Mike Wise is one of America’s best sportswriters. 10 years at the New York Times, and three years and running at the Washington Post.
He’s also the inaugural interview for the SVPSteezy. Check out his views on the difference between New York and Washington, the best game day spreads, and why he told ESPN ‘thanks, but no thanks.’
10 years at the New York Times and you jump down to
Personally, the first year was tough.
Basically, I figured out living in
Professionally, it was less of a work adjustment and more of an ego adjustment. People who live in New York tend to be New York York-centric, believing that no one would ever want to leave a career at the Times and an apt. on the Upper West Side for anywhere else in the world. And then there was the human-resources woman at the Post, who, on my first day, said, flat-out, “Boy, you worked at the New York Times? Most people go from here to there, not the other way around.” At the time, that played into all my insecurities about leaving
Also, as well-respected as the Post sports section is, at the time
The ‘Skins were coming off the Spurrier era, the Wiz were coming off the Michael Jordan hangover, there was no baseball outside of Baltimore, college hoops didn’t include Georgetown in the conversation and hockey was on strike. But the same day I interviewed for the job here, Joe Gibbs came back. Soon after, a 14-year-old kid was playing pro soccer. And baseball returned. And Gilbert Arenas led the Wiz to the second round. And little old George Mason went to the Final Four. And
As for pulse,
The drawback is the hypocrisy of the fans. I remember the same people who gave Patrick Ewing a standing ovation when he returned were the louts booing him at the end of his Knick career. For all their alleged sophistication and loyalty,
Washington, meanwhile, is Friday Night Lights on steroids. It’s got small-town proclivities you have to be sensitive to when covering sports. If you’re going to take on an icon in print or on the air, you better have the goods to back up your argument and better be prepared for the deluge afterward.
One of the nice things about that kind of environment is the connection between the fans and the teams. They run deep. I wrote a piece about Sam Huff and Sonny Jurgensen recently that brought me more than 50 emails. For a feature column! Not some provocative piece. Wild.
The downside to Friday Night Lights is the homerism. For a large market, more people get a pass in this town than any big city I’ve ever seen. Many of the media members who cover the teams — some of my friends in the business — grew up around here. Therefore, the Terps, Hoyas, ‘Skins and Wiz were their favorite teams growing up. It seeps into their coverage in ways they don’t even understand. I don’t like the fact that talk-radio hosts — even Dan Snyder’s station — refer to the teams as “We.” As in, “We might be in trouble this week. The Eagles look solid.” Or, “The problem with US is, we don’t run the ball effectively.”
As goofy as Mike and the Maddog are on talk-radio in
Now, do I understand the need to commiserate or celebrate with ’skins listeners, who are the bulk of your audience and sponsorship? Yes. But D.C. is such a diverse place. A lot of folks move here from ACC schools or the Northeast for their first jobs. They have different allegiances. You just cut off that market share if you keep sounding like you’re in the tank for one team — no matter how profitable that might seem.
All that said,
In most metropolitan sports markets, its common place for a columnist to be hated for bashing every move the local teams make. You’ve been critical, yet are not widely despised. Is that by design, or is it because Daniel Snyder is just that bad?
Funny you should say that. As reviled as Dan Snyder is — and I’ve never met the man, so I can’t say what I think of him personally — he has tapped into that small-town fever. The TV deals between the team and Comcast and Joe Gibbs and NBC4. How he managed to hire his own talking heads to dispense his product on his own stations. The advertising deals cut with various forms of media, including my own. All those connections lead to a better control of the message, a chilling effect that shows up in ways big and small. Heck, the guy even purchased the Web site that used to harshly critique the team and the owner — sometimes unfairly. From an owner’s standpoint, it’s pure genius. Vladimir Putin wishes he could have that kind of filter.
But I’m happy I’m not widely despised. Partially despised is much better. There are some people who can’t get over the fact that I think the ‘skins nickname is flat-out wrong and insensitive to the 2 million American Indians left in this country. They can’t get over it and won’t read me because of it.
My thing is, that’s how I feel about the owner’s stance on the name and NFL’s cowardice in the matter. It has nothing to do with how I feel about Jason Campbell, Mark Brunell or the team, in general. I try to separate things like that, if that makes sense.
I guess I don’t subscribe to the notion that I should bash someone for bashing’s sake. Too many people in my business are into yanking someone’s chain instead of having convictions about anything. Real fans and readers see through that. You can’t slam a person or team non-stop unless they really deserve to be smacked upside the head. If readers feel they already know your destination they won’t take the journey with you.
I saw this happen to a few columnists in
The other key is fairness if you’re going to rip somebody. I wrote what was, for me, a difficult piece about John Thompson last {March}. Fred Brown had told me, on the 25th anniversary of throwing away the pass against North Carolina in the championship game, that his former coach was a fraud. He said he emotionally abused the G-town players. Now, I have great respect for Big John and have developed somewhat of a respectful relationship and almost friendship with him over the past few years.
