Gary Smith

Sirs, Madames,

I have no doubt about the truth in Gary Smith's articles. They operate in their own fact-based reality. Which is fine. Which is the pt.

YHS, etc

 

There is some sort of joke here, right?

 

This is what I was wondering when I started this thread. If you had the time and balls to try your hand at a Smith-style piece as an unknown, would it even be possible? Wouldn't your subject quickly hate and then shun you?

 

I could not agree more.

Every syllable dead solid perfect.

 

Benighted Brown,

By way of explanation of a non-joke.

There are stories that have plenty of facts but no truth. Dreary as a cop's notebook.

There are features, Smith's among them, that are like novels in that they create whole worlds of their own and convey truth. Some people might think that by doing 50 or 100 interviews he is simply doing due diligence so he doesn't f-ck up. But no matter how any interviews he does and how intensive they are, the worlds in his pieces are created as much as recreated, but these worlds are his subjects' not his own. His aim isn't simply to piece together as much of the jigsaw as he can puzzle out ... his aim is truth. I don't know about anybody's issue with his facts ... but even if there might be somebody somewhere who'll say or prove a detail is in error, the larger truths over-ride and on these Smith hits way more than he misses.

He's one of the few featurists in any dept whose features are whole worlds unto themselves. Which to me makes them superior as pure writing to Deford.

YHS, etc

 

Reilly once called him the I.M. Pei of profilers.

Hard to argue.

 

Thank you, good sir.

 

An excellent read, and I thought that it subtly showed a less than glowing view of Andre in places. I doubt that he was only obsessing about Steffi, but it makes for a nice tale. Certainly, Brooke Shields come across as pretty shallow.

 

Did you mean ...

?

 

I'm bumping this over from the Mike Fish thread.
There are times, it seems, that, for all the research he does, and for all his uneniable skill as a writer, Smith can get spun. I'm thinking not only about his Tillman piece, where he pretty clearly got played by the army, but his Tiger Woods opus, where Earl spun him, and his Jim Valvano piece, where he let Valvano essentially blame Armen Keteyian (and, through him, SI) for his cancer.
Just throwing it out there.

 

in fairness, wasn't the tillman piece right after the incident? tough turnaround there.

 

True. He had barely a week, I believe (May 3 edition, death in late April)