The Dark Side of the Book Deal

My dad was a salt miner.

 

Does he want to write a book?

 

No. But he wonders when his son is going to finish his.

 

Jones, that was classic. Having written a maximum of 3,000 words on any of my numerous novels (what, you thought I was kidding with my handle?), I can certainly attest to the grunt-like quality of it.

BTW, every time this topic comes up I remember that scene in the HBO miniseries with Eric Stoltz -- he's a screenwriter -- when he tells his agent or his shrink, "There's a story inside everyone. For most of us, that's wherer it should stay." I don't necessarily agree with that, but I remember it every time.

 

You could become another Tim Russert and do a sort of Big Russ and Me.

You could call it "Pound Salt"

 

Concrete is a tough business.

For a long time I thought the hardest part of writing novels was adding filler sufficient to blow out your page count. Something along the lines of "Good Lord, it took 60 pages for them to each lunch?!" And so on. Now I wonder if today's slimmer novels simply dropped the 60-page lunch, or left it in.

 

He was not. He used to drive the bullpen cart at Shea Stadium.

 

Jack London reportedly aimed at 1,000 edited words every day he worked.

He's the guy who said (or wrote, or both): "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

 

You didn't know that the nick name for shea was the salt mine

 

Part 1

In October of 1999, I flew to Beijing to research a book on soccer. Three months earlier, the United States had defeated China on penalty kicks to win the Women’s World Cup. It had been the largest sporting event ever held for women. Even Karl Malden attended one American practice, undoubtedly becoming the first cast member from “On the Waterfront” ever to watch women kick around a soccer ball.
Ninety thousand people packed the Rose Bowl for the championship game. Another 40 million Americans watched on television. Brandi Chastain scored the winning kick and pulled off her jersey, and her sports bra got more attention than Poland joining NATO.
A couple of days after arriving in Beijing, I got a message from the hotel desk to call Mr. Gay.
Mr. Gay?
Was this some kind of escort service?
Two years earlier, I had been in a hotel in St. Petersburg, Russia, and women kept calling and offering room service that wasn’t strictly on the menu.
This was something totally different. Turned out, Mr. Gay was Gay Talese. He was also in Beijing. Apparently, he had learned of my presence from The New York Times’ Beijing bureau. Come on over, he said. The Yankees and Red Sox were on TV live in the American League Championship Series. It was late morning, still the previous evening back on the East Coast.
No way I was turning down a chance to meet Gay Talese. So I hopped a taxi to his hotel, knocked on his door and was met by a man dressed the way boot-camp Marines make their beds – everything tucked impeccably, fewer wrinkles than a Botox patient. And the creases in his slacks, so sharp they could have sliced ham. I was afraid to touch the man for fear of a paper cut. I mean, I’m a sportswriter. For my ilk, khaki Dockers amount to a tuxedo. And here’s a guy watching a baseball game in a hotel room in his suit. And he’s not even the commissioner.
He couldn’t have been nicer: Need anything to eat or drink? Whatever you want, just ask.
Small pleasantries, and then he asked the inevitable question, So what brings you to town?
Writing a book on soccer, I said. Came to interview the Chinese team about the championship game. In particular, I wanted to speak with Liu Ying, a midfielder whose errant penalty kick cost her team the world championship. Liu had lost her nerve that hot July afternoon, approaching the ball with her head down and her shoulders drooped. Briana Scurry, the American goalkeeper, believed that Liu did not want the burden of the kick. Scurry dived and blocked it, sensing the electrical hum of distress like a shark.
