve got a story here by Franz Lidz about George Steinbrenner and here’s the situation:  He’s with an old friend of Steinbrenner’s, old, good friend. Franz’s intention was to write a story about George, how he’s been, who is going to take his place. Very logical, good story. Hadn’t been done. So he gets one of George’s oldest and best friends who hadn’t seen George in a year, and goes over there. Somebody leaves the grounds and they drive in through the gate. They meet a gardener. And Tom says, “We’d like to see George.” So they see George and he says, “Hey, Tommy, how you doing?” I told all of this to Sandy and I said Lidz didn’t break-and-enter. He said, “No, there is nothing wrong with that, it’s enterprising reporting.” And that was exactly my take but I wanted to bounce it off Sandy because I trust his judgement because he thinks about these things. I didn’t see anything wrong with it; I thought it was perfectly handled. Not only that, when Franz wrote it, he wrote it sympathetically. All he did was write what he saw, and then he wrote a long background story on the kids. I thought the piece filled a void that had been out there for a long time, it was like a public service. It was all rumors, nothing was documented. In a situation like that you want to go in there and say, “This is what really is happening.” Let the chips fall where they may but at least it’s not just speculation. And don’t forget, the Yankees are the most important sports franchise in America. It would be like the owner of the Manchester United football team in Britain. Not only that but a very active owner.

BB: What was interesting was that a lot of guys in the New York media, even old enemies like Mike Lupica, really backed-off George. In the context of that, the Lidz story was almost jarring. Which is ironic considering what a public figure Steinbrenner had been for years.

BN: And that’s another thing, Alex, which made the piece okay. It’s because George had been so front-and-center for so long.  He was the most voluble, volatile owner in America, not just New York, who had used the press all of his life to attack players, to attack his managers. So it’s not like he was Gene Autry. Most owners are in the background. This guy was not only not in the background, he was up front and used the press. So he invited this scrutiny because this is the way he was. It would be inappropriate to go after an owner who was essentially a private guy, but George? His whole life was spent in the limelight. Where is George? That was the question people were asking in New York. And nobody was dealing with it in the press. Franz went out there and found out and I thought he did a hell of a service.

BB: There was one story in particular that I was happy to see in the collection and that’s Mark Kram’s memoir story about his father. My other favorite in the book.

BN: Yeah, I thought it was a hell of a piece. I’ll tell you why I liked it because it was so hard to write. I mean can you imagine writing a story like that about your father? And coming to terms with your father’s failures. His father was a brilliant guy, who was an extremely difficult guy to live with and to work with and everybody knows it. I heard stories about Mark Kram Sr. for years at SI. I wasn’t quite sure, despite what I’d heard, what had happened. And Mark’s piece cleared it up for me. He did his reporting. I don’t know why the piece was not accepted by SI [it was originally commissioned by the magazine]. I didn’t want to raise the fact that it was an SI story because that would open up a can of forms that was why didn’t they run it?

BB: What’s most important for you, a writers’ style or the writer’s take?

BN: I just like really good writing. I tend to like lyrical stuff. Charlie Pierce, he’s my kind of guy. Scott Price, I like his stuff. I like the guy who turns a phrase and not everybody can do that. It’s a talent.

BB: Michael Lewis…

BN: And Mark Kram, Sr. And Mark Kram, Jr too. And John Schulian, and Frank Deford, obviously. Wright Thompson has a nice turn of phrase. He says things a little bit differently. You don’t find a lot of clichés. And the hardest thing to expunge from your prose is clichés because they are the first thing that come to your mind. They are the easiest–like anything else it’s going to the path of least resistance. So, at least in my own experience writing, I try to avoid clichés and try to find a new way to say something old. And that’s hard. I can see guys doing the same thing when they’re writing, because they are saying things differently, they are finding new phrases. The happy accident of the nice term or phrase—that’s what writing is all about and that’s what makes it worthwhile. It’s part of the creative process. It’s the fruits of the creative process. So I look for that kind of stuff. I’m drawn to the people doing a bit different whether it be Moehringer or Jeanne Marie Laskas. They obviously have talent. And I hope I’m able to recognize it and see the originality of it and that’s hard work. I mention it in the intro, but I found the reporting in all of these pieces extremely good. And you can tell when the reporting isn’t any good because it’s like a ham sandwich without the ham. It’s all mayonnaise.  But when you get pieces like these with reporting,  you can feel it, you are there. You’ve lived it, felt it. And if you don’t get that feeling you know the writer is phoning it in. But I don’t think there is a single story in here that was phoned in. That’s what I liked about best. Great reporting, vivid writing.

A Bronx Banter Interview

By Hank Waddles

I can pinpoint the exact date when I became a Dallas Cowboys fan. On January 15, 1978, I was a young boy living in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, but without any attachment to the Lions when my Aunt Hazel and Uncle Tommy came over to watch Super Bowl XII between the Cowboys and the Denver Broncos. Uncle Tommy had bet money on the Broncos, so each time the Cowboys scored his face would twist into a painful grimace. Since I was an eight-year-old smart aleck, I thought it was hilarious and soon found myself quite naturally rooting for the Cowboys and against my uncle. When Dallas scored its final points, putting the game out of reach for the Broncos, Uncle Tommy actually slid off the couch in disgust, making me laugh out loud until my mother shushed me. My uncle passed away only a few years later, so that night remains my strongest memory of him. I’ll never know how much money he lost that night, but I gained a team.

Perhaps because I took pleasure in my uncle’s pain, the Cowboys rewarded me with a string of painful losses: to the Steelers a year later in Supe XIII (thank you, Jackie Smith); to Montana and Clark; to Riggins and the Hogs. Soon enough they descended into mediocrity and irrelevance, until Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson came to the rescue and rebuilt the franchise.

Any football fan can tell you what happened next. Jerry and Jimmy turned the team upside down, traded Herschel Walker, drafted Aikman and Emmitt, and started winning Super Bowls. Author Jeff Pearlman starts with what we know and goes deeper, talking to everyone who had anything to do with the team during that era, ranging from the players and coaches to the reporters who covered them to the women who slept with them. The result is Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty, a revealing and engaging look at one of the greatest teams in NFL history. Recently Jeff was kind enough to talk with me about the book. Enjoy.

