Michael Kruse Archives - Nieman Storyboard https://niemanstoryboard.org/authors/michael-kruse/ Thu, 17 Oct 2024 16:56:16 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://niemanstoryboard.org/app/uploads/2024/02/cropped-NiemanFavicon-40x40.png Michael Kruse Archives - Nieman Storyboard https://niemanstoryboard.org/authors/michael-kruse/ 32 32 Just one question … for Michael Graff, on the death of Earl Badu https://niemanstoryboard.org/2013/03/28/just-one-question-for-michael-graff-on-the-death-of-earl-badu/ Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:26:58 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2013/03/28/just-one-question-for-michael-graff-on-the-death-of-earl-badu/ Big buzz earlier this month when Michael Graff‘s story on the suicide of former University of Maryland basketball walk-on Earl Badu hit SB Nation‘s longform wing: You know the wish can’t come true, but people say it all the time to hide their own fears, so you’ll open with it, too: You wish he could just be happy. It would […]

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Big buzz earlier this month when Michael Graff‘s story on the suicide of former University of Maryland basketball walk-on Earl Badu hit SB Nation‘s longform wing:

You know the wish can’t come true, but people say it all the time to hide their own fears, so you’ll open with it, too: You wish he could just be happy. It would be easier that way. You could just hang curtains around everything else — the past, the future, the end — and you could look down through a tunnel at him and say, Freeze. Stay right there. And he’d remain locked in this memory, the little guy with the big heart playing in the final minute of the final game of a storied arena.

The piece, edited by Best American Sports Writing boss Glenn Stout, managed to resonate in spite of—because of?—almost no access to, or cooperation from, Badu’s family and friends. So from Graff, who lives in Greensboro, N.C., and also writes for Our State magazine, I wanted to know: How’d he do that?

Here’s what he said:

I was in my office in September writing about the symphony, of all things, when I read a brief on the Washington Post’s website that said Earl Badu committed suicide. The report showed that he jumped off an overpass and “onto Interstate 695.” I couldn’t believe it. Anybody who knew about Maryland’s 2002 national championship team remembered Earl. He was the Terps’ all-time Rudy. I remembered the basket he scored late in the last game at Cole, and I remembered just how loved he was by the fans. And now all I could picture was this scene with cars swerving around his body.

I waited. In mid-November I sent a half-hearted pitch to my editor, Glenn Stout, and said, basically, “Here’s an idea. I don’t know if I can get it. But if you think you’d want it, I’ll try.” Glenn said go.

I knew I had these two moments in time, moments that most humans never experience—a big shot, and a suicide. All I had to do, I figured, was fill up the 10 years in between.

Throughout December, I struggled with access. I live in North Carolina. And coaches and athletes from big places like Maryland have a lot going on. So it’s easier for them to work with writers they know, especially on hard stories like this. I was way behind. But I figured I had one thing going for me: I cared about it.

I started in the athletic department. I was honest in my requests. I told everybody up front that I was going to write about the suicide. Then I let them decide whether they wanted to participate. I didn’t want to mislead anyone.

I requested public records. The incident report showed that the suicide took place in two locations—the house and the top of the bridge. His parents were involved; other people were involved. Also, he didn’t jump onto the road. He jumped into a ditch.

The biggest blows came when Badu’s parents and Juan Dixon, his best friend on the team, decided not to participate. I contacted an old friend of mine who knows Juan and his brother Phil personally. That friend called the Dixons, and they said they wanted to be respectful of Earl’s family. I had Earl’s parents’ address from the police report. I called them twice. I left two messages. Then I mailed them a letter. When their attorney called me on Jan. 7, I was actually in my truck and on my way to their house. I decided to leave them alone, at his request.

I talked to Glenn throughout the process. I told him I was having a hard time filling up the middle. He said, “The unknown is part of the story.” That stuck. (Ed. note: The unknown, in fact, can serve as the theme of a story, as Alan Huffman showed in his recent “Why’s this so good?” breakdown of a Carol Smith piece in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.) The lack of access forced the story to become deeper than the space between two moments in time; it became a story about the space between life and death.

In a way, the main character became suicide, not Earl.

I put myself in every place I could see him. I drove to the courthouse. Basic Internet court-record searches showed his legal trouble, $300,000 in debt to Alan Cornfield. Those troubles came to life in scenes in court documents. One of them was the scene of Earl on a cell phone in court, telling the judge to let him finish the call.

I drove to the house. I wrote what I saw and felt, turned around, and got the heck out of there. At the edge of the neighborhood, I started recording more notes. I recorded them all the way to the top of the bridge, where I stopped. I got out, walked around, put my hands on the wall and looked down. I hurried back to my truck. I put a notebook on the armrest and, with my hand shaking, I wrote this: “Jumping takes courage.”

I kept calling people. I found some of his old high school coaches and teammates. The farther out I got, the more people talked. They told me about the Earl they knew. They loved him.

I spent three months with this story, off and on and between other things. I went to bed with it and woke up with it. After a while, the question changed from “How do I get the story?” to “Why am I doing it? What’s the greater good?”

I guess in a small way, I wanted to change the way readers saw the next person they passed. Obviously, we enter every situation carrying our own life experiences. It’s easy to look at every end-of-the-bench player and think of him in a Rudy type of way. If he’s not great at basketball or football, we think, he must be a “good student,” or a “hard worker.” I’ve seen sportswriters lead players into those answers for years, and I’ve watched how they’ve shaped those humans. It’s not fair; we’re more complicated than that.

