March 25, 2025 • 49 mins
Many know sports columnist Jason Gay from his work at The Wall Street Journal. In his interview with program host Dr. Chris Meek, Jason starts at the start, speaking candidly about how he decided to become a writer and the path that led him to his current job. Named the Sports Columnist of the Year by the Society of Professional Journalists on several occasions, Jason will discuss his approach to writing about sensitive topics, such as scandals or controversies; the most challenging and memorable interviews he’s completed, his approach to striking a balance between respecting interview subjects while still asking the tough questions, and so much more on this episode of Next Steps Forward.
About Jason Gay: Jason Gay is The Wall Street Journal’s sports columnist. In 2024, Jason’s sports column was awarded first place by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He was named Sports Columnist of the Year by the Society of Professional Journalists in 2010, 2016 and 2019. He is author of the essay book “I Wouldn’t Do That If I Were Me,” published in 2022, and his 2015 bestseller “Little Victories” was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Write to Jason at jason.gay@wsj.com, and follow him on Twitter @jasongay.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
There are few things that make people successful.
(00:08):
Taking a step forward to change their lives is one successful trait, but it takes some
time to get there.
How do you move forward to greet the success that awaits you?
Welcome to Next Steps Forward with host Chris Meek.
Each week, Chris brings on another guest who has successfully taken the next steps forward.
(00:30):
Now here is Chris Meek.
Hello.
You've tuned to this week's episode of Next Steps Forward, and I'm your host, Chris Meek.
As always, it's a pleasure to have you with us.
Our focus is on personal empowerment, commitment to wellbeing, and the motivation to achieve
more than you ever thought possible.
To that end, we have another outstanding guest with us today.
Jason Gay is the Wall Street Journal's sports columnist.
(00:52):
In 2024, Jason's sports column was awarded first place by the National Society of Newspaper
Columnists.
He was named Sports Columnist of the Year by the Society of Professional Journalists
in 2010, 2016, and 2019.
You couldn't get a three-peat in there somewhere?
He's the author of the essay book, I Wouldn't Do That If I Were Me, Modern Blunders and
Modest Triumphs But Mostly Blunders, published in 2022, and his 2015 bestseller, Little Victories,
(01:17):
Rules for Imperfect Living, was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Jason Gay, welcome to Next Steps Forward.
Thank you very much for having me.
My pleasure.
So Jason, I've been in financial services for 25 years.
I hate to admit that because that just means I'm an old man, but yours is always the first
article I read in the journal every day when I open it up, so thank you for the work that
you do.
(01:38):
It just sort of starts my day off with a cup of coffee and the right note, so thank you
for all that.
Well, I appreciate that.
I feel like I'm one of those munchkin donuts before you get to the serious stuff, you know?
Maybe it helps us absorb some of that serious stuff, so I appreciate the work you do.
And again, Jason, so many people know you from your work at The Wall Street Journal,
but let's start at the start.
(01:59):
How'd you decide you wanted to be a writer, and what was the path that led you to your
current job?
And have you been a sports columnist your entire career?
Well, I was not a sports columnist my entire career.
I had an interest in newspapering going back until I was young.
I delivered the newspaper, I grew up in a home where the newspaper was front and center
(02:22):
on the kitchen table every morning.
I had an unsuccessful paper route.
And it's just sort of part of my life, and I grew up in Boston in the late 70s and early
80s, when it was sort of a high watermark, Boston Globe, which was a really tremendous
(02:42):
sports section at the time, still is.
And it was just, you know, much in the same way that I guess people listen to music and
they sort of, you know, unconsciously get influenced in terms of, you know, musical
taste.
I just developed a fascination with sports writing, but I didn't, you know, that was
(03:03):
not the path that I set myself out on initially.
In fact, my first job at newspapers, I was selling advertising.
It was a job that a friend of mine had quit.
And I thought, well, that sounds like a reasonable job for a college graduate to have, selling
advertising at a newspaper.
Fortunate or unfortunate for me, I was rather terrible at being a salesperson.
(03:26):
You know, this was the old days of like, you know, cold calling people and asking if they
wanted to buy advertising, and I was no good at it.