BronxBanter
I’m guessing that this book was kind of a perfect storm – high profile football players that haven’t yet faded from the public consciousness, lots of Super Bowls, lots of sex, and lots of drugs. How long after you started this project did you realize you had hit a goldmine?

Jeff Pearlman
I would say I actually knew even before I started it. I’ll be totally honest with you – I haven’t even said this to anyone. I had a really, really, really good feeling about this book early on. Early on. This was basically my way of thinking. My first book about the ’86 Mets made the Times best seller list for six or seven weeks, and I didn’t expect it to. I had no expectations at all because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, it was my first book, and it made it. My kind of way of thinking with this, the Cowboys were like the Mets on steroids. You’re talking about a team that’s probably the most popular sports franchise in the country, much more famous figures. With the Mets, yeah, you’re talking Gooden and Strawberry, but then Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter are big New York figures, but they’re not national guys. With the Cowboys – Aikman, Deion, Emmitt, Irvin, Switzer, Jerry, Jimmy… it was pretty bountiful.

BB
And they were on the stage for a long time.

JP
Right, right. And they’re still in the media spotlight as national guys. So I had a very, very strong feeling. Now I learned from my Barry Bonds book. My second book was about Barry Bonds, and I learned from that book that timing is very important. That book came out two weeks after Game of Shadows and bombed. So you never know what’s going to happen – I learned that the hard way – but I had a very good feeling about it.

BB
Like with your Bonds book from a couple years ago, I see that you talked to well over a hundred people for this one. What was your process like from beginning to end?

JP
The first thing I do when I sit down for a book like this is, I used to work for Sports Illustrated, so they let me use their library. I go to their library and I make photocopies of every yearbook for the times I’m covering. And then I’d do files for every guy in the yearbooks – every executive, every player, every guy who was drafted, every free agent invitee, guys who made the team, guys who didn’t make the team – and I try to track them down. That’s the first thing I do. At the same time, I use a Nexus account. Do you know what Nexus is?

BB
I know what it is, yeah. A database.

JP
A newspaper data base, right. From the years I’m writing about, I’ll do a search of headline leads for the words “Dallas Cowboys,” and I’ll go through every story between those years that talks about the Dallas Cowboys. I ended up printing out probably 6,000 pages of articles that I’ll go through one by one. So those are the two main reporting chores, and then through those articles you find more people. You’ll read about some guy who opened up a car dealership with Troy Aikman or some guy who walked Michael Irvin’s dog, stuff like that. So that’s how you do it. I don’t know if it’s the best way, it’s just how I’ve done it.

BB
Well, it’s certainly a thorough way. How long is it usually from your first trip to the library – well, I suppose you’re probably researching and writing at the same time to a certain extent, but…

JP
Oh, no I don’t, actually. I usually research it as much as I can, and then I sit down and give myself four months to write or five months to write or whatever time I have to write. You report along the way while you’re writing a little bit, but I try to get most of it out of the way ahead of time.

BB
It seemed to me that not too many of these players were very remorseful about what they had done, no different really than when I talk to old college buddies and we laugh about stupid things we did when we were drunk – only we weren’t sniffing coke off a hooker’s ass, we were wrestling in the dorm hallway. How many of these guys have a sense of how out of control they were?

JP
I think most of them did, but it’s kind of like you just said. Certainly I did things in college I’m not very proud of, but most of them I’m pretty willing to tell the stories about. I don’t mind telling stories about getting wasted on Maddog 20/20 and vomiting in an alley. I’m not really embarrassed by that stuff, and think most of these guys aren’t either. I think they sort of look at it sort of joyfully. I think they were fully aware of the implications of what they did…

BB
But they’re still good stories to tell.

JP
Yeah, they had the stories and they were happy to tell ‘em. Most of these guys aren’t Troy Aikman. They’re not on TV, and they’re not in the spotlight. These are guys like Kenny Gant working in a factory, or Clayton Holmes sort of homeless in South Carolina, so this was the best time in their lives, and they’ll talk to you for ten hours if you’re willing to sit there.

BB
It seems like a professional locker room must be a breeding ground for behavior like this, and that an NFL locker room is probably like the Fertile Crescent of debauchery and self-destruction. Should any of this behavior be surprising, or should we expect it?

JP
I don’t think it’s surprising, but I don’t think it’s the norm for it to be this extreme. I’ve covered sports for fifteen years now, and most places aren’t like that, especially today. More than ever – it’s a cliché, but it’s true – people are so image conscious now and aware that wherever you go nowadays any boob with a freakin’ camera on his phone becomes a reporter and can post on Deadspin or YouTube or whatever. So this kind of stuff, I don’t think it happens as much as it used to, and I don’t even think clubhouses are quite as wild. You know it’s rare that you have a full-family environment in a sports clubhouse. You just don’t see it that often. I saw it with the Oakland A’s a little bit in the late 90s, but I haven’t seen it since, so I think the Cowboys are actually rarer than you might think.

BB
That’s interesting. That was one thing that I wondered about. Even though this is only ten or fifteen years ago, the media world is a lot different now than it was then.

JP
Oh, yeah, drastically. Here’s the example I always use, and I think it’s a good one. I think it was last year, Matt Leinart shows up on Deadspin in a photo of him in a hot tub with two hotties and a beer, and there were probably millions of views of that picture. The guy wasn’t doing anything illegal. He’s twenty-four years old, single, living in Arizona, in a hot tub, drinking a beer with two women. Nothing wrong with that. He’s allowed to do that. He’s single. It wasn’t a picture of him attacking anyone or doing anything bad, but it became this huge controversial picture. Is this guy really dedicated to football? Now imagine you’re the Dallas Cowboys holding your position meetings in a strip club! I mean, it’s not even in the same ballpark. So I don’t think you can do what they did anymore and not worry about the ramifications.

BB
Kind of along those same lines, I’m interested in your personal opinion – or maybe professional opinion on this. What is a journalist’s responsibility to the team he or she covers as compared to the public’s need to know? Or, I guess, what does the public need to know? These 90s Cowboys were breaking laws and putting themselves and others at serious risk, so I think people probably should’ve been writing about all that a lot sooner than they did. But where is the line? When is it okay for a journalist to keep certain details out of game reports, and when is it time to blow the whistle?