Suicide as a character, then, is a tornado that spins all over the place. It isn’t a solitary act. It spins onto a basketball floor. Into the eyes of fans. Into the words of sportscasters and writers. Into the pressure to make money. Into a courtroom. Onto a bridge. It makes teachers and friends and family and bosses and everybody who’s ever been in contact with the victim feel connected in a really bad way.

That’s why I waited until the end to introduce the other people in the story. Not many people cared that Andre Collins hit that last shot. But he did. It wasn’t Earl.

Nobody even knew about Rodney Welsh and Janet Stout, two people whose names were sort of hidden in the police report. But Earl changed their lives that day. Rodney, especially, still can’t sleep at night because of it. I thought that made it important to write about them, and to do it at the bottom—as real endings to those two stories that I introduced at the top.

One night in February, about a week before the deadline, I dreamed about Earl. I dreamed he was in a room, something like a dressing room inside an arena. He was leaning against a pillar, talking to his mom. And out of nowhere, Earl turned to me and he said, “This is all about a girl.”

I woke up stunned. Had I gone wrong? I was one week away from turning in the story, and I didn’t have a girl anywhere. All I had was money. That actually helped me let go of some blocks and turn this in.

Reporters believe we need to know everything about a story before writing it. We hold stories or never publish them because a source won’t call back. But sometimes not knowing is just part of it. Especially with suicide. And I know this from personal experience: It didn’t matter if I talked to every person who came into contact with Earl in his life, I’d still have one source missing—the main one, the only one who knew what it was like to live with that despair.

I wrote the first draft in first person. A friend who’s an editor read it and had hesitations with my character that way. That’s when I decided to try the whole thing in second person. I think I was able to be more honest that way. The global “you” made it easier to talk about, which I guess is sort of telling. I turned it in at 2 a.m. the day of the deadline. Glenn wrote me three emails before 9 a.m., and we were on the phone working through revision notes by 10. The first version ended with Janet Stout. Glenn liked that, but he said he wanted me to try a few others. If they didn’t work, we’d stay with Janet.

A few days later, I sat down in my chair in a corner of the living room with a cup of coffee. My neighbor is a single mother. Her two boys were in their driveway playing basketball. They’re about 10 and 12. They call me “Mr. Mike.” They don’t have a goal. They make hoops with their arms. The one making the hoop counted down the seconds: “5-4-3-2-1.” The other one shoots. Then they switch. I got my laptop, sat in the chair, turned around, closed my eyes, listened to their shoes and voices, and wrote the ending.

Michael Kruse is an award-winning staff writer on the enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times. He recently gave a TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. His “Just One Question,” an occasional column, has covered stories by Lane DeGregory, Gene Weingarten, and others.  

The post Just one question … for Michael Graff, on the death of Earl Badu appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Michael Kruse Just one question … for Gene Weingarten, on the Jeffrey MacDonald case https://niemanstoryboard.org/2013/03/07/just-one-question-for-gene-weingarten/ Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:01:15 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2013/03/07/just-one-question-for-gene-weingarten/

Everybody's read his latest? Great.

WILMINGTON, N.C. — They are old men now, the doctor and the lawyer, ancient adversaries confronting each other one last time.

The doctor shuffles into the courtroom, his feet in socks and slippers, his ankles in chains. Once a swaggering bon vivant with a Maserati, a yacht and a playboy lifestyle, he is now dreadfully diminished, drained of color and of dignity, with a prison pallor and hair gone white, insulted by a prison haircut. He wears a washed-out dun prison-issue jumpsuit with big black letters: INMATE NEW HANOVER COUNTY. The only daub of color is the maroon accordion file he holds. It glistens. It has been so often repaired over the years that it’s more Scotch tape than cardboard. Inside are papers that document a lost life. For nearly half that life, the doctor, 68, has been in federal custody, largely because of the efforts of the government lawyer who sits across the room, at whom he will not look, not even once, in the seven days they will spend together here.

The two-time Pulitzer winner did something fascinating in this Washington Post magazine story about the notorious Jeffrey MacDonald case. He wrote:

Journalists do have agendas; their articles do marshal facts selectively. They don’t always reveal their biases. Stories are seldom completely arm’s-length.

weingarten-g2

Then ... these six paragraphs:

So, just to be clear:

I intend to spin you toward a certain conclusion. The process is stealthy and has already begun; it was no accident that I called Dr. MacDonald’s stab wound an “incision.”

I have come to believe that Jeffrey MacDonald murdered his family and injured himself as part of a coverup; I’ve concluded this both because I have researched the case extensively, and because, as a writer, I see exactly how Errol Morris prejudiced his account while shrewdly appearing not to do so. I admire his skill but not his book. I think the media have been careless and gullible in reviewing it, perhaps partially because the story of a grievous, enduring miscarriage of justice presents a more compelling narrative than the alternative.

I think “Fatal Vision” is among the best true-crime books ever written, but I think Joe McGinniss unattractively betrayed Jeffrey MacDonald to keep the doctor talking. Still, I do not think McGinniss deserved the national scorn he endured. The partnership between the journalist and the murderer was an exercise in ferocious, mutual exploitation, for enormous stakes, and MacDonald’s lie — that he was innocent — was a far greater deception. And, anyway, in such a freighted transaction no meaningful measure of morality attaches.

