Last month I texted a former boss about getting coffee. I was feeling nostalgic and blue. It had been tough to leave that job; I’d made good friends there. And, knowing that no job that isn’t writing these rambling stories on the internet will ever fulfill me, I lease my creative energy out selectively, prioritizing the character of the people I work with over job descriptions.
She couldn’t meet up, she said, because she was en route to Oxford, Mississippi, for a wedding. While there, she planned to get dinner at City Grocery, where Wright Thompson, the sportswriter who’s more recently become popular for his book Pappyland and role with the SEC Network series TrueSouth, likes to grab a drink.
At my sending-off party last August, she and my other co-workers had signed a poster wishing me luck for the next chapter. Prominently in the middle of that poster, one of them had included a quote from Thompson in Pappyland:
“That's writing, he said. “Be simple, blunt, and profound.”
I’ve spoken about profile writing—the thing Thompson is best known for as a journalist—at conferences. I usually include in my slides another quote of his: “Every single movie ever, it’s the character confronts an obstacle and is changed by it. That’s it. That’s what all stories are.” The quote is a condensed version of the hero’s journey, perhaps the smartest and easiest way to structure a profile.
I don’t know the first story of Thompson’s that I read, but I know that one of the reasons I went to graduate school for journalism in 2013 was because I wanted to follow in his footsteps. At some point, I discovered the aggregator Longform.org, which until 2021 compiled the best long journalism on the internet, and read through all of Thompson’s stories there. I was seeking a job that no longer existed. But I didn’t realize it because Thompson still seemed to have it, essentially writing a dozen or so extremely in-depth articles a year about the inner lives of athletes. He did it about Luis Suárez and Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan (his book, The Cost of These Dreams, has many of his best). I wasn’t as interested in reporting about sports as I was seeing behind the curtain for a glimpse of the scars, triumphs, failures, and inspirations that make athletes who they are to us.
I chose the University of Tennessee because it was down the street and I got a break on tuition. If I had been braver about it, I would’ve gone to Mizzou—Thompson’s alma mater—or Columbia or Boston. But I had read an article on UT’s journalism school’s website before enrolling for my first semester about a kid who, a class year ahead of me, was able to turn an ESPN internship into a full-time job. After that, I was sold.
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