Episode 27: Sports Writing

In this episode of the Watchung Booksellers Podcast, veteran journalists Harvey Araton and Mark McClusky discuss sports writing and sports media.

Harvey Araton is a longtime New York sports journalist whose career spanned four newspapers-the Staten Island Advance, New York Post, Daily News and New York Times, where he was a Sports of the Times columnist and also wrote for other sections. He was nominated by the Times for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and was inducted into the media wing of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017. Araton is the author or co-author of eight nonfiction books and a novel. He has also taught media courses as an adjunct at Montclair State University. He lives with his wife, Beth Albert, in Montclair, where his sons went to school.

Mark McClusky is the Head of Content at Harding Loevner in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Before joining the firm in 2021, he was the Digital Editor of Sports Illustrated, the Editor of Wired.com, and a long-time media executive at the forefront of new storytelling technologies and platforms. McClusky is the author of the New York Times bestseller Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes and What We Can Learn From Them. His magazine writing has been anthologized in Best American Science & Nature Writing, and he’s made numerous media and speaking appearances, including NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, CNN, CNBC, PBS NewsHour, NPR, and South by Southwest. A graduate of Carleton College, Mark lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife and two daughters.  

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The Watchung Booksellers Podcast is produced by Kathryn Counsell and Marni Jessup and is recorded at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, NJ.

The show is edited by Kathryn Counsell and Bree Testa. Special thanks to Timmy Kellenyi and Derek Mattheiss.

Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica.

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Transcript

Hi, welcome back to the Watchung Booksellers podcast, where we bring you conversations from our bookstore's rich community of book professionals who talk about a different aspect of the book world. And if you are new to our podcast, thanks for joining us. I'm Kathryn and I'm here with my co producer Marni.

Hey Marni. Hi there. I'm gonna throw a change up, talking sports terms, um, this week. What is the last sports book you have read? Well, I'm currently reading a sports book. If I'm being fully honest, I haven't read a ton, but I am reading Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Oh, very cool.

And it's, I'm a former runner. Hope to someday run again. And I, I'm really relating to it. It's very, very well written and beautiful. Of course it is because it's Murakami, right? Right, right, right. Exactly. How about you? The last sports book I have read was also a running book. My kid is a distance runner and he recommended this book to me.

It's called Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. It's truly fantastic. It's about ultra marathon runners and it's, it's kind of bananas. But it's a super fun book, and also makes you really excited to go run without shoes.

 But anyway, that leads us to today's topic. Today we are talking about sports writing. With veteran journalists Harvey Ayrton and Mark McCluskey. Harvey Ayrton is a long time New York sports journalist whose career spanned four newspapers, Staten Island Advance, New York Post, Daily News, and New York Times, where he was Sports of the Times columnist and also wrote for other sections.

He was nominated by the Times for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994, and was inducted into the media wing of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017. Ayrton is the author or co author of eight non fiction books and a novel. He's also taught media courses as an adjunct at Montclair State University and he lives with his wife Beth Albert in Montclair where his sons went to school.

And Mark McCluskey is the head of content at Harding, Lovner and Bridgewater, New Jersey. Before joining the firm in 2021, he was a digital editor of Sports Illustrated. The editor of Wired. com and a long time media executive at the forefront of new storytelling technologies and platforms. McCluskey is the author of the New York Times bestseller Faster, Higher, Stronger, how sports science is creating a new generation of super athletes.

His magazine writing has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing, and he's made numerous media and speaking appearances, including NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, CNN, CNBC, PBS NewsHour, NPR, and South by Southwest. A graduate of Carleton College. Mark lives in Montclair, New Jersey with his wife and two daughters.

Enjoy the conversation and we'll be back after to fill you in on what's coming up in the store.

Harvey, it's, it's a real pleasure to meet you. Yours is a name that I've known. for years and years and I actually had no idea that you lived in Montclair. So it's a real pleasure to meet you. Same.

Thrilled to be here with you and to, uh, talk about sports media and the state of the industry. State of the industry. Like before we do that, Montclarians? What was your Montclair origin story? Well, as my wife was about to give birth to our second child, the idea of dragging a three year old and a newborn up three flights of stairs in downtown Brooklyn wasn't so appealing.

I had a couple of friends and colleagues who had moved out to Montclair, as well as half the staff of the New York Times already living here. So, came out one day, And what I really loved about it was that there are actually, during the week, people walking and talking on the streets, you know, unlike many other suburbs where everybody commutes to Manhattan and, you know, comes home on the six o'clock train and the town, you know, basically goes to sleep.

So we've been here for a good 30 years now and it's been great. It's funny . I, I had a similar story when I moved here to come back to work at Sports Illustrated. I had a colleague from Wired Magazine, Jason Tanns, who actually has hosted an episode of this podcast as well, who said, you got to move to Montclair.

And my wife and I knowing nothing about New Jersey at that point, we rented a house for a year and fell in love with it and bought a house and have been here since. So that's about eight years. So you mentioned Sports Illustrated and I was an out of boroughs kid. So born in Manhattan, but I lived out in Brooklyn and then my family, when I was about 10, moved out to Staten Island.