I’d never met Brian Murtagh before starting on this article, but he and my lawyer-wife worked together for years at the Justice Department. She would tell me about her friend who, 30 years after the case that would consume his life for better or worse, could not stop talking about ice picks, bloodstains, holes in pajamas, and beautiful, dead children.

Okay, I think we’re at arm’s length now. We’re good to go.

I wanted to know why he did that. So I asked him. And he said:

Three reasons.

The first is straightforward. I feel I had to do something like that, both from an ethical standpoint and a practical one. In the past, in online chats, I have written that I thought MacDonald was guilty, so it would have been both misleading and unwise to leave the impression (through omission) that I started on this story with no presupposition at all. Also, I think I was ethically required to mention that Murtagh had been a colleague of my wife's, and that fact seemed to fit well in this section.

The second reason is stylistic, a matter of texture: I think it was an interesting and entertaining way of addressing the Janet Malcolm issue: Getting the reader to see, specifically, HOW writers are positioned to subtly manipulate them, such as using the word "incision" at a point in the story before I showed my hand. It seemed to address the Malcolm issue in a concise, approachable, show-me-don't-tell-me way.

The third is that I am a punk. I liked the swagger of it.

Kruse thumbMichael Kruse is an award-winning staff writer on the enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times. He recently gave a TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. His last installment of “Just One Question” was with Tampa Bay Times colleague Lane DeGregory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. 

The post Just one question … for Gene Weingarten, on the Jeffrey MacDonald case appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]>

Everybody's read his latest? Great.
WILMINGTON, N.C. — They are old men now, the doctor and the lawyer, ancient adversaries confronting each other one last time.

The doctor shuffles into the courtroom, his feet in socks and slippers, his ankles in chains. Once a swaggering bon vivant with a Maserati, a yacht and a playboy lifestyle, he is now dreadfully diminished, drained of color and of dignity, with a prison pallor and hair gone white, insulted by a prison haircut. He wears a washed-out dun prison-issue jumpsuit with big black letters: INMATE NEW HANOVER COUNTY. The only daub of color is the maroon accordion file he holds. It glistens. It has been so often repaired over the years that it’s more Scotch tape than cardboard. Inside are papers that document a lost life. For nearly half that life, the doctor, 68, has been in federal custody, largely because of the efforts of the government lawyer who sits across the room, at whom he will not look, not even once, in the seven days they will spend together here.

The two-time Pulitzer winner did something fascinating in this Washington Post magazine story about the notorious Jeffrey MacDonald case. He wrote:
Journalists do have agendas; their articles do marshal facts selectively. They don’t always reveal their biases. Stories are seldom completely arm’s-length.

weingarten-g2

Then ... these six paragraphs:
So, just to be clear:

I intend to spin you toward a certain conclusion. The process is stealthy and has already begun; it was no accident that I called Dr. MacDonald’s stab wound an “incision.”

I have come to believe that Jeffrey MacDonald murdered his family and injured himself as part of a coverup; I’ve concluded this both because I have researched the case extensively, and because, as a writer, I see exactly how Errol Morris prejudiced his account while shrewdly appearing not to do so. I admire his skill but not his book. I think the media have been careless and gullible in reviewing it, perhaps partially because the story of a grievous, enduring miscarriage of justice presents a more compelling narrative than the alternative.

I think “Fatal Vision” is among the best true-crime books ever written, but I think Joe McGinniss unattractively betrayed Jeffrey MacDonald to keep the doctor talking. Still, I do not think McGinniss deserved the national scorn he endured. The partnership between the journalist and the murderer was an exercise in ferocious, mutual exploitation, for enormous stakes, and MacDonald’s lie — that he was innocent — was a far greater deception. And, anyway, in such a freighted transaction no meaningful measure of morality attaches.

I’d never met Brian Murtagh before starting on this article, but he and my lawyer-wife worked together for years at the Justice Department. She would tell me about her friend who, 30 years after the case that would consume his life for better or worse, could not stop talking about ice picks, bloodstains, holes in pajamas, and beautiful, dead children.

Okay, I think we’re at arm’s length now. We’re good to go.

I wanted to know why he did that. So I asked him. And he said:


Three reasons.

The first is straightforward. I feel I had to do something like that, both from an ethical standpoint and a practical one. In the past, in online chats, I have written that I thought MacDonald was guilty, so it would have been both misleading and unwise to leave the impression (through omission) that I started on this story with no presupposition at all. Also, I think I was ethically required to mention that Murtagh had been a colleague of my wife's, and that fact seemed to fit well in this section.

The second reason is stylistic, a matter of texture: I think it was an interesting and entertaining way of addressing the Janet Malcolm issue: Getting the reader to see, specifically, HOW writers are positioned to subtly manipulate them, such as using the word "incision" at a point in the story before I showed my hand. It seemed to address the Malcolm issue in a concise, approachable, show-me-don't-tell-me way.

The third is that I am a punk. I liked the swagger of it.

Kruse thumbMichael Kruse is an award-winning staff writer on the enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times. He recently gave a TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. His last installment of “Just One Question” was with Tampa Bay Times colleague Lane DeGregory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. 

The post Just one question … for Gene Weingarten, on the Jeffrey MacDonald case appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Michael Kruse Just one question … for Lane DeGregory, on the presidential hugger https://niemanstoryboard.org/2013/02/07/just-one-question-for-lane-degregory/ Thu, 07 Feb 2013 15:50:12 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2013/02/07/just-one-question-for-lane-degregory/

My Pulitzer-winning pod-mate Lane DeGregory in the Tampa Bay Times, on the Florida pizza man who famously gave Barack Obama that bear hug:

FORT PIERCE — After talking to MSNBC and Inside Edition, while waiting to be miked for Wolf Blitzer, Scott Van Duzer, 46, tried to fit in two slices of pepperoni pizza and a Gatorade on Monday during what had become the busiest day of his life....