JP
I don’t think it’s a matter of game reports. I don’t know if it’s a line so much as it’s almost apples and oranges. I think it’s a really complicated question. Because let’s say you’re covering the Dallas Cowboys. You’re jock-tailing. You’re covering the Cowboys for the Dallas Morning News, and you need these guys to talk to you.

BB
Yeah, you need a relationship.

JP
You needthese guys to talk to you, and you hear a rumor about them, whatever, sleeping around with hookers. What are you gonna do, put that in your game notes? I mean, what can you do with it? I think what these guys are supposed to do and should do, is tell their sports editor and give it to their investigative writer or takeout writer or something like that to handle it, because you can’t expect your beat writers to really report on this stuff, it’s just not realistic. Now at the same time, I wrote about in the book about one of their broadcasters, Dale Hansen, was at parties, going out with these guys at parties where they were smoking pot, and then he’s calling the games on Sundays. And he was proud of it, and I thought it was a joke. I think he really missed an obligation there. You cannot be covering the Cowboys and hanging out with them. That crosses a very thorough line.

BB
I’d love to have an answer to this question, whether you want it to be on or off the record.

JP
I’ll answer any question you got.

BB
Alright. What’s your opinion of Skip Bayless? He’s always struck me as an arrogant ass who became nationally known simply because he happened to be writing for a Dallas paper during the Cowboy dynasty, and then he kinda traded his integrity for fame and notoriety. Is that a fair assessment or am I missing something?

JP
No, I think it’s pretty fair. I’m alarmed in this profession… I understand it to a certain degree, because print journalism is hurting majorly right now. The money’s not there, papers are folding, papers are cutting back, so I understand guys going to TV. What I don’t like is when I see these shows like Around the Horn…

BB
Oy.

JP
You know, all these shows where these guys I respect, these guys I read for years, are freaking screaming at each other. Because good writing is almost, not even almost, good writing is the complete opposite of that. Good writing is trying to make a point using dexterity. Finding a way to make a point without hammering it, but making a very smart, well-informed, detailed opinion, and offering it there and hoping people see your point of view. It’s not screaming as loud as you can. I feel like Bayless, I mean Bayless is a great writer. The guy’s really talented, and can write a freakin’ story like you wouldn’t believe. But I feel like he got wooed by the dark side somewhere along the line. He almost had the opposite path that I did. When I was in college, I wrote for my college paper and my goal was to write and use it to meet women. That was my thing, I thought I’ll get attention and I’ll meet women.

BB
Because that makes perfect sense.

JP
Right, right, right. Whatever, I was twenty years old and I was an idiot. But you kind of learn over time the true joy of writing. You see it is as almost like an artform. It’s a really complicated process, and I really enjoy it and I dig into it. I almost feel like Skip took the opposite approach. The guy used to write these great stories, was pretty masterful with the words, but then one day he realized if he yells, he gets a lot more attention. So now he yells. That’s what he does, he’s a yeller. I cannot watch him on TV without getting mad.

BB
I agree. Okay, just talking about the football, how good were these Cowboys between the lines? The NFL is obviously very different right now, but how would those teams compare to the recent Patriots, for example?

JP
I think better. I think they were more talented across the board, I think they were deeper. One thing that’s overlooked, they were just able to shuttle guys in. Their defensive line, just as an example, they were eight deep on the defensive line. You don’t see that these days. Their secondary, talk about a secondary. Kevin Smith and Deion Sanders were both shutdown corners, Darren Woodson was the best safety in the league. Their backfield, obviously, with Emmitt, Aikman, Moose Johnston, Novacek. Across the board, great. Great, great, great. All-time great team. Has to be one of the top four or five teams in the history of football.

BB
And what about Jimmy Johnson? What was his impact on the team?

JP
Profound. He was the builder. That’s his main thing. He wasn’t a great Xs and Os coach, I don’t even think he would say he was. But he was a great motivator, he knew talent, he knew what buttons to push with the guys, so very, very profound.

BB
That brings something else up that I’ve kind of always wondered, and then in reading this book it triggered some things: the role of an NFL head coach as opposed to an NBA coach or something like that. It seems like Jimmy Johnson built the team from a personnel standpoint, but as far as the actual day-to-day coaching, he might not have been as important. I read an interview where you said your dad compared Jimmy Johnson to a CEO. Is that accurate that he’s not as much of a ball coach, like Spurrier talks about?

JP
Sure. I think the best coaches, from what I’ve seen over the years, the best coaches are master delegators. He had a great offensive coordinator in Norv Turner, and he trusted him. He had a great defensive coordinator in Dave Wannstadt, and he trusted him. He had guys like Dave Campo and Butch Davis around who he just trusted, period. His strength was motivating, putting guys in the right position, getting the right guys, and then trusting his assistants to sort of do the right things. Norv Turner was a better offensive football mind than Jimmy Johnson, and he knew that. Dave Wannstadt was a better defensive football mind than Jimmy Johnson, and he knew that too. And I think that’s as genius as anything, recognizing your limitations and acting on them properly.

BB
So after the implosion, along comes Barry Switzer. At the time, I saw Switzer as kind of a buffoon, and I always thought his press conferences were better than most sit-coms.

JP
Yeah.

BB
After reading your book, though, it seems like I had no idea what a buffoon he really was. How did he luck into that job, how did he manage to win a Super Bowl, and how did he eventually fly the whole thing into the ground?

BB
Well, I don’t blame him entirely for flying it into the ground, first of all. It’s funny. It all depends on vantage point whether you think he was handed a great situation or a lousy situation. On the one hand, he was given this team that won two straight Super Bowls, so he inherited a great team with a lot of talent and a good coaching staff. On the other hand, a very, very tough job to walk into because if you don’t win another Super Bowl, you’re considered a failure. And people do need to remember, he led them to an NFC title game and he won another Super Bowl. It’s hard to kill him for that. Many people say, oh, they definitely would’ve won another Super Bowl in ’94. You can’t say definitely. I mean, he took ‘em to the NFC Championship game and the 49ers were awfully good. How did he get the job? He got the job because Jerry Jones wanted more control, and he wanted a guy who would allow him to have that control and wouldn’t put up a fight, and would be loyal. Jerry was really, really mad with Jimmy Johnson when he showed interest in the Jacksonville coaching job. That really turned him off and put the question in Jerry’s mind whether Jimmy was truly loyal to the Cowboys and truly committed to what he was doing. He knew Switzer would be. Switzer didn’t have any other options. It’s not like Switzer was a hot commodity on the coaching circuit and was gonna go somewhere else and use the Cowboy job to get something. He knew him, he knew him for a long time from college, so I think for Jerry it was a pretty easy choice.

