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Some of this material is of a kind that it should be sourced, in my opinion. The bottom line is that you do it one way or another, but you don't even necessarily need footnotes or a bibliography. Just phrases like "According to....." might do, or a statement of your sources before you launch into the paraphrasing. To a reader like myself, that this is not in here is a nagging distraction. Sourcing is just a part of good writing, so the fact that this is a Substack doesn't make it unnecssary. I have no doubt of your integrity, but we want our Substacks to be well-written, and it's really an easier part of writing well than some of the more creative parts. The piece will come across stronger if you source.

In case the types of passages that I'm thinking of are not obvious, an example is the three consecutive paragraphs beginning "A three sport star in high school....", "Boomer will admit to you now....", Being a young man with a big ego...." I have no idea what you read to come to this information and these opinions, or if you interviewed him.

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You know David, I hadn't received a single word of criticism on this website until yesterday, and now I've received two poignant bits in the last two days. I guess it shows that I'm beginning to grow and people are beginning to care.

In all honesty, it just comes down to me being very new to this non-fiction writing thing. I used to only speak about football games, which required no source other than rbsdm.com. I only began writing in a style that would require the citing of any source with the Trent Green stuff in July, and quite I've had very little exposure to the non-fiction writing world. The four months since the beginning of July have felt like forever (at least to me), but I must admit to still being very inexperienced at this. As you can probably tell by the way I write things, almost all my writing experience comes from the world of either literature or literature analysis, neither of which require any citation (aside from the one work I'm analysing).

All of that is to say yes. I'll work on it. It's not a natural skill for an analyst to cite a source, and because I'm not being paid for any of this (and not charging anybody to read it) I don't technically HAVE to cite anything, so I honestly never thought about it until now. After all, who would think to fact check something like this? That's what I thought at the time anyways, and on a platform like Substack, this is not an academic journal. It's not my job here to make it as easy as possible for you to fact check me like it would be in an academic context.

You make a very good point though. While I feel no legal or moral imperative to source anything, it's a writing etiquette thing, and one I'm failing at pretty badly. Now that I have something of an audience, I ought to begin worrying about things like this. I'm not going to retrofit anything (the reward to effort ratio is not high enough), but going forward I will work on it.

Thanks for caring enough to criticize David. I'm happy I can elicit any reaction at all!

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My level of identification with what you wrote was a 10 out of 10, which doesn’t mean I won’t continue to criticize, as you describe it, or at least discuss. Yes, I see you as worth the effort. Early on, we learn there is no point in browbeating some mismatched opponent who is unlikely to be a convert on a conceptual level anyway. If we don’t see that, there is not much to us. But with you, I think you may understand, and I think we can discuss interesting things.

I too have found myself needing or wanting to do real journalism at points and have run into challenges I didn’t know existed, and have confronted a missing skillset. I too come from the perspective of both literary analysis and statistical analysis, datasets of ultimate convenience, as they are infinite but not elusive or ambiguous.

What we strive for, I guess, is to capture the source but to still be off book (to use a theater analogy) and graceful. The truth is mandatory, so I wouldn’t say one can go too far in the other direction, but my attempts to report and honor sources have generally been paralyzed and stilted. One can drive oneself crazy asking what a source really said, and how much we really know. Any paraphrase can seem a liberty (and perhaps is).

While I focused in my reply on the fact that, without citation, your writing sounds naked and eviscerated, and I stand by that, I completely disagree with you about your obligations here or lack thereof. The obligation may not be legal, but it’s moral. If you were addressing some idea or analysis and realized belatedly you might in fact be saying something you heard someone else say recently, it would only be natural to give the other person credit, even if you privately thought your idea was slightly different, and it was really just being extra careful to cite the party. I dare say you probably do this without thinking much about it, because I see honesty as very fundamental to who you are and to your sportswriting, and as part of what makes you appealing. I understand that you may distinguish between an event (or reporting), on the one hand, and analysis, on the other, and not see your obligation in the former context. While reporting or interpreting probably do not belong to one as fully as original thinking does, events rarely just are. The way we get them, they are usually someone’s construction, and that construction should be credited.

