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Episode 26—Kevin Robbins Talks Harvey Penick and the Sacrifices of Writing a Book
130 Plays8 years ago
Meet Kevin Robbins, author of "Harvey Penick: The Life and Wisdom from the Man Who Wrote the Book on Golf."
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 26
00:00:08
Speaker
Hey, what's going on, CNF-ers? It's the hashtag CNF podcast. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara. No long, goofy intro today. Just getting right into
Kevin Robbins on Harvey Panic's Book
00:00:19
Speaker
it. Episode 26 features Kevin Robbins, who is the author of Harvey Panic, The Life and Wisdom of the Man Who Wrote the Book on Golf. So if anyone's played golf, you've probably read Harvey Panic's Little Red Book.
00:00:38
Speaker
Kevin's book is about Harvey Panic and subsequently the Little Red Book. So it's a wonderful biography. Go buy it. If you need any other convincing to buy the book, you're just going to have to listen to the podcast. And then afterwards, you'll probably want to go buy the book. So that's it. Let's get on to it.
00:01:01
Speaker
for carving out some time here. I appreciate it. It's nice to be able to finally speak with you and I get to talk to you about your wonderful book eventually. So I just want to first thank you for carving out some time in your afternoon. Yeah, thank you for thinking of me, man. It's an honor.
00:01:19
Speaker
Oh, excuse me, I was taking a gulp of water.
Journey to Journalism and College Experiences
00:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. But before we get to the book, I always kind of like to get into some of the origin story, if you will. And I want to first ask you, like, where did you grow up? And where'd you grow up? And sort of what did you want to be when you were a kid? I grew up in a south suburb of Kansas City called Grandview. And I'm probably a lot different from your other guests in this way in that I really
00:01:49
Speaker
was a pretty directionless kid growing up in Grandview and didn't really know how I would fit into the world when I got older. I'm not sure I really gave it a whole lot of thought. I was just like having a good time playing baseball and it's hard to say, Brendan, but I eked out of high school somehow and I went to this
00:02:17
Speaker
little state school about an hour away from Kansas City called Central Missouri State and when I was there I met these three guys who were juniors. I was a freshman and they were juniors. I talk about this a lot with my classes.
00:02:38
Speaker
Because I want them to know that to be open to meeting influential people when they're in college, these three guys, they kind of saved my life. They had a direction, they had a purpose, they were serious about school, they didn't fuck around a lot. And when they did, they did it when the time was right. And those guys, they remain my great friends today, and they know what they mean to me.
00:03:05
Speaker
They just kind of, without trying, they showed me the way. And so I became serious about school. And I found a degree program that I was interested in. It was psychology. And I didn't end up really following through with that as a career, but it was a helpful foundation. And I later tacked on a journalism degree my fifth year and got a double degree in journalism and psychology.
00:03:32
Speaker
was fortunate that my aunt was the editor of Kansas City Magazine and she gave me a part-time job after college doing the calendar and then she threw me a small story and then a medium story and then a longer story and then nine months later I had my first job at a daily newspaper.
00:03:49
Speaker
And that's the way, that's the way it happened. And you said in, in high school, you kind of, you felt like you kind of eat, eked it out, kind of lucky to get through. Um, why do, why do you think that time was a challenge for you? That well, that's just it. It really wasn't a challenge. Um, like I know a lot of people, uh, they find meaningful mentors or, um,
00:04:16
Speaker
role models in high school and I didn't and I'm sure they were there but you know they just didn't we didn't connect. I don't know you know it's like I was I didn't take life seriously I didn't take school seriously I did and you know it's like my parents they're good people and they're both
00:04:40
Speaker
Professionals and I know they tried to to straighten me out, but I just wasn't willing So I you know It's like I wasn't a challenge and then when I got to college and I met these three guys And they did kind of challenge me to be better and that's what I needed at that time So how did your paths cross with these three guys who were juniors in college? at a fraternity rush party That's how it happened and
00:05:10
Speaker
And another way that I'm different from a lot in our community is that I was a member of a fraternity. And I know that a lot of people in our industry, they were not. They actually have strong opinions against that sort of thing. But I will admit that fraternity saved me, largely because these three guys were in it. But the people I met in that group,
00:05:37
Speaker
You know they gave me something to aspire to and I'm not sure we'd be having, I know we wouldn't be having this conversation if I didn't meet those people.
00:05:45
Speaker
Yeah, well there's something to be said even if you know joining a fraternity of that nature that you know you were able to get under the wing of some guys who have been there for a couple years and even even though it might be an unorthodox way of say getting eventually getting to the point where you're at you had even though they were just a couple years older than you you did have some sort of guiding influence and North Star to help I don't know give you that direction that you said they you just it was hard to come by for you the first few years of your life
00:06:15
Speaker
I think we all meet people in our lives. It's accidental and it just took me that long to meet those people. What would you say was the moment that you really wanted to become a
Path to Becoming a Writer
00:06:35
Speaker
writer and pursue some non-fiction storytelling?
