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Now in Paperback: Howard Bryant says, 'Everybody Gets Forgotten'
1k Plays9 months ago
This originally aired on June 10, 2022 as Episode 320.
Howard Bryant is the bestselling author of several books, including Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original (Mariner Books).
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Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Social: @creativenonfiction podcast on IG and Threads
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction of Episode and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey CNFers, now in paperback, another paperback episode. Shit's getting real over here in CNF pod HQ and sometimes you guys just gotta lean. I gotta ask the backlog. I'm like, hey, can I get a spot here? And Howard Bryant is here. This episode was originally episode 320 and it aired on June 10th, 2022.
00:00:24
Speaker
That's the extent of my new introduction, and there is an older parting shot about the book proposal process. It's kind of fun to listen to knowing where we are and where we've come from. So in any case, I'm going to get the hell out of the way and let this wonderful episode with Howard Bryant do some heavy lifting for us. Okay? All right. See you in Evers.
00:00:49
Speaker
Hey, before we get rockin' and rollin' today, I just wanna say thanks for listening and thanks for taking a valuable hour to an hour plus out of your life each week, maybe more, maybe less, and spending it with this show. There's so much out there competing for our very finite attention.
00:01:07
Speaker
It's very zero sum. Listening to CNF Pod means you're not listening to or reading something else.
Gratitude for Audience
00:01:14
Speaker
So I just want to say for those who spend that time with this show and with the guests on the show, we look to celebrate. Thank you. Thank you so much. Ideas don't sell books.
Ideas vs Characters in Books
00:01:28
Speaker
Ideas don't make books. Ideas make textbooks. But characters make books. Stories make books.
00:01:42
Speaker
Oh hey there, CNF resistors, the creative non-fiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, how's it going? Did you finish the thing? Did you start a new one? Did you start a new one at the expense of the thing you should be finishing? Speaking from experience, you'll soon have a pile of false starts and nothing to show for it, except bald tires and an empty tank of gas. It's true.
Howard Bryant's Career Highlights
00:02:09
Speaker
Howard Bryan is here, holy cow.
00:02:11
Speaker
Holy cow. I tell you, I've been such a fan of Howard's work for years. He's a longtime baseball writer and author. He was the guest editor of the 2017 edition of Best American Sports Writing. He's the author of The Last Hero, A Life of Henry Aaron, The Heritage, Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism.
00:02:37
Speaker
Full dissidence notes from an uneven playing field and his most recent biography is Ricky the life and legend of an American original It's published by Mariner books and that's Ricky Henderson the all-time stolen bass record holder the leader in lead-off home runs fun fact and
Ricky Henderson Biography Introduction
00:02:57
Speaker
In my beard eye playing days of college and post-college days, if you led the game off with a plunk, we called it a Ricky, because you led off the game with a splash. Yeah, that happened. Anyway, like all of Howard's work, it's a spectacular book, and it's a fun book. One Howard desperately needed after writing heavy books like The Heritage in Full Dissidence.
00:03:25
Speaker
We'll soon get to Howard, but first a little housekeeping if you'll indulge me. Subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and maybe consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts. So the way we're seeing effort, sailing the choppy waters of the podcast ocean might find our little podcast that could.
00:03:44
Speaker
show notes to this episode, and a billion others are at brendadomerra.com.
Podcast Subscription and Support
00:03:50
Speaker
There you can sign up for my up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter where I give out reading recommendations, book raffles, writing prompts, and other cool stuff I stumble across that I think can help you get where you wanna go and maybe even entertain you a little bit too. First of the month, no spam, so far as I can tell you can't beat it. And if you're feeling extra generous,
00:04:12
Speaker
Consider becoming a member patreon. Hey patreon.com slash cnf pot where I get out transcripts coaching I realized coughing up two bucks or four bucks a month is a lot to ask That's money that you could be betting on the horses or getting coffee
00:04:28
Speaker
Who doesn't like to bet on the horses? Okay, his website is howardbryantbooks.com. He's a two-time winner of the Casey Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year for his book Shutout and The Last Hero. He's been a senior writer for ESPN since 2007 and is a sports correspondent for NPR's Weekend Edition.
The Art of Writing Biographies
00:04:53
Speaker
You're going to want to pay attention in class, kids, because Howard brings the heat here on the art of writing biography, building the world of biography, lobbying for access to these larger-than-life figures. It's all, it's amazing stuff.
00:05:08
Speaker
some of the insecurities that we all stumble across as writers, and our mutual connection with the late great Dick Todd, great book editor, Tracy Kidder's book editor, among others.
Howard's Relationship with Editor Dick Todd
00:05:21
Speaker
So are you ready? Are you ready? Let's do this. What do you say, CNFers? Here's Howard Bryant.
00:05:35
Speaker
would be, I think it was 2013. Maybe AWP was in Boston around there. And I was at a bar meeting a bunch of, you know, Goucher College Creative Nonfiction MFA people. And the great late Dick Todd was there.
00:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, my neighbor, my old neighbor. Yeah, yeah, and I saw you, you had come in the door to see Dick and I think I said hi to you in passing, but you were there to see Dick and he's just such a tremendous mind and just a gift for story and certainly that gentle hand of editing and so forth. I was wondering, maybe you can speak about Dick Todd and your relationship to him and just what you remember of him. Well, I think that when you're
00:06:23
Speaker
working on any type of project, especially the lonely trail of writing. You need people who are not only really gifted at what they do, but know how to talk to you as well. And Dick Todd was
00:06:39
Speaker
an old-school classic editor who was very firm in the things that he knew to be true about writing and also was very committed as well to the success of his writers, not only him placing his stamp on other people's work, but to really help you get to where you were trying to go to as a writer. And for me, Dick and my relationship was rooted 100%
00:07:10
Speaker
through Goucher College. Because one of my very, very best friends in the world, Lisa Davis, was part of the MFA program at Goucher when I was at the Washington Post. And so I was living in Virginia. She was over by Baltimore, obviously over where Goucher is.
00:07:32
Speaker
I was over there for her graduation. And that's where I met Dick Todd. And it so turned out, right at her graduation, I was on my way to moving to the town of Ashfield, of all places in the world, of Ashfield, Massachusetts, that had all of 1,600 people. And you're moving where? No one on Earth would point at Ashfield as a place that you would be moving to. And as it turns out, I ended up moving to Dick's hometown. So when I got there,
00:08:01
Speaker
There was already the red carpet was waiting to to join that lovely group of people and they were so welcoming and it was beginning of a friendship. I'm really sad that he's gone.
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah, me too. I had the great privilege of working with him in my fourth semester at Goucher. So it was back in 2008 when I finished up and where I was working on a kind of a horse racing manuscript at the time. And he did have such a great eye for things. And I think even Tracy Kidder, who's sort of a regional neighbor of yours too in Western Massachusetts. Oh, Tracy's down the street. He used to come to our Super Bowl parties. Amazing.