I grew up in public housing, so basketball courts were our little oasis of freedom and fun. But I think I must have been about, I don't know, 12 or 13 years old. I had a sister who was like four years older than me, and she was, um, working part time job and stuff, and being a kind soul, she, she, uh, fronted me a subscription to SI, and it kind of opened my eyes to, uh, What great writing and photography.

I think, you know, there are a zillion kids in this country who would say the same thing. I'm one of them, sure. So, you know, for all of my life, you know, or I'd say most of my life, the day that SI dropped in the mailbox, you know, was the major sports media event of the week. So, you being obviously familiar, having worked there, I wanted to ask you the question is, with what's happened at SI over the past, what, five to eight years or so?

Or 25, I mean, you can sort of, but go ahead, yeah. How does that, in your mind, symbolize to what's happened to the sports media industry at large? So my first tour of duty at Sports Illustrated, I started there, I was an intern the summer of 1993. And then went back to work there in 1994 as a, in Sports Illustrated terms, reporter, which is mostly a fact checker, but sometimes doing reporting and every once in a while maybe getting to write.

The other thing that was happening then was the internet, was specifically the web was starting to be a thing. And I fact checked the first story that SI ever did about digital sports and the web. And was a very enthusiastic computer person from other parts of my life and really thought that this would be an amazing opportunity for Sports Illustrated to expand its reach, leverage its strengths on new platforms and reach new audiences.

Oddly a thing that I still think 30 years later, even though it hasn't really come to fruition in the way that I might have imagined. You know, what SI had back in those days, you know, it was Thursday afternoon, at least in western Pennsylvania where I grew up, that it came in the mail. And I would sit down, I'd read it cover to cover, and it was a news magazine back then.

It's something that's hard to, for people to remember. Like, I found out the results of random sporting events through reading that magazine. You know by 96, 97 that function was gone. Like if you were a sports fan, you knew what happened in the game. You weren't reading Curry Kirkpatrick writing about a college basketball game and learning the outcome.

You were looking for something else, which was context and information, and why should I care? And how does it fit into a larger universe? And I wish as I had leaned into that mission more. The storytelling, as you say, the photography. Those are the things that are hardest to commodify in this business.

The things that are easiest to commodify is, Yankees beat the Guardians 6 3 last night, right? You know, everybody knows what happened. You want somebody who can tell you something more deeply about it, but that sometimes takes time and effort and energy and cost, and the economics really changed too, obviously.

And I think similar dynamics took place at the Times, right? Over the course of your career. Yeah. When I, well, I got to the Times in, in 91 after being on strike at the Daily News for five months, which was a joyless experience, and I got there at a very unique time because for most of its. existence, the sports section of the Times, kind of was an orphan.

So one day it might appear in the back of the business section, another day it might appear in the metro section, and just as I was getting there, and in fact, they hired from the Daily News, myself and Philip Bondi, another Montclair resident, or I should say former Montclair resident. He recently moved to Roseland.

But they hired us, and I think that they're almost trying to make the announcement like, Look, we hired a couple of muckrakers from the tabloid world. Like, we care about sports now, right? And then they, they gave it its own freestanding section seven days a week. The only day it was freestanding had been Monday, Sports Monday, which had been a major concession on the part of the masthead.

And so suddenly, sports mattered. And they increased their budget, they started, you know, instead of sending one person to cover the World Cup, they started team covering it, and the Olympics team got much bigger, and you felt like you were really part of something that was special, because the Times, back in those days, and this, you know, again, precedes the Internet, was one of the few publications other than SI that you know.

did have a national edition. So you could walk past a box on the streets of San Francisco or Kansas City and put some coins in the slot and buy the New York times. So it was a, it was a great time to be there. And it's interesting because the times, as you know, about two years ago, purchased the athletic website for a staggering amount of money, 550 million.

Or for a business that was losing 50 million a year at the time. Two owners who were hedge fund guys. Everybody was saying they were laughing their way all the way to the bank. And the question at that point was, what are they going to do with it? And is it a viable business proposition to pay that much money for something that has not had a profitable quarter in its history?

Still has not. And also employ, in effect, a sports department of 400 people. And I would tell my colleagues, I mean, I left the full time staff in 2017, but right up until they shuttered the sports section a year ago, September, I was still contributing on an occasional basis. But I was telling all the people who, you know, were working full time, the other shoe's going to drop sooner or later.

They can't really be considering having these two staffs shadowing each other. In other words, The Athletic's going to send eight people to the Super Bowl, but the Times will send its own five or six to the Super Bowl. And sure enough, when they made the announcement that sports was closing down, I think it hit people on many different gut levels.

I mean, the first one was like, they're, you know, doing away with union jobs and, you know, So there was that side of it, and then there were just, there was a sort of a sports diaspora. You know, guys were going to different parts of the paper. They didn't know how they were going to be treated or dealt with, although they promised that nobody would lose their job.

And a couple of people did make the transition from The Times to The Athletic. But, you know, I've sat on a couple of panels, done a couple of radio shows. discussing what it was. I think as a person who has worked in digital, you would probably have a better grasp on what their strategy might have been from the start in terms of making what is essentially a risky purchase, given the sales price, than most people.