00:06:41
Speaker
It would have been my second full-time job. I worked at this little daily newspaper in suburban Kansas City called the Olathe Daily News. I was there for about a year and then I went to Iowa, to the newspaper in Burlington, Iowa. I started the first week of the year 1990 and I was my first
00:07:07
Speaker
It was my first, of course, job away from home. The first time I had made what seemed like a permanent move away from Kansas City. And there I started reading the Des Moines Register. In the 90s, the Des Moines Register was one of the great American daily newspapers. It had same day delivery to all 99 counties in Iowa. Had a great staff and a storyteller by the name of Ken Fuson. And just reading Ken,
00:07:37
Speaker
in the Sunday Register exposed me to what newspaper storytelling could be. And I remember he was the first, like the first writer I wanted to be. You know, I would read stories and I would want to do that level of work. And I even called him in 1990. I called him. He answered his phone. I was fortunate.
00:08:03
Speaker
And fortunate also that he's a nice guy willing to talk to this kid in Burlington, Iowa. So I formed this friendship with him too. And he later agreed to read my stories and give me critiques and that kind of thing.
00:08:23
Speaker
Even though I had been working as a kind of a writer for a couple of years, it wasn't until 1990 that I realized that I really, really wanted to do that and I was ready and willing to put in the work.
00:08:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's always interesting to hear people and writers explain or sort of illustrate that one person or that one writer who sort of unlocked the genre for them. That's a great anecdote that you just shared and I imagine as a teacher now you're
00:08:57
Speaker
you're putting work in front of your students that might be opening that door to them. It's always fun to hear that and I wonder, do you see that in your students too? Like you hand them work by maybe a Wright Thompson or Seth Wickersham or any of these contemporary great sports writers and I'm sure writers from the other genres too.
00:09:21
Speaker
But I wonder what that's like seeing seeing that light bulb go on in your students the way it did for you when you when you spoke with Ken or read Ken's work. Yeah, that is what happens and it's very intentional, you know.
00:09:35
Speaker
I'm pretty certain that there are only really two ways to get really good at what we do. One of them is to read a lot and one of them is to write a lot. So we do read a lot. I flood these classes with stuff going back to, you know, I make them read The Four Horsemen and I make them read the Death of a Race Horse. I mean, those are very, very old. And we read a lot of stuff from Esquire in the 1960s.
00:10:03
Speaker
early New Yorker stuff and you're right Seth Wickersham, Wright Thompson, a lot of guys at ESPN, Sports Illustrated, The Ringer, what used to be Grantland. Every week we're reading that kind of stuff because that's the way you learn.
00:10:21
Speaker
Right, and you mentioned Ken Fusin. Who were some of the other writers that, as the light bulb was turning on for you, that also unlocked the potential for you to do more longer narrative work, like maybe some of the more pioneers of the genre, or just a particular piece that caught you, and you're like, if that's one I reread all the time, that's kind of a guiding principle and a guiding piece for the work
00:10:51
Speaker
I choose to do. I remember when I was in Iowa, I was there from 90 to 94, reading a guy named Spencer Hines at the Portland Oregonian. I remember reading some early Tom Hallman work at the Portland Oregonian. I started buying writing books.
00:11:15
Speaker
So I remember there was a book called On Writing Well, The Writer's Art by James Kilpatrick, a book called When Words Collide. These were kind of the manuals, the how-to manuals. But I was very much stuck in newspaper writing at the time, and I wasn't really reading as much magazine work or stories or fiction or nonfiction like I do now. So it was all like newspaper people.
00:11:43
Speaker
In 1994, I went back to school. I went to graduate school at Ohio University. And that's when I took a couple of creative writing workshops in the English department under a guy named David Lazar. And it was crazy. They were night classes. And we worked in the personal essay form.
00:12:12
Speaker
And so it was me, this 30-year-old former newspaper reporter, and me and seven or eight English PhDs in this room talking about personal essays, both personal essays that we read. And that's where I was exposed to people like Joan Didion.
00:12:33
Speaker
And also, it was a workshop, so we wrote our own personal essays and had to read them aloud and then listen to the critiques from our peers.
00:12:45
Speaker
that was a really clarifying experience for me to be in that room of these really capable, stout scholars and having to swallow hard and take a deep breath and read my work in front of them. I like that course. I like it so much I took it twice just because I found it to be just liberating. So anyway, that's where I
00:13:14
Speaker
I started reading more magazine type non-fiction and personal essay and then my job, from Ohio I went to the Memphis Commercial Appeal and by that time I was like a standard bearer for the non-fiction form and I was helping to organize little writers groups at the Commercial Appeal and by that time I had a clip file and I was
00:13:44
Speaker
cutting out and storing stories that I loved at the time. I was following the prize winners and I got involved with that listserv called Ryder L that John Franklin hosted. I was all in at that point. So what did the other English PhDs make of you, this newspaper person coming into that class? They were really cool. And I admired them for their restraint because I feel like they really carved me up.