BB
Amongst the players, there is obviously one true star of your book, I think. Or a breakout star, I guess.

JP
Michael Irvin.

BB
No, no, no.

JP
Oh, Haley?

BB
Yes. Talk to me about Charles Haley.

JP
It’s funny, I consider Irvin the star of the book, and Haley…

BB
Right, I think there’s Irvin and Smith and Aikman, but I really think the book is about Irvin.

JP
Yeah, me too.

BB
But Charles Haley… I knew he was kind of a knucklehead. I followed the team, so I remember when he threw his helmet at Jerry Jones and some of the other antics, but I had no idea…

JP
Yeah, he liked to masturbate. I don’t know, he was, the first thing I gotta say, a great player, and should be in the Hall of Fame. I don’t know how Charles Haley’s not in the Hall of Fame. I don’t get it. The most Super Bowl rings of all time, a hundred plus sacks, to me he was right there with Bruce Smith and Reggie White as fierce defensive ends. So I don’t totally get that. But he was clinically insane and he acted the part. Guys either stood up to him and decided I’m not gonna take shit from this guy, or he made your life miserable. A lot of guys – Shante Carver, Robert Jones, Larry Brown – they tip-toed around that guy and never wanted to deal with him. And then were guys like James Washington who stood up to him and said get the fuck out of my face. And if you could deal with him that way, he was a great teammate, but if you were always afraid of him, if you let him bully you, just like in high school if you’re dealing with some bully, he made your life miserable as you were always tip-toeing around that locker room.

BB
Then there’s Emmitt Smith. His image was always pretty positive, but your book paints a different picture. Probably not to the extreme of Irvin or Alvin Harper or some of the others, but he was no innocent either, right?

JP
Well, it’s not that he was a bad guy. People always say, oh, you really did a job on Emmitt Smith. I never looked at it that way. I didn’t think he was a bad guy, he was just an egotist to a major degree. You know, we create these guys. It’s not like he did anything wrong. We lavish praise on these guys, and then we’re sort of turned off. For example, Emmitt had his swimming pool, and on the bottom of his swimming pool he had his image in tile.

BB
Yeah, I remember that.

JP
I mean, that’s crazy. Who the hell would do that? But we make these guys. We praise these guys and love ‘em. The thing about Smith, he was a very selfish player, he was very statistically oriented, but the truth of the matter is if you’re a running back who’s running for 1,800 yards, averaging 4.5 yards a carry and scoring twenty touchdowns, you could be the most statistically oriented guy in the world and it doesn’t make a damn’s worth of difference, you know? So any criticism I put on that guy for being ego-centric, which he was, it’s relative. He was in a position where he could be that way and it didn’t impact the team in any way, shape, or form. They were still really good.

BB
One thing that really intrigued me, and we touched on it a little bit earlier, was the relationship between Aikman and Irvin. I remember watching Aikman’s retirement press conference, and he must’ve thanked about fifty teammates, including every offensive lineman who ever blocked for him, I think, but he saved Irvin for last, and broke down while talking about him. What was it between the two of them, two guys who on the surface couldn’t seem more different?

JP
Yeah, I love that relationship because it’s not like these guys were hanging out off the field all the time, but there was a general love and affection between the two guys and I think it comes down to a commonality of work ethic. Two guys who were really, really driven, really, really wanted to succeed, and needed each other. Irvin entered the league a year before Aikman, but both of them were questioned early on in their careers. Irvin was considered too slow, too injury-prone. Aikman too mechanical, too robotic. And they sort of emerged side by side, and they helped each other’s emergence, obviously. Aikman could throw Irvin the deep balls, and Irvin caught everything Aikman threw at him, as tough a receiver as you’ll find. I think the affection really comes from the work ethic and all they went through together. There’s a real love there, it’s a great story. Because like you said, two guys from totally different worlds who are now… it would be wrong to say they’re inseparable, because they’re not inseparable, they don’t even hang out together. But there’s a true love for one another.

BB
I wanted to ask also about Michael Irvin. He brought a lot, obviously, on himself, with all the off-field things he got himself into. But what’s your opinion generally of him?

JP
I like him. I find him very likeable. It’s funny, he’s the one guy… some people read this book and say, you were really hard on Irvin. Other guys say, wow, you really like Irvin. I think that’s a good sign for the book. I feel both. But I think at the end of the day, he’s such a redeeming character. He’s like the Bill Clinton of sports. You can hate Bill Clinton, you can be the most arch-right-wing, I hate Bill Clinton and everything he stands for, but you still have to admit he’s kind of likeable. There’s something about the guy you like. It’s the same thing with Michael Irvin. You can hate everything this guy stands for – the way he’s treated women, the drug abuse, etc., etc. But at the end of the day there’s still something about the guy that’s really endearing and unique and likeable. And that’s how I kind of feel about him. You write this book and you sort of live the 90s again, and you think about the way Michael Irvin treated people, and you’re disgusted and you feel horrible for his wife, but again – just like Bill Clinton, there’s something about the guy you just love. That’s how I kinda feel about him.

BB
Another interesting thing that surrounded that Aikman/Irvin relationship was the undercurrent of a racial divide on the Cowboys, something we’ve been hearing about in sports since 1947. Whether it’s Aikman, Novacek, and Johnston splitting off back then, or the Latino players in the Mets clubhouse separating from their teammates in 2008, it’s something we can’t get away from. True?

JP
Well, yeah…

BB
Or are these exceptions, do you think?

JP
No, it’s true. I’ve never been in a locker room that hasn’t had some sort of racial divide. Never. And I always find it depressing, because I’m a sort of liberal idealist times a thousand, and I always liked the idea of sports bringing people together.

BB
Right, right.

JP
Different ideas, different backgrounds. But when I went to college, it always bothered me, but you’d walk into the cafeteria and the black students would be sitting with the black students, the white students would be sitting with the white students, and the Hispanic students with the Hispanic students. So we kind of self-segregate ourselves. I think the locker room kind of represents society in that regard, and it’s kind of a bummer, but it is what it is.