But I couldn’t not write that story. If this is how the guy felt, that’s news. My readers needed to hear Fred Brown. So I let him have his say but also let Thompson know that I wanted his side of the story. So, while most of
I don’t mind stirring it up, but I picked my spots rather than making it a shtick. And I throw in the occasional sappy piece, because 1) I like writing those and I am, deep down, a sap and 2) The guy who wants to beat me down in front of the Post can say, “You know, I’m not going to kill Wise today. I’ll wait till tomorrow.”
A couple of months ago, you wrote a great column on athletes and their blogs. Where do you think sports print journalism is going as a profession?
Hell.
No, it’s a radically changing environment. A column was once the ultimate you could aspire to in this business. But the Jim Murrays and Red Smiths and Shirley Poviches are gone, replaced by telegenic kids who can write okay, blog swell and hold five different mass-media gigs at once.
I still want to believe good writing is the lifeblood of journalism, but I don’t know if most 20-year-olds who don’t read believe that anymore. And who am I to mourn the passing of an era? Are you kidding? Me to a camera is a moth to a flame. I get a kick out of TV and radio I didn’t think I would, much to my bosses’ dismay sometimes.
There are still a ton of good, young writers whose attention to words supersede everything – The Post’s Eli Saslow is one of the most refreshing, young feature writers in the country. He has that hunger to flesh out the out-of-the-box story that we all had at once and need to get back. But I’m afraid he’s an anomaly as well.
At most papers, a talent like that is put on a beat, where he must blog, break news and come up with a quick-and-dirty feature every day. He feeds the beast, which grows bigger by the day as newspapers try and find new outlets for their writers to fight declining circulation. The result is, you get a very good worker bee instead of a seminal American writer, who happens to write about sports.
I hate to blame Gannett for this culture, but they were at the forefront in the 1980s. At some point, Al Neuharth decided we needed to know nothing important about everything. He basically invented the crawlline in USA Today before it hit CNN or MSNBC. He figured out America wanted to know less about more things.
The downside is the loss of the long, involved SI-type story that would take you five sittings on the toilet at lunch to finish. But once you were done, you never had to read another word about Sonny Liston. I miss that.
The upside is a guy like Dan Steinberg at the Post or Bill Simmons at ESPN. Via the Net, they’ve developed niches for themselves. Readers are consuming more online content and they want words and thoughts that crackle. Without space considerations, you can out-volume your competition and get into some pretty avant-garde and deep stuff sometimes.
Yahoo just hired a bunch of first-rate writers, stealing them from good magazines and newspapers. Because my father was an old ink-stained wretch, I always had this loyalty to the printed product. I just couldn’t imagine my words only showing up in cyberspace. It’s too disposable and abstract for me, even still.
Of course, when you see a guy at the fish market wrap his ahi tuna and scallops with your column, you kind of realize it’s not that big a deal to work for a new Web frontier.
ESPN calls and offers you a great contract for writing, television and radio. Is that the top of the mountain for you, or “No thanks. Evil Empires aren’t really my thang.” What do you think about sports writers becoming the darlings of TV?
ESPN has called, but it was for some ESPN.com NBA job about a year and a half ago. I had done the NBA to death in New York and needed to be more general. I think I told the guy I was happy at the Post. And that I wanted to host Outside the Lines or be a poor man’s Kenny Mayne and write scripts for their TV series line. He told me to get in line.
I don’t know, I have a real love-hate relationship with ESPN. So many of my very talented friends there are obscured by caricatures. Others are thriving. I enjoy doing the Jim Rome show several times a year and it would be a kick to have my own gig, but I think it’s pretty hard to ever think you could outdo Tony and Mike on PTI.
Howard Bryant, who covered the ’skins for us, just left for a mint of a deal at ESPN. Part of me worries that they own his soul now. I like going on with Keith Olbermann or PBS or CNN to engage a larger audience than jjust Jockworld about steroids and things I believe are worth talking about. Howard and other under-contract employees at ESPN can’t. He has got to go on every ESPN News and First-Take program there is if something comes up they need him to talk about. Yeah, his Q rating grows exponentially. But what kind of life is that for a family guy?
Then again, I think of what a great woman I know once told me: “Manage Your Drama.” So, if you go to the mother ship and negotiate with your immediate bosses a deal that allows you to have a life, that’s a pretty damn good gig. Would I ever go to work for Microsoft or U.S. Steel? I’m not ruling it out, but I’m not caught up anymore in the idea that a place like that validates me.
I mean, I’ve worked at the Times and the Post – the two best newspapers in the world. It’s not like my sister is going to turn on the TV in Sacramento and say, “Whoa, I just saw you debating Skip Bayless about whether Barry Bonds is Satan or not. You’ve made it in life!”
