National Sports Journalism Center

One moonlit night along the Atlantic Ocean, I sat cheek to cheek with Charlize Theron, the world’s most beautiful woman.

She was in South Carolina to film a movie, "The Legend of Bagger Vance." I was there writing a feature on the filming for Golf Digest. She had never played golf, knew nothing about golf, and had nothing to say about golf, but I insisted to the movie publicist that it was necessary for the artistic integrity of my piece that I interview her, preferably in the moonlight at midnight.

So there she was, standing at the top of a small set of stairs outside her trailer, radiant, even luminous, wearing a trench coat against the night chill. As she stepped down the stairs, she opened wide the coat to reveal a red Jazz Age flapper’s dress with fringe in all the right places. She then shimmied, causing the fringe to move in ways that such fringe was made to move.

And she said, in a movie-star way,"Scandalous, aren’t I?"

We sat on the back of a golf cart for a half-hour. I asked questions, she answered. The next morning I could not read a single note. They were scribblings and scrawls of a kind made when you dare not take your eyes off the interview subject. So in the piece I confessed to bedazzlement and wrote only, "She smiled a lot."

After that, I never left home without a tape recorder.

Not that the dratted machines guarantee success. This week, for instance, I asked a friend to dictate some questions about the art and craft of interviewing.

I had connected the telephone to my tape recorder to capture his words precisely – except I plugged the phone thingie into the tape recorder’s "ear" hole instead of the "mic" hole. So he read the questions again; this time I screwed up by having shoved a phone-cord button from "rec" to "play."

The thrice-dictated questions are now printed at the end of this column for reasons that will become apparent, even to those of you whose minds might now be wandering to the question, "Wouldn’t those blue humanoids in ‘Avatar’ make a helluva basketball team?"

I wondered that myself.

I mostly wondered how in the name of Michelangelo and God’s Lesser Geniuses anybody could have created such a movie. Leaving the theater, I had a million questions for James Cameron, the director and writer whose imagination raised the Na’vis’ world, Pandora, as brilliantly as it had sunk the Titanic. I wanted to ask in my sportswriterly way, "James, the turning point in the war – the elephant-tank stampede? Or the cavalry of dragons flying in under the floating mountains?"

You gotta want to know why and how. If you can watch Brett Favre do his old-man miracles and come away without a question, you are a walking, talking flat-liner. Curiosity amped up by the event and/or by the interview subject is the foundation of all good reporting. Because no aspect of a reporter’s work is more important than asking questions, I once thought to demonstrate the process to my wife. I tossed softballs about her background, education, and experience as a nurse. But we were only six or seven questions in, each answered in sentences of progressively fewer words and in words of fewer syllables, when my beloved rose from her chair, waved her hands as if calling at the last instant for a fair catch, and said, "E-NUFF!!!"

Here you may ask, if even marriage is no guarantee of a good interview, what’s a person to do?

I have found that begging works.

Also, with most people, flattery can be slathered on to good effect.

With subjects bored by interviews, it can be profitable to ask unexpected questions, like, "The Na’vis, could they play for Bob Knight, you think?"

I have often asked for help. "I don’t get it," I have said, "please educate me." Flattery is a variation on that begging theme: "I know nothing, you know everything, educate me." Even when you have done your full load of homework, even when you have done the thinking necessary to advance the story, even after making a list of questions and checking it twice, you still want the subject to reveal himself – so you ask the let-your-ego-run question, as with Ferdie Pacheco, the doctor in Muhammad Ali’s corner all those years: "Educate me on what you did for Ali when most people think you just showed up on fights nights and stood in the corner between rounds." Pacheco talked for four hours.

A hundred years ago, Ali said, "You nervous talkin’ to a world man like me?"

He sat with a dozen sportswriters.

"I’m not nervous fightin’," he said. "Why you nervous writin’?"

It’s good to remember, we’re all pros here. Don’t be shy. A stupid question? It is not a stupid question if it gets you an answer you can use, or if it helps you look less stupid the next time you interview a movie star in the moonlight.

Thoughts on interviews . . .

Make them conversations, not interrogations.

Don’t work from a script, let it happen.

Listen, then listen harder.

Silence is your friend. Faced with dead air, the interviewee often says something he hadn’t planned on saying. As Ryder Cup captain, Curtis Strange was given lessons in dealing with the media. "They told me, when you’ve answered the question, shut up," he said, causing me to say, "Curtis, don’t spread that around. I’ve made a living by waiting for guys to keep talking."

The great sportswriter Jimmy Cannon once said, "I usually start with a little small talk. You warm up slowly. Then you drop the bomb, and if the guy doesn’t answer, the interview will be almost completed. I save the tough questions for last because I don’t want an empty notebook."

It’s all rife with practical and ethical questions such as those dictated by my friend from a discussion section of the classic journalism textbook, "Reporting for the Media," ninth edition.

1. How would you respond to a source who several days in advance of an interview asked for a list of the questions you intended to ask?

2. Do you agree that reporters have an obligation to inform their sources when they plan to record an interview even when it’s legal to do so?

3. If a story’s publication is likely to embarrass a source, do reporters have a responsibility to warn the source of that possibility? Does it matter whether the source is used to dealing with reporters?

4. Would you be willing to interview a mother whose son just died? Would it matter whether her son drowned in a swimming pool, was slain, or was a convicted killer executed in a state prison?

5. Imagine that you wrote a front-page story about students’ use of marijuana on your campus. To obtain the story you promised several sources that you would never reveal their identities. If, during a subsequent legal proceeding, a judge ordered you to identify your sources, would you do so? Or would you be willing to go to jail to protect your sources?

My answers to the primary questions and the secondaries: 1. Depends. 2. No. 3. No. Yes. 4. Yes. Of course. 5. No. Yes.

Send me yours, with a touch more elaboration than I’ve offered.

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