And I think they just said, well, if this donkey can't sell an ad, well, maybe he can
cover high school football.
And really, that's where it started, started covering sports there.
But then after, you know, that initial newspaper migrated into a whole bunch of things, you
(03:49):
know, I covered politics, I covered social issues, covered the drug war, you know, a
whole bunch of things that not in every case was something that I really wanted to do.
But in retrospect, was really about experience in terms of just getting myself out there
and learning.
(04:10):
Running for the Wall Street Journal is a plum job, no offense.
How'd you land there?
You know, the paper was going through an overhaul in the beginning of the prior decade.
So I want to say like 2009, 2010, they were adding a lot of, let's say, like sort of off
(04:32):
core stuff.
So you know, obviously, the great tradition, there's just still a robust tradition of the
Journalist Financial News Coverage.
Well, they wanted to make sure that the journal, you know, had audience beyond that.
And so they were hiring people to cover the arts, hiring people to cover lifestyle, fashion.
Sports was in that category, too.
(04:52):
And so I was part of that initial wave of people who came in to write about sports.
And honestly, it was a wonderful environment to start because, you know, no one was coming
to us.
No one picks up the Wall Street Journal, at least not for sure, fantasy football team,
based upon what these donkeys have to say.
They were really, we had a lot of latitude to try and to fail and to fail again.
(05:17):
And we found ourselves, you know, riding in the wake of really, really talented reporters
doing really serious stuff in finance and politics and beyond.
It's just a very enviable slot, very fortunate for us because we were able to figure out
who we were and just, you know, without the pressure of having to make it work right away.
(05:39):
And that's probably very good timing, given the fact that the financial crisis was just
sort of on the tail end of it there.
And so people were still looking for the journal, to your point, for that deep, robust financial
news.
And so being able to have something to kind of break the ice a little bit as opposed to
the sky is falling was probably a good time for you guys to jumpstart that.
I think that's true.
I mean, look, newspapers, as we both know, are many things, you know, and they can be
(06:05):
a totally separate thing for one reader than they are for the other.
You know, no two readers have this exact same taste and reading habits.
People read back to front.
People read from the middle, you know, print, digital, laptop, phone, you know, that evolution
continues.
But you don't have to be one specific thing always.
(06:28):
And your writing style is known for its humor and relatability, which are often two of the
most difficult things to achieve as a writer.
What are your secrets to pulling off that magic?
Oh, gosh, I mean, I wish I could tell you it's like a conscious act of like trying to
be a certain way.
The truth of the matter is, I just try to be myself and I like to think of myself as
(06:53):
somebody who sees the sillier side of things and sees things through a comedic lens, oftentimes.
You know, humor is not always successful.
I'm perfectly capable of making a terrible joke, as I am a good joke.
But I think that sports has this incredible palette because it's a world full of very
(07:14):
self-important, serious people that's not really actually high stakes and consequential.
You know, at the end of the day, we're talking about shorts and basketballs and footballs
and, you know, like men and women playing games of our youth.
And it is supposed to be fun.
It is supposed to be entertainment.
And I try to lean into that as much as possible.
(07:37):
And how do you, and did you hone your craft, especially your sense of humor?
You know, were you the class clown growing up?
Do you come from a family that valued humor or had members that were just plain funny?
You know, my dad was a very serious person.
So I think maybe, you know, in the great tradition of children rebelling against their parents,
you know, that might have been my excuse for trying to be funny, is that my dad was quite
(08:01):
a serious person.
I don't think my mother, my mother is, you know, lovely, but, you know, I don't think
she's like a joke teller necessarily.
And you know, I was what I was, you know, I was not the world's greatest athlete.
I was not the world's greatest student.
I don't know if I was the class clown always.
(08:21):
I tended to be just the guy who was like scraping by.
That's how I think of myself academically.
The left hand bumper sticker, the guy scraping by?
Yes, exactly.
So obviously you have a huge national and international readership of the journal, and
that's a huge responsibility and not a small amount of pressure for any writer.
(08:43):
How do you balance being entertaining while still delivering meaningful analysis?