I have my own theory, but I'll throw it out to you about when, when you read about that, was that kind of an another aha moment in terms of where the industry was headed? Well, it was, I mean, let me backpedal a little bit because I was sort of, at the time, during the rise of the athletic, I had come back, this is what prompted my move to Montclair, to run Sports Illustrated's digital business.

So all of our websites under the banner at that point of still Time Incorporated, soon to be. Purchased twice and then sold and then parted out and become a disaster. But as SI was put up for sale after a company called Meredith bought Time Incorporated and then put SI up for sale and we had lots of meetings with potential new owners or investors and we would pitch our Vision for what Sports Illustrated could be sort of moving forward.

And the consistent question was, well, what about the athletic? And the athletic started with what, to my mind, was sort of an interesting idea that actually took advantage of the atrophy of local sports sections at local newspapers. Like the newspaper business has been, perhaps more than any other media business, destroyed by the internet and by Craig Newmark inventing Craigslist and Death of classified ads, and newspapers have been really hard, and there've only been a few.

The Times may be one of them that have found a way to survive and even thrive in a new economic environment. So the Athletic was like, oh, well, the Chicago Tribune and the Sun Times are terrible now. Like, we're gonna hire Jesse Rogers, who used to cover the Cubs for the Trib, and we're going to hire really great beat writers on the teams that you care about, and you're a super fan of Chicago sports, and you're going to pay us X dollars a month to get the sort of coverage that is no longer available to you in the market.

And that made sense to me, right? They started in Chicago, Toronto was a big market for them at the start. They launched that in more and more markets until basically they were running, like, newspaper sports sections in every major market in the country, and then layered in a national level on top of it.

Right. Like now many of them, former SI people, Steve Mandel now writes, you know, national college football for the athletic Andy Staples, who was SI went to the athletic, you know, so many people, Seth Davis on college basketball. And that didn't make any sense to me, right? Like now you're, now you're replicating my problems through your business model.

But. What they managed to do really well were two things. They had a very good product in the sort of technology sense, like the app was really good, the website was very clean and easy to use, it wasn't gunked up with like tons of terrible ads and video popovers and all the crap that many sites have now resorted to to try and make the revenue numbers work.

And they convinced the marketplace to value them like a technology business, not a media business. So at the time that SI was For sale. S. I. was a profitable business. Like, not as profitable as it once was, but it was profitable. As you noted, the Athletic has never been profitable. And we had people, you know, the Athletic being purchased for 550 million dollars.

That was at You know, that multiple is infinite because they were, they lost 50 million dollars the quarter before they were purchased by the Times. Why it made sense for the Times? Because you think you can upsell people, right? That the Times vision of, I'm going to have subscription revenue across many verticals, right?

Not just the core newspaper, but they've had a lot of success with cooking, games has been a big success for them, and I think the Athletic was somewhere around 1. 2 million subscribers when the Times purchased it. And now I think it's well over 2 million. So that's Great. And, you know, you sit and you do a lifetime value calculation and you hope that, you know, if I can keep that person for X number of years, then I can make that number make sense and I can start to, and they've obviously done this, start to bundle all these services, right?

So you get the everything times bundle that I still send, I think I subscribe to it. I still get a Sunday paper because it actually ends up being cheaper for some reason, you know, and then, you know, All of those things, the core website, games, cooking, and if you can upsell those people who are just athletic subscribers to another product, it starts to make sense.

And you're playing the scale game in a very technology company way, not in a very media company way. Yeah, I agree with you about their original business plan. If you go back to, all the way back to the National Sports Daily, back in the late eighties, their business plan, I think they ran through a hundred million dollars in a year and a half.

In like minutes. I remember being offered a job there by Frank DeFord. One of the great human beings ever to work in our business. And I remember asking a question, it was, it was Frank DeFord and Vince D'Orio who had been a long time editor at the Boston Globe. And they had a plan to have a Sunday edition of the National.

And I remember asking, um, are you guys going to have home delivery? They said, no, you know, we'll have boxes around the major cities and we'll be in, you know, newsstand stores. And I said, well, who's going to get up on Sunday morning and drive to look for a national sports daily vending machine? There were issues like that that made me think that They didn't really have a plan.

And I think not only the national, but then many subsequent sites to come, AOL Fan House, Sports on Earth, surrendered to the conceit of journalists, thinking that if we assemble an all star team, that's all we need. If we have Mike Lupica and Scott Osler and, you know, a handful of others, people will just rush out to purchase us.

And That's really not the way it works, and that's why I thought exactly what you said, that by providing that wall to wall coverage of the teams that people follow. And I'll give you an example. So I have a full subscription to The Times, and so by virtue of that I get The Athletic, and I actually got it prior to that.

So I'm not that young, but I am no longer the kind of sports fan I was when I was working full time in the industry. I've come to a couple of new fan interests. I follow Penn State football. We're 6 0. Are you an alum? No, but my older son was. And he was there during the horrible Sandusky years. In fact, he actually interned in the football office and he knew Sandusky and Paterno.

Oh my goodness. Um, but, um, so then he graduated and then they had the 2016 team that with Saquon Barkley had upset Ohio State and went to the Rose Bowl. So we bonded over that. Now I'm like a, I'm like a fanboy. I know who they're recruiting and all that kind of stuff. And then my other new, um, is Liverpool in the English Premier League, which my wife kind of pulled me into during the lockdown version of COVID because Euro soccer was the first sport to come back in front of the empty stadiums.

