Content & Context

Dialogue: Steve Rushin

The writing of Steve Rushin—who became a senior writer for Sports Illustrated at age 25, and currently writes the weekly “Air and Space” column for SI— is as well-crafted as you’re likely to find anywhere in American journalism. In his witty travelogue Road Swing: One Fan’s Journey into the Soul of American Sports, Rushin describes a dying television as “a Zenith at its nadir,” and compares a golf course in the Pennsylvania hills to “a green silk tie across a rumpled bedspread.” I interviewed him recently by phone.

B&C: Because of the precision and cleverness of your word choice, I’ve always suspected you’re a writer for whom the writing process is exceptionally swift or exceptionally tedious.

Steve Rushin: It’s the latter, I assure you. I’m ridiculously lucky to get a week to write 938 words. If you have a week, you better have the right word and spend a lot of time on getting the right transition between paragraphs. I treat it as my job; everyone works five days a week in the real world. It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like a pompous idiot, but I try to follow the rule that the easier something is to read, the harder it was to write, and the harder it is to read the easier it probably was to write.

B&C: Your writing style suggests various literary influences. What do you like to read?

SR: I read a wide variety of things. I love to read—novels, nonfiction, it runs the gamut. I’ve always been a nerd in that regard. I was one of five kids, my mom was a schoolteacher, and we all had a library card growing up. I was the only one who actually took to it. On our family vacations to California when we were kids, I always went to the library, and checked out books on all the places we were going in San Francisco. … My wife [basketball star Rebecca Lobo] and I live in a small townhouse. If we ever get a house, I don’t care what it has except a library. I’d like to just sit in a big chair with a goldfish-bowl-sized brandy sifter, and a globe, surrounded by books. We have boxes of books on bookshelves, boxes in our garage. … I was in a used bookstore and picked up a 1200-page biography of Charles Dickens. I will probably finish it in the time it took Dickens to live his actual life, but I will finish it.

B&C: Despite your literary interests, it doesn’t sound phony when you take the tone of the Average Joe watching the game at the bar. How distinct are those two voices?

SR: I should sound phony talking about Dickens; I’m much more comfortable being the guy at the bar, the sports fan. It’s not mutually exclusive; liking sports, liking to read. When you meet somebody and they ask what you do, and you say sportswriter, they automatically assume you’re only interested in the team batting average of the Oakland A’s or something. They’re surprised to learn you have other interests as well. Frank Deford says people hear the first half of the word “sportswriter,” not the second half of the word, when it’s just the opposite for him; he’s more interested in the writing than the sports. … It’s a tie for me, a photo finish.

B&C: You’re in your thirties and have been writing a column in SI for five years, with hundreds plausibly to go. Does that prospect arouse delight or dread?

SR: Dread. The prospect of writing next week arouses dread. People who write three columns a week would be laughing at this, saying, Get a real job, and God forbid I sound like I’m complaining. But the two toughest parts of the job are coming up with the idea and then sitting down and writing. Of course, those are the only two parts of the job. [There’s that saying], “I hate writing; I love having written.” This will sound like the sports cliché , but I take it one week at a time. I rarely have a column in the bank. I was supposed to go on vacation last summer; it was planned long in advance that I would write something before going on vacation. I ended up writing about my vacation in Ireland, golfing. That was a lesson not to stress out about it; something will come together, and the week it doesn’t, I have my letter of resignation composed, I just have to hit F7 and send it in.

B&C: Road Swing came out in 1998. How much longer must we wait for the sequel?

SR: I’ve had a few e-mails from people offering to ride shotgun [on my next trip]. The next book I have coming out is a collection of my longer pieces for SI, mostly on exotic places … that also has a travel aspect to it. The next book I write, I’d prefer if it didn’t require me to drive 25,000 miles. That was something I’ve always wanted to do once. In the last five years I’ve started to write a weekly column, and I haven’t had the time or zeal [for another book].

B&C: How about a novel?

SR: That’s something I’ve wondered if I would have the ability to do. I don’t know if I’d have the stamina. When you walk into a Barnes & Noble and see 100,000 books; 98,000 of which I don’t want to read, I say, does the world really need another bad novel? The answer may be, Yes, dammit. But I don’t want to sit down until I have an idea burning. Even if you do have a good idea, [writing] is drudgery. It’s double drudgery if every day you sit down at the computer feels like a coal mine.

B&C: You employ a lot of sarcasm, and your writing style has been described as “irreverent.” Do people complain that your columns are too negative?

SR: I have gotten that. I hope that people are paying close attention and know that you can be appropriately sarcastic but also write columns you hope are poignant about worthy subjects. I’d like the column to be surprising each week. I don’t want people to know before they reach into the mailbox. That requires different subjects, different tones. I don’t want to be a one-note guy who’s just funny, just angry, or just weepily nostalgic for sports of 20 years ago. If you’re not a little bit—I don’t want to say cynical—but if you’re not a little bit jaundiced sometimes about what’s going on in sports, you’re not paying attention. However, if your eyes are not open to all the wonderful stories out there—I just met a kid in Atlanta who was born with no hands or legs who was on his school’s wrestling team. If somebody like that doesn’t inspire you, doesn’t move you, you’re dead.

