National Sports Journalism Center

Give me a detail.

Yes, tell me a good story.

And make it sing with detail.

There’s the Tracy Porter story out of the Super Bowl. Maybe Reggie Wayne took the route too deep. Maybe Peyton Manning threw too quickly. Or maybe Porter really did outsmart the Colts and get to the target area before anyone else, what the pros call "jumping the route." However it happened, we know that Porter’s interception of a Manning pass intended for Wayne became a 74-yard touchdown return that ensured a Super Bowl victory for the Saints.

Porter said he made the big play because he had paid attention in the classroom. He’d learned that on third-and-short, from a certain formation, Manning looked for Wayne just beyond the first-down stick. Porter said, "I saw it over and over on film the past two weeks." With the game at stake, he jumped Wayne’s route, and Manning’s pass flew directly at him. "When I saw the ball coming," the cornerback told reporters later, "I knew I was going to be in the end zone."

Tracy Porter had all the good-luck bromides working for him. Residue of design. Preparation meeting opportunity. Long before anybody had even thought to pump air into a pig’s skin, a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln said, "I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come."

Also, Porter got a haircut.

Not just any haircut. Porter flew his barber in for the game. Flew him to Miami for a commemorative cut. Of course, the audible to his barber had absolutely nothing to do with the play that made Tracy Porter immortal in the Big Easy – unless it had everything to do with it.

Nakia Hogan, writing in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: "Perhaps Porter knew he’d have such an impact on the game. Perhaps that’s why he arrived at Sun Life Stadium last Sunday with images of the Superdome and the Lombardi Trophy carved into his faded haircut."

Great detail, that.

Even better, this: "That haircut caused him to miss the team bus to the game because his barber was still putting the finishing touches on it when the bus pulled away."

In the little bible that I carry everywhere – "The Elements of Style," by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White – rule 16 in principles of composition is, "Use definite, specific, concrete language." Rather than write, "A period of unfavorable weather set in," write, "It rained every day for a week." Professor Strunk added, "If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is this: the surest way to arouse and hold the reader’s attention is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers – Homer, Dante, Shakespeare – are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures."

In Nakia Hogan’s words, we see the Lombardi Trophy etched into Tracy Porter’s head, or, more precisely and no doubt less painfully, "carved out in tonsorial topiary,." as Lee Jenkins wrote it for Sports Illustrated.

Muhammad Ali and his father, Cassius Clay Sr., once stood before an open casket in a Philadelphia rowhouse funeral parlor. I wrote, "There were five or six rows of wooden chairs on a gray linoleum floor. The room’s only lights were bare bulbs in floor lamps at either end of the coffin. The harsh lights played against Ali’s face each time he tilted his head to look at the dead man, killed by an off-duty policeman after pulling a knife in an argument during a closed-circuit telecast of the Ali-Bonavena fight. . . .

"Ali put his hands on the coffin’s edge. ‘What’s he feel like?’ the heavyweight champion asked. ‘Is he hard?’

"‘Like clay,’ his father said. ‘Putty. Not hard.’

"Ali touched the dead man. With his right index finger, he pushed against the body, testing it, first on the thigh, then between the thumb and fingers, finally on the cheek.

"‘Cold,’ he said. . . . ‘Life is pitiful. One second, this man is alive. He’s arguing that I’m a better fighter than Joe Frazier. The next second, he’s dead.’

"Ali walked away. ‘I ain’t worth dyin’ for,’ he said."

Her first year covering hockey for The New York Daily News, Lawrie Mifflin drew telling detail from a defenseman named Mike McEwen, small for the work, maybe 5-foot-11, 170 pounds. First he admitted that he’d been scared on draft day, wondering what the pro scouts thought of him.

"Then he told me that before you get drafted you have to go for a physical exam," Mifflin told William Zinsser for his book, "Speaking of Journalism." "The selecting teams want to know about a player’s height and weight. They tell you to strip down to just your jock and your socks. So he took two pairs of woolen socks and he put two hockey pucks inside each sock, one under the ball of the foot and one under the heel, and he shuffled into the room and stood real tall, and on all the official documents he wound up being listed as 6’1" instead of 5’11". It said a lot about how badly this kid wanted to make it into the National Hockey League."

Good work there, getting a professional athlete to tell you his scared-kid story.

Better, Mifflin recognized it as revealing of character.

Best, she knew "to write it just the way you would tell it to someone and not go waxing on about ‘shivering in the other room and gnawing his fingernails . . .’ Don’t embroider what doesn’t need embroidering."

The Poynter Institute scholar Roy Peter Clark, in his book "Writing Tools," suggests an exercise in detail.

"Sit with notebook ready in a public place: a mall, a cafeteria, a sports stadium. Watch people’s behavior, appearance, and speech. Write down the character adjectives that come to mind: obnoxious, affectionate, caring, confused. Now write down the specific details that led you to those conclusions."

Which is how I once came to write down the words of a caring/confused dialogue between an 83-year-old man and his middle-aged son . . .

Dad: "You got a cup?"

Son: "What you want a cup for?"

"I gotta pee."

"Go next door to my house."

"I can’t make it soon enough. You got a cup?"

The son fetched a McDonald’s cup from his car. A few minutes later, the old man returned.

"What you do with my cup?" the son said.

"Left it there."

"Be a surprise for the workers."

"Nothing in it."

"Huh?"

"I couldn’t hit it."

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