And so I follow that somewhat religiously. And so when I log on to The Athletic and I don't do what I did as a young person. Buying the Daily News or the New York Post, which has always been known for good sports section. I don't just open it up and see what they're presenting me, right? No, it's been curated down to your putative interests.

Right. They send What you ask for. And so when I log on to The Athletic, there's all the Liverpool and EPL stuff. There's all the Penn State football news and the Big Ten. And most days, that's all I'm looking for. I'm not conducting a massive search to find that gem of a column that You know, that might be hiding somewhere in the NFL coverage.

And that to me is a major difference in the way people consume sports now. So let's talk more about that because that's, I jotted down some notes and that's one of them. I have written down here, editor versus algorithm. Part of what I'm nostalgic for, and maybe in an old man sort of way, right, is the That presentation of a worldview by a human being that shows you that thing that you didn't know you should care about and then you read it and you're like, holy cow, that was super interesting and now I know this cool thing, right?

Now that content is exceptionally tailored to what the algorithm thinks is your interest and that serendipity is lost and I do think that that's a huge loss. And again, maybe, and then when I say that out loud, I'm like, but maybe I'm just a grumpy old man, right? Maybe that's just my naivete or my longing for the past.

No, I think it's an excellent point. And I think from my standpoint, there's this dichotomy. There's the sports fan, the emergent sports fan, you know, now in, you know, I say I'm not retired, I'm downsized. I still do some stuff for the other sections of the Times and some various stuff. But the sports fan in me looks at it like many young people that, you know, opens it up to find Liverpool news and Penn state football news.

But the professional that remains in me grieves for the same thing that you mentioned. So for instance, for 16 years, I wrote the sports of the Times column and there was a point in, I would say, From the late 90s into the early, to like, to maybe 2007 or 8, there were five or six of us writing that column.

It was George Vesey and Dave Anderson and Bill Roden and Selina Roberts, myself. And then there was Ira Berkow, uh, who wrote occasional columns, and then Bob Lipsight weighed in every now and then. And the difference between what I'm looking for and reading now is exactly what you said, that we had people Who were just out there trying to find the subject, the story, that most interested us.

The one that we really wanted to tell. And many times we'd go looking somewhere, under a blanket somewhere, to find this story. And sometimes it would be, you know, heavily opinionated. And other times it would be more featurized. And, now when I open the book. The print section of the New York Times. I never get that.

I get an assortment of stories that the athletic chooses on a daily basis and then passes along to an editor at the Times who just takes it and looks at it for, you know, style. Do you know who's curating that at the Times? Yeah, Ken Plootnicki is the editor, but they're not, at the Times, whoever's handling a copy, usually Ken, is not even allowed to call up an athletic reporter.

It's a separate company, or let's put it this way, a separate organization, operating unit, within the Times, under the Times. Corporation umbrella. So they can call up and say, you know, you're really taking too long to get to the point here. I need you to condense this. So give me a rewrite. They can't do that.

Yeah. So hence what I said before about having to send two teams to the Super Bowl. They're doing that anyway, because let's say for instance, the Olympics. There's a lot of stuff that can wind up on A1 at the Times. You know, drug stories, or, you know, political stories, or whatever it is. And if they can't control the reporter at The Athletic to give them exactly what they feel they need, well, okay, let's round up the Olympic team, the people who are scattered around the paper, and send them to Get the band back together, and they're off.

So, it really, you know, they're kind of making it up as they go along. But I too grieve for smart people putting together a package That they think is good because they are the trained professionals. They are. It's, uh, now let me argue against the point that we agree with for a second. I mean, there is a sort of self regard in believing that you're better at that than that in the past has.

Resulted in some viewpoints and types of coverage, not getting the sort of play that they probably should have in the past. So I try and be mindful of my own biases when it, when it comes to thinking that way, but I just, I think what algorithmic programming does is pushes you towards lowest common denominators.

And I don't mean that in terms of bad writing or even bad thinking, but just in terms of, Lack of originality, right? Something truly unique is algorithmically difficult to serve to a large audience. And so, like the quirk, I want more quirk in my media content, but especially in my sports content. Yeah, I remember one time covering the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

And, you know, the whole, the whole world seemed to be coming apart within the Olympic village there. That was the Canadian versus the Russian. Payers competition, the payers competition scandal. Uh, there was the, the bidding process itself for Salt Lake had been Yeah, the French, even, even for the IOC. Yeah.

Corrupt. And then the Canadian, uh, hockey team was, uh, Wayne Gretzky was upset about something and the Russians were threatening to pull out. And, and so one day I just woke up. And I had seen a story in the paper about the Olympic chaplains, and I noticed there was a Lubavitch rabbi who had come out to Salt Lake to open up a synagogue out there.

And I was like, wow, that's, that's quite an anomaly. And so I called him and I went to pay him a visit to talk about The meaning of the Olympics. And we got a photographer to shoot him and he had, you know, all the orthodox garb on and his little Olympic vest. And we talked about the spirituality of the games and what it all meant.

