“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts, or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”
-Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
Steven Morrissey, more familiarly known as Morrissey (one of the Smiths’ founders and its lead singer) is a pretty morose guy nicknamed “the Pope of Mope.” When asked by a fan about Plath’s life and if it influenced his music, he answered, “Her death was far more interesting than her life.”
Ouch. That was mean.
I’ve said some mean things about people I would like to take back, but I don’t believe I’ve been so harsh, myself even though folks closest to me tell me my left-handed compliments are too good… for my own good.
With this said, worry not. I won’t have a topic as depressing as the life of Sylvia Plath. I shall, instead, share how her quote works in evaluating postgame sports stories completed less than an hour following either an exciting or boring contest as well as features one takes forever to get to print.
I’ll begin with the latter.
I have a long form feature in next Thursday’s Times-Union where one interviewee was questioned in December, and the other’s responses will be much more recent. Considering what Plath said, I’ll avoid the trap she mentioned.
I have numerous interviews on a recording iPhone app I have, in turn, played on speaker to dictate into Microsoft Word documents to be sure I did not lose the exact wording, and I also kept these interviews in case I wanted to return to the conversation to get the tone of voice properly when I convert spoken word to written word.
There are interviews and conversations I recorded and kept for multiple years because they allowed me to revisit the conversation to re-teach myself the insight the person with whom I spoke enriched my knowledge or perspective.
Warsaw girls’ head basketball coach, Lenny Krebs, for instance, through two conversations he agreed to record while we engaged in them with the intent more toward gaining insight and perspective instead of taking the conversation to print.
Both he and Warsaw boys’ wrestling head coach Kris Hueber gave me extensive time in discussions to help me understand their respective sports, to get inside the minds of the coaches, and furthermore, clarify what I’m witnessing on the hardcourt and on the mat.
I took precautionary measures in alluding to statements Krebs and Hueber med by relistening to these discussions I carried on my app for dozens of months to be sure I did not exaggerate the story or turn the discussion into something it wasn’t on both a high and low level.
I’ve watched wrestling since I was in elementary school. If you attended a Catholic school in Northeastern Ohio, you might not have had enough interest to field a basketball team, nor a football team, but wrestling?
If you could put the proper shoe on the proper foot, your parents would send you to the parish’s wrestling tryouts. I washed out immediately but kept on watching.
I don’t believe watching a lot of elite wrestling while tagging along with my maternal relatives, I was learning enough about the sport’s execution and strategy.
The same could be said for basketball, another sport I’ve enjoyed watching on a regular basis since 1975 (I began sixth grade that year, and it was the first time I picked up a basketball without quickly putting it down in a few minutes).
My interest lay more in each sport’s outcomes: the final score, the resulting won-loss records, player stats, team coaching and player transactions, and historic results among all those data.
The most obsessive I was about basketball in particular – this was before the days of rampant free agency, mind you– was being able at any time during the regular season – to write down from memory each NBA roster (there were 22 NBA teams from 1976 through 1980).
I had friends who could teach me court sense, drill me on fundamentals, offer advice on how many reps per skill I needed to complete, but I cared mostly, and monomaniacally, about the data.
My uncle/godfather, whose basketball skills are inferior to mine, even understands concepts like the difference between pattern basketball, and the styles currently played on hardcourt that have reduced offensive output comparatively to college teams in the mid-to-late 1960s who had no three-point shooting options.
I played football, and that was the one sport I could see all the pieces moving at once, but even on the gridiron, I knew more about my opponents’ starters and their schemes. I guess that’s why I was one of few athletes on the team who played almost entirely on defense, with exceedingly rare reps on the other side of the ball unless I was used as a target player in seasons I did not start on defense.
Although these things are far from the present, I can look at them and recall them accurately, with reasonable self-awareness to boot.
The former, the story written almost completely in – or immediately following – the present, is not necessarily exaggerated nor taken too high or too low when I put it in print.
Instead, whether through my own analogy, or using a coach’s quote to illustrate and expound on the overall tone of the contest better than I could see taking place myself, I don’t necessarily twist the story (statistical errors not included), but I give the game a different look if I can for people like me, who can’t always see even the most obvious mechanics of a sport, but maybe they can pick up the evening’s or afternoon’s vibe.
I am able to stay grounded, as well, by looking at a key moment as my lead, and then walking readers thought the chronology. The latter is done successfully and realistically by regurgitating the stats – the unanswered point runs, a player’s hot hand contributing to a reversal of fortune – to wrap up the contest’s story.
Greater than 980 words later (including the headline), if my high school expository writing teacher (and Academic Challenge quiz show coach), Mr. John B. Murphy were reading this today, he would ask me, “How long have people been dreadfully dragged through your strained sentences?”
I’d truthfully tell him, “Since November 2020, Mr. Murphy.”
Although he taught me how to avoid such a style, once I moved past high school and college English composition courses, I went back to my comfort zone.
“I am what I am.”
-Popeye the Sailor (voiced by Jack Mercer multiple times circa 1930s, 1940s)