Then Gay uttered the words that nearly gave me a heart attack:
He had also come to Beijing to speak with Liu Ying.
He was interested in writing about the freight of defeat on a grand scale, Gay explained. He had proposed a piece for Time magazine. If that didn’t work out, maybe he’d write a book. He talked for a few minutes, but I’m not sure I heard anything else. Maybe I passed out.
All my professional life, more than 20 years, I’d been wanting to write a book. Finally, I get a chance and I travel 7,000 miles in coach and I get to Beijing with an idea so original and obscure that no one could possibly be writing about the same thing. And not only do I run into that somebody but he happens to be Gay Talese, such a formidable writer that his 1966 profile of Joe DiMaggio in Esquire had just been voted the best American sports story of the 20th century.
Not the year, not the decade, the century.
It’s a great story with an immortal line. Marilyn Monroe leaves her honeymoon in Tokyo to perform for the troops in Korea and returns and tells DiMaggio, “Joe, you never heard such cheering,” and he says, “Yes, I have.”
But I wasn’t thinking about the story at the time. At least not clearly. I was in panic, sweat was pouring. It looked like I had yanked my shirt straight out of the rinse cycle. Everything started going fuzzy. I think someone knocked on the door. Could have been the maid, could have been paramedics.
I returned to my hotel and once the time difference allowed, I frantically called David Hirshey, my editor at HarperCollins in New York. Take a deep breathe, relax, he said. He ended up giving me a long-distance Lamaze class. Tell the truth, I could have used an epidural.
“Don’t worry,” David assured me. He knew Gay from his own days at Esquire. “Whatever he writes, his book won’t be out until five years after yours.”
Still jittery, I stayed around for a week to interview the Chinese players. When she spoke of the penalty kick, Liu Ying leaned her head against a window and looked far away.
“I blamed myself,” she said.
Long after I had gone, Gay remained in Beijing. I think he stayed for months. A couple of updates from the Times’ bureau informed me that he had been seen in the company of countless government officials. What was he up to?
As I wrote my book on an extremely tight deadline, my panic subsided. I met Gay again in March of 2000, at a women’s soccer tournament in Portugal’s Algarve region. I’m pretty sure there is a law against wearing business suits in this sun-baked vacation region, but somehow Gay had escaped the fashion police, perhaps because he was dressed in the party hues of a banana daiquiri. We had lunch and he couldn’t have been more pleasant and generous. He even wrote a blurb for my book, “The Girls of Summer.”
As the 2003 Women’s World Cup approached, I heard from a mutual acquaintance that Gay’s own book was nearly finished. Then, nothing. But now has come time for the birth of “A Writer’s Life.” Apparently it is a juicy hamburger of a book, with two soccer chapters sandwiching meaty wanderings on everything from civil rights to Lorena Bobbitt.
Can’t wait to read it.
David Hirshey nearly got it right. Gay’s book appeared six years after mine instead of five. I have since written two more books, one of which somebody actually read. But even now, years later, I still get frightened and my stomach falls with a rollercoaster’s weightless dread when I think of Gay Talese and Beijing. That initial fear, that sense that everything had gone wrong and would end badly, is never far from the surface. I know how Red Sox fans felt all that time.