And did it have to be in the section? No. But a lot of people got a kick out of it because it was something really quirky and different. Right. And I miss that kind of stuff because the selections being made now or the things that come at you You know, on the web are, as you say, that mass appeal stuff. I always wonder the times in its print section, not that they really care about the print section anymore, let's face it, that is a generation that's going to die off and there won't be a lot of print readers.

It may not even be a print, you know, product in what, 10, 20 years. Some papers are already cutting back around the country on, on how many days a week they publish. But, uh, you know, what I see a lot of in the, Print section of the Times are breakdowns, you know, Stu Mandel's top 15 thoughts on college football Saturday, the top wingmen in the NHL, you know, at the beginning of the season, a lot of that kind of stuff, which I, frankly, at the Times for most of my years there, we felt like that was more important.

Sports talk radio kind of material. Let me, so I have a hypothesis about this and curious if you will buy into it or think that I'm totally off base here. I think a huge thing that has happened in terms of influencing how sports is covered has been the rise of first fantasy sports and now legalized sports gambling, and that that pushes towards that sort of more data driven rather than story driven content.

And so that like The 15 best wing men in the NHL. Not that NHL fantasy or gambling is particularly large compared to other markets, but like, that's what that's servicing, right? That's servicing like, okay, I've got my draft. Like who are the best left wings in the NHL right now? You know, the sort of like winners and losers and ups and downs.

It feels much more like financial coverage to me, oddly. And that you're, that you're talking about market moves. Where when we were younger, it felt like you were talking about people and stories more. Yeah, no, I think, and to extrapolate on that a little bit, I think that leads to the rise of the quote unquote insider, right?

So, um, Back in the day when I came up in the industry, in the sports section, young people would say, you know, I'd love to cover the Knicks or the Yankees. But ultimately, I think the ideal, the position that people had their eye on from not everybody, not everybody got there, was the general columnist. And right about the time, things really started getting a little crazy in the industry where, you know, layoffs were really multiplying.

It was interesting because the first Serious wave of layoffs typically hit general sports columnists. Right. Because, number one, they were the most expensive on the staff, and number two, they weren't attached to any particular thing. They were there to provide a sort of overview, a smart, erudite take on, you know, And also, a columnist wasn't beholden to anyone.

I mean, if I went off on George Steinbrenner or Jim Dolan, I didn't care if he was going to be mad at me or wouldn't return my call. I didn't need him. It didn't affect your ongoing coverage. Yeah, I mean, I had people I spoke to in the industry who I could, you know, talk to. Try to get information from. But there was not one person I had to have.

And if I felt somebody was really a villainous character who deserved, you know, my wrath, that's what I was there for. But then again, you know, we weren't, at least in the granular way of looking at it, we weren't completely essential, right? So I remember when Newsday, which always had a good sports section, laid off three of its columnists, I believe, in like one swoop.

Wally Matthews, John Ed Howard and Sean Powell all got laid off like within I think like two or three months, and they just said, you know what? You know, listen, Barbara Barker, you know, you're covering the Knicks, but when you need a column about basketball, you'll write it. Now, how does that compromise someone?

She can't go after James Dolan if she's covering the Knicks. Yeah, she's not gonna get back into the building. So, so we had, you know, the providers of Information, inside information rose and then, you know, the, the Adrian Wojnarowski's and Adam Schefter's of the world suddenly became not only the dream job, but the job that was paying the most by far and away.

I mean, there was some, you know, you think back to, and I'm wary of this turning into the two of us just being nostalgic. But, you know, you, you think of, like, there was Will McDonough and Gamo at the Globe, that, that sort of, like, notes column on Sunday, right? Yes. And, and that had some of that NFL insider or MLB insider flavor to it.

It wasn't this moment by moment literal transaction. Like, I win because I post that somebody's been traded 30 seconds before somebody else posts it on Twitter, right? That just Yeah, yeah. Social media changed all that, and I give Woj a lot of credit. Uh, I've known him a long time, and when he was a columnist at the Bergen Record here in North Jersey, and he was offered a job at Yahoo, this was about the time that Twitter was first starting up.

He had some sense of how he could take that insider approach to the NBA. Okay. and run with it on social media. Now, sometimes it got a little out of hand where, you know, how essential was it that five minutes or two minutes before Adam Silver comes out to announce the fourth pick of the draft, he's saying, he's tweeting ESPN or Yahoo or ESPN sources, you know, say the Bucks will choose.

The guy in the room who has the card that the Bucks sent in. Right. Is this something that really is adding that much, but nonetheless, you know, I'm sure these organizations. Before they shell out that kind of money for an insider, they've done the metrics on, you know, how many eyeballs it's bringing to their site and name brand and the crawl coming across the screen.

I give them a lot of credit, but at the same time, I think the NBA, let's just take a stay on the NBA for a second. I think they love that because it's 12 month marketing for its product. And at the same time, um, that Woe just drops his bombs, and then every show on ESPN, Fox, or whatever network has panel discussions, they just bandy these same talking points back and forth all day.

And then the stuff that You know, for instance, as an NBA guy for many years, I've been like waiting for the first big read now, unless I, I might have missed it. That really pushes Mark Cuban to explain why he's now in, he's now partners with Miriam Adelson, who is the biggest Trump donor. Not to get too political, but in a league that's always prided itself on its progressive politics and had no problem at all, you know, with having LeBron and some of the other guys go after Trump on Twitter when they felt that he had gone too far.