00:14:14
Speaker
Um, but they, they recognized, you know, my forum, which was the journalistic, uh, sort of detached third person, uh, sort of balanced voice. And so they really liked to encourage, they encouraged me to work within that realm and stretch a little bit, but they didn't expect me to be them. And I really respected them for that. They were very, their critiques were, were very positive.
00:14:41
Speaker
and very impersonal, and they helped me out a lot. So how would you characterize how your writing was before that program, before you took the class twice, and then how it elevated once you sort of graduated from those classes? Wow, that's a really good question. That's one I've never really confronted. I think, okay, I think what maybe it did
00:15:09
Speaker
was it encouraged me, emboldened me to take sort of calculated risks, to use like scenic detail at a higher level. These are my hopes. These aren't facts. This is what I hope happened.
00:15:35
Speaker
But, you know, I had to be careful because I knew I knew I wasn't going to try to write the personal essay as a vocation. I knew I was my destiny was to go back in the newspapers. So I really had to recognize the difference between, you know, writing the first person point of view versus the omniscient narrator of the third person kind of thing. But just like
00:16:03
Speaker
listening to them read their work too. And it was almost like performance art. And I guess maybe I also developed more of an ear for the lyricism of language too. Again, that's my hope, not fact.
00:16:20
Speaker
Those two, just like the exposure to these different voices, I think really helped me both decide who I wanted to be and who I couldn't be.
00:16:38
Speaker
I don't know, just a way to strengthen your capacity as a writer, though you wouldn't necessarily adopt everything that you had in that class. Just as an aside, sometimes I write some short fiction on the side that I really don't have any intent on submitting or anything, but it's that practice of
00:16:58
Speaker
of getting a little more cinematic, I can make stuff up, but then when I go to the non-fiction and go back and put the reporter hat on, it's like, okay, now I kind of know what questions to ask people, what details to pay attention to, to verify those facts, but it's like the fiction dabbling kind of, it opens up what questions I should be asking the people that I report on. Yeah, you know what you're looking for. Yeah, yeah.
00:17:27
Speaker
And so how did you get to Harvey Panic?
Significance of Harvey Panic's Biography
00:17:34
Speaker
Well, let's see. The shortest version of that is in 1992, the year The Little Red Book was published, my grandmother, my maternal grandmother in Kansas City, gave me The Little Red Book for Christmas. And I had always loved golf, and I loved playing it.
00:17:56
Speaker
I didn't really know exactly what I liked about golf until I read that book. And I realized like Harvey helped me understand all of these little beauties about the game that I had always experienced, but couldn't really put words in or into or defines very well. Yeah, you know, so in other words, that book really became an important thing for me and it it made me a better player. It made me a better
00:18:23
Speaker
Uh, it made me understand the game more and what I liked about the game. So Harvey's sort of been with me since 1992. And then when I came to Austin in 2000, um,
00:18:36
Speaker
We have 300 days of sun down here a year and I was able to play a whole lot of golf. When we got here, we didn't have kids yet, so I was able to get out and really, really play. I became better and competitive and entered qualifiers and was playing a little bit on the state scene and that kind of thing, meeting golf people. Then I became a golf rider. I met Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite who live here in Austin. I met Harvey's family.
00:19:05
Speaker
So these things that were happening, they were all sort of pushing me towards this eventuality. And when I became a teacher at UT, part of the expectation of faculty is that we write. And we either write trade books or scholarly books. And I didn't really want to write scholarly books, nor was I qualified
00:19:31
Speaker
So I'm lying in bed one night in the summer of 2012 before my first fall semester, and I'm trying to think of my first book. And I thought, wow, that 1995 Masters that Ben Crenshaw won the week after Harvey died, that could be a really good book. I mean, it sounded like the kind of book I would want to read. I was reading a lot of golf, by the way, by this time. Mark Frost, John Feinstein, anybody who wrote golf, I was reading them.
00:20:01
Speaker
So the next day I called Ben's business agent, who I knew from my days as a newspaper reporter, and I told him my idea and he said, well, you know, to be honest, we're doing our own book right now that has to do with the 95 masters and we just don't really have the time to devote to this. So I was disappointed, but ready to find another idea. I'm lying in bed literally the next night, two nights,
00:20:31
Speaker
consecutively here is how this all happened and I just realized like I was missing the bigger picture I was I was looking at the 95 Masters as a story and it was a story But it was just part of the bigger story and why why did the 95 Masters? Why does it remain one of the most memorable? Championships in the history of golf and it's not because Ben won, you know He was 43 and not playing his best golf, but he's still a really great player. It was the fact that he won and
00:21:01
Speaker
that tournament a week after Harvey died. So I thought that's it. Harvey's biography. I had never written a biography. I'd read a few, but it's like this is my possibility here. The next day I called the guy who later became my agent and off we went and that's how it happened.
