I wasn’t nervous the first time I interviewed a professional athlete. Picture me: driving to the Sachs Recreation Center in Deerfield, where the Sky practice — and where I’d attended a birthday party in my youth.
Ah, women’s sports, where you can ascend to the highest realm and still have to practice in places meant for children and the elderly. (Times are changing though: The Sky have a brand-new facility opening in Bedford Park next season.)
Now picture me in the waiting area, brimming with confidence. I’m reading through my questions — solid questions, based on a lifetime of experience with basketball — when the PR guy asks who I need.
She emerges from behind the curtain, wiping sweat off her face.
A real live Sky player.
She stands before me, waiting. I feel it all so acutely: her readiness to fulfill her media obligation and move on with her day. Me forgetting all of my questions, grasping for something to say.
Nothing — and I mean nothing! — prepares you for meeting your heroes.
Panicked, I cough out some word salad and avoid her eyes. If they met, she’d be able to see it: that I was an impostor, that I missed that layup in ninth grade, that I wasn’t even a full-time journalist.
My real career was in finance.
On the side, I wrote about the Sky. First, as a blogger, then as a part-time journalist for a women’s basketball news site called The Next.
My goal as a sportswriter has always been to get people to think more deeply about sports.
Yes, sports is full of surface-level excitement, but it also contains a deeper drama of selfhood. As an athlete or coach, you end up asking yourself: Who am I? Am I succeeding? Do my teammates or players see me? Do I see them?
On the beat, one of the biggest obstacles to exploring these topics is the players and coaches themselves. They’re not always interested in baring their souls after practice, or during a losing streak, or really anytime at all.
And I get it! Players are not always talking about the soul stuff with their teammates, much less a reporter.
So, if you want to go deeper, you have to get creative. You watch the team from behind the glass, trying to piece together their customs, their language, their values. You ask indirect questions, hoping to refract some meaning. You try to build trust.
If you’re Steve Greenberg — the Sun-Times’ great sports columnist — you might go all the way to Gooding, Idaho, where Colston Loveland, the Bears’ star rookie, grew up. Get to know his family, see his hometown through their eyes.
When I joined the Sun-Times this past summer, Steve and I discovered that we’re basically neighbors. Now we sit together at the local coffee shop and talk about writerly concepts: tone and word choice and how to source ideas.
But the first time I saw him at a Sky practice, before we were co-workers, I thought he was an opp. He waltzed in for an exclusive with Angel Reese, thinking she might divulge her hopes, her dreams, her fears.
He lamented in his column that she sent him away with one-word answers.
I remember reading it and thinking: Why would Reese share her hopes and dreams with you?
My initial reaction to Steve pretty much erased any doubt I was about to flip my life around, leave finance and dive into sports beat reporting full time. I was already reacting to a columnist with a “get off my lawn” attitude a month into covering the team.
But the truth is, I saw myself in Steve’s piece. The longing for something real, something revealed. Of course, I want to know Reese, and all the athletes I cover.
I wonder what to do with that longing as the job becomes more routine, as I come to expect soundbites about “sticking together” and “trusting the process.”
I wonder if I’d be better at covering something I’d never lived, like politics, where I wouldn’t see my own experiences reflected in the players’ eyes.
For now, I’m sticking with the Sky beat. Persisting with my mission. Boarding planes, waiting for practice to end. Learning how to have a good day.
Part of the trick, for me, is holding two truths at once:
- On any given day, I will probably go home with a bag of cliches, deflections and disinterested responses.
- Today might be the day when I get something more.