Gary Smith points the way to the long and the short of good sportswriting

Sportswriters aren’t famous for praising other sportswriters, but one man unites his peers like no other. Gary Smith, long-time star of Sports Illustrated, has delivered some of the great reads.

Even the greatest fishermen don’t land them all.

Gary Smith, the great long-form sportswriter of our time, pauses when you ask about the stories that got away.

One stays with him, that of the late Al Davis, the famous, cantankerous, and famously cantankerous owner of the Oakland Raiders NFL team.

“I wouldn’t call it a regret exactly,” says Smith. “But I think if you could have had access to Al Davis in his last month of life, it would have been a hell of a story.

“Davis had battled death his whole career. Anyone he knew who got sick — or anyone he barely knew, come to that — he would galvanise a whole crusade to fight it, bringing in the best doctors, sit with the person...

“It was almost a personal campaign against death, and I had a sense that when he had to face death, that it would have been a great story.”

Smith and great stories go together like a horse and carriage. That’s why the sportswriting world was taken aback when it was announced earlier this year that he was stepping back from magazine writing with Sports Illustrated.

“I just started working on a book and was leaning more and more towards thinking of that rather than taking the three months off that are required for a magazine piece,” he says.

“I just figured it was better to honour that instinct that was so strong, so I decided to follow that.

“Jaded? No, it was more of a sense that I wanted to work out what was going on with the book, to work on that.”

He mentioned the fact that he started work on a book: is he superstitious about talking up a project like that before he gets around to writing it?

“A bit — I’m not superstitious as such, but I don’t discuss the books too much while I write them.

“Even with the magazine pieces I’d like to keep them wrapped up inside and riddle it all out without talking it out, as it were.”

Those magazine pieces — like Crime And Punishment, about a teenage basketball star convicted of rape, or Tyson The Timid, Tyson The Terrible, about the former world champion, are lengthy, discursive and penetrating.

The man who wrote them says that having the time to spend polishing the material was key.

“It’s huge. For me, that was the only way to get the kind of depth I was really interested in. Having those two-and-a-half months or whatever for the story was vital.

“There’s face-to-face time with the interviews, but then when I’d get back I’d go over the material also, and that’s often when it would dawn on me where the real heartbeat of the story was — and that would require a whole new wave of interviewing and phone calls.

“Sometimes, if you had good fortune, the heartbeat of the story would come to you as you were engaged in the face-to-face interviews, but more often that came afterwards.

“That’s why the time for all those follow-up calls was critical — and it was a big reason why I stayed with Sports Illustrated for all those years, because they gave me that time and space.”

What Smith is referring to there, of course, is legwork rather than divine inspiration.

“Absolutely — the more you prize showing and not telling, the only way to show it is to have hard anecdotal material which brings alive the facets of personality versus just telling the reader.

“I kind of shifted it, too, I didn’t use as many quotes because I wanted the thing to come alive on its own rather than me, or another character, having to explain it.

“That shifted more onus onto the legwork to bring those facets of the character to life.

“If something happened while I was there that could be used anecdotally, great, but nine times out of 10, the character’s not going to reveal critical data right in front of you.

“Usually people can manage their image in a face-to-face setting — you might get a telling moment, but odds are the really telling moments occurred in the past.

“Writing like you were there... that again put the onus on the legwork, having the time to recreate scenes from the past so the reader feels they’re right there while it’s happening.

“So that shifted it from the journalism where you have lunch with someone for an hour and a half and you have to hang it all on that hook.”

Where did those ideas come from, though? A sudden light-bulb moment? Editors? Snippets in newspapers?

“About 50-50 — about half the ideas came from editors, and half from me. Sometimes it could be just a couple of lines, a brief reference which set the ripples going.

“I was living in Sydney for a year and someone brought USA Today while visiting — and there was a three-sentence reference to an African-American coach in an Amish-Mennonite community, that he’d led them to a state title but was now dying of brain cancer.

“I thought, ‘wait, he’s done this?’ It seemed to me a story that might carry an 8,000 word piece, so when I got back to the States I called the high school, only for them to tell me he’d died a couple of weeks before that.

“I asked if I could come out, and that’s how the story (Higher Education) took off.

“Then I saw a reference to a walker who committed suicide because he’d come fourth in an Olympic trial, and only three athletes were going to the games, and something struck me about the incongruity of that — an athlete so driven as to commit suicide but in a sport like walking, which you wouldn’t associate with that kind of drive?

“I felt there was something there.

“A vibe from the couple of sentences was often what would set me off (Walking His Life Away was the story which resulted).”

Surely being from Sports Illustrated helped with access, though? Dropping the name of the magazine in an early phone call must have opened a few doors.

“A lot of times, no,” says Smith, who won the National Magazine Award for non-fiction a record four times. “I wasn’t on TV much and I kept a pretty low profile with four stories a year. I was pretty unknown though the internet helped with that. If people wanted to know more I was always glad to send them examples to show them what they were getting into.

“But while towards the end the internet helped with awareness, for a good part of it I’d walk in a bit out of the blue. I’d tell them it was very in depth, but using my name as a crowbar to get in the door... that wasn’t the case.

“Here and there it helped, but not generally.”

He doesn’t read a lot of journalism himself nowadays. He says he went through a Kundera and Camus phase a while back, but now he reads “a lot of philosophy, stuff about meditation”.

Hardly a surprise given the depth of his approach, but the soulful connoisseur of the human condition retains a journalist’s eye for a yarn.

“There are great stories all over the place. One doesn’t work out, there’s another one. If you put your full attention and heart into it, there’ll be something really valuable there.”

Gary Smith always found those stories.