Column submitted for your approval

I've tried to get into writing columns at my shop. It's been a long time since I've had a regular one, and the first two have been kind of raw. This is the third. It's better, though I think it read a lot better in my head than it did when I put it to the computer screen, like maybe it could have been so much more. Tell me what y'all think. Also, if you can figure out what poster I am from the column, please keep it under your hat/toupee/whatever. But that goes without saying.

Anyway, it's on the next post, becuase it's too long otherwise.

 

When a champion’s legs can’t outrun the demons
By Brian J. French

Chances are, if your mind was on sports this past weekend, you were thinking about the AFC and NFC title games. Or perhaps the ODU-VCU showdown at the Siegel Center. Or maybe the Australian Open.

I was thinking a little about Pam Edwards.

You wouldn’t have known her. Not unless you ran against her at a cross country meet in the late 1990’s, or went to class with her at Tallwood High School. I didn’t know her much better, really; even as she won her races, she was reticent around the media, and I was too unsure of myself to press the issue the few times our paths crossed.

Here’s what I know: She was one of the Class of 1999’s co-valedictorians, wrapping a stellar grade point average around two state cross country titles before attending Wake Forest University for her undergraduate work, then Penn’s medical school for her postgrad studies.

And this former champion and Ivy League student, on the precipice of greatness, took an overdose of pills and died in her Philadelphia apartment.

Edwards committed suicide on Sept. 8, 2005 – the ending abrupt, but maybe not that surprising. She fought anorexia during her freshman year and profound depression for much of her life, attempting to end her life years before, her parents and brother told The Virginian-Pilot in a harrowing story published two months ago.

And running close to the surface was an extreme drive to win – to win at, literally, any cost.

Suicide, and depression in general, is a bitter thing to explain to those who don’t have personal knowledge of it. You can be assured that laymen with little more than surface observations of Edwards were perplexed when the story trickled out. How could someone so smart, so successful do something like this? Couldn’t she work harder to get better? She was training to be a doctor, didn’t she know how to diagnose herself?

It never works like that. Depression is one of those mazes that you can’t think or study your way out of any more than rationalizing that ocean currents shouldn’t be carrying you away from the shore as you’re in the middle of a riptide.

So you have this teenage girl who, if you judged her by tangible means, would seem to have plucked the world from a ripe oyster. Fleet afoot and razor-sharp in class, a past dotted with accomplishment and a future brimming with impending successes.

And she’s dead. By a hand that might this day be healing someone.

(next post)

 

And at some point, in a moment of shadows and solitude, you wonder if the thing around which you’ve centered so much of your life was an accessory to the crime.

Sports is, at its core, a zero-sum game; for all the intangible benefits that both leading scorer and benchwarmer can share, the results bear out an uncompromising, steely-eyed judgement. If Team A wins, Team B loses. If Johnny Striker scores a goal, Billy Goalkeeper gave up a goal. If Jenny Point Guard makes a steal, Sara Shooting Guard committed a turnover.

And even if you’re the best in your field, an island unto yourself in a sea of stragglers, there’s always someone better out there. Worst of all, it’s usually you; you find yourself fighting shadows of races once run and benchmarks to meet and times set by people 40 and 4,000 miles away and history taunting you, telling you that yes, there WAS someone better and you can’t touch her.

And after a while, the pressure and the drive can undermine the most stable and neutral of spirits, souring the underlying enjoyment that this was supposed to be providing you and locking you into a whirlpool where even your best effort is unfulfilling and further proof that you’re not accomplishing enough.

And it breaks you, and it doesn’t let you unbreak yourself, not without the fight of a life.

And you read about how it all unfolded, and what she did to herself to stay in the race, and then thought slams into you like a running forearm to the back of the neck: Am I part of the problem?

And, if you have anything resembling a soul, it shakes you, shakes you to the core.

If this is the essence of competition, then maybe you’re contributing to its sharpening, throwing a shovelful of coal into the engine fire without consciously doing so. The message is thrust into your mind at all angles and velocities but invariably spells out the same word: We celebrate winners.

I’m not saying that my job leads people to depression or speeds up the Darwinian development of sports as a showcase of gloried winner and irrelevant loser. That’d be self-indulgent, for starters. But every so often, you’ve cause to step back and reevaluate. And usually the impetus is something dramatic. The suicide of a 24-year-old woman fits that bill.

So I guess the lesson is to embrace perspective, to understand what sports is (a leisure activity, a way to stay healthy, a way to build character and camaraderie, a means to an end) and what it’s not.

But again, anyone can read a list of symptoms and tell themselves that they’ll make the right decisions if they ever get to that point. It’s one thing to know how to get to the fire exits; it’s another thing altogether to navigate smoke-choked corridors in the bowels of an inferno.

