This an interview between, me, LizaBanks Campagna, and NY-Times best-selling author and long-time sports journalist, Joan Ryan. After speaking to our class about her illustrious career, I was interested in speaking to Joan further about her experience on covering sports and the culture of journalism throughout her career. In this conversation, Joan tells tales of lessons learned from years of gaining trust, earning credibility, and the reward that comes with it. A more in-depth version of this interview can be found on my blog.
Interviewer: What makes you want to write a book?
Joan: It’s like calling to me, its calling to me and then I try to tell to it to shut up [laughing] but it’s still calling to me. And I mean that’s what I used to get excited about in journalism, every single day, if you were doing your job right, you were learning something new and you never knew what that day was going to bring. As a columnist, I could pursue what I wanted. And that’s why I ended up leaving sports because I did end up getting bored, If it’s September it must be football season, etc, you just kind of feel like you’re in this circle.
Sports are very personal, How do you grapple with that as a fan, spectator, and a journalist to remain unbiased in your reporting?
Joan: As a columnist, you did get to have a point of view. Everything you write has to be 100 percent factual –not 99 percent– 100 percent factual. Now you can take those facts and interpret them differently than someone else would but you better make your case. The thing I love about sports is it is so personal. You’re just writing about people that happen to play sports. Because I didn’t know a ton about how professional sports worked but I did know how to write about people, I knew I was going to be ok. I think being a woman, especially back in the day and now even too for female reporters in sports, you don’t have a lot of advantages but one of the advantages you do have is that I think you can connect with the players more on a personal level in a way that players might be more defensive from a male reporter asking them, they’re just not as likely to be as vulnerable. It is kind of stereotypical and all that but it’s just–
The Truth?
It’s the truth and not every female reporter has that demeanor but a lot of us did and I definitely used that. It was my strength to just connect with people to foster truth and be trustworthy with the information that I’m never going to manipulate them or make them regret they told me that. You really have to be trustworthy. If you’re covering a team, you’re there all the time and if you betray one person, you’re done.
Would that ever keep you from saying something?
No and one example was I was doing a story on Ruben Sierra and you know the Oakland A’s were good back then [The profile was written in 1995]. And he was this big up and coming star so I wanted to interview him. And I was always trying to talk to them outside the ball park, like in their homes or at a restaurant. So I was able to talk to him in his home with a translator. And I don’t prompt him but he says something about how he was mad at the general manager, Sandy Alderson, he was mad at him for something, I don’t remember. Or maybe Sandy Alderson had criticized him at the plate. And he [Ruben Sierra] said “I’d like to get him at the plate and throw right over his head.” Or something along those lines. And I was like Wow…So you can’t ignore that he said that. But when I wrote the story I didn’t lead with that but embedded it into the story as a way to show his fiery personality or what not. And he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer for saying that–
Yeah and to a reporter
With a translator! and I was recording it so there’s no way he could think it was off the record. So then the next day all the beat writers asked the general manager about it and lucky for me– this is where the trustworthiness comes– the manager and the GM took my side not their players side because they believed me more than they believed him.
What, did he deny it?
He denied he ever said it. I wasn’t even in the ballpark the next day when this was all happening. I just read it in the papers the next day that they took my side and I thought Ok, that’s all those years of giving them no reasons to question me and I wasn’t going after them and that’s huge, huge, huge.