THE DAILY Goes One-on-One With Journalist Alexander Wolff

Sports Illustrated senior writer and inveterate hoops fan ALEXANDER WOLFF had a dream in ‘04 of bringing pro basketball to Vermont. He took steps to make it real when in December ‘05 he and a group of individual investors founded the Vermont Frost Heaves. As a member of the reborn ABA, the team will compete during its inaugural 36-game season in the league’s Blue North against natural geographic rivals, thus keeping travel costs down. The ABA has also set a team salary cap of $120,000 as a further cost-containment item. The Frost Heaves’ business plan calls for at least part ownership of the team, after it achieves financial stability, to be turned over to its fans. Wolff, as President & GM, will continue to file regular inside reports to SI and SI.com about his own personal dream team. He spoke with SportsBusiness Journal New York bureau chief Jerry Kavanagh.

Date and Place of Birth: 2/3/57 in Wilmington, Delaware.

Education: Princeton.

Favorite piece of music: I have a lot of favorites in different genres: “Maiden Voyage” by HERBIE HANCOCK, GUSTAV MAHLER’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony and “Domino” by VAN MORRISON never disappoints.

Favorite vacation spot: The Maldives. The tsunami did great damage to the islands. There are estimates that if global warming continues at its present pace, the sea levels will rise such that the nation will cease to exist. The highest point is eight feel above sea level.

Favorite author: I’ve got many. BILL BRYSON makes me laugh. I enjoy The New Yorker when I can get to it.

Last book read: “Wandering Home,” by BILL MCKIBBEN, and the ABA operations manual.

Best basketball movie: “Hoop Dreams.” A courageous and remarkable piece of cinematic stamina.

Worst basketball movie: Any basketball movie that ineptly stages action scenes. I just cringe when I watch them.

Greatest extravagance: Parmesan reggiano.

Best professional decision: My association with Sports Illustrated [where] I’m afforded the time and the resources to gather a story and the space in which to tell it. Professionally, it’s all you can ask for. And in over 26 years, I’ve had a chance to migrate from weekly news stories and the occasional feature to now being able to do the much more rewarding longer pieces.

Best advice: Growing up, I heard from my parents that you should never throw too much of yourself into any one thing, to try to maintain some balance. When you look at how much basketball has been a part of my life, I guess you can say that I ignored that advice. But at the same time, it was good advice, and there have been many other things I have turned my attention to: music, travel, reading -- about all sorts of things. Basketball has maybe been the main professional thread in my life, and all those other things have made it a much sunnier, happier life.

Advice for aspiring journalists: If you choose this as your profession, you will hold your graduation at the time of your burial, because you will be constantly learning. That’s the single greatest reward. It’s certainly not in the millions that will accrue to you; it’s in the constant learning.

SI Writer And Vermont Frost Heaves President & GM Alexander Wolff

Q: The Frost Heaves begin play November 10. How do things look for the team?

Wolff: We have a firm presence on the Web (www.vermontfrostheaves.com) in the consciousness of savvy sports fans in Vermont. We have a business plan in place, and we put to a vote of our fans who are members of our online community, the “Bump in the Road Club” (which numbers over 1,800), the choice of our coach: WILL VOIGT, a 1994 graduate of Cabot, the smallest high school in the state. He previously worked for the San Antonio Spurs and most recently as a head coach in Norway.

Q: Do you have an inner GEORGE STEINBRENNER that this is satisfying?

Wolff: If we’re subcontacting out a coach, the hiring of a coach, to a decision of our fans, that’s not something that somebody who’s channeling George Steinbrenner is doing.

Q: Why are you doing this?

Wolff: It’s a chance for me to be involved in every little part of the process: starting up and running a team, and then being able to write about it as it happens. So, there’s obviously that professional appeal to me and the fact that I adore the game, but also that I can do it here in Vermont. My family lives here. I met my bride here. And I’ve come up here since the early ‘60s in summers and lived here since 2002. It’s the kind of place that’s just small enough that you can make things happen. It’s a real palpable sense of possibility in this state, and I don’t imagine that I’d be trying to do this in any other state. But I think that Vermont is an area or market -- to use a word that I’ve come to kind of abhor -- that’s really well-suited to this.

Q: How receptive has the public been to the venture?

Wolff: I think people are responding to the mission here to meld the old Vermont play in the wonderful old downtown gyms with the new Vermont and the Internet revolution. We’re trying to do something completely new in a slightly different way.

Q: What was the inspiration for the Frost Heaves?

Wolff: You look at somebody like MIKE VEECK and the St. Paul Saints, and you take some inspiration from him. But it’s also very much attempting to draw from Vermont values, the way things are done in this patch of New England: participatory democracy, as much as possible be responsible citizens and be “green” in our thinking, provide a sense of community for the neighbors in the wintertime and frankly, because there’s been some real basketball success at the University of Vermont recently, build up some excitement.