00:08:43
Speaker
Yeah, of course in my I think Tracy said like, you know, he always felt like dick was Essentially even when he was in his 20s early 30s. He's just like was an old soul. He's like he was born an old man Yeah had a very gentle demeanor in a
00:08:58
Speaker
Even an email he wrote me one time because I was struggling to get some footing in traction with that manuscript I was working on and I was just diligently like plotting away at it. He just wrote it like a short email to me. He's just like, you know, Brendan, I think you have I think you have one of those things it not necessarily, you know, talent or anything, but it's like
00:09:18
Speaker
You have you can you just keep kind of keep gnawing at the bone. You keep going after it. And he's like, I think a lot of people who kind of make it in this, they they have the patience and the wherewithal to just endure. And that's put a lot of fuel in my tank over the years. No, it's very important. It's really
Challenges in Writing and Improvement
00:09:33
Speaker
important. And it's and it's true. And there's there are very few of us who get tapped on the shoulder with ridiculous abilities to turn phrases into to have a feel for the work and have a feel for words and all of these in any any profession.
00:09:47
Speaker
and even in with with ricky when you talk to I think jt snow has a quote in the book where he talks about how there's You know, what did he say? There's there's 20 percent Now there's 10 percent of us who You know have to do everything the hard way Um with like zero ability. It's just all grind there's 10 percent
00:10:14
Speaker
of us who are in Ricky's category, where you're God given, you're just a genius at this. And you can do things that none of us can ever do, no matter how much we practice and no matter how much we try. And then the other 80 is the rest of us. And we're trying to get there. We're just trying to get enough breaks and to do enough and have enough ability to get there. And I think that's a pretty appropriate way to apply almost any profession.
00:10:39
Speaker
Some people are at genius level and you just look at them and you go, I can't do what you can do. And then, you know, most of us are somewhere in the middle.
00:10:49
Speaker
Yeah, and the danger is so often those genius types are so revered, whether they be athletes or writers, that we, us mortals, we have a tendency to compare ourselves to them and hold ourselves to some sort of standard that is
00:11:09
Speaker
is unreachable and sometimes that can really be demoralizing. So I imagine, too, there are people that maybe in the writing world that maybe you've tried to compare yourself to and maybe to your own detriment. Have you run into that issue of comparing yourself to people that might be like a little, I don't know, too far out of reach and it's just, it kind of wounds your pride. Carrying myself, too? It's kind of the
00:11:39
Speaker
That's the great line out of Quiz Show. Well, I never considered myself to have a level, but yeah, it happens all the time. You know, you know, I was talking to David Maroness this morning and I read, I'm reading his upcoming Jim Thorpe biography and I'm like, I can't do it. You know, he's just too good. It's not that it's a competition per se, but you go, oh, this is how you write a book or this is how you do it. And
00:12:05
Speaker
And that sounds sort of ridiculous in some ways because, I mean, I've written 10 of these now, so I think I have some idea of what I'm trying to do. But you keep trying to tell yourself, next book, I'm going to sound better. Next book, I'm going to write better sentences. Next book, I'm going to be more concise here and I'm going to be more expansive there. And you're trying to
00:12:29
Speaker
You have to have respect for them because I'm sure David is thinking the same thing in his own work and I'm thinking I can't reach you and he's thinking I can't reach where I want to reach. And so I think it's actually in some ways instead of driving ourselves crazy about it.
00:12:45
Speaker
I think it's something to be applauded that you have enough respect for the work and you have enough respect for the material that you really, really want to push yourself to do it justice.
Importance of Characters and Stories
00:12:57
Speaker
That you really want to try to be good because the material demands that you be good.
00:13:03
Speaker
And that part of it to me is the it's the agony of writing, but it's also the privilege of writing. You also want other people to read what you have to say. So you want it to be something presentable. Yeah. And then, of course, you read the grades and you go, I can't I can't get there. And you just throw your hands up and let them round the bases.
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, you wrote what you just said, your hope with the next book you'll get that much incrementally better and you've got such a wonderful body of work. Over the course of your, we can just keep with your book writing, what would you identify that you're much better at now than you were even like five books ago, let alone right at the beginning?
00:13:53
Speaker
Well, I think the biggest thing that I always remind myself, and I learned it after my first book, After Shout Out, is ideas don't sell books. Ideas don't make books. Ideas make textbooks, but characters make books. Stories make books. Synthesizing makes books. The ability to connect dots and to tell
00:14:23
Speaker
the public. Here's why this is important while doing it through story and anecdote and through people in the way that makes people relate. Oh, I can relate to that. Otherwise, they feel like they're just being spoken at like you're in a lecture hall.
00:14:38
Speaker
You can write a very dry academic book that has all the information and has all the goods and has all the details. But did you write the book you want to write? Probably not. I mean, unless you're an academic and I'm not. So for me, the very first thing that I learned in doing this as I was going into, you know, after the first book and after the second book was to constantly hone in on your details.
00:15:05
Speaker
And more than likely, and this is why Marinus is such a genius level when he does this, he can take a story and give you the whole world. There are so many dots that you can connect, that you can relate to, and then what happened, and then what happened, and then what happened. And you get a feel for that universe, that ecosystem that this person exists in. And
00:15:34
Speaker
It will tell you so much more about the world, about that person. If you can explain the world that they live in, if you can explain why they are significant, it will make them much more readable. It'll make the story much more readable. And I think in every book you are trying to explain, here's why you should read this. Here's why this is important. Here's why this is not just interesting, but here's why it's significant.
00:15:59
Speaker
And to me, that all just goes back to the research. The more you research, the more dots there are to connect. The less you research, the less dots you know exist. The less dots out there, you can't connect the dots because you didn't do the research to know that those dots were there. And so it really always does come down to knowledge of subject and how much.
00:16:21
Speaker
Are you willing or how much are you able to immerse yourself into that subject? And more than likely there are there are more connections than you'd think.
00:16:32
Speaker
Yeah, and I counted in the back of the e-galley that I had for Ricky, and I might be off by a few, but I counted 127 interviews in the back.
Pandemic Research Challenges
00:16:45
Speaker
And so that's a tremendous amount of legwork for the research. That's just the interviewing. That's not even the reading that you do. And I'm actually upset about that. That's the piece of the book that I'm the most mad at. I don't think I spoke to nearly enough people because of the pandemic. My initial...
00:17:01
Speaker
The hardest thing about Ricky is one, he played 25 years and two, he's young enough where most of his contemporaries are alive. You could have spoken to a thousand people. Right. And so that was really difficult to try to go out and find, you know, I need to find these people. And my initial plan when I first did it to work on this book in 2018 was
00:17:25
Speaker
You could walk into a clubhouse and everybody would have a Ricky story. Somebody would overlap with Ricky somewhere, one of the coaches and even the players because so many of these players now are the children of former big leaguers. And Ricky is one of those mercurial human beings that just shows up
Ricky Henderson's Career Overview
00:17:41
Speaker
in places. Hey, did I ever tell you the time Ricky Henderson?