I've yet to read that and one of the reasons why I think we're lacking in that kind of stuff is because everybody's too busy talking about, you know, where Kevin Durant's going to be 12 months from now. Yeah, I, I totally agree with you. I mean, it's a, it's a little bit back to my hypothesis that everything is so transactional, like almost literally transactional, right?

That I want to know that because I want to place a bet on something or I've got a fancy team that Let me talk to you a little bit about And we'll sort of change the subject a little bit. I mean, you are, um, enshrined in the National Basketball Hall of Fame, which is an astonishing thing to get to.

There's a, there's a, there's a little plaque. There's a little plaque in the, I mean the media, the media area gets a little area. But, um, I, I mean, It is a league that, as you say, has been more progressive in some ways, and I think more digitally savvy in some ways over time. I'm just curious about where your head's at around basketball in, in the year 2024.

What is your level of interest in the NBA these days? I still follow the NBA. I mean, I've just, uh, so many decades of, of just reading the box scores. Even preseason games, I'm ashamed to admit. And, and, you know, I, I try to, to not let my old guy mentality Drift into this, but I feel like, you know, having covered the sport in the eighties, which was such a great decade, the magic bird, and that was the era of, and then Michael, obviously of explosive growth.

And then the nineties was the rocket ship to the moon with, with Jordan. And certainly, you know, for the first years of this century, we're fine. But the League, it feels to me a little bit too manufactured, you know. And part of it is the ongoing conversation that just never stops on television, on cable shows.

I just don't feel it's as authentic as it was back in the days that I was covering it because I was closer to it. And I think that so many of the top players are almost untouchable now. It's hard to humanize a product. LeBron. He's great. And, you know, he's arguably the greatest player ever. And, but so much of it is controlled.

So much of their media is orchestrated. You know, I covered it when, you know, there was only one locker room. There wasn't an adjacent training room. And you could walk in and Michael would be sitting there with a towel over his head. And you could stand there and chat with him, you know, in a small group for, you know, 25, 30 minutes before the game.

There's none of that now. Right. Almost none of it. I mean, it's become, as I would say most sports have, much more corporate, right? And much more controlled and much more, as you say, sort of a product. Is, is part of that also, so I'd never been an NBA guy, actually, until I started writing, I wrote a book about sports science and was sort of fascinated that the NBA was actually at the forefront of a lot of things that I, I had not understood.

And at the same time, the Warriors. We're on their sort of ascent to those sort of six or seven years of playing basketball in many ways a different way than it had really been played for generations. And um, so that's really the big genesis of my NBA fandom. I was always the guy that was like, every NBA game is the same, right?

You know, like somebody takes a big lead and then third quarter, either they come back and you should watch the fourth or you turn it off because it's over. I just wonder if there's a sense of these games being, the term of art in chess is solved, right? Or, like, checkers is a game that's been solved. A computer can play perfect checkers.

Can't play perfect chess. But as games get optimized more, it flattens out the stylistic differences between teams, so I grew up a huge baseball kid and baseball was played lots of different ways, right? You had Whitey Herzog teams on artificial turf, like banging the ball into the turf and getting big hops and running all over the place.

It was speed and defense. And you had Earl Weaver, you know, three run home runs and strikeouts. And. Now everybody's three run home runs and strikeouts, because it turns out mathematically that's probably right, but it's less interesting in some ways. You don't have these contrasts, and I feel that way about the NBA now, right, that everybody is like three and D, and you've got four guys standing around the perimeter passing the ball looking for an open shot, passing up a layout to kick it out for a three point shot, you know, things that again, to be the old guy, like, freak us out.

Yeah, and the Warriors obviously did it brilliantly, and they, so they were great to watch, but You know, when it becomes the style for everyone and most of the other teams aren't as good at it, it's not as easy to watch. I kind of feel I was a big fan of the San Antonio Spurs during the Tim Duncan era. It was interesting because the league supposedly would always cringe when the Spurs made the final.

Small market team, a star player who didn't really care about, you know, Stardom. Invisibility and all that stuff. And Popovich being cranky. But I just loved the way they played. And, uh, I used to argue that if you picked up the Spurs and moved them to New York, well, they would be the reincarnation of the old Knicks.

Because very much the, you know, the The Quiet Warrior that Willis Reed was, was Duncan, right? And the paparazzi would have been following Tony Parker and his wife Eva Longoria. Eva Longoria all over the city. Right. And you had the international aspect, yeah. But, you know, David Stern used to joke that the perfect finals are the Lakers against anybody.

So, yeah, I think it's become kind of generic. And I also feel like a lot of their so called progressivism It feels performative to me. You know, I remember when David Stern passed away and I wrote an appraisal of his life and I was talking about the particular issues that he somewhat stumbled over or was criticized for.

I cited the situation with Daryl Morey in, when he was with Houston and he had posted a tweet about everybody should support, you know, about Hong Kong and how China just like basically lowered the boom on the NBA, took them off the air and how everybody stayed silent. Because, I mean, LeBron didn't say anything, which it's not incumbent upon anyone to consider themselves a human rights activist all around the world.