00:21:24
Speaker
That's incredible. The fact that you had read so much golf, how surprised were you that there hadn't been anything extensive written on Harvey to this extent? Yeah, I was. We all were. When I was lying in bed that second night, and the Harvey book occurred to me, I thought, okay, how have I missed his biography?
00:21:51
Speaker
And the next day, when I talked to Jim Hornfisher, my agent, and he basically verified that it had never been done, yeah, we were wondering ourselves, like, how did this happen? Why did this never happen? So we were lucky.
00:22:06
Speaker
So all right. Now you realize that there hadn't been anything written on them to this extent. And now you've got to be all kinds of excited and like just jacked up, wait, like trying to, to get this, uh, to get the ball rolling. So what were your first steps then when you realized there wasn't anything written and then you were going to be the person to write this book? So the first step was to call Harvey's son, Tinsley, who lives here in Austin.
00:22:33
Speaker
And I felt like I needed to get his blessing for the project. I had known Tinsley. We were acquaintances. I had written about his father before for the newspaper. And Tinsley agreed. That was important. And so did his sister Catherine. So I had the two descendants of Harvey who remained to this day. I had their pledge of cooperation.
00:23:03
Speaker
And then it was a matter of calling Harvey's contemporaries. You know, when Harvey died in 1995, he was 90 years old and I knew that time was not on my side if I wanted to get actual live interviews done. So the early stages of the book research really amounted to
00:23:33
Speaker
personal interviews with people who are still living who could give me some sort of recollection that was new. There's been a lot written in magazines and even books about Harvey and about his life so I knew that
00:23:50
Speaker
I knew that I would have a lot of archival material, archive material available to me, but I also wanted to get things that had never been revealed, even little, small little details, anything to give it some freshness. So the early stages of the research involved talking to people who could give me personal memory. And then once I had that pretty much taken care of, then I
00:24:20
Speaker
I devoted a lot of time to this research facility on campus that had Harvey's collection, his papers, archived there. And then down the road at Texas State University in San Marcos, about 20 miles south of Austin, that's where Bud Shrake's papers were located. So the book was very convenient because everything I needed was in Central Texas, most of it in Austin.
00:24:48
Speaker
Yeah I know when I get it really sort of jazzed up about a project sometimes I get like real like so excited about it that it's it's hard to slow down and like just take a few beats and
00:25:04
Speaker
just kind of take the time, take a little bit of time. I wonder if you at any time, just because there is the looking through Shrake's papers and Harvey's papers and then trying to hustle to get these interviews done with some of Harvey's older contemporaries, what was your process and how did you work through that to ensure that you were
00:25:27
Speaker
You were being rigorous, but getting all the information you had in a timely manner, but also doing it in such a way where you weren't going too fast and missing things because of the excitement of the project itself. Yeah, that's hard. I had some limitations that I had to confront. One was I had a full-time job. Yeah. The other was by this time.
00:25:57
Speaker
2012 when I'm getting started I have I have a daughter who's 10 and I have a son who's seven so I Have I have these other obligations so I had to be really good at compartmentalizing and scheduling myself man So I really it was like almost impossible to go too fast because my my life circumstances wouldn't let me but also what helped was I
00:26:28
Speaker
When I went back to grad school, I had to learn to become a researcher. And being a newspaper reporter for as long as I've been, those two things helped me do, I think, a sound job of researching Harvey's life. The training of being a journalist, of trying to tell the whole story
00:26:55
Speaker
And those two years that I spent in graduate school where I did a lot of academic research and wrote scholarly papers for publication. So I felt like I was trained well and that I knew how to pace myself and that I knew what I was looking for. And then these outside influences of having a family and having a job.
00:27:19
Speaker
those things told me when I could go do my work. So it really was a matter of just giving up a lot of what used to be free time and devoting that to meeting my deadline.
Challenges in Biography Writing
00:27:33
Speaker
Now, having never taken on the project of a pure biography, what challenges did you face as you were looking to undertake something that you hadn't done before?
00:27:49
Speaker
Well, there was one central challenge, but also there was also a quality of the biography form that helped, that simplified everything. And that was, I knew when the story started and I knew when it ended. So a lot of choices were taken away from me and I'm grateful for that, that I didn't have to make story choices because basically the book begins when he
00:28:19
Speaker
when he's born and it ends shortly after his death. But there was a significant challenge that it remains the biggest weakness of the book. And that is that Harvey lived kind of a complication free life. Like his life was free of struggle. And so there's not a lot of good story tension or dramatic tension in his life.