00:17:43
Speaker
What? He was where? Yeah. Very forest gumption like that. Exactly. He's that guy. Now that there's a pandemic, now there's no access. Now you can't walk into the clubhouse anymore. What's the best way to proceed? That was really, really challenging for me.
00:18:07
Speaker
I had a choice because once again, if you had 10 years to write the book, you could have both. I had three years to write the book, so I didn't really have the amount of time to do both. And what I mean by both is you could really zero in on the research on the day by days. And once again, Ricky played
00:18:27
Speaker
So you're doing, you know, Ricky played from 79 to 2003 and that's just the big leagues. It doesn't include the minor leagues and it doesn't include when he was bouncing around the independent leagues and up until 2006, 2007.
00:18:42
Speaker
You could go through those day by days and go through all that newspaper and go through all that microfilm Or you could also just spend a lot of time Just trying to find every phone number in the book because you can't get a hold of people anymore the last in-person interviews I did were in January of 2020 and so everything else was Okay, I gotta dig in
00:19:06
Speaker
on the microfilm. I got to dig it on the day by day. And so you had to make a choice. And so the choice that I made was the inner circle people that I already had relationships with to really try to dig it and rely on them while spending every day in the microfilm.
00:19:24
Speaker
And when you're setting out to tell the story of a person that is so larger than life and has just lived such an incredible, incredible life, it can be overwhelming to look at it globally. Like, oh my God, how do I get my head around this? So when you were set out to write this biography, what was your lead domino? Where do you start?
00:19:50
Speaker
Well, I think the first thing you do, at least for me, when I work on a book project, is you have to have an idea. Why am I here? You ask yourself the existential question, and you're taking on, when it's biography especially, you're looking at a person, I think of it the same way I did when I did the Hank Aaron book, which was I just envision a locomotive.
00:20:20
Speaker
with a big old coal engine and somebody there is shoveling all the coal into the engine to make it go. And for me, my first, you know, metaphorical question is, what is that coal made of? What is it that makes this person who they are? What is it that what is that coal made of? And you start to think about, you know, can you find a place
00:20:45
Speaker
where you have a point of entry. Is there some point of entry that will allow me to dig into this person's life? Or if you have somebody contemporary that you remember, like Ricky, I saw Ricky play. And so it wasn't like Henry Aaron where he was born 30 years before I was. Ricky was born 10 years before I was. And so I remember any play to him, I remember the bulk of his career. So you already had an entry point because you saw it.
00:21:16
Speaker
And for me, the arc that I began to create, and I think that that arc, you shouldn't be so dogmatic about it. That arc has to change as you do the research. You do go into it with a premise. And for me, the premise for Ricky was, here's a guy that people talk about with that Forrest Gump sort of mentality. They talk about him
00:21:41
Speaker
almost this combination between Satchel Paige and Yogi Berra, this larger than life American character where these stories can't be true. All of this feels made up. And then you want to interrogate that. And so that was one of the first things for me was, okay,
00:22:03
Speaker
But when I was thinking about all of those stories, and hey, is the John Oliver helmet story really true? And did Ricky really frame a million dollar check without cashing it? And did Ricky really get frostbite in July? Are these stories really true? To me, I wanted to say, how did we get to this point with this man when in the 80s, when he was at his height, nobody hated him?
00:22:32
Speaker
He was one of the least popular players, one of the most gifted players, but people did not love Ricky. And then interrogate that. So now you've got an arc here. A story is beginning to form. The first arc is you have a guy who was completely unpopular and then suddenly falls into the public's hearts. How did that happen?
00:22:54
Speaker
Then the other part was, why was he so unpopular? What was that all about? You begin to create these different layers of this person. They begin to reveal themselves. Then you decide, of what is being revealed, do you want to examine or to make most prominent?
Free Agency and Ricky Henderson
00:23:14
Speaker
And I understood in working on this book that this really is a, it's the end of a trilogy for me really in sort of my work on this in that, although I didn't do the first part of the trilogy, it is the end of a trilogy. I'm on the last two parts.
00:23:31
Speaker
The first part is the trilogy of American sports in the 20th century, which is essentially the first era is the immigrant era. And the immigrant era where you have this generation, the second generation of Americans coming in from Europe
00:23:51
Speaker
How do they become American? Through sports. The Jews and the Poles and the Italians and the Germans. Those kids whose parents didn't speak English, who were their heroes? Joe DiMaggio's of the world and the Lou Gehrig's and the Honus Wagners. This is the beginning of the sports century.
00:24:12
Speaker
And then the second era is the integration era where black people are now prominent and they are now part of the culture. And how did they become part of the culture through sports, through Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. And now you have a visual instead of black people always being in some subservient background. They're now in the foreground. And that began with sports.
00:24:40
Speaker
And then the third wave is the money. The third wave is the free agent era where the athlete becomes super rich, where they become the commodity, the free agent era. And that's Ricky. That is the less heroic, less romantic, far more practical piece of this story where now these players have their freedom and now they are being able to be compensated and to cash in on their ability.
00:25:09
Speaker
And what does that do to the relationship with the public? And what is it, how do we treat them? And that's really where Ricky, that was the big piece of this book for me, which was we are now in that third wave. And we've been in this third wave, obviously, for the last half, last 50 years almost, where it was fascinating to me doing the research that people were angrier with players in the early 1980s for wanting $700,000 than we are now that Mookie Betts makes 38 million.
00:25:38
Speaker
Yeah. But this is the start. And so you could have written this book on Reggie Jackson, you could have written it on Nolan Ryan, you could have done it on Ricky or Winfield or Magic John, any of those early guys who were at the beginning of this massive free engineering. You have to remember that by the time when Ricky first got into the big leagues,
00:26:00
Speaker
in 1979, he was making 17,000. By 1982, he was making $535,000. And so this era is well underway. And so much of the dislike that people had for players like him was, how dare you guys make this much money? The anger was real. Yeah.
Player Salaries and Historical Context
00:26:24
Speaker
Yeah and I remember just in the you know growing up kind of in the 80s and 90s and as the any time you know a big contract was signed or whatever. And I grew up in southeastern Massachusetts to follow the Red Sox and my dad was a baseball player. Where did you grow up? Little town of Lakeville. Probably not so little. Lakeville or by Middleborough. Yes right next to Middleborough. Went to a point in high school. I grew up in Plymouth.
00:26:48
Speaker
Oh, very nice. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I grew up there just next to a cranberry bog. My mother worked at Ocean Spray in Lakeville. Oh, no kidding. My mom worked there the holiday season to make a little extra scratch for Christmas and everything. Nice, nice, nice. Yeah. The cranberry economy.