If you go to a place like that you have to make sure you don’t get lost in the Bristol universe. Your act can’t be someone else’s act.
And for the most part, the Post has been berry, berry good to me. I still need to work out some kinks as a columnist and I just don’t know if there is a better place to do that right now for me. Washington has become home.
Oh, yes, sports writers becoming the darlings on TV. I like this — if I am one of the darlings. I like that Tony and Mike and Mike Lupica and Peter Vescey and Bob Ryan and pioneers like that found incredible ancillary income for people of my ilk. But the tradeoff is, quality sports sections are dying.
I blame the sports editors of America for the decline of their own sections. They all allowed their writers to cut side deals with ESPN and other outlets. In the beginning, ESPN needed a Peter Gammons from the Boston Globe or a Michael Wilbon from the Washington Post to give it name recognition, credibility. Now, they’ve flipped the script. According to most sports editors, ESPN somehow gives the newspaper guy credibility now.
They got scared their big dogs would leave, so they all brokered deals with the TV devil instead of using their imaginations to develop another young talent. Memo to sports editors: People don’t buy the Miami Herald for Dan LeBatard or the Daily News for Mike Lupica or the Washington Post for Wilbon, Sally Jenkins or, hell, even me. They buy the institution. We just happen to be fortunate enough to be part of it. If Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich left The New York Times tomorrow, the republic would still survive.
But now that the monster is out of the bag, you can’t put it back. And for all the slipshod work turned in by columnists that sports editors allow, people like Wilbon are truly amazing. He is one of the few who pulls it off. He’s taught me more about balancing the extra-curricular gigs while not sacrificing your voice than anyone.
Washington DC has always been a tremendous sports town, but the teams have not always followed suit. What’s the best long term investment for a DC sports fan? Wizards, Redskins, Nationals, or the DC Divas?
Divas, baby. Seriously, the ’skins aren’t going to contend for the Super Bowl for probably another two or three years at the earliest. The Nats are five years away, irrespective of how much they’ve made lemonade out of lemons this season. This might sound crazy, but the Wiz could conceivably go to the NBA Finals this season. There’s just no juggernaut, as Cleveland proved a year ago. And Gilbert Arenas is coming into his prime. They’ve got some front-office/coaching resentments that need to be worked out, but they might be there. My guess is, they either implode or win the East within two years – there’ll be no in-between.
Terrapins Rising, Hard Knocks, or America’s Got Talent?
Sadly enough, America’s Got Talent. I can’t watch a sports documentary after Hoop Dreams. They’re all sanitized and pre-packaged. No one gives total access anymore – it’s all negotiated to prevent the organization or coach from embarrassment. I like the guy who does Maryland’s show – Jess Atkinson, and the Chiefs show is all right. But most shows just feel like infomercials for the school or league.
I won’t ask you who you think the better owner is, so who has the best game day food spread, Wizards or the Redskins?
I actually think Snyder wants to win more than any owner. Who would spend that much money to lose? Abe Pollin finally opened his pocketbook for some real players the last few years and he’s such a legendary philanthropist. The Lerners? We’ll see. As far as showmen go, I’m a Leonsis guy. Ted is personable, perceptive and has a good heart. He’s probably the most well-liked owner in town, and that’s pretty amazing considering how cheap he ran the Caps the last few years. He’s one of the guys who can write season-ticket holders a long letter detailing why he’s not going to spend money now – and why his team is going to just be putrid – and after you’re done reading it, you say, “Gee, Ted took time to write. Okay, I’ll renew.”
Oh, yeah, game-day spread. Wiz, hands down. They have ice-cream sundaes at halftime and get different restaurants to cater some nights. The skins? They took the people who cater most of their boxes and suites out of the press room, replacing them with cheapee hot dogs, potato chips. It’s a travesty, worse than bringing Bruce Smith and Deion here. And I was actually told part of the reason was the organization’s dislike of the media for slamming them during their 5-11 season.
If they were smart, they would go back to the old caterers. Food is about the only way you can be bought anymore as a journalist. If they start serving ice cream at halftime, the stories would be much more fair. Honest. : ).
A round table discussion with a famous athlete, famous coach, and famous anybody else in the world. Dead or alive - who is Mike Wise talking to?
John Wooden, Muhammad Ali and Ulrike Mayer-Wise (Mom).
Metro you’d least like to catch - Red Line, Blue Line, or Green Line?
Red Line. I mean, come on, you fall asleep and it’s over. You have to get off in the run-down ‘hood of Shady Grove. That’s not right.
Fill in the blank. The one thing I really wished you would’ve asked about but now I won’t tell you about is….
What Did You Mean When You Said “Personal-Growth Work?”
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