Part II

For my previous book, Katie came calling on “Today,” Jane did a segment on “Dateline,” C-SPAN aired my appearance at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Wolf Blitzer, Bill O’Reilly, they all wanted me. Kindly makeup artists tended to my face with the care of groundskeepers on the 18th green at Augusta.
Now another book and, except for Cold Pizza when the book appeared two years ago, nobody called. Not Katie, not Wolf, not the women with a dab of powder for the shiny spot on my nine-iron forehead.
The ivory-billed woodpecker, which might be extinct, leads a more visible and less solitary life than this book. If it were any more missing from public awareness, it would have to be reviewed on the side of a milk carton. It was issued a year ago in paperback. I fear this will only give the millions who ignored it the first time a chance not to read it again.
The latest book is neither great nor important, but a confection of sporting futility in Philadelphia called “If Football’s A Religion, Why Don’t We Have a Prayer?” No city with teams in the four major professional sports has gone as long – 24 years – without a championship. For the Eagles, it’s been 46 seasons since they finished atop the National Football League. But such is the consuming interest in the team that Edward G. Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania and former mayor of Philadelphia, does a two-hour post-game analysis each week on local cable television.
Rendell ran for re-election against the Republican challenger Lynn Swann, a Hall-of-Fame receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers and a former television sportscaster. Pennsylvania is the only state, a colleague of mine insists, with a governor who wants to be a sportscaster and a sportscaster who wants to be governor.
In November of 2005, during an Eagles’ home game against Green Bay, a guy ran onto the field trailing a powdery cloud, knelt and made the sign of the cross at the 30-yard line, then plopped to the ground as if trying to recover a fumble. Or so it seemed. What he was actually doing was spreading his late mother’s ashes.
“She never cared for any other team except the Eagles,” he told a local television station after being released from custody. “I know that the last handful of ashes I had are laying on the field and will never be taken away. She’ll always be part of Lincoln Financial Field and the Eagles.”
Unfortunately, interest in the book seems as provincial as Philly itself. I feel trapped in a child’s nightmare, wanting to shout, but able to raise only a whisper. Not that I had any delusions of challenging Harry Potter. At this point, though, I’m not sure I could outsell Colonel Sherman T. Potter.
Don’t get me wrong. There were generous print reviews in Philadelphia, a small excerpt in Philadelphia magazine, mentions in USA Today and Reader’s Digest, supportive appearances on local sports-talk radio and cable television. Once, in the green room, I even got my caterpillar eyebrows trimmed. Still, I’m barely a household name in my own household. The hardback version of “If Football’s A Religion” hit the shelves Sept. 1, 2005. Any day now, my wife will start the book and my mother will finish it.
My 16-year-old daughter, forget it.
Asked if she and her friends were interested, she said, “Who would read that?”
The previous book, “Among the Heroes,” told of United Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001, after passengers and crew members resisted the hijackers. It was a best-seller. My publisher, HarperCollins, sent me on a tour complete with limos and a credit card. Now my editor, David Hirshey, calls only to flick verbal jabs: “Do you have a book out?”
Last Christmas, I phoned him to ask how the Eagles book had done. “Terribly,” he said. When I asked how many copies had been sold, he replied, “I told them not to tell me.”
My publicist worked hard. Still, the new book could not have been quarantined any more securely if it had the avian flu. At my first reading in Philadelphia, one person showed up. Two, if you count the security guard in the Eagles hat. Fifty seats had been set up for the expected audience. I felt like a teacher whose every student had skipped class. My second signing was worse.
There I was at my suburban Barnes and Nobles, on the second floor, triangulated between the escalator, Beginning Readers and Vegetarian Cooking. A display of seasonal favorites stood nearby. “Scooby Doo’s Haunted Halloween,” “Biscuit Visits the Pumpkin Patch” and “Hershel and the Hannukkah Goblins” would surely draw readers like hummingbirds to nectar. And I would be sitting right there, with my sweet offerings of Eagles football. But nary a person stopped by.
So the store manager moved me to a table downstairs. Everyone who entered the store would have to walk past me. Some customers averted their eyes, like jurors entering the courtroom to deliver a guilty verdict. Others held their gaze for a moment too long, and I felt pinned like a dragonfly in an entomology collection. No one bought a book.
Instead of being embarrassed, I began to embrace this literary brush off. Could I actually set a record for most signings with fewest readers? The streak ended when six people showed up for my next reading. Not that the audience was transfixed. One woman kept her head down the entire time, flipping through a pamphlet. I think she was getting an early start on her taxes.
Then things began to look up. A month and a half after publication, I finally got a customer review on Amazon.com. Four stars out of five. Then, on Super Bowl Sunday in 2006, a munificent review in The Boston Globe. And a book club took notice. Less like Oprah’s Book Club and more like Russ Meyer’s Book Club.
It was a blog, actually, called Trust Me, I’m a Blonde. The blogger, known as Blonde, likes to talk about breasts and post pictures of breasts. But she reads everything and loves sports and men who wear mullets. Some people think of Las Vegas as Sin City. Blonde thinks of it as the City of Mullets.
“I am loving this book,” Blonde wrote. “A must have for the Eagles’ fan.”
There you go. The market for naughty women who like football and men with bad hair is cornered.
At least I’ve got that going for me.

 

great story.

quick nerd moment: years ago, i was but a neophyte in a press box at a rather large sporting event. i was seated near mr. longman, who was kind enough to chat with me and answer a few questions. i will make no mention of the other reporter from a major newspaper who was on my other side and not nearly as friendly.

big fan of longman's work.