BB
One of the problems with being in English major in college is that you tend to analyze everything as if it’s a Shakespearean play – except that this IS a Shakespearean play, or maybe a Greek tragedy – you just knew the fall was coming. Do you think there was any way Jerry Jones could’ve avoided that fall, or was he destined to gouge out his eyes in the end?

JP
Well, that’s a little exaggerated. The fall comes for every sports team, you can’t keep it going forever, it’s impossible. They won three Super Bowls in four years. It’s funny how everyone’s like, oh, they should’ve done so much more. I understood that with the ’86 Mets, because the Mets won one World Series and were very talented. I mean, the Cowboys won three fucking Super Bowls in four years! I don’t know what people want out of ‘em. It’s hard to say, oh, they should’ve won five, or they should’ve won six. They won three Super Bowls in four years, so I don’t actually see it really as a tragedy. There are some aftermaths that are kind of sad, but I feel like overall, I feel like it’s more a success story than a tragedy. Three Super Bowls in four years with a bunch of guys nobody wanted. I feel like overall it’s a positive.

BB
Okay. With Jerry Jones, I always felt like he was essentially a clone of George Steinbrenner. They’re both consumed with winning, they both piss off other owners even as they create revenue for their respective leagues, they both think they know a lot more than really do, and for a time they both even insisted on wearing sport coats with turtle necks. So their recent stadium concession deal seems to make perfect sense, doesn’t it? Do you see the similarities between these two guys?

JP
Definitely. They’re cut from the same cloth. The saddest part of it, they hide it pretty well, but they both have this kind of “screw the fans” mentality. Both stadiums are about money. They’re not about the need for new stadiums for the fans, they’re about making greater revenue and charging these people who’ve supported your team for years a ton of money. So I’m not so cool with that, but they’re definitely the same kind of guys. At the end of the day you’d have to say they’re good owners, but I don’t love the greed that goes with it.

BB
Finally, I’ve heard that you’re working on a Clemens book. I’m sure he’s been nothing but completely forthright and cooperative, right?

JP
[Laughing] Yeah, exactly.

BB
I’m sure you’re seeing a lot of similarities between Clemens and Bonds, one of your recent subjects. But with Bonds, he kind of built his asshole resume over the course of several years, or decades even. Now, even though there were negative stories out there about Clemens, his fall was pretty precipitous. For a long time he was this great American hero, and even held up in contrast to Bonds in a lot of ways, I think.

JP
Right.

BB
Were people just being naïve in thinking that Bonds was clearly juicing but that Clemens was simply a freak of nature?

JP
Yeah, I think so. It never helped Bonds that he didn’t treat people well. I think that was a big part of it. And there aren’t that many similarities between the two guys. If you take away the steroids – well, this sounds dumb – if you take away the steroids and the “baseball legend”, as far as their personalities, they are very drastically different. And Clemens is a lot more liked in general society than Bonds ever was. People actually kind of like the guy.

BB
So where are you at in that process with that book?

JP
Living in hell. Yeah, it’s a tough one. But it’s okay. I’ll be out relatively soon.

BB
Well, I’m looking forward to it. Finally, I’ve got one last question. You’ve spent much of your career sifting through the negative side of sports. I’m wondering how this affects you as a fan. Can you still root for your teams? Can you take your kids to a game and encourage them to have heroes? Or have you seen too much?

JP
I haven’t been a fan in a long time. I don’t have teams anymore, I really don’t. Not because of any sort of negativity as a sportswriter, but just because I feel like how can you cover teams and root for them? So I don’t have any teams. But I can still take my kids to a game and enjoy it. I took my daughter who’s five to an Islanders game last year and we had a great time. I still think sports are fun to watch, I still enjoy watching them. I would never encourage my kids to deem these people idols or people worthy of imitation in their lives. But my son’s name is Emmet, not after Emmitt Smith, but his name is Emmet, and I bought an Emmitt Smith poster for his room because I thought it was cool. I’m not saying he needs to be like Emmitt Smith, but sports is fun. At the end of the day, it’s fun. That’s what’s most important.

BB: Buck became a celebrity after appearing in Ken Burns’ PBS series. What did he do for the previous twenty years? Was the PBS thing really life-altering for him?

Pos: There’s no doubt it changed his life. He was a scout in the ’70s and ’80s — mostly for the Cubs, but later for the Kansas City Royals — and he told most of the same stories. He carried himself in the same way. It’s just that people really didn’t listen to him much then. I’ve heard a long interview with Buck from the early 1980s, it was just the Buck people heard a decade later. You can hear all the same joy and optimism and love in his voice. It took Ken Burns to really hear that voice and bring it to America. And it was never the same for Buck after that. Suddenly, he was in demand — an overnight success at 82, he said.

As for what kept him going in those dry years — well, I would say part of it was always baseball. He loved scouting. He was involved with the Hall of Fame veteran’s committee; Buck was such a driving force in getting so many Negro Leaguers into the Hall. But there was more to it. If I had a key question in this book, it was exactly this question: “Buck, how did you keep from being bitter?” There’s no easy answer for that. Some people just have a gift for loving life.

BB: I was so moved by Buck’s reaction to not being elected into the Hall of Fame. Obviously, he was hurt by it, but he recovered–at least on the surface–faster than those around him. Then he told you, “Son, what is my life about?” It wasn’t about the glory, it was about the giving.

Pos: That’s exactly right. It was so vivid to see the way Buck responded to the Hall of Fame. So many of the other things Buck overcame in his life — not being able to attend Sarasota High School, not being given the chance to play or manage in the Major Leagues, on and on — were just concepts in my mind. But here was something I saw first hand, and I know Buck was disappointed that he did not get elected into the Hall of Fame. But he recovered, I think, on the surface and beneath. That’s what his life was all about. You move beyond bitterness and disappointment. You embrace life.

BB: You know the famous Satchel Page line about not looking back. Do you think that applied to Buck at all? Do you think he ever had reflective moments of sorrow or anger but just dismissed them and kept moving ahead?