00:27:09
Speaker
No kidding. Yeah, and I used to go ice skating on that bog. Peter Beaton was there, and he made group cranberries for Ocean Spray and everything else. That's awesome. Yeah, it takes me back. Yeah, no kidding. But I remember my dad talking, just reading The Globe, and he's like, whenever anyone signs a contract of this nature,
00:27:33
Speaker
He's like not a single person ever. Thanks Kurt flood for for the sacrifice He made to allow to usher in the free agent era and I in reading the heritage and reading this I love I love the grace notes when you bring in you know Kurt flood a bit and how he really made this possible for the modern athlete a hundred percent hundred percent and and
00:27:58
Speaker
And on top of that, in addition to Kurt Flood, who was one of the first guys to say, wait a minute, why don't I have the right to decide where I want to play? You don't own me. And people hated him for it. And they thought he was ungrateful because you get to play a kid's game. It's not a kid's game.
00:28:21
Speaker
This is a multi-billion dollar industry. And that's one of the things about this book that I really sort of enjoyed getting into was when you go back into the day by days, and remember free agency was only 1975. So by the time Ricky gets into the league, free agency isn't even five years old. Baseball is 105 years old, but free agency is less than five years old. And when you read the newspaper columnists
00:28:50
Speaker
And you read the letters to the editor and the sporting news and you read the baseball, you know, you get involved back into the baseball universe. They honestly believe this was a game. This was not a sport. It was not a business. And they treated it as though it was not a business. And in numerous editorials, it's reiterated over and over again that this is not a business. Even though you're being paid X amount of dollars, it's not a business. And so imagine
00:29:19
Speaker
the attitude of a curt flood in that, yes, not only is it a business, but I have a say in this business and the reaction to that after 100 years of infantilizing these athletes.
00:29:35
Speaker
And because so many of us fans of the sport grew up playing it and know what it's like to play it, like our resentment just collectively, not like personally, but like the resentment can go to the player because we know what it's like to
00:29:51
Speaker
throw a ball hit a ball but we don't know what it's like to be a multi-billion billionaire owner running this operation and we're okay with them making hundreds of millions of dollars a year and being worth billions but
00:30:09
Speaker
We are okay with that but we're pissed off that a player is making, relatively speaking, pennies compared to that owner. So our resentment rains down on them and Steinbrenner did a good job of that, of denigrating Ricky in the 80s. Well, I think what it comes down to is we allow for
00:30:33
Speaker
If you wear a suit, we expect you to have money. We don't question the money that you have. We assume that you've earned it and we've assumed that that earning was legitimate. If you play, we assume that you're being given something. If you're black and you play, we expect you to be grateful for being given something.
00:30:54
Speaker
And we're going to get very, very angry if you take ownership and agency of your career. No, you can't do what I can do. And neither can anybody else around here. And that's why you're paying me all this money to do it. If you could do it, you'd be paying yourself. And if somebody else could be could do it, you'd be paying them. And so that attitude,
00:31:21
Speaker
really does infect and it informs.
00:31:29
Speaker
The relationship, this adversarial relationship that people were having with the sport, fans were having with the sport, that the sport was having with its own players. It's one of the reasons why baseball players and owners truly hate each other and have not gotten along since the beginning of time.
Baseball's Labor History
00:31:43
Speaker
It really is. Baseball, no matter how you slice it, is a labor story. It's one of the most original labor stories in this country, even though people view it like it's just a game. It's real labor. And the reason why I say real labor
00:31:57
Speaker
is because these guys have power. Most of us don't have any power. We hear, even our unions don't have any power. Okay, we're gonna try to slash our salaries 40%. The union is gonna try to get it down to 30, but we're getting cut. Those guys are like, we're not taking a pay cut at all. We're gonna fight for things that nobody else gets because we have talent that nobody else has. And I think the thing with
00:32:26
Speaker
with Ricky, especially in this time period, is he was completely unabashed about discussing this. It was a huge piece of his personality. This country recognizes, respects, and worships money. Everywhere you go, it worships money.
00:32:50
Speaker
I worship money too, give me mine. Not a heroic position, not a popular position at all. And also, I'm going to view myself based on money. I'm not going to give you that aw shucks. Oh, it's just good to be here. I'm playing a kid's game. I would have played for free, not Ricky. And this is the reason, as we were talking earlier, when you're starting to build this character.
00:33:15
Speaker
This is why people didn't like him because he's stealing the joy and the nostalgia and the willful ignorance that we as fans have always had. Isn't it enough that you get the girls? Isn't it enough that you can run like a god? Isn't it enough that you don't have to be in an office building every five days a week?
00:33:37
Speaker
and how much is enough. And yet it's a question that we never asked the people who actually own the game, how much is enough for them? So I sort of appreciated this as you go forward in the narrative of the book. It's one of the reasons why when I was actually trying to work on books about this era,
00:33:59
Speaker
A lot of publishers were really lukewarm about it because it's not necessarily heroic. It's not something, you know, fans want to feel good when they read a baseball book. They want to get excited about it and they want to get lost in the field of dreams and the green cathedrals of it all. And here's Ricky saying, fuck you, pay me, right? To quote our good, late, dearly departed Ray Liotta. Ray Liotta.
00:34:24
Speaker
That was Ricky. But that's also a huge part of the arc of this book, which is how does that guy that people couldn't stand because he embodied the greedy, selfish athlete of the 1980s. How does everybody universally love Ricky by the time he's 40 years old?
00:34:45
Speaker
And speaking of Ark and then the world building that you were talking about earlier with David Moranis' Jim Thorpe book, which I have a galley as well, and I'm looking forward to digging into that eventually. But that's neither here nor there. But you were bringing up about the world building he was that he accomplishes. And similarly, the world that you were building with Ricky,
00:35:07
Speaker
I think you really start the book with the Great Migration of Southern African Americans to the northern cities, and Ricky was among that from the southeastern conference territory and up to Oakland.
Great Migration's Impact on Sports
00:35:21
Speaker
So how important was it for you to set the context of Ricky going back to the Great Migration?
00:35:27
Speaker
Huge. It was so big that the original title of the book was Ricky Henderson and the Legend of Oakland. And the publisher didn't like the word Oakland in the title because they thought it was too regional. It was too limiting for the book. So the word Oakland got yanked. But the thesis or the theme of the book really did start with, this isn't coincidence. We talk about the effects of the Great Migration on so many things.
00:35:53
Speaker
But we don't talk about it in terms of sports. We talk about these places as if the players already got there. Like when we talk about Mobile, that you had Satchel Paige and Henry Aaron and Ozzy Smith and William McCovey and Double Duty Radcliffe. They were all from Mobile. Or if you go look at LA, you had Darryl Strawberry and Eddie Murray and Eric Davis and those guys were there. When you look at Oakland, everyone tells the Oakland story that Bill Russell and Veda Pinson and Frank Robinson were all on the same team. And it's true. And Dave Stewart and Ricky Henderson and all these guys are from Oakland. And I'm thinking,
00:36:24
Speaker
How'd they get there? So much of the story of American sports, especially of that integration era that we're talking about, begins with the migration. How did these guys end up there? And what I found fascinating about that was that so many of these players, they're all from the same place, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas. And if we were talking about white athletes, we celebrate
00:36:53
Speaker
white athletes because we celebrate white America and we celebrate the roots of white America, especially when it comes to Ellis Island and immigration. Imagine if we had a ton, a generation of athletes who all became world-class and they all came from the same town in Ireland and came across and went through Ellis. That would be an amazing story that would be told over and over and over again. But the great migration for these black players, this was their Ellis Island.