To me, the best line of the story was the following:

But you can't confiscate a bear hug.

That's more than a line. It's a lesson. So I asked DeGregory how it happened. And she said:

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="157"] DeGregory[/caption]

The story was the product of our morning meeting. Everyone wanted to know more about the man who hugged the president so hard he lifted him off the ground. So I called the pizza place, and the manager said he had no idea whether the owner would be in. “Everyone wants him today,” the manager said. The guy’s cell phone voicemail was full so we couldn’t even leave a message. But our editors wanted us (Lane and Times photographer John Pendygraft) to take a chance and see if we could catch up with him. So we left at 11 a.m. and started on the 3-hour drive across the state.

There was a big time problem, though. Besides not knowing if the guy would even be available, John had to get back at 6:30 p.m. to pick up his daughter at daycare. And I had to be back for a 6:30 “meet the teachers” night at my sons’ high school. We knew even if we made good time we wouldn’t be in Fort Pierce until 2 p.m. and if we had any prayer of making it back in time we would have to leave by 3 p.m. That left an hour to find and interview the guy – and no time to write the story. We fretted all the way across Florida.

When we pulled into the parking lot, the owner was just pulling up. Inside, six camera crews were waiting. We followed the owner inside and I ambushed him while a worker brought him two slices of pepperoni, and some guys from Wolf Blitzer’s crew snaked microphone cords around his collar, and I got about 20 minutes before he had to cut me off and talk to the TV folks. Of course, I asked about security: What had the Secret Service done to secure the pizza place? Had he asked permission to hug the POTUS? He told me about packing away the knives and scissors and swore the embrace was spontaneous. At 2:55 p.m., he had to leave to catch a plane to New York, so we followed him out the door and got our ending. “If we hurry,” I told John, “we just might make it.”

I was driving, so John sent his photos from his laptop in the passenger seat on the way back. He promised to switch when he was done so I could start typing, but by then it was raining so hard we couldn’t see and there was nowhere to pull over. So while I was driving about 40 mph with my flashers on, I flipped through my notes (not safe, I know) and dictated the story to John, who typed and helped and edited as he went. When I got to the part about securing the pizza place, I dictated: “They had put away all the restaurant’s knives and scissors.” Then I turned to John and, jokingly, added, “But I guess you can’t do that with a hug.”

He laughed. “Nope,” he said. “You can’t confiscate a bear hug.” And I knew that was the best line in the story, the one I hadn’t written. I told him, “Type that!”

We filed the story as we were crossing the bridge back to St. Petersburg and pulled into the parking lot at 6:29 p.m.

Kruse

Michael Kruse is an award-winning staff writer on the enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times. He recently gave a TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. His last installment of “Just One Question” was with freelancer Justin Heckert. 

The post Just one question … for Lane DeGregory, on the presidential hugger appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]>

My Pulitzer-winning pod-mate Lane DeGregory in the Tampa Bay Times, on the Florida pizza man who famously gave Barack Obama that bear hug:
FORT PIERCE — After talking to MSNBC and Inside Edition, while waiting to be miked for Wolf Blitzer, Scott Van Duzer, 46, tried to fit in two slices of pepperoni pizza and a Gatorade on Monday during what had become the busiest day of his life....

To me, the best line of the story was the following:
But you can't confiscate a bear hug.

That's more than a line. It's a lesson. So I asked DeGregory how it happened. And she said:


[caption id="" align="alignright" width="157"] DeGregory[/caption]

The story was the product of our morning meeting. Everyone wanted to know more about the man who hugged the president so hard he lifted him off the ground. So I called the pizza place, and the manager said he had no idea whether the owner would be in. “Everyone wants him today,” the manager said. The guy’s cell phone voicemail was full so we couldn’t even leave a message. But our editors wanted us (Lane and Times photographer John Pendygraft) to take a chance and see if we could catch up with him. So we left at 11 a.m. and started on the 3-hour drive across the state.

There was a big time problem, though. Besides not knowing if the guy would even be available, John had to get back at 6:30 p.m. to pick up his daughter at daycare. And I had to be back for a 6:30 “meet the teachers” night at my sons’ high school. We knew even if we made good time we wouldn’t be in Fort Pierce until 2 p.m. and if we had any prayer of making it back in time we would have to leave by 3 p.m. That left an hour to find and interview the guy – and no time to write the story. We fretted all the way across Florida.

When we pulled into the parking lot, the owner was just pulling up. Inside, six camera crews were waiting. We followed the owner inside and I ambushed him while a worker brought him two slices of pepperoni, and some guys from Wolf Blitzer’s crew snaked microphone cords around his collar, and I got about 20 minutes before he had to cut me off and talk to the TV folks. Of course, I asked about security: What had the Secret Service done to secure the pizza place? Had he asked permission to hug the POTUS? He told me about packing away the knives and scissors and swore the embrace was spontaneous. At 2:55 p.m., he had to leave to catch a plane to New York, so we followed him out the door and got our ending. “If we hurry,” I told John, “we just might make it.”