Pos: I can’t see how he could be human and not have those reflective moments of sorrow and anger. He dealt with so much injustice in his life … the worst of America in the 20th Century. But I can tell you this, I was pretty close to him for this book. I mean, you travel a year with someone, and you see them in all sorts of moods. I never saw things back up on him. He was a very spiritual man. And he gained so much from his contact with people. Anytime he seemed to need a burst of energy, he would go up to a stranger and just start talking.

BB: Buck really did need people as much as they needed him, didn’t he? I love the story about him taking a break during a hot day, and finding a young boy to talk to, and by the end of their chat, he was revitalized.

Pos: There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Buck’s connection to people is what kept him so alive and so hopeful about the world through 94-plus years. There is a constant theme in this book, I think. Whenever Buck felt a little tired, a little down — a little bit “old,” you could say — he would find someone to connect with. Sometimes, like in the chapter you mention, it was a child. Other times it was woman in a red dress or a man in an art gallery or a couple kissing in an airport. He never talked about these things — it wasn’t like he said, “Hey, I need to go talk to some strangers now.” He just did it. And it was always amazing to me the way he seemed reborn after connecting with someone.

BB: Buck never had children. But he had so much love to give. It’s almost as if because he wasn’t a father to his own kids, he ended up being a father to thousands instead.

Pos: Yeah, I think he did feel just a bit sad about missing out on that part of life — fatherhood. But baseball was his life; he was on the road all the time, plus he was already in mid-30s when he got married. But you are right, there are many people who feel like in some way Buck was like a father to them. I’m one of those people.

It’s funny how we regard celebrities. Most old-jocks are remembered because of their greatness, and how that connects us with our youth or important moments in time–Willie Mays, Aaron, Musial. But they are rarely the kind of men that Minnie Minoso or Buck have been, men who thrive on giving back. It’s no surprise that Buck became a star for Ken Burns. He is charming, has a way with words, but above all, he’s a gifted storyteller. I love it that this is the heart of his gift. More than numbers, or dates, the story was the thing with him.

You know, I think this is something we tend to forget: It takes tremendous talent to be a spokesman like Buck. It isn’t something that just anyone can do. Buck was warm and funny and goodhearted, but he was also a wonderful speaker, a terrific storyteller, an observer of life and he had a world-class memory. These are remarkable talents just as it is a remarkable talent to be able to hit the curveball. My point is that sometimes we might expect too much from athletes — and I include myself in this. What are the odds that someone can be a world-class baseball player AND be a world-class speaker or writer. I don’t know that God hands out gifts so freely. I do think many athletes try to give back. Some are better than others. But few have the talent to inspire people the way Buck did.

BB: I think one of the greatest lessons Buck provided is learning how to slow down and appreciate the moment. It is particularly poignant today, in our Internet culture of instant gratification.

Pos: He enjoyed everything. It’s funny, he was always moving, and yet he was always appreciating the moment too. We were in Washington — Buck was testifying before Congress regarding the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. And you should have seen him there; he was as happy as he could be just wandering the halls of those Senate offices, eating lunch in the Senate dining room, testifying before the committee. He had the time of his life — and this was TESTIFYING BEFORE CONGRESS. He said, “I wish my mother could see me now. Senator O’Neil!” He was something else. You couldn’t help but be happy around him.

BB: You talk about the restless spirit of a scout. It seems as if, more than anything else, Buck had the temperament of a scout, always moving, never sitting for too long. Do you think this is correct?

Pos: Absolutely. He used to say, “Moving is the opposite of dying.” He always seemed happiest when we were on the move, going to the next ballpark, the next game, the next interview … he really did believe that it was the journey that counted. We talked about this some, and I talked about this a lot with some of his friends: Everyone knew that when Buck couldn’t move, couldn’t talk to people, couldn’t remember, couldn’t share his stories, when that sad day happened, well, he would not last long after that. That’s exactly how it happened. After he spoke at the Hall of Fame, he really took a turn for the worse. He checked into the hospital about a week later. And though he came out briefly, it was only a brief respite. He died less than two months later. He said it wasn’t how long you lived. It was how well you lived. And he lived long and well.

BB: For someone who devoted so much of his life to the memory of The Negro Leagues, Buck refused to trash the modern player, even in light of the recent drug scandals. It is a time-honored tradition to believe that players were better in your day than they are now. Why do you think Buck refused to fall in line with this kind of thinking?

Pos: Buck was simply not a guy who was blinded by nostalgia. He believed America was a much better place late in his life. He felt that way about baseball too. He felt the game was better than ever. He was never happier than when he was around the players. One of my favorite scenes in the book happened in San Diego, when Kenny Lofton came over to Buck and said, “Buck I’ve got someone for you to meet. He’s the next Josh Gibson.” And he brought over Ryan Howard. Howard was a rookie then, and he had, I think, nine or 10 home runs. Buck said to him, “I understand you have some power, son.” And Howard kind of looked at the ground sheepishly and nodded, and Buck said, “Son, don’t be ashamed of your power. Swing for the fences.” I like to credit Buck for Ryan Howard’s success.

He just loved being around the players. Kept him young. He always said baseball players are baseball players, no matter the time, no matter how much money they made, no matter what. He did like to say there were some things he thought players did better in his day — fundamental stuff, mostly — but he always said the players in today’s game are bigger, stronger, faster and a heck of a lot of fun to watch.

“Baseball is still baseball.” That was one of his mottos.

BB: I think the fact that Buck lived for the moment, and appreciated today’s players without any trace of cynicism helped give him credibility as an expert on the Negro League players that none of us ever saw. If Buck could be trusted to give the modern player his due, then why would he be lying about the old timers?

Pos: Well, I think Buck proved over many years that he had a great sense of judgment about players. I mean, you look at the list of players he signed or helped along the way — Ernie Banks, Elston Howard, Lou Brock, Joe Carter, Lee Smith, George Altman, Billy Williams, Oscar Gamble, the list goes on and on. He had a scout’s eye. So yes, the fact that he had such a great sense of ballplayers added tremendous credibility to his scouting reports about those old Negro Leagues players so few people saw.