I try not to think about the thing that you described, you know, the sort of size of the
audience and, you know, the quote unquote, like responsibility that comes with that.
Obviously I feel a great responsibility to be fair and accurate.
That's the most important thing, you know, for any journalist.
(09:06):
But in terms of like, if I sat around and I worried about pleasing everybody every time
or making everybody laugh, I would just, I wouldn't be able to get out of bed.
It would be too nerve wracking.
So I focus on what makes me entertained, and that's my compass for better and for worse.
If I find it entertaining, if I find it funny, that's the direction that I lean and I keep
(09:29):
my own counsel that way.
You know, obviously I have editors who are incredibly helpful in terms of running ideas
past, saving me from myself, correcting things, fixing my mangled grammar, which is not infrequent.
But, you know, I try not to think of the many people who are reading the paper, because
again, I really freak out.
(09:49):
I mean, when I started at the Journal, I was not a journal reader.
I didn't grow up in a home that got the Wall Street Journal.
I thought of it as a very serious, sober publication.
I think had I known what a big deal it is, it would have paralyzed me.
So I feel grateful actually to have that ignorance.
I just kind of jumped off the cliff.
(10:10):
One of the bigger stories you've written recently, and one of my favorites, was on the Luka Doncic
Anthony Davis trade.
The dust has yet to settle on that.
I mean, I read your article, but, you know, two guys talking here, what are your thoughts?
I mean, it's stunning.
You know, I don't think it's settled in for anybody, including the people who are traded
(10:32):
in it.
Doncic gave his press conference in Los Angeles today, and he said he basically has been like
absorbing this over the last 48 hours, as we all have.
I mean, this went beyond just being surprised.
This was such an incredulous reaction that the first wave of response to it was, oh,
this must be a hack.
(10:52):
This must be some sort of hoax.
There's no way this is actually true.
That goes to show you the level to which people did not believe it.
The NBA has a pretty robust world now of trademongering and discussing the coulda, woulda, shouldas,
(11:14):
and for something to sort of fall into their lap without anyone having any speculation
about it is really unusual.
I remember my son showing me in the morning whatever guy reported it, and I'm like, is
that a reliable source?
He's like, no, he's the guy.
I'm like, okay, that's a big deal.
So I turn the TV on, and there's Stephen A. Smith doing his thing.
So traditional media has been rocked by so many changes in recent years.
(11:37):
How has the role of a sports columnist evolved in the age of social media and instant reactions,
and how has it remained unchanged?
Well, let me deal with the unchanged part of it, which is that the incredible privilege
you get in this job is to be able to build a relationship with an audience.
(11:58):
I think that was true when the first sports columnist came along, to the people who did
it in the sort of peak of the newspaper era, when you had morning papers and afternoon
papers, to what you have today, which is in many ways just as powerful a media ecosystem,
but obviously stratified in many different ways.
You have the ability to connect with people because you're in their lives rather frequently.
(12:20):
Most of us are writing one, two, three, if not more times a week.
For better or for worse, people get to know you, and you're not always on your best.
And when you succeed, hopefully they'll let you know that, too.
But you have the ability to connect with people, and optimally what you go for is people are
(12:43):
reading you for you.
Obviously there are some stories, like Luka Tanchic's Getting Traded, that are just so
irresistible people are going to want to read it no matter what.
But hopefully people are coming to you and will ride along with you just because they
have a relationship to your byline, to your sensibility.
In terms of the way the job has changed, there are fewer of us.
(13:04):
You go to a sporting event, the Super Bowl coming up, and I think there are probably
half as many sports columnists at newspapers at the Super Bowl than there were when I went
to my first one 15 or so years ago.
I just think that that attrition is very real.
There's much more of a digital influence, there's much more of a focus on the social
(13:25):
media aspect of it, the audio, the video componentry.
There's less of an economy of people who are focusing on words.
I like to think of it as like making some homemade canoes for a small but discriminating
audience of people who still want old wooden canoes, and there's nothing wrong with that.
(13:48):
I like this idea.
There's always going to be a core audience of people who care about the way sentences
are arranged and the way that words make them feel, and they aren't just looking for the
kind of like quick hit type of news flash that you get on social media.
