By: Jon Finkel
FBI profilers aren’t necessary to decode the personality traits and behavioral patterns that make up most successful sportswriters. The specific breed of journalist that Jeff Pearlman, the New York Times bestselling author of Showtime, The Bad Guys Won and Boys Will Be Boys, belongs to is one of the more prevalent strains of the sports scribe tribe. The telltale signs first appear at a young age in the form of a borderline maniacal sports book obsession.
THE BEGINNING
“When I was a kid I’d go to the library and absorb all of the sports books,” Pearlman says. “It got to the point where the librarian would call me and tell me when the new sports books came in. She wouldn’t let anyone touch the books until I got them. I would read anything. I would eat these books up.”
Pearlman grew up in Mahopac, New York, and the stories of big-time athletes in big-time cities opened his eyes up to a much larger, more colorful world.
“I’d read about guys like Dave Winfield and Rod Carew and I thought they were the coolest guys,” he says. “It made me want to be a part of it. Every day I would read the sports section of the newspaper. We had this rule that you couldn’t bring the newspaper into the bathroom, but since I was the only one who liked sports, I could.”
The second phase of the creation of a sports writer happens when the young future star begins to obsess not only on the stories about athletes, but on the person writing them and their publications as well.
“Dave Anderson of The New York Times was the first byline that I knew,” Pearlman says. “But I wanted to be Mike Freeman, who covered the Giants and Nets for The New York Times back then. I would study his articles. And I wouldn’t just read Sports Illustrated; I would absorb it. I’d pay attention to the leads, the transitions, everything. When I was thirteen or fourteen I guaranteed my mom that I was going to write for Sports Illustrated. That was like my rallying cry.”
Stage three in the sportswriter metamorphosis happens when the young writer actually begins to write, and, more importantly, people take notice. For Pearlman, this moment will be forever crystallized in an incident involving high school girls, short skirts and shouting.
“When I was a senior writing for my high school’s paper, The Chieftan, I wrote a piece about how cheerleading wasn’t really a sport,” Pearlman says. “I was walking through the hallway after it came out and all of a sudden I was surrounded by cheerleaders yelling at me. I realized that they knew me from my writing.”
Thus, the shouts of attractive teenage girls sealed Pearlman’s fate. There was nothing else he wanted to do with this life.
THE TRAINING
Pearlman went to college at the University of Delaware, which he says wasn’t exactly a journalism powerhouse. However, his idol, Mike Freeman, did attend that school, which made it worthwhile.
“Freeman was like the guy who made it from Delaware,” Pearlman says. “He was my idol. He was my blueprint for how I wanted to write.”
Following Delaware, Pearlman interned at the Nashville Tennessean, where he would eventually land his first job. Unfortunately, while he learned to write, he says that he needed a few lessons in humility.
“I was this little cocky guy who didn’t know how to report,” he says. “I was a total failure. They moved me to the pop music beat and I wasn’t good at that. Also, I could not get errors out of my copy. I felt like because I was a good writer in college that I didn’t have to take advice, but what happened was I kept on making mistakes.”
Finally, an editor sat him down and put him on the cops beat to work on the fundamentals of reporting. Most cop stories focus mainly on the who, what, when, where and why, which forces you to cover the basics. For a young writer too in love with his own talents, it was the best thing to ever happen to him.
“That moment changed my career,” Pearlman says.
What Pearlman ultimately learned was that there are millions of writers out there who can turn a phrase better than he can, but if they can’t report, it’s worthless. Also, an attitude of self-importance will not do you any good.
“I was the guy who would argue with someone about why they moved one of my commas around,” he says. “I was so arrogant. When I look back on how I was I want to smack myself.”
THE DREAM JOB
After Pearlman’s grand humbling, he put all of his energy into making good on the guarantee he made to his mother several years earlier. This came in the form of applying for jobs at Sports Illustrated over and over again. To this end, young writers can learn a few things about how to stand out from the crowd when trying to get a job at a place as well known and well-respected as SI.
“I designed a cover letter to look like the front of a Sports Illustrated magazine,” Pearlman says. “I wrote it as a fake letter from the editor, written in the future, about how, in 1996, they hired Jeff Pearlman and how great of a writer he has become. I think they liked that letter.”
The second thing he did was pitch unique ideas to catch the eyes of the editors. In this case, Pearlman had applied for the NBA draft (he was not an NBA prospect and didn’t play college basketball) and in talking to the editors at Sports Illustrated realized they could turn that first-person experience into a story, which he did for his first byline with the magazine.
From there, Pearlman went from fact-checker, to reporter, to writer/reporter to finally staff writer. He says his ascension to full-time staff scribe happened quickly because he was constantly pelting his editors with story ideas. By the time he was 26, he found himself in a moment that the 14-year-old Jeff Pearlman would have given anything to be a part of: He was summoned to a State of the Magazine meeting at SI headquarters and was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with literary giants.
“I was star struck because all of my heroes were really writers,” he says. “Steve Rushin and Phil Taylor and Kelli Anderson and Michael Farber and Austin Murphy were all there. I felt kind of like Christian Laettner on the Dream Team. That was my moment where I thought it was insane. Only four years earlier I was working at my college newspaper.”
THE BOOKS
While Pearlman had achieved his dream in his mid-20s, he had never really given thought to writing books.
“My goal was to just write for Sports Illustrated,” he says. “After I had been there a while, another writer and friend, Jon Wertheim got a book deal to write about Venus Williams and the women’s tennis tour. After that I thought maybe books weren’t such a bad idea.”
After meeting with a literary agent, Pearlman set out to write a book about the 1986 New York Mets, a team that won the World Series, but was also full of larger-than-life characters. The title, in fact, says it all: The Bad Guys Won: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put on a New York Uniform–and Maybe the Best.
Pearlman would go on to write several more bestsellers, including Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty and Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s.
He calls writing books a form of pleasure and pain. It feels good to write but it hurts and it’s hard… and beginning is the hardest part.
“I like to print my interviews and research out,” he says, “So when I start, I’ll have a blank page and thousands of printed papers surrounding me. Fortunately, sports books have a pretty general flow to them that lends itself to book writing.”
For writers looking to become authors of sports books, Pearlman says that you want to make sure that you start your book with a dramatic point.
“You want to use personal moments to tell the stories of the games,” he says. “It’s all about the personal stories. It’s not about the season or the moment, it’s about the guys who made those moments happen.”
While Pearlman no longer writes for Sports Illustrated, he is writing daily and building his brand at www.JeffPearlman.com. Visit his site for all of his book information and be sure to check out The Quaz, a featured segment on his blog where he posts Q&As with fascinating people every week.
His new book, Gunslinger, on NFL legend Brett Favre, is due out this fall. His new self-made documentary, Book Whore, provides a clever, funny, up-close look at the levels authors will go, or stoop to, depending on how you look at it, to sell books.
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