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| SI Senior Writer Gary Smith |
GARY SMITH is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated known for the penetrating insights in his four annual long-form (8,000-word) personal profiles. He has earned numerous accolades, including four National Magazine Awards, and has been recognized 11 times in the Best American Sports Writing anthology. Smith's work has also appeared in Esquire, Inside Sports, Rolling Stone and Time. His most recent collection, "Going Deep," was published late in '08 and contains 20 of his favorite stories. Smith spoke recently with SportsBusiness Journal N.Y. bureau chief Jerry Kavanagh.
Favorite vacation spot: I try to mix them up. I loved living in Sydney for a year.
I've been back there several times. I loved living in Bolivia and Spain and Paris.
Favorite piece of music: "Thunder Road" by BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN is right up there.
Favorite authors: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, ALBERT CAMUS, MILAN KUNDERA.
Favorite movies: "Ghandi," "Lawrence of Arabia," "The Shawshank Redemption."
Best and worst sports movies: I don't watch too many sports movies. They're kind of mainstreamed, and mainstream movies don't do much for me.
Favorite sporting event: Baseball and basketball have been my two favorite sports since I was a kid.
Last book read: "Psychotherapy Without the Self," by MARK EPSTEIN.
Earliest sports memory: It would probably be when I was 6 or 7 and out in the yard playing and my mom called me in. The Phillies were batting with two outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. She explained just enough about the situation to pull me into the drama, and it sparked something.
Superstitions: I've pretty much whittled those stupid little things out of my life.
Extravagances: As soon as I hear something about a book that sounds interesting or introduces new ideas, I jump on Amazon and buy it in a heartbeat, which means I'll have about 30 books lined up in the on-deck circle when I should be knocking off the ones I've got.
Q: The New York Times referred to you as the "Sports Whisperer." MIKE VEECK, about whom you wrote, said, "People warned me he'd get deep inside my head. ... That piece could have saved me 20 years of psychoanalysis." And RICK REILLY, in the introduction to "Going Deep," wrote, "God, please don't let this guy ever profile me." I think he was kidding.
Smith: I'm really fascinated by what makes human beings tick and how they respond to circumstances in their lives, how they solve their problems. And hopefully the person that I'm writing about and spending so much time interviewing senses that there is a genuine interest to understand. With that maybe comes some trust in being able to get to terrain that you might not get in a typical interview -- where there's much more of a time limit for most journalists and they need a quick take on something. I have the luxury of getting down into some complexities and paradoxes and really trying to understand on a deeper level.
Q: It's characterization rather than plot that drives your stories.
Smith: There is some plot in there because I'll often cover the arc of a person's life from deep into a situation that can be quite complicated. But it's not the plot of the games that's critical. That is just a stage on which things play out and the different aspects of character manifest. Maybe you get more audience around the table because it's sports, but it's much more dealing with the universal aspects of character that all of us deal with. Hopefully when they read some of these stories, they'll come away seeing that these people are human beings dealing with a lot of the same demons, fears, dreams or whatever that they are dealing with.
Q: Your style is non-judgmental.
Smith: I think when you get down to the bottom and trace back why people do what they do, and see the circumstances they created and who they became, it strips away a lot of that desire to judge. Oftentimes it was just sheer survival that compelled the person to settle on a certain behavioral pattern or personality that they show to the world. Once you start to see that, I think it becomes a lot harder to judge.
Q: The profiles require that you spend a considerable amount of time with the subjects.
Smith: For sure. They're probably sick of me by the time it's done.
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| Smith Recalls Awkward Moment With Tyson |
Q: Is it ever awkward?
Smith: There are moments, sometimes at the beginning. I remember MIKE TYSON. I put my hand out to introduce myself and he just walked away and left my hand hanging in the air. That was rather awkward. And sometimes you've got to ask them about things that are very sensitive, and that can be difficult. Hopefully that occurs at a point where they have enough trust to at least appreciate where the question is coming from. They may not be able to answer it completely frankly, but at least they won't kick me out the door.
Q: What attracts you to a particular subject in the first place?
Smith: It's hard to say exactly what it is. It's got to have ripples and twists and turns and some legs to it to go 8,000-9,000 words. Just something in there that will suggest there's a lot more to this, or how this might play out.
Q: All within sports.
Smith: The other thing that interests me is how sports, or certain people in sports, really strives or do something that really pulls people together. Sports punches through barriers between human beings and finds something very connective among very different types of people. Sports has that possibility strongly within it, and people who find a way to use it that way interest me quite a bit.