And I want to give them that as much as I can.
(14:12):
Sports and sports writing aren't always about winning game moments and joyous celebrations.
How do you approach writing about sensitive topics such as scandals or controversies,
or even as the old ABC sports announcer used to describe it, every weekend, the agony of
defeat?
And when you write about those topics, does it negatively affect your relationships with
sources?
I mean, again, if you put a premium on being fair and accurate, I think that you can maintain
(14:38):
almost any relationship.
I think that it's when you sort of go far afield and you are not presenting things accurately
or fairly, that's when you run into trouble.
You have to go back to something I said before about like, you know, sports having a lot
of seriousness, but the stakes being lower.
I mean, that's also true of winning and losing.
You know, somebody's going to win the Super Bowl this weekend.
(14:59):
Someone's going to lose the Super Bowl this weekend.
It's not the end of the...
Do you want me to say that?
I'm sorry.
Is that okay?
Because I know we're going to run.
Okay.
Totally fine.
I mean, you know, someone's going to win this Super Bowl.
Someone's going to lose the Super Bowl.
It's going to be uplifting for whoever wins it.
(15:19):
It's going to be briefly emotionally devastating for the people who lose.
It's not the end of their lives.
It's not the kind of like emotional carnage that true suffering brings.
So like in that, you get to sort of like...
What sports gives you is this kind of like quick hit of jubilation, of sorrow, but not
(15:42):
with the kind of lingering after effects that, you know, and I know there are some fans like
Minnesota Vikings fans would probably disagree with this, but like not with the sort of lingering
generational after effects of, you know, true pain.
Two part question.
If you could interview one living athlete that you haven't yet, who would it be and
why?
And then second, what interview do you wish you could have done with someone who's no
(16:05):
longer alive and why would it be that person?
Oh, that's great.
I would say that I would love to talk to Rafael Nadal, who I have talked to like in casual
arrangements but never sort of done a quick, a substantive one-on-one.
He's one of my favorite athletes that I've covered.
He just retired.
(16:25):
He had this magnificent career.
I don't think we're going to see a tennis player quite like him again.
I'd love to be able to sit and ask him a bunch of questions.
Somebody who I didn't get to, I mean, Bill Russell comes to mind.
He was somebody who I've done a lot of reading of what he's written in his life.
(16:45):
He was a remarkable person as both an athlete and as a character in activism and just led
an astonishing life of success and standing up for things.
I would love to be able to talk to him.
What's your favorite sporting event as a fan or to cover as a professional and why?
(17:09):
Oh, I like the tennis.
I mean, I grew up with it.
My father was a high school tennis coach in Massachusetts.
So I grew up around public tennis courts and just going there and hitting balls for hours
and hours.
My father and I had these traditions of watching breakfast at Wimbledon, 9 o'clock in the morning,
Bud Collins in his crazy Technicolor pants and John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg and all that
(17:32):
sort of glory time of the sport.
And so to be able to walk into these cathedrals like CentreCourt, like Roland Garros in Paris,
it feels like a remarkable privilege.
I mean, just to be that, the first time I did it, I felt almost emotionally overcome
(17:53):
because you kind of can't believe that it exists.
It's something you've viewed through the prism of television your entire life and to finally
get to it and see it in the flesh, and it actually not just lives up to what your expectation
is, but surpasses it.
I mean, a place like CentreCourt, one thing that's really astonishing about it is it seats
about 14,000 people.
(18:14):
It feels like it's about a third the size of an American stadium that seats that many
people.
It is very, very compact and intimate and wonderful in that way.
And then you have this organic surface of green grass that they're playing on that plays
differently hour to hour, weather to weather and day to day.
(18:37):
When you and I first connected last summer, you're like, sorry, Chris, I can't chat.
I'm in Paris covering the Olympics.
And I'm like, yeah, of course you are.
What else are you supposed to be doing right now?
So I was a little envious when you sent that back to me.
And Jason, you're a sports fan at heart.
How do you keep that passion alive while covering sports as a job and does it ever become drudgery
because it is your job?