I was driving, so John sent his photos from his laptop in the passenger seat on the way back. He promised to switch when he was done so I could start typing, but by then it was raining so hard we couldn’t see and there was nowhere to pull over. So while I was driving about 40 mph with my flashers on, I flipped through my notes (not safe, I know) and dictated the story to John, who typed and helped and edited as he went. When I got to the part about securing the pizza place, I dictated: “They had put away all the restaurant’s knives and scissors.” Then I turned to John and, jokingly, added, “But I guess you can’t do that with a hug.”

He laughed. “Nope,” he said. “You can’t confiscate a bear hug.” And I knew that was the best line in the story, the one I hadn’t written. I told him, “Type that!”

We filed the story as we were crossing the bridge back to St. Petersburg and pulled into the parking lot at 6:29 p.m.

Kruse

Michael Kruse is an award-winning staff writer on the enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times. He recently gave a TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. His last installment of “Just One Question” was with freelancer Justin Heckert. 

The post Just one question … for Lane DeGregory, on the presidential hugger appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Michael Kruse Just one question … for Justin Heckert, on the kid who scored 138 points in one game https://niemanstoryboard.org/2013/01/17/just-one-question-for-justin-heckert/ Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:12:16 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2013/01/17/just-one-question-for-justin-heckert/

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="160"] Heckert[/caption]

Justin Heckert had a great late 2012 with stories in Esquire and the New York Times magazine, and then this piece in Sports Illustrated, “The Loneliest Number,” which is about Jack Taylor. Kind of. Remember Jack Taylor? He's the kid from Grinnell College in Iowa who in a basketball game in November scored 138 points. That tally, remarkable to some, obscene to others, sparked a few days of a predictable sort of knee-jerk, good-or-bad sports talk. I wanted to know what made Justin's mind shift instead to this idea of a broader story that starts with ... Frank Selvy and his mother ... in a South Carolina gym called Textile Hall. So I asked him. And he said:

When Jack Taylor scored 138 points, I was in South Carolina, spending Thanksgiving with my in-laws. My father-in-law, Lee Brown, is assistant news director at WYFF, the NBC affiliate in Greenville. When Jack scored 138, Lee brought up Frank Selvy. Lee's mind is a repository of South Carolina historical information. He said, from memory, Selvy was the first – and only – player ever to score 100 in an NCAA Division I game. And that it was the first sporting event broadcast on TV in the state. I told Lee I was intrigued. The next day, while at work, my father-in-law visited a wall in the WYFF offices where they put up pictures and text of old and important stories from "the Upstate," so those stories can live on – a type of newsroom memory wall. There was an entry devoted to Selvy. I learned he scored his 99th and 100th points on a near-mid-court shot at the buzzer. I decided that Frank Selvy must have really wanted to score 100 points. If you take a mid-court shot at the buzzer, while crushing the other team, while already having 98 points ... you want it. Who wouldn't want to get 100, if they had 98? So I figured Jack Taylor must've really wanted it. I figured Bevo Francis must've wanted it. I just didn't know the reasons.

I figured that Kobe (who I couldn't get for the story) must've surely wanted 100 when he got decently close in 2006. It's such a rare number. It's the unreachable NBA number of Wilt Chamberlain, who is a basketball immortal. So I pitched the story to SI. My pitch, which was brief, focused on what Jack had just done, using it to contextualize the feats of Selvy, and Bevo, men who had lived long lives. I stated that I wanted to find out why they wanted 100. And how they got it. And the story was green-lit, right on Thanksgiving. I first interviewed Selvy, because he was in Greenville. I sat with him in his kitchen and asked him why he scored 100 points. He is an old man, but he remembered that game as well as he must've remembered anything in his entire life. He didn't have to sit back and search his memory about anything he was telling me. He told me he wanted to impress his mother, that he wanted to show her how good he was. He had clearly spent much of his life thinking about this.

"His mother." That very short explanation is thus the lede to my story. Because I think it's a very relatable reason to want to achieve something great – to impress your mom. This piece's goal was to be much deeper than just a story about scoring, of course. Everyone was talking about how much Jack had scored. That taking so many shots was a type of sacrilege, or something. All the sports pundits seemed pissed that he'd disgraced the game. The truth is that what he'd done was not much different than what the two 80-year-olds had done so long ago. Their coaches wanted them to score as many points as they could. They all took almost every shot. Their teams stopped playing defense. And all three of them got what they wanted.

Michael Kruse is an award-winning staff writer on the enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times. He recently gave a TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America's New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. This is his inaugural "Just One Question," an occasional column for Storyboard. 

The post Just one question … for Justin Heckert, on the kid who scored 138 points in one game appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

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[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="160"] Heckert[/caption]

