This interview was conducted on December 2, 2008. Excerpts of the interview were published in SBJ on January 26, 2009.
Gary Smith is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated known for the penetrating insights in his 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 2008 and contains 20 of his favorite stories.
Q. In the foreword to Ira Berkow’s book Beyond the Dream, Red Smith wrote, “Ira Berkow knows that what is important about a game is not the score but the people who play it.” The same could be said of you.
Smith: Well, hopefully so. That’s how I approach it.
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. I think there is a decent amount of plot in there, but it’s not the plot of the games that’s critical. There is just a stage on which things play out and the different aspects of character manifested.
Q. You wrote, “My subjects just happen to be in sports,” yet the subjects could come from any profession: arts, politics, business, for example.
Smith: Maybe you get more audience around the table because it’s sports. But really, it’s much more dealing with universal aspects of character and dreams and wants and things that all of us deal with. There’s where the reader can begin to connect with some of these people, even celebrities, that maybe they only looked at in a vertical way and never saw much relationship to themselves. The hope is that when they read some of these stories, they’ll come away seeing that these people are human beings dealing with a lot the same demons, fears...whatever, that they are also dealing with.
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. The New York Times referred to you as the “Sports Whisperer,” and Mike Veeck said, “People warned me he’d get deep inside my head, but I had no idea. That piece could have saved me 20 years of psychoanalysis.” Rick Reilly, in the introduction to Going Deep, wrote, “God, please don’t let this guy ever profile me.” I think he was kidding. How are you able to get inside the heads of people?
Smith: I can’t say that I do, but I’m really fascinated by what makes human beings tick and how they respond to circumstances, how they solve their problems. Sometimes it’s the problem of their life, with the circumstances they were dealt, and there are so many problems and so many different ways to solve them. That interests me.
Q. That requires trust on their part.
Smith: I hope some trust as the process develops. Maybe we’re able to get to some terrain that you might not get in a typical interview where’s there’s much more of a time limit. Most journalists need a quick impression and a quick take on something, whereas I have the luxury of really getting down into some complexities and paradoxes and really trying to understand on a deeper level. I hope most of the story subjects appreciate this, that there is some sincerity in that attempt.
Q. The profiles require that you spend a considerable amount of time with the subjects, right?
Smith: For sure. They’re probably sick of me by the time it’s done.
Q. Is it ever awkward?
Smith: 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. So, that was a rather awkward moment. And there are moments when you’ve got to ask them about things that are very sensitive, and that can be difficult. You hope that occurs at a point when 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, hopefully, 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 it might play out. The other thing that interests me is how sports, or certain people in sports, strive or do something that really pulls people together. They punch through barriers between human beings and find something very connective among people from all different races, backgrounds, religions… whatever. Sports has that possibility strongly within it. People who find a way to use it that way interest me quite a bit.
Q. Do you do all of your own research and fact-checking?
Smith: Yes.
Q. The research into the subject’s background can elicit interesting or surprising results.
Smith: You never know where you’re going to 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. In ambiguity, there is a gold mine. There is a lot of tension involved.” Also, “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. 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. They want to get a sociologist to check in with a quote, or something that covers it. That seems to be how a lot of that is treated. It’s understandable because, like I said, of the restrictions of the daily swirl.
Q. It’s different for you.
Smith: I’m lucky. I have the time and the space to explore more. In the paradoxes of human beings and their behavior, why they do things and how conflicted it is and how it’s running in two different directions at once. Often, I’ve found if you can really get to that and convey it in the writing…there’s great stuff there, and I think it just strikes a more authentic bone in the reader. The reader knows usually enough about himself, or has some glimmer about himself, even if he doesn’t always want to let that ambiguity rise to the surface.
Q. It’s there, though.
Smith: It’s there; things aren’t that clean. Our actions are often the result of very mixed impulses and drives. There’s tension among those impulse drives, which obviously is a great boon to storytelling: the rubbing of those different conflicts and how we find resolutions. We solve a lot of problems in ways that attend to a couple of different things at once. They’re not ideal always, but they satisfy conflicting drives sometimes. That, to me, is really interesting and is more honest to what a human being really is.
Q. Your style is non-judgmental.
Smith: Well, I’m trying. I think when you really get down to the bottom and trace back why people do what they do and see the circumstance they created and who they became, it strips away a lot of that desire to judge. Sometimes—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.