00:28:48
Speaker
And I mean, that's just those were the that was the situation I was faced with. I couldn't make anything up. I couldn't I couldn't do anything about that. So, you know, the first half of the book, it kind of sort of plods along. I like to think that it picks up a little bit of pace when
00:29:13
Speaker
when he starts to write the Little Red Book with Bud Shrake and then Tom Kite wins the US Open and then along comes another book and then Ben wins the Masters. But it's just something that I had to face and accept because Harvey lived this kind of undramatic life.
00:29:33
Speaker
Yeah, I know what you mean, but that must have been – yeah, because in order to have a good story, you need conflict or I believe what John Franklin would call a complication. And like you said, Harvey led a pretty complication-free life, but I think the book – I loved it beginning to end.
00:29:54
Speaker
And I think it really gained a certain degree of elevation when you go into Bud Shrake's life. And then that intersection of Shrake, who is just 180 degrees different in a lot of ways than Harvey, and then the unlikely partnership in some ways that creates this iconic little red book. So what was it like researching that component of it to give another side of the coin, which was
00:30:23
Speaker
in essence, this book is also a biography of the Little Red Book, so you get Shrake in there too. So what was that experience like doing that kind of research to the yin to Harvey's Yang in this case? Yeah, it was, I enjoyed it very much because it did provide a different kind of texture to the story. It was a story of these kind of unlikely collaborators. Bud and Harvey lived differently. Bud kept
00:30:53
Speaker
But he kept everything involving his personal and life and literature. So his collection is far more vast and a lot greater than Harvey's. I had to be careful not to see too much of the story to Bud. In fact, my first version, I might have done that because we compressed his presence in the book quite a bit.
00:31:22
Speaker
Um, but it did give that I'd like to think it gave the story a little more of a sense of adventure, uh, that it broadened, um, the scope of, of the story because most of it, let's be honest, it takes place on some golf course in Austin. Uh, but, but meanwhile is, you know, this globe trotting larger than life kind of man about the world. Um,
00:31:46
Speaker
So it gave, it gave the, I hope it gave the story a little more of a cosmopolitan feel, but yeah, I, I welcome Bud's presence in the book. Um, I think it added a great deal. So what did you enjoy most about the process of taking this book from research to its final version? Well, you mean besides the, the trip to the masters that I took into, I took for the book was I did go to the masters. That's great. It was fine.
00:32:16
Speaker
Um, you know, it was a grind, but I look back at the, at the five month, the first five months of 2014, I believe it was, uh, yeah. Uh, but we're basically starting January 1st of 2014 and ending three days before my due date in, in May, I made myself write a thousand words a day. And, um, that, uh, that, uh,
00:32:47
Speaker
My days took on a kind of a reliability and I had a set time when I would sit down to write and it provided a sense of routine but in the best sense of the word. I really enjoyed hitting that stride and maintaining that stride.
Writing Routine and Discipline
00:33:09
Speaker
It was a grind and there are a lot of things I had to say no to and I know that I missed
00:33:17
Speaker
certain things, certain events and activities with my family that I very much would have enjoyed doing, but I felt like I had a task that needed to be done. There was no room for compromise and that gave me a sense of purpose like I'd never felt.
00:33:38
Speaker
Any creative endeavor, there is an inherent degree of selfishness that's involved. And I wonder, you having a family and having students and those kind of obligations, for the time of the writing of the book, how did you reconcile that need to be selfish to finish the book with
00:34:01
Speaker
your extraneous with your other personal activities and your responsibilities as a husband, a father, and a teacher? Well, that's a really, really interesting question because I got to admit I never really felt any sense of selfishness. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I wanted to, as I explained
00:34:28
Speaker
I wanted to make good on my commitment. So I've told you a little bit about myself and you probably have the sense that when I was young I never saw myself writing a book. I never saw myself amounting to much and yet here I was all these years later and I had a contract with a real publisher to do a
00:34:55
Speaker
a story about someone really meaningful. I felt like I was contributing to the story of American Golf and I was going to meet that obligation. I was going to make that deadline and do what I said I was going to do and prove it in a small way to myself.
00:35:22
Speaker
in a bigger way prove it to the world that I could actually do something worthwhile and do it on time. So I didn't feel selfish as much as I felt selfless if that makes sense.
00:35:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's like you added an extra degree of civic duty to golf and to that family. That's an interesting approach that I hadn't really heard before. Clearly, it helped you meet your deadlines.
00:35:58
Speaker
and made you adhere to that schedule. But also, did that pressure you put on yourself, did that ever become a hindrance or was it always a gentle crack of the whip that kept you focused on your North Star of finishing the book and doing it well and meeting your deadlines? Well, it was an intractable commitment to writing a thousand words a day. I sort of tricked myself late in the fall of 2013
00:36:26
Speaker
I tricked myself into thinking that I had to write a thousand words a day or I wasn't going to meet my deadline. Mathematically, that wasn't true. But that was the little trick I had to play on myself to sort of engage in that commitment. And so that's what I did was I wrote those thousand words, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but I literally kept track on the ledger.
