The Boy Who Wouldn't Die... Amazing piece in SI about Rae Carruth's son

Should something have happened before Lake started working on this story?

 

I stated a matter of fact.
I wish you wouldn't place words in my mouth.
Frankly, I don't see much that has changed in (less than) three years.
When boy becomes man, old enough to process what has happened (as the case may be), then go at it again.
Why plow old ground?
It's like a director doing a remake because he thinks he can put out something better.
This wasn't the case with this writer's story on Darrent Williams.

 

I thought this was a wonderful story and I enjoyed it...

 

Glad someone else thought of this.

On a more serious note, I can't wait to read the full story.

 

I'm taking the middle ground on this. I'm glad 3OF brought up the original story, and I didn't think he was being condescending in doing so. I enjoy comparing two takes on one story, and I really liked Elizabeth Leland's version. I'm interested to see what Thomas Lake can bring to the table.

That said, the audiences are entirely different. This is akin to the classic Frank Deford story on Bob "Bull" "Cyclone" Sullivan, "The Toughest Coach There Ever Was." Local newspapers had told Sullivan's story in feature form before, but Deford came in with a broader angle and told the hell out of the story. Lake's as close as we have to a modern Deford. His story earlier this year, "The Legacy of Wes Leonard," was outstanding but definitely rehashed a lot of what local media outlets had covered in great detail. He made it stand out by writing the hell out of it, seeing the big picture and finding out enough fresh details through dogged reporting to make it work.

I'm really excited to see what he does with this, and I'll probably read it as soon as the mail comes tomorrow.

 

The craft/turf question is always interesting, especially when a national publication takes up a story that's already been written locally.

Who owns or even possesses any story?

 

Probably half my stories are ideas I stole from newspapers, including my next one. Magazines often write stories that have been "covered" before, because you can often do it better. I'm not saying that's the case here—I haven't read Thomas's story yet—but magazines often go over old ground in an attempt to write the definitive account, those stories, like Thomas says, that people will remember. The New Yorker's story about the bin Laden raid is a good example.

And KY—I'm almost certain pseudo's response was a sarcastic retort to Mr. Fart.

 

That New Yorker Bin Laden raid story by Nicholas Schmidle is the clubhouse leader for article of the year. How he was able to get such accurate detail of such a clandestine mission was startling.

 

I can see a need for a "remake" if there's a lot of ambiguity involved, or facts are still lacking. Not the case here.

 

But it's not a remake. It's a new story for a new audience.

 

I started reading it this morning and couldn't put it down, though I had to because of time constraints. one thing Lake seems to be very good at is making use of court documents to reconstruct events. I remember a few years ago, I was covering a high school sports lawsuit, trying to call sources and so forth, as I always did. At some point, one of the lawyers said, "Just go to the courthouse." I did, and there was a treasure trove of scoops sitting in, essentially, plain view for me. God bless discovery. Lake, I believe, relied heavily on court documents in the Darrent Williams story, as well.

Couple early thoughts:

@ I don't so much like the throat-clearing at the beginning about various kinds of wounds and forgiveness. I would have started with the paragraph about the mother's wound - I think it's the third paragraph - and gone from there. I imagine Lake will tie the end to the beginning about the different types of forgiveness, but I don't know that that would change my mind on the lede approach. This is definitely out of the Gary Smith playbook. I also remember Charles Pierce engaging in some maddening throat-clearing on his Wes Welker feature a couple years ago, while he was still slumming in sports on occasion. I don't like these pseudo-philosophical ledes. Not at all. And I used to write them all the time myself. Now: Lake, Smith, and Pierce are all smarter than me and probably more thoughtful and articulate. But I still don't love it. Or even like it.

@ I love the line about how the grandmother and her boyfriend "gave into their desires." At first, in the preceding paragraph, I was a little down on all the church material. This almost feels like a cliche by now - church-going used as a proxy for being a good person. God's existence and hand in events accepted as a given. But when Lake then went with "gave into their desires" in the next paragraph, I realized what he was doing wasn't necessarily taking Saundra's professions about God at face value, but rather engaging in a terrific bit of characterization, all the way to the diction/euphemism used regarding teen sex. Great little passage that does a ton of work.

 

It seems crazy to say that national magazines shouldn't report on pre-reported stories. Last week, The New Yorker had a tremendous piece on confidential informants in the line of danger. Several of the cases relied upon in the piece had previously made news, some of them nationally, and the piece freely acknowledged that. I had not thought about Carruth's son for years. I live in Chicago and don't read the Charlotte Observer. I'm thrilled that Lake took on this subject.

As a side note, this looks like a great issue overall. The piece on the West Virginia coach who went to Harvard Law School looks interesting. The Chipper Jones back page is a nice touch. Lots of good reads, it appears.