Q. And then?
Smith: Once you see that, it’s hard to take that manifestation or that mask that they may be showing the world and just judge it as if is not connected to all that came before it. Or what may have happened to that person at 2 or 3 years old, say, and that mask became a survival tool. Once you start to see that, I think it becomes a lot harder to judge.
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 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 have written, “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.
Q. A broader life experience? A mature perspective?
Smith: The idea basically being that somebody’s lived a lot more life, and had a lot more life experiences. He’s basically been in the bubble of baseball and perfecting, you know, a single skill set. Kind of limited in a lot of ways since he was probably 10-11 years old. When he has to leave this and experience a lot of things…about letting that go and getting to a lot more of life.
Q. A more complete or detailed picture.
Smith: I would imagine he’d be a much more interesting story because there would be more turns and twists to his life and with the loss of something that gave him an identity: baseball. It’s going to have an effect on him, you know. I would think a large effect in how he deals with it. Sometimes it’s when you get a person for a story, not necessarily when they’re in the limelight. There could be a lot more expansion to the story beyond that.
Q. John Cage said, “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” Who are the original thinkers in sports?
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 are a vehicle through which you grow as an entire person. When it becomes an end in itself, imagination gets quashed.
Q. In this increasingly technological age, is the printed word becoming passé?
Smith: It’s definitely under siege. I feel that it’s always going to have a place because I think it gets to a deeper spot in the reader. Stories still strike us, and have an effect and a power on us. They’re still really important on some deep level, and I don’t think that the Internet is the best medium. It’s a great medium for information and a horizontal knowledge.
Q. What about something like the Kindle?
Smith: Maybe that will work. I don’t mean to say that it can’t happen electronically, but something about the [reading] experience has to be different from what we’re getting right now on the laptop, or whatever, for that kind of exchange to really work in its truest, deepest sense. Something that takes us more into what a book or magazine experience is like, where we can walk off with it and be alone and linger over it and not have your finger on the trigger button of your mouse or have to scroll down, the way you approach material on the Internet. If that’s doable, then maybe there is a way that books and magazines will thrive, but in a different format from what is being served up right now.
Q. The trouble with the electronic format 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. All that stuff is taking you away from boring deeper and deeper into the words and the story and how it connects with you and your life. All that stuff is calling you away. Real writing is all about chiseling every word and every sentence and every paragraph that just pulls the reader closer and deeper 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 Herman Hesse, who was more intrigued by human growth and what’s going on inside them, and Camus and Dostoevsky and Kundera, who really are much more psychological. Those guys influenced the way I think, for sure.
Q. Do you go back to them now?
Smith: You referred to writing in the margins. There will be times when I’ll pick up and leaf through one book and see what I’ve marked, and reread some of those nuggets that are in there.
Q. It’s a curious thing to reread a novel years later and see what you once underlined or 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 so much 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, even though it may have interested you then. It’s felt reality vs. intellectual reality.
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. What about an interview with anyone, past or present, living or dead?
Smith: There are so many. It would be fascinating to talk to Jesus Christ. It would be fascinating to talk to Friederich Nietzsche, to Dostoevsky. I’d love to sit down with them and throw some ideas around.
Q. Not a sportswriter’s typical interview subject. If you could switch places with any athlete, whom would you choose? Or would you even want to?
Smith: I probably wouldn’t because 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 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. That was a rather striking experience to spend a lot of time with him and see how hungry he was to grow and 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 playing career, which is why he was so confusing to so many people, to tennis fans.
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. 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.
Q. There is a song in The Mikado in which Ko-Ko lists things that would not be missed: “nuisances who write for autographs…people [with] irritating laughs.” 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.
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. 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. Is there a sports story or sports business story you are watching closely?
Smith: Not really. 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: What's 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.
Q. Do you see that happening?
Smith: 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. Bobby Knight wrote about the panorama you see through the car’s windshield, 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.
PERSONAL
Date & Place of Birth: 10-27-1953
Education: La Salle University
Education: La Salle University
Last book read: Psychotherapy Without the Self, by Mark Epstein
Earliest sports memory: It would probably be when I was 6 or 7 years old 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.
FAVORITES
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.
I've been back there several times. I loved living in Bolivia and Spain and Paris.
Piece of music: "Thunder Road," by Bruce Springsteen, is right up there.
Authors: Nietzsche, Camus, Kundera
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.
Sporting event: Baseball and basketball have been my two favorite sports since I was a kid.
