breeds success.
The best interviewers are those who are curious and who desire to know as much as possible, even about basic elements, such as what a person was wearing (acid-washed jeans, skinny jeans, or apple-bottom jeans?), the setting where a story took place (a soft breeze, strong enough to tousle someone’s long hair and cold enough to evoke goose pimples?), and the specific details connected to a story (did the protagonist eat linguine, penne, or angel hair pasta? Was the sauce marinara, pesto, or arrabbiatta?)
“I want to know everything,” Thompson says. “I want to go back and report the interiority of scenes. I want to know what something smelled like. I ask about everything.”
Details breathe life into features and profiles like “Staying the Course.” Approaches to interviews for these types of stories vary a great deal from game stories. Feature and profiles emulate short stories, in that they should all have developed characters, a clear setting, a primary conflict, and a plot. In “Staying the Course,” golf pro Patrick Ford and golf course superintendent Nick Bright struggle to preserve two golf courses until someone saves the Daufuskie Island resort from bankruptcy, even though they do not have money to buy new equipment, must creatively fend off pests like mole crickets by mixing honey and poison, and eventually, do not receive power to the main building. For 18 months, these two tireless men work to stave off nature, insects, and weather, so the course does not fall into disrepair before someone can purchase it.
In features, you’ll need to ask for information not offered in documents, learn what motivates people, gather stories that help explain or clarify, learn people’s interior thoughts, and drill deeper into the primary conflicts.
There are several conflicts, but the biggest one involves the reason these two men don’t depart for a job at another golf course. That personal or interior conflict drives this story. Thompson, of course, asks each of the men this very question. Along the way, we learn snippets about the people.
Now they have only a skeleton crew to run the mowers, and less than $1,000 a month to keep the place alive after gas and payroll. Life is basically hand-to-mouth, and everything is harder than the one before. “Now, it’s just like, shoot me,’” Nick says. “You sit here and wonder, ‘Why the hell are we doing this?’”
“I would sometimes say, ‘Look, this seems like this to me. Tell me more,’” Thompson said. “I’d ask, ‘It seems like you hate this guy. Is that true?’ Or I’d ask them whether something I noticed was right or wrong. I’d look for patterns in behaviors and I’d ask about subtext in relationships.”
Sportswriters learn when they ask questions, hang out, take detailed notes, and then ask more questions. Is someone happy with a decision? Then, ask. And ask multiple follow-up questions until you get specific reasons, elicit emotional responses, or collect a story that explains it all. Ideally, get all three elements.
sports insider
Listen. And adapt.
That’s what Michael Wallace did while interviewing Charlotte Hornets guard Jeremy Lin.
Wallace had been asked to explore why the small-market Hornets were suddenly among the hottest teams in the NBA. The team converted 3-pointers at a high percentage, shared the ball well and had terrific camaraderie. But Wallace wondered how best to put a face on the story.
He ultimately decided to focus on Lin, best known for a meteoric performance with the New York Knicks several years earlier after having been picked up from waivers. He scored at a high rate, made last-second winning shots and helped the mediocre Knicks win seven in a row, which resulted in significant national exposure (dubbed “Linsanity”) that included a cover photo on Sports Illustrated. Lin had played in relative obscurity before catching on with Charlotte.
So they chatted.
During a lighter moment in the interview, Lin, an Asian-American, mentioned that he still gets stopped by security when he tries to enter some NBA arenas. “He basically implied he gets racially profiled, because he doesn’t necessarily fit the look of a basketball player,” says Wallace. “That nugget of info ended up giving me the perfect ‘in’ to my feature on the Hornets and how they’ve emerged from their sort of identity crisis to become one of the NBA’s hottest teams entering the playoffs. Lin may still get carded when he enters arenas, but no one questions who these Hornets are anymore on the NBA landscape.”
Michael Wallace, ESPN
Michael Wallace, ESPN
Journalism Is Not Stenography
Here’s what sports journalists know that sports fans may not: Journalism is not stenography, and an interview is not an ordinary conversation. In a relaxed feature interview—compared with the usual two-minute locker room rush job after the game—sports journalists might like their interview subjects to think they’re having a casual conversation. But in fact, that’s never the case. The interviewee may be answering off the top of his head, but the interviewer must always come prepared, listen closely while simultaneously thinking of follow-up questions, and stay tuned to the computer screen in his mind as it scrolls through the story that’s going to be written afterward. Interviewing is a complex, somewhat awkward process that, in the hands of a good interviewer, looks completely smooth and natural.
For sports journalists, interviews serve three main purposes: to acquire new information, to elicit an expert’s opinions, and to tap into a person’s thoughts and feelings. To accomplish all this, the key is preparation: learning enough about the sports, teams, and players to ask informed questions. You want to ask questions that yield new information and personal responses that go beyond the basics and help people see the world through the interviewee’s eyes. You can’t just arrive a few minutes before a game, watch it, and then ask a few general questions at the end. Publications and websites already contain plenty of hackneyed sports writing without you adding more clichés to the pile.
The 20 chapters in this book that detail how to cover individual sports divide the process into four categories: prepare—watch—ask—write. Interviewing has its own version of the first three categories, all in the service of having something great to write about. And if there’s a fourth category for interviewing, after ask, it’s this: keep asking.
Prepare
A sports fan who goes to an event can simply relax and have a good time. A journalist can’t. Being a sports journalist is its own kind of fun, but nobody would call it relaxing. You need preparation to understand what you’re seeing in a game and preparation to do a good interview. Read press guides, evaluate statistics, and interview people familiar with the team, such as team managers, statisticians, and physical trainers.
At first, keep your notebook closed and your ears and eyes open. If you are assigned to cover a game at the last minute, you can still try to read some stories and review team stats. Great questions come from sweat and hard work.
Prepare not just yourself but the people you interview. People like to know why they’re answering questions. Tell sources right away what you’re looking for—for example, “I noticed X during the game, and I wanted to ask about it.” This kind of statement eases the person’s concerns (“Oh, no problem, I know how to talk about that”) and lets the interviewee start thinking about the topic, which means better responses and more information for your story.
Finally,