If your source was instead an interview of Esiason’s you heard, you are of course not shortchanging anyone by not making this clear, but you still come off as a bit presumptuous being so confident in your interpretation of his comments. It makes me feel better to know which interview or interviews you heard. You shouldn’t sound as confident as if you are speaking for him, and to be honest, you came across that way.

Like you, I have a nascent Substack, and I am new to this, so I wrestled with the issue and considered the other side. It is absolutely true that I used to read non-fiction books not considering the sourcing at all. I just trusted the authors, I guess. They by and large knew what they were doing, and their tone removed any potential doubts. You can generally tell when somebody is writing with authority, and when they are stretching and papering over a lack of knowledge. (Your delivery, by the way, in what I have read, fits into the “having authority” and “having researched well” camps.) This might argue that sourcing can at least be well behind the scenes.

I can give you a couple of books that changed things for me, and which led to my never reading reporting again without the issue somewhere in the back of my mind. First, Seabiscuit. Seabiscuit first engenders doubt because, if you know the horse’s history from the record books, you know that Laura Hillenbrand skips races when they do not fit the arc of the horse’s ascent or descent. On the most mundane level of analyzing the horse’s performances, she betrays a lack of knowledge, and her mistakes always fall in the same direction, so they seem motivated. Then, the book became a sensation because of the amazing stories in it. Their unlikelihood means we should come to them with a healthy degree of skepticism, and the burden of proof for their accuracy should lie with her. And what I see is that she got old men to tell her amazing tales, and as soon as one told her one, she was off and running with it. It became fact for her. She didn’t try to disprove what she heard. Then she cobbled all the stories together to make a book. The sourcing that is there in Seabiscuit is rather thin, and nothing I have found has moved me off my belief.

The more you read, the more the aura around books vanishes, and the less innate authority they hold for you. Books are sometimes just other books regurgitated I know way too much about 1980s sports. I read some ghostwritten biographies five times as a kid. So if these books are used extensively or almost exclusively as the source, I notice.

I was drawn to Michael Weinreb because he is somebody who, like you and me, is not a mere foot soldier in the service of writing, but who can actually write, who gives some shape and color to what he does. In today’s world, at least, sportswriting is the most unlikely place to find this kind of voice. But Bigger Than The Game: Bo, Boz, the Punky QB, and How the ‘80s Created the Modern Athlete isn’t much of a book. There is a chapter where all he is doing is paraphrasing a chapter from Jim McMahon’s ghost-written Bob Verdi biography.

Peter Golenbock, also gifted, is a truly dishonest journalist of low integrity. Any authority on the 1980s Mets got nothing new from his Amazin’ book. He wanted to make money, traded on his name, read a few books, and cobbled them together in the guise of a new book. That was my impression.

Another challenge to the idea that citation is still necessary even in more informal, less scholarly venues comes from thinking about the presentation of magazine pieces, like those in the New York Times magazine. They do not have footnotes or bibliographies, it is true. But if you note, they almost always begin in the text by documenting their sources. Who and how many people the journalist talked to, for instance. There is often an element that could be seen as partly gonzo journalism, where the writer brings himself into the piece, but really it is mostly there to make the context clear, to give the writer the ability to write freely without having to source everything, and to give the reader peace of mind. You are aware that the writer spent several days with his subject, for instance. It is this kind of thing that your Esiason piece lacked, as much as not accounting for every detail, or having formal backup.

I’m not entirely happy with this letter, but I hope I got some of the ideas across. The more substantive something is, probably the more inadequate it is as well, but surely this does not mean we should all just do empty, vague opinion pieces. Or that is my justification for continuing to try.

I have no transition for this, but the abbreviated excellence of Jeff Blake you chronicle made me think of Mark Rypien. Both were famed “deep ball” throwers, in the mold of a Russell Wilson. I wonder if this approach can’t produce spectacular results that don’t endure long term. I think that had a lot to do with how Blake and Rypien were perceived. Their deep passing was looked upon as a bit of a gimmick, and people were waiting for them to fail. Note that, like Blake, Rypien was a sixth-round pick.

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