(18:57):
I like this question because I am happily surprised by this too, that it does not feel
like drudgery to me, that sports is something where the skin shedding happens on such a
frequent basis that it feels different every time.
You know, you go back to an Olympic Games, you go back to a Super Bowl, you go back to
(19:19):
a Wimbledon and you think, well, maybe this is the one where I'm like, enough is enough
with this.
And this is not to say that there are things that I like less than others, I mean, definitely.
But the characters change, the conditions change, the moment in the culture changes.
You know, like, think about something like college sports, the way that we talk and think
and act about college sports in 2025, as opposed to what we thought about it as little as 10
(19:43):
years ago, the professionalization that's happened in college sports.
So there's always this dynamism in sports, which makes it really compelling, a topic
to cover.
And I also feel like, frankly, as a reporter, it's cheating, because the audience is almost
always meeting you halfway, because they have some skin in the game.
It's either a team they like, a sport they like, a sport they don't like, a team they
(20:05):
don't like.
They're really meeting you halfway, and they're engaged at a level that is much harder for
somebody who covers a more esoteric topic.
You know, imagine covering the bond market or something like that.
Obviously, there are some people who care a great deal about bonds, but it's not the
same as covering, like, you know, I don't know, the NBA All-Star Game.
It's a different challenge.
(20:26):
And I think it's much harder for somebody who's doing that than someone who's covering
basketball.
I should have asked this at the beginning of the show, because you mentioned growing
up in Massachusetts.
You mentioned Boston Globe.
You mentioned watching tennis with your dad in Massachusetts as a coach.
Red Sox or Yankees?
Oh, definitely the Red Sox.
(20:47):
And I said, classic.
I'm sorry.
The show's over.
Well, you definitely had the better of us in that era.
I mean, I'm of the vintage of sports fan in Boston, where misery was sort of the job description.
This whole evolution of the Red Sox as a championship-winning franchise, these kids who are growing up,
(21:14):
they have repetitive stress injuries from so many parades where they've been applauding
at.
You know, the winning and winning and winning, that was not the childhood that I knew.
The Celtics won a little bit, but that was really it.
The Patriots were miserable.
The Red Sox broke your heart almost on an hourly basis.
(21:34):
That's character building, you know?
And it definitely makes sense how you can feel, how this can be sort of part of your
emotional connective tissue.
How do you choose your column's topics, and are your decisions mainly driven by the latest
events in the sports world?
It's a combination of things.
(21:54):
I mean, yes, primarily it's dictated by the schedule.
You know, I'm writing about football because it's football season.
Once the football season ends, we're probably going to turn away from that and focus on
other things.
But I try to do things that are a little offbeat on occasion because, you know, you want to
surprise readers.
You don't want people to feel like they're just getting the same old, same old.
(22:14):
You want to diversify yourself from the competition.
You want to feel a little bit different from them, either in subject matter or tone or
approach.
And, you know, I have good editors and colleagues that I can go to and say, like, I'm thinking
about this, this, this.
Which one do you like the best?
Or, you know, I'm up against—that I can't think of anything.
(22:38):
And it's like, there are times like, you know, two o'clock in the afternoon, I have to write
a column that night.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
And then something just happens, and you get really lucky.
And I like that sort of adrenaline, actually.
And how do you prepare for interviews with athletes, coaches, or other sports figures?
And how do you prepare for people who are known to be difficult interview subjects?
Or do you just avoid those people altogether?
(22:59):
I, you know, don't avoid a subject because of that.
I mean, my, you know, regimen is to try to read everything that's ever been written about
somebody that I'm going to go see, you know, for better and for worse.
Everything.
(23:20):
Because I want to get a sense of how they speak, how they speak on certain topics, what
topics they're asked about all the time.
I want to get a sense of when they go on autopilot, and they start giving me an answer they've
given a hundred times, I want to know, because I want to be able to shift the conversation,
make them, you know, think a little differently, and make things that they hadn't said.
(23:41):
And I don't mean that in a negative way, I just mean, like, in a way that, like, for
a reader, they're like, oh, well, Roger Federer's been interviewed a thousand times, like, why
should I read another interview with him?
He's just going to say the same thing he always says.