You kind of comment on what you know, but at the same time, I felt like there's a lot of money at stake here. So now they know how David Stern felt. People should know how David Stern, the position he was in when, you know, he would say, you know, we want a dress code, you know, that kind of stuff, because he was trying to not lose.

The fans in middle America. Now, maybe he was playing to people with biases or, or, or racial attitudes or whatever, but nonetheless, his primary responsibility was to make money for his owners. And so I thought that, you know, people should have been a little more understanding in the way they viewed some of those.

Controversies that he was involved in. Well, it's one of the great contradictions of being a sports fan or even interested in sports, right? Like I don't have any emotional connection to amazon. com like Amazon's quarterly earnings don't offer me any emotional jolt one way or another, right? I mean, I might have some views on them as a business, but you know, the Success or failure of the Cleveland Browns is something that, unfortunately, I find myself caring about because that's one of the curses that I was born with, you know?

So we have these businesses owned by incredibly rich people in a cartel with other incredibly rich people that are trying to make money. At the end of the day, that we have these intense emotional connections to for really, I mean, for the Seinfeld joke of like, we're rooting for laundry, right? You know, there's why, why should we feel that way about it?

But yet we do. Yeah, I used to always play around with the idea of a book or, or some kind of magazine article about how sports fans should wake up and kind of become as capricious in the way they approach their love of sports as The players or the, you know, jumping from team to team or the owners trading them from team to team.

Right. And just kind of pick teams that tickle your fancy from time to time. I remember, I grew up a devout Yankees fan and there was probably a point in my life where I I wouldn't want to miss a Yankee game, even if there was something particularly exciting to do somewhere else. I was just that addicted to it.

But at some point, I remember during the 2004 World Series being in St. Louis with the Red Sox, and we made our way down to the field in the postgame for the postgame celebration, and the ballpark had emptied out of Cardinals fans and however many Red Sox fans, a couple thousand I would guess, that were in Busch Stadium were all down in the lower stand behind the dugouts and the players were whooping it up.

And I remember thinking, you know what, I'm happy for these guys. I hated them my entire youth and young adulthood, but I'm kind of happy for them. And for the succeeding years, I actually became kind of a quiet fan of the Red Sox. I liked their players. I liked Tito Francona. I thought Pedro was cool, Martinez.

And I, I think that's what put the thought in my head that, yeah, we can switch sides because it is laundry, you know, at the end of the day. Right. As someone who has written so many different types of things, you know, a columnist for so long and, and some really beautiful books. I mean, what are sort of the differences in how you have to approach those different jobs as a writer?

When I first started writing books, I was definitely afraid, you know, that, I don't know if you experienced this, but I remember when I did my first proposal and then sat down to, you know, work on the book or report the book, whatever. And I was like, what if the proposal is all I got is all I got. It's, it's, it's a frightening experience.

I, I had a colleague who had written a book and I asked his advice and he's like, you just, you need to have a really detailed outline because there's going to come a point where you're like, Oh, I know nothing about anything. Nobody will ever be interested in this topic in the way that I hoped that they would be.

I'm totally lost. And he's like, and what you're going to do that day is pull out your outline and be like, here's a two paragraph section that I know enough about that I can just sit down and write it. And he's like, you're going to write your way out. by just like hanging on to that outline lifeboat.

And that totally worked, at least in the case of my book. I definitely had exactly that moment and, and found my way through it by just like, okay, I can write two paragraphs about compression socks and then two more paragraphs about sleep training. Let's go from there. I've learned a lot about compression socks.

Oh, with your Achilles tendon. Yeah, my torn Achilles tendon this past summer, but For me, you know, the difference was, I mean, I was trained in the tabloid world of nightmarish newspaper deadlines and that mad, frantic adrenaline rush. You know, I mean, I could eat three slices of pizza before I got my lead done.

You know, if they put it out in front of me just to, you know, to do something with my hands. And then the book requires such, you know, consistent commitment and routine. So having to get up every morning, go down and make a cup of coffee, go back up to my office and say, I'm not doing anything. It's, it's 8 30 now, 11 o'clock.

I'm not moving from this desk. And I'm going to make sure that however many pages I write or reedit or whatever it is, I'm going to get that done. And that takes a lot of patience when You know, most of what I had done was just mad frantic rush to make deadline. Right. We've got a few more minutes. The tradition is that we should talk about what we're reading these days, so I'll ask you first.

Yeah, so in preparation for an event that I'm going to be doing at Watchung Booksellers, I've been reading The Paper of Wreckage, the new book. It's a, um, Oral history of the Rupert Burnock New York Post, and of course, that was my second stop. I started at Staten Island Advance, where I grew up, and went to the Post and covered the Knicks there as a very young reporter.

This book, all 550 pages of it, is something I've been reading, and right before that, I took something off Barack Obama's 2024 summer reading list. A book called The Ministry of Time, a novel, by a woman named Colleen Bradley. And thank you, Mr. President, because it was, it was a very good read. How about yourself?

My reading habits are really strange. Um, I am, I am coming to the end of a re reading of Robert Caro's, uh, Lyndon Baines Johnson four volume, thus far, biography. And I have no idea what's going on. Why I felt like I needed to reread it right now. Uh, they're beautiful, insane books and just these sort of towering monuments of research and reportage and, and a figure who, uh, I have no memory of.