00:37:19
Speaker
This was their, this is their immigration story to get away from the deep South to go to a place to do better, to have better. And when you start digging in, you can't stop when you look at Bill Russell and you see Bill Russell is from Monroe, Louisiana and holy shit. So is Huey Newton. Right. And now they live two blocks from each other.
00:37:43
Speaker
in West Oakland. And then the same thing is true, that Joe Morgan is coming from Texas, and then Bobby Seale and Frank Robinson are from just a few miles away from each other in Texas. And Ricky is from Pine Bluff, and the Pointer Sisters are from Hope, Arkansas, and Lloyd Mosby's from Portland, Arkansas. And then all of a sudden, all these players are from relatively, you take a hundred mile radius or so
00:38:08
Speaker
in the deep South put a ring around them and they all end up in the same spot in Oakland. I mean, the great migration segregation immigration story is a huge piece of this, although it's not immigration because it's inside of the country. But that migration story is a huge piece of this. And in sports, we never talk about it.
00:38:31
Speaker
We just say, oh my God, it's like something in the water. It's so remarkable that, oh my goodness, it's a coincidence. How did that happen? How on earth did Bill Russell and Frank Robinson, how did they end up on the same team? Well, because the black people who came to Oakland were only allowed to live in one neighborhood and they all went to the same high school. So this is the story that I wanted to tell.
00:38:48
Speaker
And I wanted that to be really front and center. In fact, what ended up happening when we start talking about taking the pieces of the project and putting them together, it really was in a lot of ways at first two books. I'm like, this doesn't have to be a straight biography of Ricky. You could tell the story of this. I just have this phenomenon. But then you realize that one guy does emerge from this group better than the rest of them. And it was Ricky.
00:39:15
Speaker
Yeah, and I think what's especially poignant about Ricky, and he came from Arkansas, is that correct?
Ricky Henderson's Insecurities
00:39:21
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, and so when he gets to Oakland, he – I like how you're able to unpack how insecure he felt about his Southern accent and how he kind of – he had to really –
00:39:36
Speaker
speak with his physicality just based on his intellect wasn't taken seriously based on his athleticism. He wasn't taken as seriously intellectually as he was based on say his accent and then his athleticism kind of shielded him from that. So I kind of loved how you built in that insecurity that he had.
00:39:56
Speaker
As as a young person that you know, they kind of followed him through his professional career I thought that was insecure about his education that because Ricky had trouble reading Ricky was Ricky was completely secure when it came to math but not very secure when it came to English and grammar and spelling and the rest of it and Really one of the more poignant things for me in the in the book was you know was Mike Norris telling me that he realized that Ricky really could not read and
00:40:21
Speaker
very well, if at all, when he was, as a teenager, that those kids had so much ability, they had so much athletic ability that they really did get pushed through school. And then I asked Ricky, and Ricky admitted it, that they pushed us through school, that when
00:40:36
Speaker
whenever it was game day, it didn't matter if we had a test that day. It didn't matter if I was behind in my homework. It was go out there and play for the school. And that was something that is a story that we've heard really very often over the course when it comes to African-Americans and sports. And so 100%, if you put some words in front of Ricky,
00:41:03
Speaker
He couldn't just wish it away with his talent the way he could everything else He was such a superior athlete. He could do whatever he wanted on a ball field But this was one place he really couldn't hide and then as you get into the the his story into deeper into the book
00:41:18
Speaker
It does give you a different perspective, at least it gave me a different perspective of the Ricky story itself, of all the apocryphal Ricky stories and all the anecdotes and making fun of him. And so are you laughing with him or are you laughing at him?
00:41:35
Speaker
And I had been forewarning people about the type of book that I felt like writing. I'd been saying over and over again, if you think you're getting 300 pages of really funny Ricky stories, you've come to the wrong place. That was not the intention of this book, to just sit there and tell vignette after vignette of how funny Ricky Henderson was.
00:41:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really complex guy. Oh, for sure. Absolutely. And that was one of the one of the notes I had made, too, about I think you might have written this in the acknowledgments or towards the end. It was, you know, what could the writers possibly know about Ricky, writing down what someone says in worlds away is worlds away from understanding them?
00:42:16
Speaker
And I get a sense like this book or any biography done well kind of gets out to the nuance and looks to kind of set the record straight for on a personality on the totality of their lives. And I guess if you had a goal in telling Ricky's story, you know, you know, maybe what was that? Yeah, well, it was the idea that of who gets to talk for you, who gets to tell your story?
00:42:42
Speaker
And there are so many times when we talk about this, especially in post the post George Floyd America, where this is a big issue of who gets to speak for you and who gets to tell your story and what stories get told and how do they get told. And in Ricky's case and in my case as a as a as a journalist,
00:43:08
Speaker
It's the sports.
Diverse Perspectives in Sports Journalism
00:43:10
Speaker
I've always had this, even when I started my career back in 1991, that sports writers are like Supreme Court justices. They last forever. It's like a lifetime job.
00:43:21
Speaker
I mean, Bob Ryan was at the Globe for my entire lifetime until he retired a few years ago. And Dan Shaughnessy is still at the Globe. And Dan has been there since I was in what, the first grade? And they're legends. I grew up reading them. And Peter Gammon started working at the Globe, I believe in 69, a year after I was born. And so they got me into the business.
00:43:49
Speaker
and reading all these legends got me into the business, made me wanna do this. But then you also realize that nobody who comes from where I come from got me into the business. And when you walk into, and when I got into the business, when I would walk into a clubhouse, the number of black players who were relieved to actually see somebody who may have a similar experience to them, try to describe them,
00:44:17
Speaker
And it's a real thing. It would be like in another sense, how would we feel as New Englanders if we were only described by people who were from Minnesota? They don't know how we are over here. None of them in a very few, they might be sympathetic, but they really don't know how.
00:44:37
Speaker
You have to know a little bit more. You've got to have that background. And I felt like and I also felt like when I was doing the research. So it wasn't just me on a crusade. When you're doing the research, you see that the black writers, the few black writers that Ricky encountered.
00:44:53
Speaker
They viewed him very differently. The coverage of him was very, very different than the coverage of most of the white writers. And they weren't as obsessed with Ricky's quirks in his personality because it wasn't necessarily that foreign or they got past it and didn't feel like it was disqualifying. And it's a really, really important point in a sport like baseball.
00:45:19
Speaker
That's not that important in a sport like football or basketball because baseball forces you to adapt to it. Basketball adapts to the people who play it.