Obviously, some subjects are better than others in terms of being, you know, real character-worthy.
But you know, it starts with that sort of research of knowing what they are good at
(24:05):
talking about, what they've talked about a lot.
And then also, it sort of helps build a little rapport, because if they have a sense that
you've done your homework going into it, I think there's a certain, you know, base level
respect that starts, which is good.
Who have been your most challenging interviews, and who are the most fun, memorable, or gratifying?
(24:30):
You know, I think that the most gratifying interviews are always people who are not in
the public eye.
And, like, giving them the opportunity to tell their story in a forum like the Wall
Street Journal is the best, because, you know, usually those kinds of stories I'm telling
are stories of people who have done extraordinary things, who have overcome great odds.
(24:51):
You know, I think about a story I wrote last year about a college lacrosse player who was
really the first Division I athlete to ever come back from a heart transplant, which is
just shocking to say out loud, but a lacrosse player playing big time in Division II, college
lacrosse, playing with a transplanted heart.
He had never told his story in that kind of situation, that kind of forum, and, you know,
(25:14):
to see the reaction to that and the outreach that he got after that, that's what this thing
is all about, you know, not, like, sort of varnishing the people who are already famous.
In terms of people who are the most difficult, I mean, you know, I think of difficulty more
along the lines of, like, people who are just giving you kind of bland, vanilla answers
(25:35):
as opposed to being confrontational.
Confrontational's good.
You know, somebody who is, you know, got to be in their bonnet about something and wants
to be agitated at you, I don't mind that one bit, especially if you feel like you're being
fair.
It's the people who are just kind of giving you the blah, bland stuff, and golly, I mean,
that's almost every press conference you go to nowadays, they're so shrewd about staying
(25:59):
on message and not saying things that are going to get them into any kind of trouble,
so that's challenging.
Well, it's like politics, you answer the question you want to answer.
That's a very good piece of advice.
If you could go back and redo one interview, which one would it be, what would you change,
(26:19):
and why?
Oh, I would go back and redo all of them.
I mean, I always see things that I missed, I don't like reading stuff that I do because
I see only the mistakes and the holes and the opportunities lost.
So yeah, that's a 100% for me.
I think that everything, I mean, this goes for writing too, that, you know, it just always
(26:45):
gets better.
The more time you have at it, the more cracks at it you take, you know, you don't have the
luxury with a newspaper because you have deadlines, but being able to just sort of endlessly think
about it, or endlessly ask questions of a subject, the story has to come out at a certain
point.
So you don't always have unlimited time, or you don't ever have unlimited time.
(27:06):
But I always see things that I would have done, always, always, always.
And I think that's good.
I think if I was looking at my own work and saying, oh, I never felt that, like, no, I
want to be ruthless with myself.
Fair enough.
How do you strike balance between respecting your interview subjects while still asking
those tough, uncomfortable questions?
(27:34):
I think that, you know, to give that you are not kind of coming for their lunch and like
to give them the opportunity to know where you're coming from with a question, you know,
so say, if it's an uncomfortable question about like, let's say, your personal life
or something like that.
Now, I'm not going to be the first question I'm going to ask, you know, we're hopefully
(27:56):
going to build up a rapport.
They're probably going to have some sense that this question is coming at some point.
Most people do if there's uncomfortable like areas of their personal story.
But people resent more than anything is just sort of being suckered, you know, just being
like, you know, sucker punched with a question.
So I try not to do that.
(28:18):
And again, I don't have the job, you know, I'm a sports columnist, I get to say what
I think.
You know, I don't need, you know, people to tell me what they think in order to put it
out there.
I can have my own opinion about it.
But I want to give them every opportunity to answer and address it for themselves for
sure.
One of my favorite interviews I've done, and my listeners and viewers know I'm a huge,
(28:40):
huge Dallas Cowboys fan, is I had Charles Haley on a couple of years ago.
And as a sports writer, you know, a lot of things are written about Charles in the locker
room during his career, which I was going to touch on a bit.
But then Charles Haley being Charles Haley, after his career came out, they learned he
was bipolar.
So he addressed that.