Related:Rushin on flipping between basketball and war coverage

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :

BANGKOK—Imagine a city where bars, nightclubs and even movie theaters shut down early, where young people are off the streets by curfew … and where a woman cannot enter a restaurant without a male escort. That wouldn’t be the racy, all-night Bangkok that people like to call “fun city.” But it is Bangkok—and the rest of Thailand—as imagined by powerful government reformers who have already begun to put a crimp in the fun. Nearly three years ago, they began what they call a “social order” campaign, enforcing a 2 a.m. closing time that nobody had ever bothered about … On March 1, most nightclubs, bars and discos [had] their closing times moved back to midnight, one of the most stringent curfews in Asia. After March 29, under another new regulation, all youngsters under 18 will have to be off the streets by 10 p.m. unless they are with their parents.

The plywood boards blinding the windows and doors of the stately Klein farmhouse are still freshly blond. They were nailed in place barely two months after the old Klein homestead, the last privately owned working farm in New York City—tucked between a garden apartment complex and a schoolyard in Fresh Meadows, Queens—was sold to a developer for more than $4 million. A 20-blade disk harrow long used to carve furrows across the two-acre remnant of what was, back in the 1890’s, a 200-acre farm, now sits rusting under a corrugated shed behind the big house. Gnarled oaks tower over the expansive front yard where, for decades between late April and the day before Thanksgiving, carrots, corn, beets, scallions, peppers, arugula, basil and dill were sold at the farm stand. … With abandoned Klein family furnishings now being loaded into a trash bin beside the columned, two-story brick farmhouse, and a proposal for the construction of 22 two-family homes on the site rescinded, local residents, civic leaders and politicians are wondering just what will become of the property.

WEEKLY DIGEST

The birds and the bees, the ones and the zeroes. Christopher Meyer says it’s time to rewrite the book on what it means to be a living thing. In an article called “the New Facts of Life” in Wired, in the often impenetrable lingo of the magazine, Meyer identifies four properties of living things— emergence, self-organization, reproduction, and coevolution—that have been observed or programmed in machines. As for reproduction, Meyer writes, “Genetic algorithms mimic biology’s capacity for innovation through genetic recombination and replication, shuffling 1s and 0s the way nature does DNA’s Gs, Ts, As, and Cs, then reproducing the best code for further recombination.” Full story Meyer says this is yet another triumph of science that “demotes” God and humanity, though it’s unclear why we cannot conclude the opposite and deepen our awe as we appreciate the intricacies of creation.
If a Cambridge scholar were to try to write a book like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, it might turn out something like Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain. In it, Baron-Cohen explains his theory that, as The Chronicle of Higher Education summarizes, “the natural wiring of the human brain tends either toward a capacity for empathy or toward one for understanding systems“—and that females tend toward the “E-type” while males tend toward the “S-type.” Baron-Cohen actually dislikes the Mars-Venus analogy, saying it “distracts us from the serious fact that both sexes have evolved on the same planet,” and he warns that his book is “not a PC argument.” But the Chronicle says his conclusion that the tendencies of the “S-type” brain may help to explain autism has gotten the attention of autism researchers. Full storyThe New York Times, in a Science Times cover story on autism, called Baron-Cohen’s work “speculat[ive],” saying his “theory has yet to be supported by research.”
Imagine The Nation running an article lauding laissez-faire capitalism, or Playboy decrying the objectification of women. Reason magazine begs the analogy this month by publishing “The Limits of Liberty,” online portions of a speech by Richard Epstein, author of Skepticism and Freedom, at Reason‘s 35th anniversary banquet last fall. The “principle of personal guidance does not supply us with a comprehensive theory of social organization,” said Epstein, who discusses the state as an impediment and an enabler of libertarian ideals. Reason prints the responses of three writers and a final response from Epstein. Full story
How can a college or university gain—or preserve—prestige? By building its way there, using what the Boston Globe Magazine calls “starchitecture.” New buildings at MIT have won the last three Pritzker Prizes for architecture; the Illinois Institute of Technology has opened an innovative dormitory by Helmut Jahn and campus center by Rem Koolhaas. MIT wannabes are taking the same approach. Says the Globe: “Across the country, colleges and universities are emerging as the Medici of innovative design, commissioning bold new work from leading architects at a time when many corporations have lost their creative zip and the public is suffering from an advanced case of retromania.” Full story and pictures

Related: The Chicago Tribune‘s Blair Kamin on IIT’s architecture

For all that has been blamed on video games, the dilution of the visual arts hasn’t one of them. But a new exhibit featuring gaming-themed installations at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts begs the question. “Computer gaming ideas, says [the center’s curator], are infiltrating the visual arts in much the same way that video images have done for the past few decades,” writes James Sullivan in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Like the movies, electronic games have transformed the ways we process the world around us.” Full story Sullivan neglects to evaluate whether the exhibit prompts viewers to celebrate or reflect critically on how role-playing games can gratify our tawdry impulses.
Miscellaneous:China’s growing dependency on Saudi oil, from Commentary – George Kennan, ‘greatest living diplomat,’ turns 100, from the Boston Globe – How NASA’s designated smeller keeps the air clean, from Wired—Do fathers’ preferences for boy babies influence divorce decisions? From the Washington Post – Enough with the motivational quotes! From the Post – If Nietzsche wrote a diet book, from The Onion