00:45:30
Speaker
Basketball used to be a white Jewish game and then it was a white Jewish game Then basketball became more of a black game and the game began to adjust to that then basketball became sort of a black urban game With the ABA merger and so Basketball sort of adapts to that now basketball can be sort of a hip-hop game where you're watching you're watching a basketball game They're playing music during the game. My guys bringing the ball up where you can hear music and
00:45:54
Speaker
And so the sport adapts to the people who play it. Baseball still is a 19th century white pre-integration game. And if you flip a bat like they do in Korea or like they do in the Dominican, or if you play the speed game the way they did in the Negro League, somebody throws a baseball in your back.
00:46:13
Speaker
So it's really important to try and have a different perspective and understand some of these players on their terms because that industry does not care about you on your terms. It wants you to adapt to how this game is played. The tradition of baseball is both the greatest thing about it and maybe the worst thing about it too.
00:46:31
Speaker
Yeah. And you're right. I like how you wrote a lot about the people who covered Ricky and specifically Claire Smith comes up a lot in the book. And what was your experience speaking with her about how she was getting her chance to cover Ricky in the 80s especially and getting their insights from people who were really on the ground covering him.
00:46:55
Speaker
Yeah, so Claire was terrific in so many ways and her recollections and those insights. And one of the things that I wanted to do in this book was to make sure that I was focusing on people and trying to stay in the narrative, whereas you could go and spend an entire book
00:47:11
Speaker
going back and talking to people and to how they treated Ricky and what that time was like. I didn't want it to be that journalistically heavy a book. I didn't want it to be a reporter he said, she said, and then here's how I feel about Ricky 25 years later because I feel like that changes the story dramatically because now when you think about Ricky's accomplishments, people are far less likely to criticize him and understand his time.
00:47:35
Speaker
So, to me, it was really important to concentrate on what was said at that time. How was he interpreted at that time? And I didn't want to do a whole lot of retrospection on that.
00:47:50
Speaker
Certainly, I could have done a lot more interviews going back and talking to people, but it just felt more organic to say, here's what was said, and you're correcting a narrative. You really are doing a course correction on a person when you're writing, depending on how you want to approach the book. The way that I wanted to approach it was to not have the record be corrected by the people who originally created the record. I wanted what they said to stand on its own.
00:48:19
Speaker
I like to in this biography and the way you went about writing it, I could tell in a lot of moments where you really injected your voice and your writing style into this, which I thought was especially on the nose in a sense when you have a really
00:48:36
Speaker
a voicey central figure who's who's bigger than life and it was uh it was great to just the the little zingers that you've you got in over the course i got one like calling drafting and imprecise science was extremely kind to the baseball talent evaluators and insulting to the word science
00:48:53
Speaker
you know Fenway Park you know calling it like a storage warehouse more than a storage warehouse than a ballpark which cracked me up and then any the myriad times where you talk about the baseballs unwritten rules like let's the wrath of baseball gods be summoned for violating the unwritten rules according to the stone tablets of baseballs unwritten rules or all the written in and all the voluminous Byzantine unwrittens
00:49:17
Speaker
And it just made me think of sometimes in biography, maybe we get hung up on telling the story of the central figure, but maybe there isn't as much room for fun.
Injecting Personality into Biography
00:49:32
Speaker
And I can tell you were able to inject your voice into this. So just how important was that for you just over the course of the writing of this to kind of have a little fun with the story itself?
00:49:41
Speaker
Well, the goal was to have a lot of fun. That was the goal because my last two books have been depressing. They've been really hard. They've been hard on me. They've been hard subject-wise. You're writing about players being blackballed for supporting black people. Not for kneeling, for supporting black people.
00:49:59
Speaker
You are and Gabe Kappler will attest to that these days in terms of his statement or his stance yesterday or do that again already his stance when it comes to the National Anthem and gun violence, it'll be very interesting to watch what happens over the next several weeks and months there and
00:50:20
Speaker
This book is not about black kids being shot by unarmed and being, you know, unarmed black kids being shot by police. And that's really the narrative where we've been in terms of the work that I've been doing for the last five, six years. And so I wanted to take a step back and I wanted to have some fun and I wanted to think about who I wanted to write about and who would give me this sort of professional palette cleanse that I needed. And
00:50:47
Speaker
Who was going to carry a book in a way that I wanted to carry it? And I thought Ricky was as difficult a subject, but also as challenging and interesting a subject as well. So it became almost, I was never a perfect fit. That's for certain, but this was really the reason. It was, here's someone that you can have fun with.
00:51:10
Speaker
Here's somebody who is a unicorn and he doesn't exist anymore in terms of the way the game is played. There are so many different things you can jump off and tell stories about when it comes to Ricky. You can tell the story of the
00:51:26
Speaker
the death of the stolen base. You can tell stories about, once again, when we talk about baseball, forcing you to adapt to how it's played. And here comes a made-for-TV superstar in a newspaper game. And you can tell all of these different stories. You can tell the story of money, which is one of the goals of this book. And so Ricky checked off a lot of boxes.
00:51:51
Speaker
in terms of talking about this third wave, this third era. The other thing about this project that I really sort of enjoyed as well from the fun standpoint was the ability to just let it rip and just say certain things and write. It's not written necessarily the way a traditional biography is where you're writing paragraphs about what this man had for breakfast every single day.
00:52:20
Speaker
This was really more about Ricky in an era and about how he How he lived in a time where the sport was essentially changing right in front of him The biggest thing about Ricky though that we haven't even discussed and we've been talking for 40 minutes
Ricky Henderson's Achievements
00:52:37
Speaker
is the thing that really made this story come together, which is this man absolutely obliterated the record book. That's the thing that was the the piece of this whole thing is, hey, wouldn't it be fun to do a book on Ricky? And hey, you can cut loose and you're not writing about about race so much. And but you're now writing about one of the most underrated giants of the sport. And when we were talking about the arc earlier,
00:53:03
Speaker
One of the things that gave this story so much interest to me that I really was like, oh, this is something. It was one of those gold coins that you find. You didn't go in intending to find it, but there it was, was that it was the analytics. It was the saber matricians. It was all those guys who rehabilitated Ricky as well. They were like, holy shit, look at these numbers. The numbers brought Ricky back. It wasn't the personality that brought Ricky back. It was
00:53:30
Speaker
the numbers, he was vindicated. This is a book of vindication in a lot of ways that here's a guy that everybody was calling an underachiever because they were so focused on the optics of Ricky of how he caught the ball with the snap catch and how brash he was in the base paths and how they thought he should hit 320 when he hit 318 or when he hit 290 and all the things that he wasn't. And then you look back and you go, oh my God,
00:54:01
Speaker
He's destroyed this sport. And it ran completely counter to every way he has been determined, the way he's been described. And how did that happen? And because the numbers were so staggering.
00:54:17
Speaker
even the people that didn't like him had to come around. And that to me is a full circle story. That is the, when we talk about an arc, he forced you to look at him differently. And Bob Ryan, I quote Bob Ryan in there when he's talking about there's something about Ricky that, you know, is always a pain in the butt. And there's Bill Madden of the Daily News talking about how, why do you always feel like when you're watching Ricky, you're getting cheated? Look at what this guy did. Are you really gonna say?
