What Sportswriter Did You Want to be When You Grew Up?

Many of us are veterans of our high school/college papers. Which sportswriters did you idolize ?

Mine was Paul Zimmerman. I was a die hard NFL fan and he was writing explanations of the game that I found no where else.

I also idolized Mark Kram. I still remember where I read his opening paragraphs to the Ali-Frazier fight. It really disappointed me to find out 25 years later in Michael Maccambridge's history of Sports Illustrated that Kram made it up.

 

Phil Jasner.

 

I didn't want to be a sports reporter. I wanted to cover science for The New York Times, like Gina Kolata or Jane Brody.

A few years ago, I met a NYT science reporter... who wanted my job. Alas, the one-week trial switch was never arranged.

 

The way that Rick Reilly and Gary Smith played with the form of magazine writing in the 90s did more to steer me down this road than anyone. And yes, I realize now that many writers who came before them invented the form and probably did it better, in many respects. But those two guys were the North Star of my career when I realized this is what I wanted to do.

I remember reading Shadow of a Nation in a class in college, and not really understanding yet how narrative reporting worked, and we all agreed that Smith much have been working on this story for like eight years because he was clearly on the bus in 1983 riding to the state championship game with this team.

The Crows now seek glory—but often find tragedy—in basketball

With Reilly, it was the piece he wrote about the high school referee who tried to commit suicide after blowing a call that cost a team a state championship. It's a story I still think about often, in part because it has one of the great leads of all times.

When Your Dream Dies

On a refrigerated, colorless Saturday morning in the no-McDonald's town of Walnut, Ill., Kenny Wilcoxen walked along the street carrying the letter he had waited for his whole life, the one that meant that after 20 years he was finally going to ref the state high school football finals. On the other side of the letter, written neatly in blue ink, was his suicide note.

As I got older, I realized I sounded nothing like either writer. That I wasn't good enough to pull off Gary's deep philosophical dives, nor was I clever enough to infuse my stories with Reilly's sense of humor, and I gravitated a lot more to S.L. Price's writing, the rhythm of his sentences and the economy of language. This complex, beautiful, sad story about the Vesceys has stuck with me forever.

Oh, Brother Peter Vecsey, NBC's combative and widely reviled NBA pundit, couldn't be more different from his big brother, George, the contemplative and widely respected New York Times columnist. And they hardly speak to each other

I always contend that Smith and Reilly, as great as they were, inspired more bad prose from up-and-coming writers than anyone other outside of Hunter S. Thompson. Their voices were so unique, they couldn't be duplicated, but man did a lot of us try. Perhaps to our detriment. I know it was to my detriment.

Price's voice, though, held up better over time.

SI 60: In Aliquippa, a Western Pennsylvania mill town, football brings hope

 

I never read him. What made him good?

 

John B. Foster

 

His dedication to the beat, more than anything else. He knew the Sixers inside and out, and on a personal level.

I add that to what I found out later: That he was a Hall of Fame nice guy.

 

What, nobody wanted to be Bill Conlin?

 

Totally agree. Price is always a smooth, friendly road of readability.

 

Jim Murray was my favorite growing up, but I knew I could never be a consistently funny writer like him. For that matter, I had no idea I even wanted to be a newspaper person until my first day of work at the Phoenix, when I fell in hopeless sudden love with it.

 

None by and large, I just wanted to write about sports. But there was a stretch where I really liked Allan Malamud's bullet point by bullet point column.

 

As a kid, Frank DeFord. At the time, writing for Sports Illustrated was the pinnacle of any sports writer's career. ... Later in life, Rick Reilly.

Honorable mention candidates: Mike Royko and Lewis Grizzard. Neither of them wrote much about sports but both occasionally delved into it, and they were brilliant.