00:36:55
Speaker
of the number of words I had written that day and then the sum of the words so that I could actually see this thing growing. So it wasn't, you know, I don't know if a crack of the whip is a nudge, a push or just like almost like
00:37:15
Speaker
Reaching the next rung on the ladder every day. I guess Yeah, so what did your ease alluded to it already with the thousand words a day and so but what was your Regimen and your schedule like so like what say what was maybe like the first like 60 to 90 minutes of your day looking like as you were Sort of priming the pump to get into this and make sure you hit your hit your rungs so it depended on the day my classes
00:37:43
Speaker
were on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So those were the days when I would write at night. And I'll get into a little detail about that in a minute. Weekends and Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would write in the morning. So on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would get up, help my wife get the kids out the door to school. I would go do my classes. I would come home, help get the kids
00:38:11
Speaker
home from school, get their homework finished, help with dinner, and then after dinner, and we cleaned up the kitchen, the kids would go to bed, and then I would go to the YMCA. I'm not a big fitness guy, as you could probably tell, but I did have this very firm conviction that I was more productive if I would go have a good sweat.
00:38:39
Speaker
So I would go to the gym until 10 o'clock, I'd come home, I'd take a shower and then I'd go upstairs and by about 10.45 I was starting to write my thousand words and I'd usually be all done by 1 o'clock in the morning and to bed. Now the good thing about this hour at the gym or hour and a half in the gym, like I'm on the treadmill or on the elliptical or whatever and I'm thinking about what part of the story I'm about to tell.
00:39:05
Speaker
And so by the time I get home, I mean, I was so charged up that I would have to stop myself and make myself go take a shower and get cleaned up. I went upstairs, otherwise I knew that I'd just lose time and it'd be one o'clock in the morning and then I'd be, you know, like this sweaty mess still needing to take a shower. So that's what I would do on those evenings I taught. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'd get up, I'd help get the kids to school, and then I would write until about 11.
00:39:35
Speaker
And I can't, I can't spend, like I'm not John McPhee and I'm not Stephen King. I can't spend eight hours a day writing. I just, I max out and I know that three or four hours is all I can do before I need a good long break. And sometimes I can't even return to it that evening, like on the Tuesdays and Thursdays, I wouldn't go back to it. As long as I was hitting a thousand words and because I was a newspaper reporter for so long,
00:40:04
Speaker
If I have my material in front of me, I can knock out a thousand words easily in 90 minutes to two hours and then I can go back and spend some time with it and make it a little better. And then on weekends, you know, we had this, my wife
00:40:20
Speaker
Gosh, she helped me out in so many ways, but she would get, she and the kids would get out of the house every Saturday or Sunday for like four hours. And that would give me that big window to complete. And oftentimes I remember on Saturdays or Sundays, I would write 1200 or 1500 because they'd be gone in the middle of the day. And so that allowed like on in the evenings that allowed me and my wife to watch a movie and have like that kind of real and actual husband and wife
00:40:49
Speaker
time together and then allowed one day on the weekends for me and the kids to go to the zoo or go to a water park or do what I play tennis. We did that a lot. It was kind of a breathless pace for those four months but I feel like I could do it again and I feel like if
00:41:15
Speaker
If you prove yourself like I did into thinking that if you fall behind you're going to miss your deadline and the contract's going to get torn up and you've got to pay back your advance, put yourself into thinking that. It's pretty amazing what somebody can do.
00:41:29
Speaker
And given that you spent a lot of time researching, I remember hearing Doris Kearns Goodwin, when she was through a team of rivals being asked. She really came to a place where she almost felt like she was
00:41:47
Speaker
friends with Abraham Lincoln and like when she was done she really missed him doing all that research and I wonder if you felt a similar sense with Harvey having spent so much time researching with this person that you had always known about but then you really got to through your research know on such a deeper level I wonder like when the project was done if you had that that certain sense of like oh we're like I kind of miss my friend and
Portraying Harvey Panic Accurately
00:42:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think I did a little bit. But more than that, because this was my first effort at writing a book, and I had never written biography, of course, I had this sense of worry and concern that I had somehow miscalculated his life, or despite all of the research that I had done,
00:42:38
Speaker
You know, at some point I had to say, okay, I'm done researching, now it's time to start organizing this thing and writing it. I was worried that there was something I missed, or that I miscalculated his place in golf history, that I underestimated something, or maybe I overestimated something, or that things were out of balance. It really bothered, it really concerned me that I didn't
00:43:03
Speaker
Tell his story the way that it should be told, you know, according to whom I don't know but I was concerned about The giving it giving the manuscript to his children Catherine and Tinsley, what would they think I was concerned about What Ben Crenshaw and Tom kite would think about the manuscript and all the amazing women Kathy Whitworth Betsy Rawls who were going to read it, too I was
00:43:32
Speaker
So I was not so much missing Harvey as I was worried that somehow I hadn't risen to the task of writing his story the way it should have been done. So once you felt like you were at a point with your research that it was time to start writing, how did you go about organizing it so it was manageable and that you weren't missing things that
00:44:01
Speaker
You may have researched, but it just got lost in a pile of papers or a pile of books. For something of this magnitude, you got to be really rigorous and meticulous with your research. I wonder how you went about organizing that and then laying it out in such a way that you could hit your thousand word benchmarks once you started getting into the writing.