Q: The research into the subject's background can sometimes bring surprising results.
Smith: You never know where you'll end up. You treat each one as an expedition where you just don't know where it's going to go, rather than going in with preconceived ideas.
Q: You wrote, "It fascinates me, what makes a person tick. It's the contradiction, the paradox. ... Ambiguity is where the reality lies. It's much more honest."
Smith: A lot of journalism, because of time and space limitations, has to pretty much flee ambiguity. And the way it deals with paradox, it gets somebody's quote on one side and somebody's quote on the other side. So, it's like they've covered their bases. Then they get a sociologist to check in with a quote. That seems to be how a lot of that is treated. I have the time and the space to explore more. In the paradoxes of human beings and their behavior, I've found that if you can really get to that and convey it in the writing ... there's great stuff there. Our actions are often the result of very mixed impulses, and there's tension among those impulses, which obviously is a great boon to storytelling.
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Smith Feels Greater Pressure
Over Personal Stories, Like Valvano |
Q. About JIM VALVANO you wrote, "He wanted to make amends, resolve some things with the world, and I knew I was his voice for that." Any pressure or added responsibility in telling a story like that?
Smith: I always feel a deep sense of responsibility when I take somebody's life, in a way, into my hands. There's even more when a person's facing the end and their family is about to lose them. Yeah, it definitely ups the ante. I've felt it.
Q: You wrote, "Celebrities are often more into protecting their image. DEREK JETER at age 60 would be a hell of a story." Why?
Smith: Well, perhaps at that age he might be able to drop some of the veneer that he's so successfully created for what he's dealing with in a very professional, but not very revealing, way. Who knows? Maybe more ossified? It's hard to say. I would imagine he'd be a much more interesting story because there would be more turns and twists to his life. And the loss of something that gave him an identity, baseball, I would think would have a large effect in how he deals with it.
Q: JOHN MCENROE turned you down. That would have been interesting, to explore what happens when the cheering stops.
Smith: Yeah, I would have enjoyed that a lot.
Q: In this increasingly technological age, when it seems every other person is on his cell phone or BlackBerry, or watching something on a cell phone, is the printed word becoming passé?
Smith: It's definitely under siege. But I feel that it's always going to have a place because it gets to a deeper spot in the reader. Stories still have an effect and power on us. The Internet is a great medium for information, but for real storytelling, I just don't think that it is going to be something that we settle on.
Q: The trouble with reading something electronically is that you can't write in the margins.
Smith: That's exactly right. The other thing about it is that it needs to be served up in a way that doesn't have advertisements or links that you click on to go to something else. That takes you away from boring deeper into the words and the story and how it connects with your own life. All that other stuff is calling you away. Real writing is all about chiseling every word, every sentence and every paragraph so that just pulls the reader closer into it.
Q: Who has influenced your style?
Smith: It's hard to point to any particular writer. I've gone through different phases in my life, as anybody else who is interested in writing and reading. After I went through the kind of STEINBECK/HEMINGWAY earlier phase, I turned to writers like HERMANN HESSE, who was more intrigued by human beings and what's going on inside of them, and Camus and DOSTOYEVSKY and Kundera, who are much more psychological. Those guys influenced the way I think, for sure.
Q: Do you re-read them?
Smith: You referred to markings in the margins. There will be times when I'll pick up and leaf through one and see what I've marked and re-read some of those nuggets that are in there.
Q: It's a curious thing to go back years later and see what you once noted as being meaningful at the time.
Smith: That's right. You'd probably underline something very different now.
It's amazing how you can go back to the same book and get more out of it now that you have that much more life experience. It will resonate in a way that it didn't back then. It's felt reality vs. intellectual reality.
Q: Is there a sports story or sports business story you are watching closely?
Smith: It's going to be interesting to see how the economy plays out on sports and see if we can kind of whittle back our mania or religion, or whatever you want to call it, and adjust. Or if it will just be the escape from everything and motor on. I've got to believe there's going to be some pretty massive effects of it. But for the stories I write, something like that would need to play out in an individual or a small group for it to be compelling. That's definitely a worthy story, and needs to be done, but it's not where I make my most hay.
Q: BOBBY KNIGHT wrote about the panorama you see through the car's windshield. He said that the rear-view mirror greatly restricts life. What do you see looking straight ahead that excites you?
Smith: In general, it's continuing to grow and understand more of what this whole mystery and miracle of life is.
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Nietzsche Among Smith's
Dream Interviews |
Q: If you could secure an interview with anyone, past or present, living or dead, who would it be?