And then he actually forgot about the interview because he was at AT&T Stadium in Dallas giving
(29:03):
bikes away as part of the charity work for the Cowboys.
And then also an assistant reminded him, he's like, oh, okay, I forgot about this.
Well, we did the interview live while he's having lunch at a pizza restaurant in Dallas.
And so he's like eating a piece of pizza, the guy's napkin over his chest.
And so that was one of my favorite interviews of all time.
I just wanted to share that.
Jason, earlier you talked about college sports and what, right, can you picture that?
That's Charles Haley, right?
(29:24):
Amazing.
So earlier, we're talking briefly, but you touched on college sports and they become
pardon the phrase, a whole new ballgame over the past few years.
What's your perspective on name, image, and likeness and the money and big money in some
cases that college athletes are now receiving and has it changed college athletics for the
better or worse?
Well, I think it was inevitable.
(29:49):
I don't think that, you know, you could have a market economy where college coaches were
getting five, six, seven, eight, now $10 million a year.
Schools were reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of television deals or
a billion dollar contracts for college football playoffs, for basketball playoffs, and cut
(30:11):
off one party from economically benefiting, i.e. the students.
The notion of the scholarship being sufficient compensation was increasingly quaint.
And what surprised me was the acceleration that happened here.
We had a couple of things happening at once.
One, the court, both liberal justices, conservative justices, were very, very dubious on the NCAA's
(30:38):
antitrust protections and the notion that it was somehow a cartel, which really was
what they called it when it went up to the Supreme Court, a cartel.
And that set into motion all this.
The problem with NIL and with Transfer Portal and things like that is, you know, once the
(31:00):
brakes came off, so to speak, the NCAA kind of just threw up its hands and said, like,
all right, well, you know, we're just going to let this roll without sort of thinking
about the best way of deploying it.
And that created this Wild West that we're in now.
And you see the NCAA is trying to roll back with some form of settlement that will attempt
(31:26):
to level the playing field by giving actually direct payments to schools through which they
can pay players.
But I think that that, and that's already been signaled, like that creates a whole new
can of worms in terms of, you know, can you actually start compensating athletes without
collective bargaining?
(31:46):
Is the figure that's being discussed a sort of a static figure across schools?
Is that tantamount to a salary cap?
Is that, you know, an antitrust violation if you don't have any collective bargaining?
You know, is that fair?
The question has become more complex.
And these people who are running athletic departments have never had harder jobs.
(32:08):
College coaches never had a harder job, more complicated job.
However, they started this, like this was, again, they had, there was a fork in the road
moment at one point where they're like, you know, we can continue having college sports
be, you know, scale.
(32:30):
You know, the old days of Bear Bryant, you know, having in his contract that he couldn't
make more than a dollar more than the governor of Alabama or something like that in his contract.
So, you know, it could have gone on that way, but obviously it didn't and he's making
millions of dollars and reaching the point where actually the compensation in college
at times is so bountiful that they're holding off going pro.
(32:56):
No matter what anyone thinks about it, NAL has already changed, you know, great upheaval
as you mentioned and changed every college sport.
Look in your crystal ball and tell us where you see college sports in five or 10 years
from now.
For one, I think there'll be some form of unionization that happens in players, but
(33:16):
I think the thing that'll happen before that is you'll have some sort of super league break
away from the sort of quote unquote power five schools that exist in college sports.
So you know, an SEC and a big 10 like splitting away from the rest and creating their own
sort of super league with big television contracts that they keep for themselves.
(33:40):
I think that is quite likely and what will be interesting from there is that do the schools
that get left behind, do they sort of do a recalibration and kind of decaffeinate like
their prioritization of sports?
What's happened here over the last several decades is that everyone has sort of felt
(34:02):
that they cannot ignore these sports or they're getting left behind.
They're going to be left behind in terms of alumni spending, they're going to be left
behind in terms of student interest, they're going to be left behind in terms of just cultural
minds here and they have to, have to, have to do it.
Well, I disagree with that slightly.
I think that like there is actual way to go about this.
(34:22):
We certainly see the model of division two and division three.
Is there a version of division one sports that can be kind of a little more chillaxed
to use a terrible term and then you kind of have your super league above professional.