Q: Is there a local precedent for support?

Wolff: The state has been enormously supportive of minor league sports. The Vermont Expos, now called the Lake Monsters, have been around for 12 successful years. They even have a minor league pro soccer team that makes money up here. So, we’re very optimistic that we can make it happen for basketball. But even while we’re doing it on the ground here in Vermont, let the whole country and the whole world peek in and actually participate in what we’re doing over the Internet.

Q: You said that eventually at least some ownership of the Frost Heaves will be turned over to the team’s fans based on a model similar to “the NFL’s great small-market success story, the Green Bay Packers.” How long do you estimate it will take to achieve financial stability?

Wolff: I’m thinking three years. There’s no way to be absolutely sure. We need real investors to make sure the building blocks of the team are in place. At that point, some equity would be turned over to the fans. It would be a chance for investors to have an equity strategy. It’s a logical outgrowth from this idea of the fans having a say in the operation of the team.

Q: What’s been the biggest surprise?

Wolff: The excitement on the ground here in Vermont. Beyond the state it’s been outstanding, and even within the state to people who are volunteering and putting down deposits for season tickets. Let’s face it, at the time they’re doing this we were essentially just a logo and a Web site.

Q: What’s been the greatest challenge?

Wolff: Once we had the logo and Web site, it is the concept of the team. You face things like, “Oh, you mean we’ve got to pay workmen’s comp.” The reality of a business. Fortunately there are people close at hand who have done this seriously and are assisting me. But my entire life I have worked for a company that’s been very paternalistic in taking care of all the details. Figuring out every part of this enterprise from soup to nuts has been an education.

Q: You mentioned Mike Veeck. Have there been other owners or executives you have sounded out for advice?

Wolff: It was MARTY BLAKE who kind of put me up to this. I was doing a profile of him and he was talking about the growth of the ABA and how hard it is to keep tabs on it because franchises would pop up here and there. He mentioned that markets could be picked up for a very reasonable amount of money. It was at that point that I hatched the notion that, “Hey, for that, I could do this. And what better place to do it than Vermont, and what better content for the magazine and the Web site.” So, getting green lights from both JOE NEWMAN, the ABA CEO, and my editors at the magazine, and sounding out the Vermont market a little bit, it made sense to proceed.

Q: Where did ISIAH THOMAS and the CBA go wrong?

Wolff: (laughing) I’m not going to get into that whole episode, but I will say that the CBA has among its challenges the way its franchises are flung all over the map. Now, I say that and in the next breath, you have to tip your hat to them because they’ve been around, with hiccups here and there, for a very long time. You have one team in Yakima and another team in Albany, and you only have eight clubs. That’s going to put some stress on a league.

Q: How many games on the Frost Heaves’ schedule and how much travel is involved?

Wolff: Thirty-six games. What makes it doable here in the northeast is that there are plenty of franchises within a bus ride for us to play. I think venue issues and cost of travel are two of the great hurdles that minor league basketball has to solve to make it work. My feeling is that if you approach those sensibly, there’s no reason why minor league basketball can’t be as stable and reliable a form of local entertainment as minor league baseball is. Baseball, maybe because of all the cooperation and support that MLB provides and supplies minor league baseball, seems to have had an easier go of it.

Q: How do you assess the state of the game today?

Wolff: People love basketball almost universally. There’s a deep, visceral level at which people connect with the game because they’ve gone to high school games as kids or shot hoops in the driveway. But I think people are turned off by a lot of the things associated with the game.

Q: You’re trying to address some of those things.

Wolff: In starting the Frost Heaves, one of the formulations I’ve come up with is people love basketball, they’ve just been alienated by a lot of pro basketball. Here’s what we can do. It’s a little bit like what minor league baseball has been able to do to neutralize some of the negatives surrounding major league baseball. That is, make it much more accessible to the fans, play in arenas that have character instead of an antiseptic atmosphere and make tickets affordable and the players accessible to the fans. Of course people are going to come. It’s hoops and it’s accessible and it’s wonderful. So, I think basketball will be just fine if it can remember the way it’s always connected with people.

Q: You wrote, “I’ve long believed that our profession cries out for more of the writer’s, rather than strictly the sportswriter’s, sensibility.” Who does that better than others?

Wolff: Writers like GARY SMITH and CHARLIE PIERCE and FRANK DEFORD are three who can and do write about everything. When they write about sports topics, they draw into their writing great themes adjacent to sport. Each is doing it in his own style but with a sophistication and sense of the big picture. When you put the word “sports” in front of the word “writer” and shove them together, I think you putting a straitjacket on any writer. Sports writing, or writing about sports, would benefit just from a more writerly sensibility in general. In our business, cliché is the greatest enemy. We need to strip from our writing jargon and cliché.