00:44:27
Speaker
Because the story began in 1905 and ended basically in 1995, I organized everything by decade. And so I went to, you know, like Office Max. And I bought these archival boxes, one for each decade. And then I had folders, manila folders that were tabbed with specific either events or dates. And by the time I was ready to start writing the book,
00:44:57
Speaker
I had these boxes, each one representing a decade and inside folders organized by event or date.
00:45:06
Speaker
I knew the big events. I knew that 1992 was big because that's the year the little red came out. It's also the year that Tom Kite won the US Open. I knew 95 was big for obvious reasons. 93 was big because the little green book had come out. Everything else sort of faded a little bit. Most of why we remember Harvey happened in the 90s.
00:45:32
Speaker
So that's how I organized it by date. And each decade was in a box. And I started with the first box. And I ended with the last one, with some cheating. I wrote the first line of the book in October of 2014. Wait a minute. No, 2013.
00:45:57
Speaker
Um, and I, I pretty much started dead in the middle of the story at an event that happened in 1950. But, um, I had just returned from a reporting trip to Midland, Texas, where this 1950 event happened. So it was top of mind. It was like the freshest material. It was the stuff that I was thinking about the most. So I wanted to go ahead and get that story written. I also wanted to see, um, the difference in
00:46:26
Speaker
in heft, in length, in weight, in reporting depth, the difference between a newspaper story and a book story. And by book story, I mean any little story that's in the book. So I wanted to see what I was going to get out of this event that happened in 1950, and it turned out to be like 2,500 words, which is an enormously long newspaper story, but it was just a fraction of what was going to be in the book.
00:46:52
Speaker
So I remember in October of 2013 finishing that Midland story and thinking, wow, this is gonna take time, but I firmly believed at that point that I was capable of finishing the book. Like I could tell these, what seemed to be small stories, I could tell them with a lot more space and a lot more depth and get more words out of them. And how would you say your teaching helps your writing?
00:47:22
Speaker
Well, it makes me, teaching a story like this week, it's our third full week of classes at UT and it's the week when in my long-form class we've read Frank Sinatra has cold and we talked about it. So that's a 50-year-old story.
00:47:45
Speaker
students need to be kind of seduced into liking that. It's terribly long. It's about a guy they've heard of, but they don't know. None of the imagery in the story really connects with them. The writing in it is a little more languid and a little denser than what they're used to. So I really have to sort of open that story up so that these 20-year-olds can see the beauty in it. So it makes me analyze and think about these great works of journalism in a much
00:48:15
Speaker
higher degree than I've ever had to. When I was in Iowa in 1990 reading Ken Fuson, I liked his work but I didn't really think about why. Now, when I'm trying to teach the lessons of Frank Sumatra, How's it Cold? I better very well know what I'm talking about or nobody's going to trust what I have to say about it.
00:48:40
Speaker
The teaching has helped me unpack journalism to identify and isolate those qualities that are present in every good piece of journalism. And it just sort of elevates my conversation about it.
00:48:54
Speaker
So there's a great anecdote in the Little Red book where I think Harvey's asked why he didn't turn pro or what made him go to become a teacher and not a pro. And it was because he heard Sam Sneed on the driving range just hitting balls. And the sound that Sneed was making on contact basically shook Harvey in such a way as like, well, I'm never going to be able to hit a ball that hard.
00:49:23
Speaker
it would make that sound so you know i i'm not cut out to be a pro and it was just like an instant just like that and uh... i love that anecdote because it's it's applicable to so many things i think with like teachers and writers and players and coaches you know what drives people towards instruction versus the actual doing of it and i wonder if
00:49:44
Speaker
you've seen, not that anything that shakes you away from being a writer, but I wonder if you've seen some talent in your classes where you look at them and it's just they pick up the guitar and they're Jimi Hendrix without even trying. I wonder if you've experienced that and what's that like seeing that in somebody so young and precocious from a remove of a few decades of this practice, like what that's like seeing that in a young person.
00:50:12
Speaker
Well, so here's the thing about writing that's different from, you know, say piano or violin or any number of other things. Like there are very few, what is the word, prodigies in writing? Because as we discussed earlier, you know, you really have to, you have to read a lot and write a lot to become good at this. So I see, I see like the, I see little hints of
00:50:41
Speaker
and little reflections of genius in some of my kids. But also, I'm in the journalism school. I'm not in the English department. So they need to be taught the rigors of fact checking and of exhaustive reporting. And that's what makes good journalism is the fact that you reveal. And, of course, how you render it. But more so, you've got to have good material before you have a good story.