So I guess the lesson really is to trust the people around you. Ultimately, they’ll know how to get you out of the hallways when the alarms go off.

And stories like Pam’s become isolated and sad parables, not the tidal wave of the future.

 

Well written, though I have two thoughts. Why is it that this weekend you were thinking of Pam?

The other thing is, you're probably being too hard on yourself or on our profession in general. Whenever someone commits suicide, there are other, underlying problems. I suppose it's possible that media expectations of a high-level athlete can be a depressant, but it's more likely a small part of the overall mental picture.

Good column, though. If this is one of your first attempts, it's a good one.

 

Mr News,

First off, as noted: Why the thoughts this weekend ? If you can't answer that (and you haven't in the piece) then the construction is wrong.

I like a lot about this (especially if this is something like a maiden effort) but I'd say that you back in ... put her living and breathing in the lead if you want to draw the reader in and generate a sympathetic reaction.

Oh yeah, don't think that you can push reporting to the side just because you're columnizing. This column would have benefited by getting some voices and detail. Imagine how much better it would be if the parents or friends said they were or weren't worried about her, how they tried to talk to her, her last conversation, whatever.

YHS, etc

 

First off all, thanks for posting, Brian. You seem to have a strong grasp of language, and I like the way you flow paragraphs and words together. You can write. If this is a first effort, keep it up.

Now, since FoF touched on theme, let me talk about line editing for a bit, because an editor recently talked to me about this trap in my own writing:

You have a lot going on here in terms of metaphors. There are some nice ones, but probably too many. Let's look at them back-to-back:

1. Depression is one of those mazes that you can’t think or study your way out of

2. that ocean currents shouldn’t be carrying you away from the shore as you’re in the middle of a riptide.

3. seem to have plucked the world from a ripe oyster.

4. around which you’ve centered so much of your life was an accessory to the crime.

5. an island unto yourself in a sea of stragglers

6. and locking you into a whirlpool where even your best effort is unfulfilling

7. and then thought slams into you like a running forearm to the back of the neck

8. f this is the essence of competition, then maybe you’re contributing to its sharpening, throwing a shovelful of coal into the engine fire without consciously doing so.

9. The message is thrust into your mind at all angles and velocities

10. It’s one thing to know how to get to the fire exits; it’s another thing altogether to navigate smoke-choked corridors in the bowels of an inferno.

11. hey’ll know how to get you out of the hallways when the alarms go off.

12. And stories like Pam’s become isolated and sad parables, not the tidal wave of the future.

Now. Some of this nice writing. It really is. But putting it all together, and it's definitely overwriting. There is a lot going on here, a lot for the reader to digest. The best editors will tell you this over and over, and it sounds silly, but most of the time it's true: Less is More.

If I'm reading this column, I'm have to do a lot of work to keep track of rip tides, and whirpools, mazes, tidal waves, smoke-filled corridors, and forearms to the back of the neck. There are some nice images there (it might be a bit heavy on the ocean stuff though) but it loses power when you read them one after the next. Feels like you're trying to do much, and the message gets lost. I'd say pick one or two you like best, and tone the others down or take them out.

I think FoF is right about perhaps getting a little more reporting. There is some good writing here, but I sense you're going over the top with is because you don't have enough reporting or enough to build your point without a lot of fancy phrase turns.

 

Mr Down,

On over-writing: It's a good point. I think that if there was more reporting (and it could be as little as two quick phoners), there's a lot more ice cream and a lot less whipped cream. That is, less room to over-write. Less need as well.

YHS, etc

 

Thanks for all the feedback. It's hard to get a gauge on where you are when you're the only sportswriter on staff, as I am here. I don't get my stuff critiqued by people who write and/or edit sports for a living, but then that's the lot most of us weekly and small daily types must bear, right?

A few points:

* The column's origin was organic. What happened was that I was covering a big indoor track and field meet on Saturday. On Friday I had visited a wrestling website to get updates on the condition of a wrestler I had covered at the Virginian-Pilot, where I worked as a part-timer. He was involved in a near-fatal car accident in Pennsylvania a few weeks ago.

I thought about it on the way to a game I was covering that night, and it occurred to me that a surprisingly high number of people I covered back in my days at the Pilot died young. I counted a football player, a volleyball player, a softball player and Adam Petty, on whom I did a quick feature when he visited an area track to run in a touring series. All had died in car accidents (the context for Petty's, of course, being far different). Then I remember Pam. Then I remembered the story Vicki Friedman wrote for the Pilot on her suicide back in November.

I thought about it a good deal late Friday night/early Saturday morning, and again through the day on Saturday when I covered the indoor track meet, which involved people I recognized from when I covered them during the cross country season months earlier.

So to answer the (unspoken) question: it wasn't a clumsy preface to a column I wanted to write anyway. It probably wasn't constructed very well, but it was real enough.

* On the overabundance of cliches and metaphor: This was why I started this thread. In my mind was a brilliant and thought-provoking column. On my computer screen was something that was nice enough, but not really what I had intended. Certainly not as good as I thought it deserved to be, but I couldn't figure out why.

Part of it, I think, was that I relied too heavily on laying bare my thoughts and fears, as though this were some sort of on-the-cheap psychotherapy session. I thought, and still think, the column idea was legitimate, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it veers towards the self-indulgent. As though my thoughts should be carrying the day. That's what happens when you write at 3 in the morning with XM's chillout channel on the background.

I also went to the alliteration/repetition well too often, now that I look back on it. Too much emphasis on the words and not enough on what was backing them up. I liked the idea of using the same words to lead a string of sentences. I think I liked it too much.

* On reporting, or lack thereof: First off, I had what I thought was a pretty strong intro in the early stages.

You didn't know Pam Edwards. Not unless you ran against her at a cross country meet in the late 1990s, or went to class with her at Tallwood High School.

I didn't know her much better, really; even as she won her races, she was reticent around the media, and I was too unsure of myself to press the issue the few times our paths crossed.

But here's what I know: She was one of the Class of 1999's valedictorians, wrapping a stellar grade point average around two state cross country titles before attending Wake Forest University for her undergraduate work, then Penn's medical school for her postgrad studies.

Today, Pam Edwards is where she's been the last 14 months.

A Virginia Beach graveyard.

Problem is, I couldn't find anything to indicate she had been buried at all, not in Vicki's story, not in the news obit, not in the submitted obit, not in the funeral home's subsite. So I dropped it and went to another lede, one that obviously didn't work as well.

Honestly, and maybe this is when I should have punted the column idea entirely and gone with something else, I didn't have the time to do much reporting on my own. I had eight stories to write that weekend, and as compelling as her story was, she wasn't a local athlete. The only reason I wrote about her was my limited experience with her, and the only local connection is how a sports editor views sports when something like this happens. Again, probably self-indulgent and more sizzle than steak, but I also thought I had a better column than I did.

I guess the other thing that bothers me in retrospect is the what I wrote wasn't good, but rather something that would be accepted as good. Does that make sense? Sort of like how maybe a made-for-TV tearjerker movie wouldn't be a Golden Globe or Oscar winner, but it generates the proper response by virtue of its content. People told me I wrote a good column (four responses, which beats my previous story response record by people not related to the subject, which was zero). But I'm not so sure this was any good at all, just something that was meant to seem good. And that's not good enough.

Thanks again for the feedback. I rarely get my stories looked at by people in the know, at least when it comes to sports journalists. I miss it.

 

Also, much as I'd like to say this was the first time I've written a column and that I tapped into some hidden pool of column-writing awesomeness, it's not so. I wrote a bunch of mediocre-to-sub-mediocre columns at my college newspapers, then tried to write a weekly column at my first full-time job. I've written five columns since I started here nearly two years ago, three of which were in the previous three issues. Oddly enough, those four were markedly different from this one: all had at least one, usually two, interviews behind them, and they didn't have the emotional punch. This was a departure.

 

Brian,

I think the feedback you've received is valuable. In fact, I was learning from it alongside you. And that's because I thought it was some of the best journalism I've read in a long time. The pacing overwhelmed me, and you have a fine vocabulary.

After considering the points that FoF and DD made, I see precisely what they're saying. But I don't think for a second that you're going to be a one-man sports staff for long. You could take quite a leap if you continue to perfect your craft. You show a deep concern for betterment simply by posting here.

Frankly, I popped on here to tap out my own column, and the quality of your work caused me to reconsider. I've got almost a six pack of Heineken in me now, but I think I'll go ahead and give it a shot. And heaven knows I'll be writing for two hours tonight, because it will take me that long just to write something half as great as what you've produced here.

 

Brian, DD, as usual, makes a great point. I think it's obvious that you know how to write; it's kind of like American Idol, and how you can know within two notes if someone can sing. It's a real clean effort. But the metaphor thing is spot-on. If I were a writing teacher, I would spend at least a class on metaphors and analogies. When they're used right, and when they're vivid and original, they are usually the best lines in the story. Overdo 'em, and they tend to start smacking of effort.

My brother, who is a nice man but not much of a conversationalist, once read something of mine and said, "It's, like, too much." And he was right. (And if he could see it, any dullard could.) Since then, I write something the way I was always going to write it, and then I go back and prune half the metaphors. The better half survives.

It's clumsy, but it's a trick.

 

Mr French,

Just to hit it one more time ... it's impressive enough as it stands, more so in that you are operating without a safety net or sounding board (one-man staff 'n' all). Don't take the criticisms as anything less than constructive (or to be intended any other way).

If there's anything you want to bounce of me for quick turn-around, please feel free to PM.

YHS, etc