Your first read on the Super Bowl

Wetzel is the best working right now, I think.

I remember a few years ago I received an out-of-the-blue email from him that he liked a column or columns I wrote. We didn't really know each other - had crossed paths at a game or two, but he probably didn't remember me.

Anyway, I still think back to that and say, "Well, if that guy - who is the absolute best - liked my columns, then maybe in another time, another place, under other circumstances, I might have had a shot in this business."

Point being that he is the best - and also seemingly a good guy, too.

 

Wetzel is indeed a very good guy, on top of everything else.

 

Actual detail, context, command of the scene and of vocabulary ...
Rare commodities indeed in this day and age. Rare.

 

Great writing?


<i>"The defense had proven resilient. Brady had shaken off early mistakes to put together a brilliant 16-for-16 and two-touchdown passing stretch. All they needed to make was one more play. On offense. On defense. Somewhere. Anywhere.

It never happened. Instead they marched off Lucas Oil Field with Giants confetti falling above them, another Super Bowl dashed by the New Yorkers.

How? Why? There’s no simple answer.

Not now. Maybe not ever. The last Super Bowl loss haunted them, hung over them, motivated them to get back. They know that pain too well to think this will be any different. The first night is always the longest. They don’t get much shorter though." </i>

Decent writing. Not great. To call it great would be to miss the point of what Wetzel does so well.

Wetzel knows where his story is, he has the freedom to ignore the Giants actually winning the game - and good for Yahoo to allow it - and so he just stuck there with Brady for an hour. And then he is clearly confident enough to stick with <i>his</i> reality of the story all the way through. That fidelity - however the writing plays out - is really commendable. It's what makes a great columnist, and not just a great writer. Great writers, in fact, can't often do what Wetzel did.

 

That would depend entirely upon what and whom you read.

 

Seriously, I guess it gets into a whole discussion of what "writing" is, doesn't it?

Is it simply the use of words, or is it all of the things that go into the final thing that you read.

Was Heinz, for example, a "great writer" in terms of putting together stunning prose? Not really. His beauty was in his simplicity, and his remarkable eye for detail.

 

Heinz was a very great writer.

He was a minimalist who modeled his prose after Hemingway's. Other "great" magazine writers - say Wolfe or Thompson - might be thought of as maximalists. One style is easier to point out than the other.

But the attribute of greatness transcends style.

 

I'm sure it does, but I didn't mean to knock what Wetzel did. I don't think a columnist is always served with "great writing." Because sometimes great writing serves little more than the ego of the great writer. IMO, the columnist is usually served by being, for a lack of better word, a great director of image and opinion. Wetzel repeatedly shows a gift capturing something without getting worried that he didn't capture everything. His Brady column doesn't, for example, delve too deeply into how Brady's changed in the last 4 years, become angrier, more emotional - perhaps more childish. As his coach mellows into someone resembling a full-fledged human being, Brady is becoming less of one, maybe by design, maybe by proxy of Belichick, etc. You can explore those things - and the image of Brady slumped on a bench provides the launching point for it. But it's to Wetzel's credit that he didn't get a "great writing" fancy and do that.

 

Alma, has anyone ever accused you of being starry-eyed?

Wetzel's column was very, very good. He seized the moment. He had enough of a team around him at Yahoo -- to go along with no print deadlines to hit -- that he took in the scene and found the story. He did it on deadline. He wrote this piece in no more than two hours, based on the time stamp and the final line of the column. He paid close attention to detail and brought us one of the most interesting looks into Tom Brady that I've read in years.

ESPN's Elizabeth Merrill, who might be my favorite writer at the World Wide Leader, wrote earlier this week about how difficult it is to provide a new detail on Tom Brady. That's covered ground. Wetzel went and found something original to write.

The column could have used a bit of hard editing. Instead of 1,600 words, this column should have been 1,200 words. But the editing, along with the writing, was done on deadline. Wetzel is not Heinz, but there were stretches of brilliant writing. I liked this portion, in particular:

Based on your posting history on this board (and, now, based on your response to SF), Alma, I'm guessing you didn't mean to imply that Wetzel's writing was inferior to others at the game as much as that we've lowered our standards of great writing. I think this is a case where we've lowered our standards of editing more than writing. I think if you gave this column to some of the best line editors from 1980 or 1990 or even now -- I'm sure Yahoo didn't have its best line editors working at 1 a.m. Monday morning -- and let them get a crack at this, it would be really great writing. As it stands, it's about as good as anyone's going to produce on deadline at a game.

 

Dan Wetzel has outdone himself again. I did not want to like his column. The way it started out I could sniff the cliche woe-is-me-ism story that ended in platitudes about how he would bounce back. But he got me. Wow, what a writing exhibition.

 

This is one of those where I'd like to know when the writer came up with the idea for the story...was this something he was looking for going in or did it strike him at some point during the game or post-game? Shows the importance of being able to sniff out where a good story lies, and his ability to sit back and not smother the idea is extraordinary.