really want to go in there?”
“Well, I don’t want to go in, but I have to go in there to do my job.”
“All right then,” Grant said with a smile and a shrug. “Do whatever you have to do.”
And with that, I turned around and walked into a room full of naked men.
It was worse than I thought. Not the naked men. Actually, there were very few naked bodies.
The players were in various stages of undress, many still wearing their football pants.
No, I could never have anticipated the problem I was about to confront. It was a preseason game, so there were many extra players on the roster, but no names above the lockers. And even though I was carrying a flip card—the sheet given out in the press box containing all the players’ names and numbers—most of the players had taken off their jerseys, so I couldn’t tell who anyone was.
To further complicate matters, I also couldn’t look around. If I did that, the players could accuse me of being in the locker room for the wrong reason. And that was the one thing I had to avoid.
As it was, as soon as I walked into the steamy, overcrowded room, I heard whoops and hollers from distant corners, from players I could not see:
“We don’t go in the women’s bathroom!”
“Here for some cheap thrills?”
I took a few tentative steps into the room, then stopped, not knowing what to do. I was stuck.
It seemed like a lifetime standing there, but really was only twenty to thirty seconds when, out of the noise and confusion, a player in uniform walked up to me. It was Tom Hannon, the Vikings’ fourth-year safety out of Michigan State.
“Who do you need?”
I smiled.
“Tommy Kramer,” I said.
Hannon pointed to the quarterback, putting on his necktie.
I mentioned a few other players, and he pointed them out to me.
Then I interviewed Hannon, because he had intercepted two Miami passes. I thanked him for his help and beelined to Kramer and the others. Every one of them was dressed except for one lineman, who obviously desperately wanted to be interviewed buck naked. He didn’t even bother to reach for a towel. As I moved toward him, he walked the rest of the way to me with a smirk on his face, enjoying the discomfort he brought with every step he took. I found this awkward, but not awkward enough not to do my job. I was determined to get the quotes, so I interviewed the naked guy. As luck would have it, the notebook I had brought was not the stenographer size, but an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven. With my height, looking the lineman right in the eye, when I looked down as I was writing, I saw only the notebook.
Forevermore when going into locker rooms, I carried an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven notebook, perfectly positioned.
All this interviewing, which seemed like an eternity to me, took about ten minutes. When I burst out of the locker room, I had just thirty minutes until my deadline, so I ran across the field in the now empty Orange Bowl to catch the elevator back up to the press box. I pulled out my bulky Texas Instruments computer, with its scroll of paper coming out the top. I wrote as quickly as I ever had, sent my story, then sat back and looked at a colleague sitting next to me.
“Oh boy,” I said, exhaling and forcing a big smile.
Finally, I could think about what I had just been through. “I just focused on the interviews and tried to ignore all the things that were being said,” I told him.
I didn’t even think to retell the story of the taunts and jeers, or the naked guy. The end result was the important thing for me.
When I got home that night, I pulled out my diary.
“It was tough—not embarrassing though,” I wrote. “Just did my job and got out of the locker room and wrote the story.”
Christine Brennan is a sports columnist for USA Today, commentator for ABC News, CNN, and NPR, a best-selling author and a nationally known speaker.
Chapter 2 Writing Game Stories
Sports fans today no longer await game recaps in print to learn how their favorite teams and players fared. Odds are, fans already know final outcomes, stats, and highlights, even before the final whistle blows, thanks to social media and mobile phones. So there’s no need to fill stories with what happened, because fans already know most of the play-by-play and have probably viewed video highlights, which are readily available as they happen.
Instead, game stories today blend analysis, commentary, and narrative into feature-centric pieces that focus more on how and why a team or player won or lost. Ultimately, though, you are there to tell a story, whether the focus is on a player returning from a back injury or an opposing player who entered the game on a hot streak or a major slump. Develop potential angles before you arrive at the arena or stadium; otherwise you will be forced to scramble the entire game—and odds are, you’ll fail to deliver an interesting story.
“Don’t focus as much on what just happened,” says Michael Wallace, an NBA beat writer for ESPN, “and instead shape a story to tell readers why this game’s outcome is important and what it might mean moving forward. Usually, in every game, something amazing or unexpected happens. There tends to be a breakout performance on some level from someone who wasn’t expected to deliver on such a level. I tend to start there when developing what my game story or column will be about.”
By the time the Miami Heat had defeated the Toronto Raptors to even the 2016 Eastern Conference semifinal at 3–all, most fans already knew the score (103–91), that Goran Dragic had scored a lot of points, and where Game 7 would be played. But they did not know Dragic’s thoughts on eight players heading to free agency, something the Miami Herald’s Manny Navarro had learned during a seven-minute interview with the Miami point guard earlier that day. Plus, fans did not know how or why the Heat had changed its starting lineup right before tip-off to feature shorter, quicker players.
As a result, Navarro’s lead reads more like a sidebar or feature. The final score, along with the team’s key scorers, is not mentioned until the fourth paragraph:
Goran Dragic didn’t want to start looking ahead to this summer and the looming free agency of most of his Heat teammates.
“I feel like if we start talking too early then you’re already done, not focused about these games,” Dragic said several hours before Game 6. “You know, it’s not good timing to talk about that. We’re still alive.
“We’ve still got—hopefully, two games—at least two games left. That’s all that matters.”
The Heat, facing elimination Friday for the third time in these playoffs, will have at least one more game. Led by Dragic’s team-high
