Excerpt:
When I started I saw guys get jaded at 40 and then they got really jaded and terminally unhappy. The late Ray Fitzgerald was an example. I still like the games. That's why so many sports editors are missing the boat as they try to re-invent the newspaper. I still like the games. I see people crafting columns in the fifth inning or the third quarter and I say, "You're not watching the game". And people say, "I'm writing about the people and the color". Well, guess what? It starts with the game. If I'm flipping the dial as I was a week ago in my hotel room in New York – Brown and Yale were tied with six minutes to go – I'm hanging around to see what happens. I couldn't name a player on either team, but I was curious to see how it came out. I like the games. I don't think enough people actually like the games.
I don't relate to people who are not fans. Some writers insist they can't be fans – I read your interview with Dave Hooker – (Dan) Shaughnessy (Boston Globe) will tell you that – but I am very much a fan. That's my DNA – it's why I have an advantage over most other people. I can convey that to my readers – they know that if they hang in with me over a period of time there's no doubt I am one of them. That is simply not the case with the vast majority of my colleagues. How can they function – I don't get it. I can't be clinical. Even though I don't like football it doesn't mean I can't go to a game and get into it – and I'm more into football now than ever because of what the Patriots have done the last six years
On sources, and apropos of his recent unwillingness to criticize Doc Rivers:
I read your interview with Shaun Powell (Newsday) and his viewpoint about going about business without getting close to the people you cover. I respect that - but I'm not like that. I can't help becoming friendly with people in the business. I don't see anything wrong with it. You should be able to figure out parameters – I'm not going on vacation with these guys. I don't understand what he was talking about. I can't understand how you can be a columnist and not have somebody you can pick up the phone and talk to - somebody who you have a cordial relationship with and can shoot the breeze with.
What is this job all about? If you're a beat person, how can you have a source if it's not a friendly source? I don't get it – what's wrong with being friendly and compatible with them? You're selling yourself to these people. You're selling yourself to make them comfortable with you so they tell you things.
On the 'new media'
You've got the shift in readership to the likes of Bill Simmons and all of the people on the Internet, who are a little less accountable than newspaper writers. But they're all out there forcing us to re-evaluate where we fit in. It's not the same and it won't be the same – our influence is waning and eroding. Simmons is not doing what mainstream columnists do – he has no desire to speak to anyone in power – he observes and does what he does. There's room for everybody – the access to information is staggering, imposing and intimidating. You've got Baseball Prospectus and all that number crunching by genius people dissecting baseball in ways mainstream writers never could – it's very intimidating.
All you can do is use your access to bring thoughts to the public and to write as well as you can and hope that someone cares and that it matters. And how you say things is almost as important as what you're saying. When that stops being the case we'll be in trouble. Our business is under siege. Somebody starting out today should get to a dot.com immediately if not sooner – why spend your time in a dying industry? I'm grateful I'm much closer to the end of my career than the beginning. I'm grateful for the times I've lived through. I doubt the dot.comers will ever have the fun we had – because of the access and respect we got from the leagues – theirs will never be what ours was. They'll never have the fun and the relationships we were lucky enough to have had. I can't imagine starting out today. Whoever is the NBA guru today – if you will, the 'me' of 1986 or 1988 when I was at my peak – no way will he have as much fun as the guys I did it with. The world was so much simpler and the games were so much better – but that's another story
The one exception I'll take to this is to point out that Simmons clearly has multiple sources inside the Celtics front office, as well as those of multiple other NBA teams. He's broken several Celtic-related stories over in recent years. If anything, I suspect some of the threat Ryan is feeling from Simmons stems in part from how similar the later is to Ryan's self-image. Simmons very clearly aspires to write from the fans perspective and was a season ticket holder who went to almost every game at the garden from the late-1980s until he moved to LA a few years ago. Ryan wants to make the big difference between print and on-line journalims about the access and relationships the former has that the later can't replicate. I don't know if that is already outdated.
1 comment:
I don't know why I only just got an e-mail with the Bob Ryan interview excerpts, since it was posted in November. Maybe I got it before and have forgotten.
I don't think Ryan comes off as hostile to Simmons here. He says that Simmons doesn't want to talk to people "in power," not that he is uninterested in inside sources. I think he's saying that Simmons is uninterested in talking to GMs and coaches for the sake of quoting them in his pieces. That's certainly fair. His reaction to the new media seems to me more of a reaction to the multiplication of press outlets -- internet, mostly -- covering the game, most of whom are doing this by (a la Simmons) writing about what they see instead of performing something Ryan and his predecessors traditionally did, which is to go into the locker room and the coach's office and get back to the reader with stories about what was said there that they otherwise wouldn't have had. It is a shift. That kind of reportage can get very stale. Ryan -- it seemed to me -- was never as interested in that stuff, as evidenced by his book, Forty-Eight Minutes.
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