Justin Heckert had a great late 2012 with stories in Esquire and the New York Times magazine, and then this piece in Sports Illustrated, “The Loneliest Number,” which is about Jack Taylor. Kind of. Remember Jack Taylor? He's the kid from Grinnell College in Iowa who in a basketball game in November scored 138 points. That tally, remarkable to some, obscene to others, sparked a few days of a predictable sort of knee-jerk, good-or-bad sports talk. I wanted to know what made Justin's mind shift instead to this idea of a broader story that starts with ... Frank Selvy and his mother ... in a South Carolina gym called Textile Hall. So I asked him. And he said:
When Jack Taylor scored 138 points, I was in South Carolina, spending Thanksgiving with my in-laws. My father-in-law, Lee Brown, is assistant news director at WYFF, the NBC affiliate in Greenville. When Jack scored 138, Lee brought up Frank Selvy. Lee's mind is a repository of South Carolina historical information. He said, from memory, Selvy was the first – and only – player ever to score 100 in an NCAA Division I game. And that it was the first sporting event broadcast on TV in the state. I told Lee I was intrigued. The next day, while at work, my father-in-law visited a wall in the WYFF offices where they put up pictures and text of old and important stories from "the Upstate," so those stories can live on – a type of newsroom memory wall. There was an entry devoted to Selvy. I learned he scored his 99th and 100th points on a near-mid-court shot at the buzzer. I decided that Frank Selvy must have really wanted to score 100 points. If you take a mid-court shot at the buzzer, while crushing the other team, while already having 98 points ... you want it. Who wouldn't want to get 100, if they had 98? So I figured Jack Taylor must've really wanted it. I figured Bevo Francis must've wanted it. I just didn't know the reasons.

I figured that Kobe (who I couldn't get for the story) must've surely wanted 100 when he got decently close in 2006. It's such a rare number. It's the unreachable NBA number of Wilt Chamberlain, who is a basketball immortal. So I pitched the story to SI. My pitch, which was brief, focused on what Jack had just done, using it to contextualize the feats of Selvy, and Bevo, men who had lived long lives. I stated that I wanted to find out why they wanted 100. And how they got it. And the story was green-lit, right on Thanksgiving. I first interviewed Selvy, because he was in Greenville. I sat with him in his kitchen and asked him why he scored 100 points. He is an old man, but he remembered that game as well as he must've remembered anything in his entire life. He didn't have to sit back and search his memory about anything he was telling me. He told me he wanted to impress his mother, that he wanted to show her how good he was. He had clearly spent much of his life thinking about this.

"His mother." That very short explanation is thus the lede to my story. Because I think it's a very relatable reason to want to achieve something great – to impress your mom. This piece's goal was to be much deeper than just a story about scoring, of course. Everyone was talking about how much Jack had scored. That taking so many shots was a type of sacrilege, or something. All the sports pundits seemed pissed that he'd disgraced the game. The truth is that what he'd done was not much different than what the two 80-year-olds had done so long ago. Their coaches wanted them to score as many points as they could. They all took almost every shot. Their teams stopped playing defense. And all three of them got what they wanted.

Michael Kruse is an award-winning staff writer on the enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times. He recently gave a TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America's New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. This is his inaugural "Just One Question," an occasional column for Storyboard. 

The post Just one question … for Justin Heckert, on the kid who scored 138 points in one game appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Michael Kruse “Why’s this so good?” No. 22: Hank Stuever on 9-ish https://niemanstoryboard.org/2011/11/29/whys-this-so-good-no-22-hank-stuever-clock-struck-9-michael-kruse/ Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:12:35 +0000 https://niemanstoryboard.org/2011/11/29/whys-this-so-good-no-22-hank-stuever-clock-struck-9-michael-kruse/

There are two stories from the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, that to me remain better than all the others. R.W. Apple wrote a news analysis that ran on the front of the New York Times on Sept. 12. Hank Stuever wrote an essay that ran on the front of the Style section of the Washington Post on Sept. 13. Apple? He unleashed on deadline a voice-of-God assessment of the far-reaching geopolitical implications, pretty much predicting the future. And Hank?

“I turned in a vibe,” he says now.

America opens at 9, which is to say 9-ish, which has become our saddest hour.

9:02, for example. Or 8:45, or 9:04.

Or 9:11, six minutes after the second jet hit the second tower, and the mind started connecting dots in a panic. At some point we may have stopped to consider the date, 9/11, which reads as 9-1-1, which is keypad-speak for: Oh God no, help, please. Perhaps the day could simply be called Nine One One.

Why’s this so good?

Start on Sept. 11. Hank, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, had been at the Post for about two years, and his editor was Henry Allen, who in 2000 had won a Pulitzer for criticism.

They by then had started to develop an almost telepathically good working relationship. One day a few months before Sept. 11, Henry came back from lunch, walked over to Hank’s desk and said, “Plastic patio chairs,” and Hank looked up and said, “Absolutely.” A week and a half later, he had written 1,915 words about the world’s most ubiquitous piece of quasi-furniture, their place assured in the pantheon of the all-time most Stuever-esque Stuever stories.

So on that blue-sky Tuesday, in a buzzing, mobilizing Post newsroom, Hank said to Henry something about how they always know when to get us, don’t they? Right around when we’re getting to work. Right around 9. Hank, they decided, would get up early the next morning to report.

It’s worth pausing here for a second to consider what we mean when we use that word. Reporting is not walking around with a tape recorder or a notebook and a ballpoint pen. It is not transcribing. It is not talking to as many people as possible. It is not collecting quotes. Reporting is all that, or can be, but it’s also observing and thinking and recognizing themes and ultimately earning the ability to say what there is to say. Reporting is work. Hank, an outsider by nature, is a keen observer and possesses the kind of original mind that sees meaningful differences between the convenience store chains Wawa and Sheetz and turns those perceptions into nearly 2,500 words of culturally relevant synthesis.

Early on the morning of Sept. 12, he worked downtown D.C., around 17th and K Streets. He reported “the overheard,” as he puts it, but he also dutifully filled his notebook with names and ages and quotes, “just in case” he ended up having to resort to a more traditional scene or mood piece. He didn’t, thank goodness – note that in the story there is no Johnny Johnson, 22, of Bethesda.

