Van Valkenburg on the bizarro of Adam Muema

He made it work. I usually hate when people do that (especially Thompson...) but KVV definitely made it work. I really liked the piece and that could not have been an easy story to do.

 

You're missed on the board, as are a handful of the others who have walked away in the last year or two.

 

I have to run soon an attempt to pull of the Memorial Day Weekend trifecta of putting down mulch in my yard, playing golf, and attending a BBQ, but I appreciate your thoughts and want to at least attempt to address them.

I think if the idea is that this story is a profile of Adam Muema, then your main concern about the need for a family voice is 100 percent legit. (They're probably legit either way, but let me explain my side.) I think that's what I set out to find, initially. But what ultimately happened here is that I wrote a piece that's trying to structure itself like a short story. All the information isn't available to us, but that's ok, because the mystery of just who the heck this kid is, and what's going on inside his head, is ultimately the engine of the story. Now, that's probably convenient for me to say since I tried and tried and couldn't get Trina or A.J., Adam's brother, or any of his friends to go on the record, but I'm not trying to make you understand him, because no one understands him, or knows what happened to his head. Maybe it was the bat to the head. Maybe it was that he ran so hard and handed out so much punishment as a runner ("made opponents want to quit the game"), there is some undiagnosed CTE issues. Maybe it's a cult leader. Maybe it's an inability to separate his on-line life from his actual reality. Maybe, just maybe, he's playing games with everyone. ("I planned it awhile ago.") Someone could, and hopefully will, write a definitive Adam Muema story, and perhaps they'll be able to better explain whether or not this is paranoid schizophrenia, and whether he has a family history of this and how we can help him.

That's a natural desire because as readers, we want closure. We desire answers, and leaving the story where I left it is sort of like an unfinished chord. It's unsettling, and in many respects, Adam is just a shell at the beginning of the piece as he was at the end. But — and again, I may be wrong — what I ultimately decided to do here was just tell you a story of the brief week I spent chasing him. I think that unsettling feeling, the incompleteness, is a little haunting, and hopefully what makes the story different. I read a lot of fiction, and while I'm a total amateur as a writer compared to most fiction writers, I think the techniques people like Jhumpa Lahiri and George Saunders and Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and Junot Diaz play with are fascinating, and there are things that can be applied (adhering to the facts, of course) in nonfiction. There are Saunders short stories where you don't even know the characters names. He's just looking for the humanity and emotions in the moments, and the backstories are only offered up as hints. As a reader, the mystery is both maddening and compelling. I think it's probably a little pretentious to say that, but I think it's important to try things as a writer, even if they don't work perfectly.

Again, maybe some of that sounds like an excuse because a traditional approach just wouldn't work, in my opinion. But I think sometimes, especially in enterprise pieces (the term longform is too pretentious and loaded for me to use), it's easy to fall into certain tropes where we ultimately give the reader what they want and it makes a lot of stories adhere to a similar structure. This story probably could've been attempted in a lot of different ways. Sports Illustrated ran their own version of what happened to Adam last week, and they did talk to Trina, who I guess was staying with her sister (which is why I couldn't seem to find her; Trina's husband has been in and out of prison, so they've had a few addresses).

Anyway, I really appreciate the thoughtful discussion.

 

I think I actually enjoyed reading that thought process as much as the story itself.

 

Me, too.

Thanks, Double Down. Don't worry, I totally got that you were doing something different with the actual writing, rather than just reporting/writing a traditional, full profile.

And, boy, you did it well, writing something that I never could have, structurally and technically. I've missed you a lot around here and this just proves why. We all could learn so much from you.

Songbird's point about the coach is good, and I go along with that, too. It's good that's he's in the story, and what he added was substantial. My problem, and why I didn't cite him, though, is because, he, too, pretty much knew and related to Muema just as an athlete, so in that sense, he didn't add something that I thought was needed, as I wrote in my earlier post. I'm not looking so much for emotion, but information. That's just how weird this story, and this guy, seems.

There is obviously so much that we don't know/understand about Muema, and I just figured there must be someone who would/does know him as something other than a football player, and this is what's needed to fill the "shell" a little bit.

Because what we have and are doing certainly isn't working. . There is just such a disconnect between a successful football player and the guy in the Groucho Marx get-up and the blanket who didn't show up for the biggest opportunity of his life, except to take a long-range picture of the other people standing there waiting for him!?!?...). It's just so mind-bendingly inexplicable.

But for what you were trying to do, the story definitely did work. It does have sort of a short-story feel to it. You are awesome, for your writing, but even more, for discussions. Thanks for taking all the time.

 

DD, I loved the piece, and your thought process. Thanks for coming back and I hope you stick around.

 

"To be frank, no."

 

Why can't we have more threads like this?

 

Not enough good journalism?

I'm joking kind of, but on this particular thread, we have an outstanding piece of journalism and we also have the writer here and willing to talk about it. Patrick Hruby has done that here in the past too, and it does make for a fun thread.

 

We can. But people have to participate. Usually, hardly anyone does.

 

Yeah, it's a bit of a perfect storm here. KVV is known and well-liked on this board, and is a great writer so we can have a conversation about his writing that stays on track.

With most others, even some who are considered among the best in the business, those threads get sidetracked very quickly.

 

Everyone here is on their best behavior.
Goes to show assholes who say there is no decorum here.