00:54:45
Speaker
He did not give you his money's worth. Didn't I give you your money's worth? And what I find fascinating about it is, okay, now you gotta stop right there and you gotta say, hey, what's that all about? And he really does represent enormous change in the sport. One, obviously you're looking at the optics. Two, obviously you're looking at his attitude. Ricky wasn't a friendly guy necessarily. But the other thing was is that the sport changed around him.
00:55:14
Speaker
Back then, you know, when Ricky first came up and before that, outfielders were supposed to play 155 games a year. Ricky was playing 130 games. That made him a malingerer. But now today, the Anaheim, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are given Mike Trout load management to protect his body, which is the same stuff Ricky was saying back in the 80s. Yeah. So there is a vindication that comes with this project as well that I was really sort of happy to see realized between two covers.
00:55:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, based on his preternatural ability to get on base, and of course, steel base, there's like the Ricky run of him just getting first, he's just like steel second, steel third, scoring an infield grounder, sac fly. Rarely has there, when we like cast back, do we see someone's actual numbers overlaid to today's game, be like, he would be a monster today.
00:56:12
Speaker
Well, and that's exactly that. That's the analytics piece of it. That's the changing universe piece of it. That's the concentrating on what you are instead of what you aren't piece of it. And the real piece of it is how damn good he was. I mean, one of the things that I just love statistically about him, he outstole the Red Sox.
00:56:36
Speaker
during his career. He stole more bases during that same time period than the whole team. It's amazing. I mean, by the time he left the Red Sox in 02, he had stolen more bases than that franchise, which is just a staggering thing to say. Yeah. I mean, it's just not something that you can comprehend.
00:57:00
Speaker
And it's amazing. And I think to fix this, Ricky stole, by the time, I think by the time Ricky had gotten his 3000th hit, I think it was 2001, that was the year because then they got Johnny Damon and then the Red Sox stole more. But I think it was from 79 to 01, the year before when Ricky had joined the team, he had outstolen the Boston Red Sox. I can't even think of another. And I think the other piece of it too was the
00:57:29
Speaker
we talk about obliterating the record book, name me another record, name me another all-time record, even Ruth's record, even Ruth's all-time home run record, where you held on to an all-time record as an active player for more than a decade. I mean, Ruth's record, you did it because the ball changed. And so there was that piece of it, and Ruth was ahead of the game in terms of home run hitting.
00:57:55
Speaker
But Ricky broke the all-time record in 1991. He was an active player until 2003. I mean, there are very few records that an active player just keeps adding to. Right. It's incredible.
00:58:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think who other athletes are across other sports who might have that kind of they broke a record basically in their prime and then had the the coda of that career. And then like you say just keep adding to it. I'm I'm blanking right now. If there aren't that many if any. Yeah.
00:58:31
Speaker
That's why they're called career records. You break them at the end of your career. You break them after you've had your career. And then at the end, you get close enough and now the record is yours. Ricky broke that record. He was 32 years old. And on top of that, not only did he break the record when he was 32, but the gap between Ricky at number one at 1406 and Brock at 938.
00:59:01
Speaker
That gap itself is top 20 all time. So the point here is that the numbers brought him home. The numbers made a new generation of people look at Ricky and go, oh.
00:59:13
Speaker
This guy was amazing. And this new generation, which now grew up in television, they grew up through television and they grew up through cable and they grew up through all the modern stuff. They weren't as offended by Ricky. So they weren't hung up on Ricky. They weren't hung up on the fact that he didn't defer to the grand great old traditions of the game because this new generation of writer and of player, they didn't care about the great grand old traditions of the game. They cared about, hey, I saw Ricky on,
00:59:42
Speaker
When I was a kid, I went to the Coliseum and saw Ricky, or I remember Ricky in the 89 World Series, or I remember Ricky with the Yankees with the snap catch, and I remember all the things Ricky did. I went to a game and there was Ricky yelling at us, going back and forth with us out in left field. So they were able to view him more holistically instead of being offended by this new presence who is disrupting the traditions and mores of the sport.
01:00:09
Speaker
I heard you say when you're on the Bryn Jonathan Butler's podcast a couple years ago about athletes and how the big ones like LeBron or Tom Brady really controlling the narrative and how really bad that is for journalism. It's faux journalism when we see these things, but it's not real journalism because they're controlling the truth.
01:00:35
Speaker
And it got me thinking about this biography too and how you navigated the access you would need to not only speak to Ricky but to tell a true story with, not with his cooperation in terms of he's gonna have editorial control but cooperation enough to give you the reins to tell the true story.
Writing Biography Without Direct Access
01:00:59
Speaker
So maybe you can speak to that dynamic and how hard that is.
01:01:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's extremely difficult and it is one of the most difficult things that you will do as a writer, which is how do you tell a story without access, without cooperation? I remember talking to the late great David Halberstam about it when he was doing his Michael Jordan book, Playing for Keeps, and he said that Jordan had said that he was going to talk and then Jordan never spoke.
01:01:26
Speaker
every time you make a phone call, you got to make five more. You got to make two more. You got to make three more. You got to do more research to fill in those holes. It's never going to be enough, obviously, and it's never going to be the equivalent of having this person tell you things specifically directly from, you know, write an original source from their mouths. Ricky spoke to me until he realized it was a real book.
01:01:51
Speaker
Then Ricky didn't want to talk anymore. So Ricky shut it down and Ricky did the worst thing that you could possibly do to a writer. He told all of his people to shut it down as well. And that's the one thing Henry Aaron didn't do. When Henry didn't want to talk, Henry didn't talk. But Henry never went to anybody and said, hey, there's a guy writing a book about me. Don't talk to him.
01:02:09
Speaker
He never did that piece of it, but Ricky did. Some of Ricky's closest guys had agreed to call me and then suddenly I never heard from him. They never called me back. There were some of Ricky's people who had given me interviews and then wouldn't do follow-up interviews because Ricky had shut the whole thing down. And now you're up against it. Now you're like, okay, I have undertaken this project and I can't finish it. I don't have the access. I don't have the resources to finish it.
01:02:35
Speaker
How do I make this something more than just some regurgitated compilation of newspaper stories? How do you do that? Well, I got saved by the bell because Ricky's wife Pamela made sure that didn't happen. Anytime I needed an idea, I called her, she called me back. We were on the phone for hours. She was the best source anyone could ever have. She's one of the heroes of this book too.
01:03:02
Speaker
She is the hero of this book. She was tremendous. And the reason why she was tremendous is because, not just because she didn't want to see me fail, it was because she's truly committed to Ricky's greatness as a man, as a person, as an athlete, all of it. They met each other when they were in high school and she has been committed to him and his evolution for almost a half century.
01:03:33
Speaker
And she was the reason why I wrote this book in the first place. She came up to me during 2014 when I was on stage with Henry Aaron. And she said, I want you to do for my husband what you did for Henry. Ricky wasn't into it. Ricky had no interest in this. And if you'd left it to Ricky, Ricky, it would have never happened. But I remember the point that I always make is the stories that we tell are not the most important stories.
