National Sports Journalism Center

The best storytelling organization in sports journalism today is ESPN, both on its website and in its magazine. Faint praise, perhaps, because ESPN is the only outfit that even tries to tell stories on a regular basis. The original master, Sports Illustrated, still comes with great pieces, but they are few and far between. As for newspapers, they seem to be out of the long-form narrative business, beaten down by economics that have robbed them of talent, space, and the will to reach for excellence.

I once worked alongside a man who had a reminder sign over his desk. It said, "It’s not rocket science." This job is simple. Just tell me a story.

Take me to a place I’ve never been. Let me smell the scary-sweet jungle after a rain and hear a jaguar’s explosion of a roar. Tell me about a man I never knew, and tell me so I care about the mystery of his life, of our lives. Tell me a story that begins with a sentence that makes me read every word of the 5,000 to come.

Begin: "The city outside the window of Room 1507 at the Carlton Hotel is a most unlikely place to go insane." Tell me, quickly, what you see in Room 1507: two narrow beds, tan covers, brown carpet, all of it worn. And: "The bedside table is cracked, the original wood grain visible beneath the varnish. A single page in the thick phonebook is creased: the page for funeral homes."

Wright Thompson is as good as sportswriters get. He wrote those words. ESPN.com had sent him to Brazil to tell the Tony Harris story. Harris was a guard who had helped Washington State reach the 1994 NCAA basketball tournament. Five seasons in Brazil’s professional league had made him a star. "Kids rushed to him after games for hugs and autographs," Thompson wrote. "Girls waited at every exist of the gym."

But in February of 2005, Harris abruptly demanded a plane ticket home to Seattle. He said his son had been in a car accident. Thompson learned otherwise; Harris told his church pastor that after a money dispute with his team, kidnappers had left him in the wilderness as a warning to back off. Despite that, on Oct. 31, 2007, when he had foundered in Seattle, 36 years old, broke and dispirited, Harris went back to Brazil to make money the only way he knew, playing basketball.

Eight days later, Tony Harris dialed 0 on the phone in room 1507. "Zero takes him home," Thompson wrote. Harris spoke with his wife, Lori. "He told her of the closing darkness, of the whispers in the locker room: He had slept with someone’s wife the last time he played here, or that he’d fled because he had AIDS. . . . on the phone with Lori, confused and scared, he began settling accounts. Tell my mama I love her. Tell my son I love him and to finish school and make something of himself and that I’m proud of him." When his wife said, "You’re scaring me," Harris said, "I need to tell you this in case something happens to me."

Something did.

Ten days later, he was found dead. His decomposing corpse hung from a monkey pepper tree in wilderness that Brazilians call "cerrado," meaning inaccessible. Around the corpse’s neck was a long, black shoelace of the kind Harris used in his blue and white Nikes, size 13.

The story was told in the Seattle papers. (Back in the day, two years ago, there were Seattle papers, plural.) For most of a month, the story was told, 300 words here, 500 there. They told the story the way newspapers do, thinking small.
Only ESPN called a reporter and said, "Pack. Go. Now. Call us."

Only Wright Thompson went looking for a story.

There was the story of the player’s death. There was the story of how a son, a husband, a father – a human being in distress – came to believe he had only one way out of his troubles, to die.

Those are different stories, and Thompson’s is the one that makes the job worth doing. It’s the story that quality magazines do, the one that ESPN’s bosses want done. It is also the one that newspapers have surrendered on. Neither Thompson, who came to ESPN after five years at the Kansas City Star, nor I, ink-stained forever, understand that.

"They are the engaging, gripping parts of the paper that inform and also entertain," Thompson said. "It seems illogical that when more and more people are disengaging from the paper, you’d get rid of the one thing that’s fun to experience and read, and doesn’t feel like homework."

Inexplicable, he said.

"It’s like a movie studio deciding not to make blockbuster movies and just make foreign-language films. People like stories. They understand how to read a story. It’s just so counterintuitive for a business that has out-grown the inverted pyramid to continue to do something at its own economic peril."

So he flew to Brazil and did what great reporters do. He asked questions that allowed the story to show itself to him.

"He is a man who has heard truth and lies, who has seen light and dark, and learned there is but a thin line separating the two," Thompson would write. Though he wrote that about a diplomat in Brasilia, the words fit him as well. He found a taxi and the driver that Tony Harris had hired, the taxi that carried him out of the big city into the cerrado, where he walked into the wilderness, never to be seen alive again.

"At night," Thompson wrote, "it’s like God himself forgot the cerrado. How long was Tony lost out here? A day? Two? Three?"

Save for two hours, Thompson had retraced Tony Harris’s every frantic, frenzied, incoherent movement on his last day of life. Thompson walked into the cerrado and up to a crime-scene tape encircling the monkey pepper tree. On its trunk he saw the dark stains of body fluids. He saw gouges made where Harris had bitten into the tree; police found a tooth on the ground. It had been a suicide, Thompson believed, a paranoid’s suicide.

All this is fabulous work.

I rise in applause.

Okay, okay, I hear you. Yes, absolutely, ESPN has deep pockets and can pay for trans-continental travel and give a big-bucks reporter/writer a month to do it. Still, I am here to say every newspaper, however budgetarily challenged, can find its own drama, if only it looks for it, if only it looks beyond the white lines to the people touched by the games.

Find those people.

Tell me a story.

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. He can be followed at Twitter.com/DaveKindred and facebook.com/people/Dave-Kindred/509353295