Q: You wrote, “To watch Princeton play [basketball] was to be reminded repeatedly of why I love the game.” What is it about the game that you love?

Wolff: Basketball embodies that perfect balance between the individual and the collective. You can prepare all by yourself, shooting baskets until there’s no light left, and then go find a game and integrate yourself with teammates. It’s a little bit like doing your scales as a musician and then going to play in an ensemble.

Q: You see that in college basketball.

Wolff: Watching the NCAA tournament reminds me of that very thing. The teams with the greatest individual players don’t always win. Surprises are always lurking because on a particular night, one team may jell better than the other. There are all these imponderables that come into play. Yeah, it can be coached but as JAMES NAISMITH famously said, “In the end it really can only be played.”

Q: What’s your earliest basketball memory?

Wolff: Being put to bed by my parents in December 1964 and being told I could not stay up late to watch Michigan, with CAZZIE RUSSELL, play Princeton, with BILL BRADLEY, in the Holiday Festival. I was seven years old.

Q: You caught the basketball bug at an early age.

Wolff: It was 3 or 4 years after that when I started growing up in Princeton to go to Princeton games and become a student of the game. But I think part of it, too, was just being able to play by myself in the driveway. I was the only boy, the eldest child. What I do for a living involves solitude to some extent. And shooting hoops is something that has given me great comfort over the years.

Q: Do you still play?

Wolff: Oh, yeah. I play in a noontime game at Middlebury College.

Q: Is there anything in the game you would not miss if it were eliminated?

Wolff: That’s a good question. I’m tempted to say the free throw because it’s a stoppage in play. On the other hand, I think that reminds us of the fundamentals and the simple elegance of the game. You run up and down 94 feet full tilt and you suddenly you have to steel your heart a little bit to sight the rim, calm your nerves and take that big deep breath like WILLIS REED always took when you would see his medallion would pop off his chest.

Q: What’s been the best new idea in basketball?

Wolff: The three-point shot. I was something of a skeptic at first. I think it led to a lot of things: It spread out defenses and opened space on the floor and had games hanging in the balance longer. It re-emphasized the old fundamental of a good shot. The three-pointer led a lot of coaches to try to play some pressure defense in conjunction with it. On balance, it’s been a positive thing for the game.

Q: In your book “Big Game Small World,” you write, “Basketball has the potential to further international understanding.” How?

Wolff: The game was spread almost instantly after its conception. It was on three or four different continents a decade after its invention. As a result, it has worked its way into life in countries as diverse as China, Brazil, the former Yugoslavia and all sorts of different parts of the world. It doesn’t have the baggage of being identified as an American game and American export, which at this particular time in human history isn’t really a great advantage to have. It also is a game that can be and is played by everybody. There’s wheelchair basketball. Basketball for women has made such great strides. Old folks like me play pickup well into their 50s and even 60s. Even the smallest high schools field basketball teams when they can’t afford either the numbers or the equipment for football teams. That universality makes it available. In China during the cultural revolution they were getting rid of everything western, but basketball got a pass because it had already sunk down roots. It somehow traveled really well, and I think there’s something so elemental about the game.

Wolff Feels That Basketball Will Be Marquee Sport At '08 Olympics

Q: DAVID STERN has identified China as a huge target audience for the NBA.

Wolff: Yeah, the sheer numbers. But now they’ve demonstrated that Chinese can go into the NBA and excel. Obviously with the Olympics coming to Beijing in a couple of years, basketball is going to be the marquee sport. [Sports Illustrated] is launching an initiative in China, as are many other people. One thing about David Stern, he picked up very, very quickly on the international promise of basketball. And more than any other pro sports executive he has fulfilled promises and certainly reached goals that he set for himself.

Q: You refer to “two essential things the rest of the world has more of than the U.S.: savvy and shooting ability.” How did the U.S. lose its savvy in the game it invented?

Wolff: I think part of the problem is that in the United States we leave to free market forces most things, including the development of athletes, particularly in these marquee team sports. And in countries where their basketball federations are much more regimented, they install systems to make sure all the bases are covered. Their junior teams are running the same offense the players will be playing when they graduate to senior teams, and so forth. We’re just so much more untidy that way.

Q: And shooting?

Wolff: Television hasn’t really helped with the emphasis on highlight reels that steer young players toward high-risk/high-reward types of skills and don’t really encourage the shooting of 300 free throws at the end of every session with the ball. Shooting, in general, is something that European and South American club players do a lot more of, and any player will tell you the more you do it, the better you get at it.