01:04:03
Speaker
If we're lucky, they're the most important stories. The stories we tell are the ones that get repeated. And what I tried to appeal to Ricky was I tried to say, you haven't swung a bat in the major leagues since 2003. For somebody to have seen you, to have a first-person memory of you when you were at your very best, they had to have been born at the latest
01:04:32
Speaker
in the mid 70s, which means they're almost 50 now. And these athletes like to believe that what they did is immortal, everybody gets forgotten.
Episode Conclusion and Recommendations
01:04:48
Speaker
The only people that don't get forgotten are the ones we keep telling the stories about, the ones we keep repeating. And the thing that I always like to say about this is somewhere on some subject
01:05:03
Speaker
There were a couple of people in the seventh century talking to themselves going, nobody will ever forget this. And we have no idea what they're talking about.
01:05:13
Speaker
And the last thing I've got for you, Howard, is when I like to end these podcasts by bringing this airliner down for a landing by asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. And like I said, it can be anything from a kind of handcrafted coffee mug to a brand of tea to a fanny pack. It's your choice. So I wonder for you, extend that to you, Howard, what are you excited about that you would recommend to people out there? What am I excited about?
01:05:42
Speaker
I'm excited about, I remain excited about a couple of things. The first thing I'm excited by is I still absolutely love Raul Pex, exterminate all the brutes on HBO. If you can find it on HBO Max, look it up. It's an unbelievably inventive doc series, depressing as hell, but phenomenally made and it's an amazing just story tell.
01:06:05
Speaker
Uh, it's great. It's great. I'm really I I keep talking about it because just from an artistic standpoint, what a vision Along those lines not depressing as hell but equally inventive and amazing and wild and mind-blowing is everything everywhere all at once the uh movie I just saw Just a couple of weeks ago with michelle. Yo, it's tremendous. Nice is absolutely tremendous
01:06:33
Speaker
And then, of course, I'm reading the Jim Thorpe biography, Pathlet by Lightning by David Marinus, which comes out, I believe, in the fall. And it is also great. I'm into a lot of things. Nice. As well, you should, because a lot of those other things, whether it be movies or streaming, it informs your main craft, I think. I think it's really important. I think it's nourishing. It puts
01:06:55
Speaker
And then you can be like, oh, how can I when I read this novel, like how can I maybe make my nonfiction kind of really pop like this novel or something? I think it's very nourishing to have those different diversified artistic portfolio of interests. I'm also still very much into Powell's. Are they still doing in person? I think so. I think they're I think they're doing in person now. I'm going to go call my publicist and beg to get into Powell's because I would love to go back there. I love that bookstore.
01:07:23
Speaker
Nice. And yeah, if you have an event with this or a forthcoming book, I'll be sure to shoot up the five and shake your hand because it would be wonderful to meet you in person. It would be my pleasure. Thank you. Very nice. Well, Howard, I've been a great admirer of your work for so long. And it's been just a lot of fun and an honor to speak with you about craft and about this wonderful biography you've written. So thanks for the time and thanks for coming on the show. Thank you, Brendan. Be good.
01:07:53
Speaker
Oh, what did I tell you? How great was that? What a thrill to speak with Howard. The name of the book is Ricky, The Life and Legend of an American Original. It's published by Mariner Books. Get it for the baseball fan in your life, the Ricky fan in your life. I mean, what a life. That dude.
01:08:09
Speaker
That dude was amazing. Fun to watch. I remember growing up watching him, the green Mizuno batting gloves, the lead off home runs that we affectionately named our, if you led the game off with a plunk and beard eye, you got it Ricky. Consider patreon.com slash cnfpod and you can always head over to brendanomare.com for show notes and to sign up for the up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter.
01:08:35
Speaker
So I've been grinding on this book proposal, still going. Chipping, chipping, chipping away. I gotta finish it soon though. Time is ticking. Time marches on.
01:08:48
Speaker
I don't know if I had mentioned that I got another round of edits back, and there's quite a bit of heavy lifting to do. I've been chipping, like I said, chipping away at it, I think closer to the end of this round of edits than the beginning, which is always encouraging. My agent has been wicked cool, and she's really sinking her teeth into it, so that's encouraging. It's getting there.
01:09:07
Speaker
I'm delving into a person who has been written about quite a bit, who's dead, and I had one of the comp titles sitting on my desk for upwards of a week. I think it's been more than a week. And I knew there would be stuff in there that would be essentially in direct competition to what I'm hoping to turn up. Probably even richer stuff than I could ever turn up. And I've been putting off reading the book because the last thing I want to do is be reading it and be like, fuck.
01:09:37
Speaker
That's an amazing detail, an amazing scene, and if I use that, then all I'm doing is regurgitating what's already been said, but in my voice, and that's just cheap, that's a cop-out. I'm sure you do this to some degree with all your research. You are doing that, but it's just like, ah, it just feels like, oh, someone did some heavy lifting, and then I'm just...
01:09:58
Speaker
Taking some of that heavy way I want to do heavy lifting and I want to find good stuff and if he's already found some great stuff And you know the person's dead then there's only there's a finite amount of stuff so you need to find different sources, but it's hard and I've just been really Afraid like sure you have to do this like I said, but you you want to find new ground find new people new anecdotes and I've been scared to read this because I
01:10:23
Speaker
If it's as good and rich as I think it is, then what more can I add to the story? What can be said that hasn't already been said? That's the death knell if all you're doing is heating up the meal in the microwave. Have you ever had this happen? Am I just a weirdo? Don't answer that. I get this trait from my mother. If I turn and face the other way and ignore the problem, it'll just go away. Like, if I don't open this book and don't read it,
01:10:53
Speaker
Oh, all that stuff in there, it's not there. It doesn't exist. Okay, so when I was growing up, let's maybe say the cable bill came in the mail. This is something that would actually happen. It was definitely symbolic of how lots of things would happen. But she might not open it for days and days. Then let's just say on a Monday, she'd open the bill and put it in a nice pile.
01:11:17
Speaker
Then on Tuesday, she might shuffle it to the other side of the coffee table, maybe put her checkbook on top of it. Then on Wednesday, maybe she'd write the check. On Thursday, she might put the check in the invoice into the envelope and maybe put a stamp on it. And on Friday, finally, it might go out to the mailbox. Sometimes sweeping piles of dirt in the house just to clean the house, there might just be, okay, sweep, sweep, sweep, a little pile of dirt.
01:11:46
Speaker
and just leave the pile there for days. I got that. My sister got that. She's better at working through these things than I am. So you get the idea that things aren't
01:11:58
Speaker
Things don't get completed. So what's the lesson? Read the book you've been putting off reading, even if you're scared, if it's covering ground, that you're afraid will be repetitive if you cover it too. Oh, and by the way, stay wild. See you in efforts. And if you can do interview, see ya.
01:12:32
Speaker
you