00:51:10
Speaker
So I see little signs that certain of these people are going to be really, really good once they learn how to get and organize their material. But at this stage in their lives, they have no appreciation for how much reporting goes into even like an 800-word story. They think they can get by with writing it, but have the material to support the writing.
00:51:37
Speaker
That's the difference in your analogy that we're talking about. Yeah. And I wonder what book or books that you often revisit, say yourself as a writer, and maybe there's some overlap between the books you assign your students.
Influential Books for Writing Skills
00:51:53
Speaker
But I wonder what you love to revisit to sharpen your own saw as you go to the blank page and do your research and reporting. Yeah, for sure. So I read The Writing Life.
00:52:07
Speaker
by Annie Dillard quite a bit. I read On Writing by Stephen King. In terms of just good nonfiction that I really connected with, there's a book called Dispatches by Michael Herr. The great classic story about Bill Bradley, A Sense of Where You Are by John McPhee.
00:52:34
Speaker
The Things They Carried by Timothy O'Brien, that's something I could read like every other month and never grow tired of and I learned something new from it every time I look at it. And then one that I just recently read again for I think the third time in my life, Young Men in Fire by Norman McClain, which is the story of the smoke jumpers in Montana who parachuted into the Mann Gulch fire in 1949.
00:53:03
Speaker
just got overrun and it's a great story about science, it's a great story about hubris and about humanity and it's the setting in the Rocky Mountains of Montana is just really rugged and kind of exotic and so that's a book that I read a lot too. And are these types of things that seem to, you seem to find new gems in them every time you come to them?
00:53:33
Speaker
They're all, yeah, but they're also very just what's anchoring or grounding. Without exception, those books that I mentioned, they seem to not really be written. And that's what I admire. I think that's the hardest thing to teach, for sure. And one of the hardest things to achieve is that quality of having something sound not written.
00:54:02
Speaker
I have this little aphorism taped to my desk at the university. I don't remember who said it, maybe Elmore Leonard or Pete Hamill or somebody, but it says, if it sounds like writing, I tear it up and start over. These books, even The Writing Life and On Writing by Stephen King, they just don't sound written. They're just so authentic and organic and natural, and I think that's a really good
00:54:31
Speaker
It's a really good bar to set. Yeah, and the more and more you read and write and learn about the stuff, you realize just the impossible amount of rigor and hard work went into rendering that prose down to something that is so readable that it just seems like it's an extension of the reader's mind, that it just flows in that way.
00:54:52
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, agreed. And I wonder when you were just starting out, what being a successful writer looked like, and then maybe how that has changed as your career progressed. Well, I don't even know that I imagined what a successful writer looked like when I was young. Again, I think this goes back to this lack of sense of direction or sense of self that I suffered from.
00:55:23
Speaker
But I do know that when I started reading Ken Fuson and then the many, many others who came after him in the 90s, my images of a successful writer was somebody who could stop, just like stop time when somebody's reading a story. It's just suspend all sense of time and space, I guess.
00:55:48
Speaker
Uh, um, it seemed very unattainable for me and I never, I never had any illusions that I would be able to do work at that level. And I never have. And that's just, you know, that's okay. I mean, it's, that's, uh, we all have our limits and, and I think I've, you know, probably bumped up against mine a few times. I'll never be a confusion or an ant hall, but, uh, but that's good. You know, like we can't have too many of those people. Otherwise that would get kind of stale. Um,
00:56:18
Speaker
So, um, now today, you know, my sense of a successful writer, I mean, I look back and it's all I've done and it's probably all I'm ever going to do. And in that way, I've kind of beaten the odds, right? A lot of us who are in this business, um, we've been forced out a lot of really talented people can't make a go of this anymore because it's just too hard.
00:56:47
Speaker
And yet, here I am. I'm still doing it. And so that, to me, is a level of success. I never thought I was going to win a Pulitzer Prize. I'm never going to win a National Book Award. But as long as I can continue being productive, and as long as these students I teach think I have something of value to share with them, then I think that's success.
Conclusion and Kevin's New Website
00:57:16
Speaker
I'm thrilled to have that level of success. Wonderful. I think that's a perfect place to end on. Let me ask you just one more thing. Where can people find you online if they want to get more well versed in your work and stay abreast of what you're doing? Well, thanks for asking because I have a new website that I built with a friend.
00:57:43
Speaker
My website address is bykevinrobbins.com, all one word, B-Y-K-E-V-I-N-R-O-B-B-I-N-S.com. It's mostly about the Harvey book, but I do have a page on my website that has some previously published work of mine, so that would be a good place to go.
00:58:04
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Kevin, this was a real pleasure and an honor to get to speak to you about your wonderful book. And I really thank you for stopping by the podcast. And hopefully, maybe we'll get a chance to talk again down the road at some point.