I was, I was born in 1971. And so I, I have no memory of LPJ. And so it's like, it seems both, uh, contemporary and utterly distant to me at the same time. So, um, Those are really wonderful books. I read a lot of genre fiction. There's um, an Irish sort of crime writer named Tana French who spent the summer obsessively reading.

She has this six book series called Dublin Murder Squad. And it's genre fiction, but like so much better written than most genre fiction. Just not sentence to sentence. They're just beautifully written books that just have these moments of just like you linger on these sentences that you sort of look at as a writer sort of longingly like, I wish I could put words in that sort of order because they're so much fun to read.

Yeah, I had the same feeling, uh, I'd been on a Colson Whitehead binge for a while. He actually was in Montclair, I think it was last year, and you know, from one book to the next, just spectacular wordsmith, uh, storyteller. Let's do one more thing for them. Three favorite sports books. Well, The Breaks of the Game, the Albert Stam book on the NBA in, I think, around 1980.

And I've always been a big fan of Ian O'Connor's books, the biographies he's done. I particularly enjoyed the one he did on Belichick. And then, uh, A personal favorite, Ira Burkow is a very close friend of mine. Ira's in his, I want to say, close to mid 80s now. And years ago, he wrote a book called To the Hoop.

And it was about his love of basketball, um, so it kind of followed him through a year of various basketball activities while doing his job. He's always been close to Oscar Robertson, so he got into a full court game with Oscar. His brother was dying in Chicago at the time, so there was a lot of Gut wrenching personal stuff.

He talked about playing with Mario Cuomo up in Albany and almost getting into a fist fight with him because Mario played with sharp elbows. I just, because I'm so fond of Ira, he was sort of like my big brother at the times when I got there in 91. That, you know, that comes to mind as well as one of my favorites as well.

Right. And yourself? Like I said, I grew up a baseball kid and an aspiring writer, so all of Roger Angel's. Books, you know, Four Seasons. Obviously, yeah. I mean, just, nobody has ever done baseball better. And just sort of, the space he was given at the New Yorker to do that. And his brilliance in every other possible way of like, of writing and editing.

I was a cyclist in my youth, and there's this weird fiction book called The Rider. That is, um, the story of a long bike race told by the rider as it's happening. That is like this bizarre, wonderful book that like completely captures what it's like to be in a bike race. And then my other one, and, you know, maybe apropos for this discussion, it's not a sports book per se, but Richard Ford's novel, The Sportswriter.

Whenever people would ask me what it's like to talk to athletes, he has, there was like two pages in that book where he basically steps out of the stories, the fictional story, uh, and, uh, the narrator says like, I should probably tell you what it's like to talk to athletes and I would just send it to people and like, you know, I, I don't know if you ever felt the surreality of like, oh, I watched this person on television and now I'm in a locker room speaking to them and, you know, they're, they're I don't know.

They're different, right? There's a lot of things about being an athlete that selects for things that aren't normal. And I don't say that as a judgmental thing, but like in his line in there it's like, athletes are what they do, right? When you ask them questions that are reflective, it's often very difficult for them because their whole life is selected not to Reflect, right?

You forget about that failure. Move forward. Think that like, yeah, that guy beat me on a go route that time, but the next time I'll be there, right? So that comes to mind. Yeah, I do. I read that many years ago and uh, that it, that was excellent. Yeah, there was, there were probably several more that we could think of if we had the time, but I think we're out of time, but this has been so enjoyable.

I'm glad we finally got to meet and know that we both, Live in town and I think we've covered a lot of ground. Yeah, it's wonderful to get to meet you and get a chance to chat about this. Excellent. Excellent.

Thank you Harvey and Mark for joining us today. Listeners, you can find all the books they've talked about in our show notes and at watchungbooksellers. com. This week in the store, we've got two great talks. Tonight, October 29th, acclaimed photographer George Steinmetz will be talking about his beautiful new book, Feed the Planet, which documents the awesome global effort that puts food on our tables and transforms the surface of the earth.

And tomorrow, October 30th, journalist and historian and former podcast guest, Jonathan Alter discusses American Reckoning, where he shares his eyewitness account of the historic first criminal trial of a president. And next Wednesday, November 6th, we welcome legal expert Kim Well to discuss her book, Pardon Power, how the pardon system works and why.

She'll be in conversation with Jessica Henry, author, podcaster, and professor of justice studies at Montclair State University. We've got something for everyone this week. Make sure to check out info for all of our events in our newsletter, show notes, or at watchungbooksellers. com. The Watchung Booksellers podcast is produced by Kathryn Council and Marni Jessup and is recorded at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, New Jersey.

The show is edited by Kathryn Council and Brie Testa. Special thanks to Timmy Colenny and Derek Matthias. Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica. Art and design and social media by Evelyn Moulton. Research and show notes by Caroline Chertleth. Thank you to the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids Room for all their hard work and love of books.

And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please like, comment, and subscribe. Follow and share it. You can follow us on social media at Watchung Booksellers, and if you have any questions or ideas, you can reach us at wbpodcast at watchungbooksellers. com. We'll see you next time. Until then, for the love of books, keep reading.