Smith: There are so many. It would be fascinating to talk to JESUS CHRIST. It would be fascinating to talk to Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. I'd love to sit down with them and throw some ideas around.
Q: Any fictional character you would enjoy interviewing?
Smith: Wow, you better believe that! Ahab would be a good one. Steppenwolf would be an interesting guy. We could go all over the place for that question.
Q: If you could switch places with any athlete, whom would you choose? Or would you even want to?
Smith: I probably wouldn't. For the most part, they've had to whittle down their lives so much to excel at something that their possibility for personal growth is greatly compromised. There are a few who have gone beyond that and found a way, probably mostly so after they've retired. It's like they die young, and if they haven't figured out something before that death occurs, about where the water and the deeper life is, then pretty much it seems like a Sahara of an existence after that death of the end of their careers.
Q: You wrote about ANDRE AGASSI.
Smith: Agassi was a guy who really struck me because he was a seeker even while he was an athlete, which is so rare. Most of them just don't have the time, or they're afraid of tinkering with the equation and looking too far beyond the immediacy of the skill set they're trying to perfect. It was a rather striking experience to spend a lot of time with him and see how hungry he was to learn and to understand himself, even while he was still playing. It intensified even more toward the end of his playing days, but he was on that kind of quest throughout his career, which is why he was so confusing to so many people.
Q: AL MCGUIRE said, "Inside, I think, all the thoroughbred athletes have uncertainty, the fear of being unsuccessful." Do you sense that?
Smith: Oh, yeah. Once you get deeper into a person -- even the greatest athletes -- the fear becomes so much more prominent. And it humanizes them because it seems like they're in such control, and the fear ... oftentimes you find it's the centerpiece of who they've become. And how they've managed to deal with it is what's made them great. But it doesn't lessen one iota how much fear is in play in the whole process.
Q: What in sports would you not miss if it were eliminated?
Smith: Bats that break so easily. I have a real fear that somebody's going to lose an eye before they get a grip on this. I wouldn't miss PSLs. I wouldn't miss baseball games starting at 8:30 and ending after midnight and days off in between tournaments and games and playoffs and World Series where they just stretch out forever. I wouldn't miss boxing, you know, with the total way that it's legislated and run.
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Smith Lists Wooden As One Of
The Original Thinkers In Sports |
Q: Who are the original thinkers in sports? Where is the imagination?
Smith: They're probably few and far between now. JOHN WOODEN -- there seemed to be something there going on beyond the obvious and typical and clichés. MUHAMMAD ALI had a big imagination. He had an ability to link his personal journey to the world. It was an act of inspiration because it took him through moments in the ring that would have melted other men. It felt like he was doing it to help the world. And, so, he had a much larger motivation in a way that people who were just on a singular quest for their own betterment or riches. What's been lost to a large degree is that sports is a vehicle through which you grow as an entire person. When it becomes an end in itself, imagination gets quashed.
Q: RED HOLZMAN said, "The best feeling in the world is to wake up early in the morning when you don't have to go anywhere." What do you consider the best feeling in the world?
Smith: One would be waking up in some strange place on the other side of the world and just drinking in all the different sights, sounds, smells, and people. Or just waking up to a full day to read and think and not too many errands to run or obligations to fulfill. To have a good cup of coffee and settle down with something that's going to take you somewhere new. That's also a great day.
Q: What makes you see red?
Smith: Gosh, I don't get real angry about a lot of things. Anger isn't one of the major components of my personality.
Q: What's been the best new idea in sports?
Smith: I don't know if it's come to fruition yet, but I'd like to see the approach of coaches and teams be, "Let's see how we can grow through this and contribute to society through this journey we're on as a team." That it become more of a relationship between sports and the fans and their communities, instead of just to win the championship and a zillion dollars. A great chance is being missed because it's so rare that you have these laboratories (sports), where you're bringing in so many different kinds of people into one setting. They're spending more time with one another than with their own families and they have to have incredible discipline. It's a rare and beautiful situation, but it's not being seen for what its possibilities are. That's where I wish the new ideas would go to, but it's not happening that much.
Q: BILLY MARTIN said, "There is nothing greater in the world than when someone on the team does something good, and everybody gathers around to pat him on the back."
Smith: Except for when somebody does something bad and everybody gathers around to pat him on the back.
Q: He would have been an interesting personality for you to profile.
Smith: Who, Billy? Oh, God, yeah! I don't know if anybody ever really nailed him and got to the bottom of what created him to be who he was.
