National Sports Journalism Center

We could begin this weekly back-and-forth on sportswriting with the famous quote from Robert Montgomery Knight, who said, "All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things."

Hmmm.

Or we could start with Red Smith. "I’m just a working stiff," he said, "trying to write better than I can."

Maybe this from Ben Throckmorton, the Texas media mogul: "Don’t write me nothin’ that rhymes," except that Ben was a character in a novel by Dan Jenkins.

It was Dan, by the way, who told his daughter, Sally, "You want to be a sportswriter? Go to a doctor, get it cut out!"

How we start is less important than how we wind up, anyway. The plan here is to have an extended conversation about the craft of sportswriting and the occasional art of it. We’ll talk about anything that touches on reporting, writing, and editing in newspapers, magazines, and books. Your suggestions, questions, and arguments are encouraged, welcomed, and appreciated. And if you have to raise your hand four times to get my attention, please do it – as I learned in December 1974 in putting a question to Indiana University’s favorite ex-general, R.M. Knight.

At mid-court, with the game flowing past them, he had words with Kentucky coach Joe B. Hall and then slapped him on the back of the head.

"Coach," I said at a press conference after Indiana’s easy victory, "what happened with you and Coach Hall there at mid-court?"

He looked at me. I sat in a little sixth-grader chair with a notebook arm that Indiana basketball used to remind the press of its place in KnightNation. "We’re here to talk about basketball," he said. "Anybody got a basketball question?"

Dutifully, someone asked a basketball question.

I raised my hand again. Same deal.

A third time. "Patience, David," he said. "We’re here to talk about basketball."

I had been afraid to ask the question. Now I was more afraid not to ask it. My hand went up again. "Coach, 17,000 people saw you hit the other team’s coach at mid-court," I said. "What was that about?"

He did not answer. He solicited more basketball questions. Then he turned back to me and said, "David, what was your question?"

He gave some piffwaddle answer, but that is not the point of this meandering. I went back to my typewriter and was writing a column condemning Knight when I looked up and saw a rolling-shoulders bear crossing the floor, head down, resolutely marching toward . . . me.

A bear, or Knight.

I thought, "This can not be good."

Fact is, it was terrific. He plopped down beside me and said, "How do I get myself into these things?" He seemed contrite and apologetic. And I kept typing. Where they fit, I dropped his quotes into the column, making it practically a live interview. I condemned him no less, but the column offered a fuller, more thoughtful view of the Knight-Hall incident.

That is the point here. Whenever we think we’re ready to write – a 3,000-word feature, a 200-word brief, an 800-word column – the piece will always get better with one more interview, one more phone call, one more minute of contemplation.

By way of telling you who I am and how I think about sportswriting, let me tell you one more story.

The first sportswriter I ever met was Fred Young of The Daily Pantagraph in Bloomington, Illinois. He was 113 years old, give or take a month. The pockets of his pants, shirt, suit coat, and top coat were stuffed with envelopes, receipts, a grocery list, and the April page off a household calendar. On those scraps of paper he had scrawled hieroglyphics that would have caused code-breakers to go cross-eyed. At his tall, stout, gun-metal gray Smith-Corona typewriter, he transformed the data into "Young’s Yarns," a column he did most of forever.

I wanted to be Fred Young.

Not that being Fred Young would get me in for free at big games such as Saybrook-Arrowsmith against Fairbury-Cropsey.

I liked the typing part.

I love the games and the people who play them. Zurich watchmakers are no more precise at their craft than Ted Williams, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Peyton Manning have been at theirs. Mark Whicker, a columnist at the Orange County Register, once wrote, "Sports is life with the volume turned up." I love it for that more than anything else, I think.

My friend Dave Anderson of The New York Times always said, "I root for my column." Me, too. Who wins, I don’t care, never have, never will. I want a moment that I have never seen before. Give me ordinary athletes doing extraordinary things, extraordinary athletes doing unimagined things.

Then let me write.

Dave Kindred‘s next book will be "Morning Miracle," an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame.