Too many sources?

You generally quote only what you can't say any better.

 

The overuse of bad quotes is probably the No. 1 thing that hurts any sports story.

Usually, outside of sports, people can rustle up whatever perceptiveness they have inside them to answer questions with a little bit of flair. But athletes and coaches, at least these days, are obsessed with some mythical code that demands they share less than silence - platitudes they don't even believe.

 

Sometimes when I read a book or magazine piece about a politician or thoughtful entertainer (think Bruce Springsteen or Phillip Seymour Hoffman, not Lindsay Lohan), I want to fling it across the room because the stuff they get is so good compared to what we have to live with.

One thing that makes sports really tough to cover is we are basically covering physical savants.

 

You can never have too many sources. You can easily have -- and most newspaper reporters seem to -- too many direct quotes. And that can be true whether you have eight quotes from eight people or eight quotes from two.