National Sports Journalism Center

Could a columnist get it done in 140 words?

I ask because I have read tweets.

In fact, I am a Twitterperson. It happened one day in Charleston, South Carolina. The Xarkdude did it to me. He is a media futurist who in the Pleistocene Age was a newspaperman named Dan Conover. We were talking about the possibility of another dinosaur (me) learning to tweet. So Xarkdude said, "This is your lucky day."

He took my cell phone, passed his hand over it, invoked the names of several cybergods, and I was Twitter-enabled. My e-mail now delivers the occasional notice that I have gained another follower. This is interesting because I am leading no one anywhere. Tragically, I have never pulled the trigger on Twitter.

I do like the idea, though.

Tight and bright.

Say it, get out.

While working for Golf Digest this summer, I watched the Texas laureate, Dan Jenkins, tweet his way through the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship. He had covered 202 of these major golf things. He did not write up Old Tom Morris with a feathered quill plucked from a Firth of Forth seabird. But he did aim a clattering typewriter at Ben Hogan. He last composed his music on a wireless laptop.

Then someone asked him to tweet.

He said, "Please?"

It was explained. "OK," he said.

He loved it. Watched golf, had a beverage, walked around, cracked wise – the typical workday of a sportswriter. Only this time the Jenkins wisecracks were collected and transformed into tweets that relieved him of the heavy lifting required for a column. None of that Red Smith bleeding from the brow. No blueprint necessary for an architectural structure.

"Damn," Dan said, "where’s this been my whole life?"

On the theory that newspapers and website shouldn’t waste readers’ time, I now propose an experiment. The column, written small.

Not tweet-small, not 140 characters.

How about 140 words?

The New Yorker used to do italicized jewels of descriptive writing on everything New York-y, maybe 250 words, tone poems, beautifully done, accompanied by line drawings. They freshened up the pages and provided changes of pace from the usual cognitive workout demanded of the magazine’s readers.

So if we’re interested in engaging readers quickly, why not do what all the futurists – Xarkdude among them – have advocated? Experiment. No one knows what’s going to work. Nothing might, anything might. I’m not sure I could do an even half-cogent column in 140 words. I do know Lincoln used 272 at Gettysburg.

On the occasion of Furman Bisher’s retirement, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of my alma maters, asked me to write 200 words on the man I admired, respected, traveled with, played golf with, and worked alongside for more than 40 years. Could I get a sense of that in 200 words? I tried.

*Furman walked out on Jack Nicklaus, who interrupted his Masters press conference to ask, "Furman, don’t you want to hear me?"

"Jack, when you get to be my age," the great man said, "you respect your kidneys."

*I was in a limousine with Jim Murray, the late Los Angeles Times sports columnist, who ran down a laundry list of his health problems before pointing at the mighty Furman.

"And that sumbitch," he said, "can’t catch a cold."

*Early in my AJC days, after being told not to ask Furman what he was writing, I did it anyway, a little so we wouldn’t write the same thing, more to hear what he’d say.

"Judas priest, general observations on the day’s events," he said, so I chose another topic.

*At his 80th birthday party, his old boss Jim Minter said that when Furman got his dander up, he was as good as anybody.

"I never knew he got his dander down," I said, which is why Furman was always as good as anybody.

*Two years ago, his glorious wife, Linda, called him in the Augusta press room and Furman became a high school kid in love.

"I just finished, honey," he said. "It wasn’t much. I keep trying. I’ll do that perfect column someday."
 
With ruthless self-editing, I could delete one of the Furman items and get it near 140 words and it would still say, almost, what could be said in an 800-word structure built with memorable scenes, discursive quotes, and Red’s bleeding. But look at Crash Davis. The journeyman catcher in "Bull Durham" needed only 89 words to explain his belief system to Annie Savoy. Here are the printable 85:

"Well, I believe in the soul . . . the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days."

I did the experiment after a Monday night NFL game a couple weeks ago, 140 words on Brett Favre:

He liked to have killed himself in a car against a telephone pole near Rotten Bayou, Mississippi 20 years ago, and he played in a month. His daddy the coach, the bull-necked Favre, died without suggesting it, and the son played the next night. Now there’s gray on his face. His wife had cancer, he played. He’ll play forever or until it’s no more a boy’s fun. Good. And he can still bring it. Makes every receiver a live one. Sees them all, they know to look back ‘cause a rocket’s coming. Vikings 30, Packers 23. Favre 24-31, 273, 3 TDs. Think they regret it now? A rookie in Atlanta, warming up, he threw Nerf balls with Billy Joe Tolliver, a contest to "see who could fling the foam furthest." In the NFL, Nerf ball contests! Super Bowls, MVPs. They matter. Almost as much as a boy having fun.

OK, so it’s 149 words.

I could get ruthless and spend an hour or so and trim it down to, oh, maybe, 146.

More than that, Mr. Sports Editor, we’d have to go to arbitration.

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. He can be reached at inkstained1@aol.com.