“I’m going to do the 9 o’clock idea,” Hank said to Henry when he got back to the office.

“Do it,” Henry said to Hank.

Here then is the part of the process where no one who does this job does quite the same thing. Some writers rarely outline, instead relying on something like rhythm and magic. Others are maniacal organizers, armed with three-ring binders and color-coded tabs. Reporters working on bigger stories have been known to take over entire offices, doing storyboards with posters taped to walls. There is no one, right way, but Hank often finds himself in the camp that relies on magic. He cites Joan Didion – she has said she doesn’t know what she thinks until she writes it down – and he believes what Henry believes – the good stuff comes from the anxious energy that comes from a great idea and a blinking cursor – and so he sits, and he trusts.

Locate the right tenor and tone. Universal, but not Op-Eddy; a lot, but not too much. This, Hank reminded himself sitting in front of the screen, does not have to be the final word on everything and all it means. “Don’t light the candles. Don’t summon the Gods. Don’t do any of that.” Like Henry says in essence, then and now, less throat-clearing, more throat-grabbing. And so go.

“I remember,” Hank says, “just hitting a groove and playing with type.”

The fourth paragraph:

Apart from the middle of the night, or the predawn, which are both fraught with simple darkness and somnolent vulnerability, 9 o’clock has taken on a peculiar quality all its own: terror before the day even really gets started, before the second cup of coffee, just before the staff meeting you’d as soon not go to, just when you think you’re five minutes ahead by being five minutes behind.

And then the fifth:

The people who would kill ordinary Americans in order to make a point have zeroed in on the humdrum of our early-mid to mid-mornings, with the idea that we’re all up and at our desks doing … doing what, exactly? In somebody’s interpretation we are busily playing our notes for an intricate orchestra of Western evil, of conspiracy, of a capitalist McDomination.

The world-class wordplay that started with keypad-speak for: Oh God no continues with intricate orchestra and capitalist McDomination. Fun is perhaps the wrong word, considering the content, but Hank is making music. There are many different ways to keep the reader reading, which is a mandate of the craft, but on the list certainly are little, interspersed pulses of awesomeness. Roy Peter Clark calls them gold coins. One here, one there, and they’re enough to train the reader to expect the next. To want it. NPR’s breakfast drone of militant rebels in jungles of countries with new names? That’s a gold coin. And later, down toward the bottom, the innocent working lives in tragic triplicate? That’s another.

This is a piece that has a sort of spotty natural propulsion. The primary engine is the strength and sequence of the ideas. In places, though, Hank crafts forward movement, equating sights, smells and sounds with times of the morning. We can hear the truck backing up. We can hear the brakes on the bus. We can all but hear the tick of the clock implicitly tied to the scream of the planes. This tactic does a couple things: 1. Movement can be as simple as Monday to Tuesday, light to dark, and here it’s 8:45 to 8:52 to five of nine and so forth. The reader is not stopping in between those points. 2. It quietly knits together the mundane with the dread of the day.

That’s important. Because all of this is flash and brilliance and not much more if it’s not attached to an idea that undergirds the structure of the piece as a whole. It turns out broad daylight was so much scarier. Hank had earned the right to say that. A new era of unshakeable unease.

It starts with five paragraphs that are beautiful. It ends with three that are pitch-perfect.

The 9 a.m.-ness of it all came raining down: all 243 pages of the committee report on the interface transfer, all those shreds of capitalistic minutiae, all those desk ferns and coffee mugs and Hang in there it’s almost Friday posters, the blue copy, the pink copy, the yellow copy, the innocent working lives in tragic triplicate.

How the morning went so wrong.

But, oh, a day later: It’s a little bit before 9 o’clock and everyone who could went back to work. The trucks were beeping, the line formed at Starbucks, and the eye contact we made with each other said what we didn’t have to.

Henry, when he talks about this story, talks about the great 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope: What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d. “You read this piece,” he says, “and you say, ‘That’s right, that’s right, that’s right.’”

Michael Kruse is a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and a contributing writer for Grantland. He won ASNE’s 2011 award for distinguished nondeadline writing.

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

The post “Why’s this so good?” No. 22: Hank Stuever on 9-ish appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]>

There are two stories from the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, that to me remain better than all the others. R.W. Apple wrote a news analysis that ran on the front of the New York Times on Sept. 12. Hank Stuever wrote an essay that ran on the front of the Style section of the Washington Post on Sept. 13. Apple? He unleashed on deadline a voice-of-God assessment of the far-reaching geopolitical implications, pretty much predicting the future. And Hank?

“I turned in a vibe,” he says now.
America opens at 9, which is to say 9-ish, which has become our saddest hour.


9:02, for example. Or 8:45, or 9:04.



Or 9:11, six minutes after the second jet hit the second tower, and the mind started connecting dots in a panic. At some point we may have stopped to consider the date, 9/11, which reads as 9-1-1, which is keypad-speak for: Oh God no, help, please. Perhaps the day could simply be called Nine One One.

Why’s this so good?

Start on Sept. 11. Hank, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, had been at the Post for about two years, and his editor was Henry Allen, who in 2000 had won a Pulitzer for criticism.

They by then had started to develop an almost telepathically good working relationship. One day a few months before Sept. 11, Henry came back from lunch, walked over to Hank’s desk and said, “Plastic patio chairs,” and Hank looked up and said, “Absolutely.” A week and a half later, he had written 1,915 words about the world’s most ubiquitous piece of quasi-furniture, their place assured in the pantheon of the all-time most Stuever-esque Stuever stories.