As for today’s players, I think it’s a natural tendency for older players to forget how difficult it is to play the game, and perhaps romanticize their own time. We’ve all seen it a thousand times. Look at Mike Schmidt now tearing into Adam Dunn and Pat Burrell for striking out a lot. Schmidt seems to think that all those guys have to do is choke up and focus on contact — that’s what he did after striking out 180 times. But it’s not that easy. One of my favorite stories — it might be apocryphal — is about Bob Gibson, when he was pitching coach of the Braves, going out to the mound and screaming at Rick Mahler for not busting a hitter inside with high heat. And as he walked off, Mahler thought: “I don’t HAVE high heat.”

Anyway, Buck didn’t have much of that in him. He always saw the game with that scout’s eye. He probably was a bit sunny about players — he tended to see the good in everybody. But when he said Leon Day could have been a 20-game winner in the big leagues year after year, I think that comes with a lot of authority because we know Buck’s record as a scout.

BB: Some people are more about the past, and others about the future. Buck seemed to be about the present while always keeping the past alive. It was like that was his job.

Pos: Absolutely. He always lived in the moment. He loved the gossip of the day. If he was around now, he’d probably call and want to talk about the Anna Nicole deal. He listened to current music. He watched some TV. He wanted to know what was going on now. I remember we were in Houston– this was when the Astros were in an awful hitting slump. Astros owner Drayton McLane walks over to Buck and says something like “We could sure use you in the lineup tonight Buck” — a complete throwaway line. And Buck said: “Well, you do need some hitting.” Drayton was amazed that Buck was so with it, so on top of the moment, but that’s just the way Buck was. And you’re right, at the same time, he was trying to keep alive memories of the Negro Leagues and baseball from another time. I don’t think Buck ever saw those two things being in opposition. He talked about the past. But he lived in the present.

BB: Can you talk about Double Duty’s funeral in Chicago a bit? That was such a vivid chapter in the book.

Pos: Yes, that was a crazy day. When Double Duty Radcliffe died — he was 103 — Buck wasn’t sure if he could make it to the funeral. I think he felt like he had been to too many funerals in his life already. And also, I think he knew that some intense emotions come out at the funerals of old Negro Leagues players — some crazy cocktail of sadness and anger and bitterness, and I think that always took a lot out of Buck. But in the end he felt like he should go; Duty was one of the last players who remembered the Negro Leagues of the 1930s, when Buck first started playing.

It was a beautiful funeral, with music and memories. Buck knew everyone, of course. One of the people Buck knew was an old player named Al Spearman, who played briefly in the Negro Leagues and then played for a few years in the minors. For a few years, apparently, Spearman had been obsessed with a Chicago character who was calling himself Johnny Washington and who said he played in the Negro Leagues. Spearman had become convinced that Washington was a fake. This was obviously the first time I had seen anything like it, but Buck had seen it many times before and so he spent much of the time at the funeral trying to calm down Spearman. At the end of the chapter, I write about Buck repeating, again and again: “Let go, Al. Let go. Let go.” Al simply could not hear him. It was heartbreaking to watch. But that was Buck.

BB: Did Buck’s death impact the book in any way?

Pos: Well, as far as the book itself goes … it had almost no impact. The book was entirely done when he died. In fact, I had received a bound copy of the book just a couple of weeks before he died. I went to the hospital and saw him, and he asked me to come back and read him the book. He took a dramatic turn for the worse just a couple of days later, and I never saw him again. I still think about that a lot.

So, after he died I wrote a very short afterword, no more than 500 words. I thought that was the best way to handle it. I didn’t want the book to change at all. The book was about his life, not his death. Several people have made the “Tuesdays with Morrie” comparison, and that’s flattering, Morrie was quite obviously an incredible man, and that book sold, whatever, a bajillion copies. But this is not a book about a man who knew he was dying. This is a book about a man who lived life to its fullest as we traveled around America. Anyone who met Buck during that year-plus we spent together would have been convinced that he would live forever.

Obviously, though, his death has made a huge impact on my feelings about the book. The book didn’t change much, but it is so much more important to me now. I hope that there’s enough of Buck’s spirit in here to help keep his name alive. That’s what I think about all the time. Those of us who knew and loved Buck — that’s our job now. To keep his spirit alive.

BB: I read a piece from a KC paper over the winter that reported that Buck hardly had any money when he died. He had a humble little home, and presumably had given his most of his money to the church. I remember thinking, “Wow, that makes total sense.”

Pos: People ask me all the time if there was anything that surprised me while doing this book. And I say it’s complicated because I knew Buck pretty well before the process. So nothing in particular surprised me. But what DID surprise me — what shocked me, in fact — is that he never let down. Ever. I saw him in all sorts of places, in all sorts of moods. I was with him when he was hungry, tired, grumpy, sad, and in every one of those moods, he was still Buck O’Neil, and he was still as optimistic and hopeful about life as any other time. I tell the story in my book about a really hot day in Houston at a game, and Buck was ready to get back to the hotel. It was hot. And an outfielder tossed a ball into the stands. A guy caught it — he basically took it away from a little kid sitting right behind him.

I said to Buck, “Look at that jerk.”

Buck wasn’t really in the mood to talk. But he said, “What?”

I pointed out the guy who stole the ball from a kid. I said again, “What a jerk.”

“Don’t be so hard on him,” Buck said. “He might have a kid of his own at home.”

That set me back. Buck being Buck. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that was ridiculous. I said, “Wait a minute Buck, if this jerk has a kid why didn’t he bring the kid to the ballgame?”

And Buck said: “Maybe his kid is sick.”

And I knew then: I would never ever beat Buck at this game. Life was beautiful around Buck O’Neil.

BB: What compelled you to write the book in the first place? Buck already has an autobiography. What did you want to convey about him that baseball fans may not have already known, or did you simply want to reaffirm what so many of us already knew, and loved, about him?

Pos: Well, this wasn’t the book I intended to write. Buck had suggested — strongly suggested — that I write a book about the joy of the Negro Leagues. He felt that plenty of books and movies had been done about the pain of the Negro Leagues, the bus rides, the white hotels, the restaurants that would not serve them and all that. He knew that was important, but he thought people were missing out on how much fun it all was. We went to lunch one day and he hinted strongly that SOMEBODY needed to write that book, and he was looking right at me.

So my first attempt was going to be about a single game, played in 1939. The game faced off two future Hall of Fame pitchers who had a bit of a rivalry — Satchel Paige and Hilton Smith. I had a lot of good stuff about the weekend (Count Basie played, Charlie Parker too) and the scene and the movies playing and the characters involved in the game. In other words, I had the background down. Unfortunately, I had almost no information about the game itself. And it wasn’t a particularly good game anyway. And it was probably just a bad idea to start with.

So I went in other directions — for a while, I was trying to make it into a novel. But that wasn’t right; it just felt too real. Finally I was ready to walk away, and it was my wife Margo — who I dedicate the book to — who said, “No. You have to write the Buck book.” That’s what she called it. The Buck book.

That’s what got me thinking about Buck. Of course, I knew Buck had an autobiography, a good one, and that’s why I had not thought of writing about him before. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt there was so much about Buck that was not in that autobiography, so many things that he could not have put in there. I didn’t want so to much to tell his story. I wanted instead to write about how he saw the world, and how people responded to him, and in time I came up with this idea of simply following him around America.

BB: What was writing this book like for you? Did you have a sense of what you wanted the narrative to be while you were hanging out with Buck or did you mostly concern yourself with keeping notes and allowing the story to develop organically?

Pos: I loved writing this book. With that said, the narrative was hard. I figured this was always going to be a different kind of book, a book with a lot of stops and starts and without that clear storyline to carry us through. There was no “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” narrative here. The original title of this book was “Baseball & Jazz,” (Buck’s two favorite things) and to be very candid I sort of saw this book as a jazz jam, I saw the book bouncing around, lots of freelancing, letting the tune take us wherever it happened to go. I don’t know if I pulled it off, but that was the idea. That’s really why so many of the chapter titles were taken from jazz songs.

Once I had taken the road trip with Buck and sat down to write the book, I knew I had a lot of great stories. There was never any doubt about that. And I felt like I had some idea of how to bring some of the Buck’s charisma and joy to the page. The rest of it — the narrative, the idea of mixing long chapters and short ones, past and present, breaking it up into seasons, all leading the crescendo of that day when Buck did not make the Hall of Fame — that came honestly and over many months.

BB: How different was writing a book compared with writing a column?

Pos: It was very different. I always put it this way: I write at home. When I’m writing a column, my two young daughters run in and out of my office constantly, my wife comes in with errands, I’m instant messaging friends, I’m scanning the Internet and reading blogs, I’m playing Internet backgammon or computer putt-putt … it doesn’t bother me at all. When I need to write the column, I just dive in.

With the book, it was very different. I found that I had to get away from the house, go to a library or coffee shop, turn off everything around me … it’s like I had to be in a different place, both literally and mentally. I don’t know if that made the writing better or worse, but it was certainly a different experience. I really did love it, though. People always say, “Wow, when you write all the time it must be hard to also write a book.” But I love to write. And anyway it was so different, such a new challenge. It’s probably how tennis players feel going from the clay in Paris to the grass at Wimbledon.

BB: What kind of collaboration did you receive from your editor?

Pos: I really did love the entire process. My editor is David Highfill at William Morrow, and he was just terrific. He was always there to talk during the writing portion, but he mostly stayed in the background and let me work out my own issues and concerns, which is probably best for me. And then, when the first draft of the book was done, he was terrific about making suggestions, asking me tough questions, challenging certain ideas. I always felt on the same page with him.

BB: Was there any point where you felt that you were rushing to get the book done?

Pos: No, I didn’t feel rushed at all. My challenge was actually the opposite — trying to learn how to take my time with the story. As a newspaper columnist, you are always time and space constricted. Get to the point quick, get out of the story quick, after a while this simply becomes who you are. I often found myself trying to slow things down — and because this was kind of an episodic book with lots of scenes instead of one long story, that really was a challenge.

BB: That’s exactly what Buck was talking about with the scouts. You need to take your time. It sounds like being around Buck, and then writing about him, forced you to appreciate this life lesson.

Pos: Absolutely. It always amazed me that a man who was so busy, who was always on the move, could find the time to appreciate everything and, yes, slow things down. I’m still trying to learn that lesson.

BB: Is there any part of you that would have liked to have spent more time on it, or are you satisfied with how it turned out?

Pos: As for being satisfied, that’s always a tricky one for me. It seems to me that some writers have that sort of satisfied feeling when they’re done with a column or essay or book or whatever. I’m jealous of that. I am missing that gene. My understanding is that whenever Jim Murray finished writing a column he would lean back and say, “Fooled them again.” I relate to that. When I sent in this book (and I had rewritten it several times), I knew that I had written it with everything I had. That was really my only emotion about it. I’ve read it since, of course, and I’m proud of it. I believe it has some of Buck’s spirit.

BB: You mentioned receiving constructive notes from your editor, how much editing did you find yourself doing on your own? And how did that self-critical approach change, if at all, in this book as opposed to your columns?

Pos: I was self-critical of the book — much more so than I am with my column, in large part because I had more time. I spent an awful lot of time thinking and reworking the structure of the book … I would say the structure changed two dozen times during the writing. It’s funny what people think about writing: I’ve had so many people come up to me and say, “Wow, I really enjoyed this; I’ll bet this book wrote itself.” I think that’s a tremendous compliment, but it’s a bit different from the truth. Maybe my next book will write itself. That would be easier.

BB: But doesn’t that miss the point of great writing? It isn’t supposed to be easy. If you are doing it well, it looks “easy” in that the reader is just caught up in the storytelling and not noticing the writing, the work. The great filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci once said that if one of his editors ever won an Oscar he’d never work with them again, because the whole point of good editing is that you are not supposed to notice it.

Pos: That’s exactly right. It’s also something we say all the time about umpires … the less you notice them, the better job they’re doing. That’s certainly true for writing. I am tremendously flattered when people say, “It’s obvious that writing is easy for you.” Of course, they usually say that after a few beers.

BB: In my mind, I keep coming back to the fact that people couldn’t help but be happy if you were around Buck. I think this is why he had an almost quasi-mythical or at least spiritual quality about him. He talked to people like they were equals, whether it was a kid or a head of state or a superstar athlete. He actually made people feel good about themselves. That is so rare.

Pos: I think that’s exactly right. One of Buck’s friends said, “Buck made you feel like he woke up that morning just to talk to you.” It’s a very rare quality. And you’re right, Buck treated Willie Mays exactly the same way he treated an 8-year-old boy he came across at the airport. He really loved people. I miss him every day.