So on that blue-sky Tuesday, in a buzzing, mobilizing Post newsroom, Hank said to Henry something about how they always know when to get us, don’t they? Right around when we’re getting to work. Right around 9. Hank, they decided, would get up early the next morning to report.

It’s worth pausing here for a second to consider what we mean when we use that word. Reporting is not walking around with a tape recorder or a notebook and a ballpoint pen. It is not transcribing. It is not talking to as many people as possible. It is not collecting quotes. Reporting is all that, or can be, but it’s also observing and thinking and recognizing themes and ultimately earning the ability to say what there is to say. Reporting is work. Hank, an outsider by nature, is a keen observer and possesses the kind of original mind that sees meaningful differences between the convenience store chains Wawa and Sheetz and turns those perceptions into nearly 2,500 words of culturally relevant synthesis.

Early on the morning of Sept. 12, he worked downtown D.C., around 17th and K Streets. He reported “the overheard,” as he puts it, but he also dutifully filled his notebook with names and ages and quotes, “just in case” he ended up having to resort to a more traditional scene or mood piece. He didn’t, thank goodness – note that in the story there is no Johnny Johnson, 22, of Bethesda.

“I’m going to do the 9 o’clock idea,” Hank said to Henry when he got back to the office.

“Do it,” Henry said to Hank.

Here then is the part of the process where no one who does this job does quite the same thing. Some writers rarely outline, instead relying on something like rhythm and magic. Others are maniacal organizers, armed with three-ring binders and color-coded tabs. Reporters working on bigger stories have been known to take over entire offices, doing storyboards with posters taped to walls. There is no one, right way, but Hank often finds himself in the camp that relies on magic. He cites Joan Didion – she has said she doesn’t know what she thinks until she writes it down – and he believes what Henry believes – the good stuff comes from the anxious energy that comes from a great idea and a blinking cursor – and so he sits, and he trusts.

Locate the right tenor and tone. Universal, but not Op-Eddy; a lot, but not too much. This, Hank reminded himself sitting in front of the screen, does not have to be the final word on everything and all it means. “Don’t light the candles. Don’t summon the Gods. Don’t do any of that.” Like Henry says in essence, then and now, less throat-clearing, more throat-grabbing. And so go.

“I remember,” Hank says, “just hitting a groove and playing with type.”

The fourth paragraph:
Apart from the middle of the night, or the predawn, which are both fraught with simple darkness and somnolent vulnerability, 9 o’clock has taken on a peculiar quality all its own: terror before the day even really gets started, before the second cup of coffee, just before the staff meeting you’d as soon not go to, just when you think you’re five minutes ahead by being five minutes behind.

And then the fifth:
The people who would kill ordinary Americans in order to make a point have zeroed in on the humdrum of our early-mid to mid-mornings, with the idea that we’re all up and at our desks doing … doing what, exactly? In somebody’s interpretation we are busily playing our notes for an intricate orchestra of Western evil, of conspiracy, of a capitalist McDomination.

The world-class wordplay that started with keypad-speak for: Oh God no continues with intricate orchestra and capitalist McDomination. Fun is perhaps the wrong word, considering the content, but Hank is making music. There are many different ways to keep the reader reading, which is a mandate of the craft, but on the list certainly are little, interspersed pulses of awesomeness. Roy Peter Clark calls them gold coins. One here, one there, and they’re enough to train the reader to expect the next. To want it. NPR’s breakfast drone of militant rebels in jungles of countries with new names? That’s a gold coin. And later, down toward the bottom, the innocent working lives in tragic triplicate? That’s another.

This is a piece that has a sort of spotty natural propulsion. The primary engine is the strength and sequence of the ideas. In places, though, Hank crafts forward movement, equating sights, smells and sounds with times of the morning. We can hear the truck backing up. We can hear the brakes on the bus. We can all but hear the tick of the clock implicitly tied to the scream of the planes. This tactic does a couple things: 1. Movement can be as simple as Monday to Tuesday, light to dark, and here it’s 8:45 to 8:52 to five of nine and so forth. The reader is not stopping in between those points. 2. It quietly knits together the mundane with the dread of the day.

That’s important. Because all of this is flash and brilliance and not much more if it’s not attached to an idea that undergirds the structure of the piece as a whole. It turns out broad daylight was so much scarier. Hank had earned the right to say that. A new era of unshakeable unease.

It starts with five paragraphs that are beautiful. It ends with three that are pitch-perfect.
The 9 a.m.-ness of it all came raining down: all 243 pages of the committee report on the interface transfer, all those shreds of capitalistic minutiae, all those desk ferns and coffee mugs and Hang in there it’s almost Friday posters, the blue copy, the pink copy, the yellow copy, the innocent working lives in tragic triplicate.



How the morning went so wrong.



But, oh, a day later: It’s a little bit before 9 o’clock and everyone who could went back to work. The trucks were beeping, the line formed at Starbucks, and the eye contact we made with each other said what we didn’t have to.

Henry, when he talks about this story, talks about the great 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope: What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d. “You read this piece,” he says, “and you say, ‘That’s right, that’s right, that’s right.’”

Michael Kruse is a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and a contributing writer for Grantland. He won ASNE’s 2011 award for distinguished nondeadline writing.

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

The post “Why’s this so good?” No. 22: Hank Stuever on 9-ish appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

]]> Michael Kruse