And the other thing that's really important here is that private equity is already circling
(34:46):
college sports and you're already seeing investments happen in the athletic department.
And once that's happening, you know, you're talking about, you know, money that is very
interested in more money and that is just going to put an inordinate pressure upon creating
these kinds of splits because, you know, it's very easy for someone who's been a lifelong
(35:07):
fan of the SEC to say like, oh yeah, we definitely should have Vanderbilt in here.
Vanderbilt's like traditionally been a great, you know, partner of the SEC.
The private equity is going to look at this and be like, what, why, why do we have these
teams?
Like, why don't we just have the good teams?
What are we doing here?
You know, all those collisions are coming.
You know, and I was just going to touch on that a few days after the recent college football
(35:30):
national championship, one of your colleagues wrote an article about if a college football
team were a franchise, like a pro NFL team, what they would be worth.
And obviously with Ohio state just running, they were ranked at, I think 1.8 billion.
Michigan was right behind it, like 1.6, 1.7.
Some familiar names, some shocking names, I was surprised to see Texas A&M in there.
But again, to the point, the concept of private equity investing in an athletic departments
(35:55):
is mind boggling because to your point, that's gobs and gobs of money and that could change
the sport forever.
And then you touched on, you know, if there's a breakaway super conference, to me that sounds
exactly like live golf.
The winners win and the losers lose.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't disagree with any of that.
I do feel like the potential upside, however, is allowing the sort of, I don't want to say
(36:23):
also rants because that's unfair to schools, because actually we're seeing more competitiveness
within college sports.
You know, the transfer portal has allowed schools that aren't traditional powers to
actually, you know, get better quickly, faster, quickly, however, schools that aren't typical
powers athletically to maybe make some hard choices about, you know, focusing on the academic
(36:50):
life and focusing on, you know, returning to a more sane and sober environment of college
sports.
Let's go down another level here.
Little league baseball players aren't getting paid yet.
I got in touch with you last year with my concerns about how one tremendous player who
lives in a town near me ended up playing for another team that just happened to be the
(37:12):
defending state champions.
Some people were calling that arrangement a symbol of quote, the free agency era in
youth sports.
I saw it as the ideals of little league baseball, teamwork, sportsmanship, and integrity being
compromised by placing winning above all else.
Do you expect attitudes and rules about kids' sports to change because of the seismic changes
we're seeing in college sports?
Oh, it's already happening.
(37:34):
It's already happening.
It's here.
In some ways it's beyond what college is because it's truly without any kind of guardrails
You know, you're speaking to the father of an eight-year-old who a couple of years ago
had three different soccer teams recruiting her and not by any doing of mine, I was like,
what is going on here?
(37:55):
She's like an eight-year-old.
She'd be happy chasing squirrels.
She doesn't care about this stuff.
I mean, you know, it's cuckoo.
And I think what's happened with youth sports, unfortunately, has become like elitist and
predatory.
Elitist in the sense that a lot of these things are quite expensive, you know, you're putting
(38:17):
your child into these programs, these travel teams, things like that.
You're talking about expenditures, sometimes in the thousands of dollars, which for many
families is just an unreasonable expectation.
The second thing is you are basically winnowing the pool.
You are like basically saying to people, you have to get good at the age of seven, at the
(38:39):
age of eight, at the age of 12, otherwise you don't have value as an athlete.
You can fall behind fast.
And they really prey upon the parent fears that, oh, I'm not doing right by my child
if they're not an X program or having this kind of success at this level.
It's madness.
And a lot of it is based around the idea of how college has become increasingly financially
(39:04):
inaccessible to people.
There's a lot of folks who think, well, if Johnny or Sarah can get themselves a partial
scholarship to do a certain sport or a certain school, you're going to take some financial
pressure off the family.
That's a very rare exceptional case.
And candidly, if you want your child to get a leg up getting into school and even getting
(39:25):
financial aid in school, there are a whole other bunch of ways, extracurricular activities
that are much more bang for your buck than getting good at a sport.
And it's unfortunate, you talk about the elitism, and when you and I grew up, we're about the
same age.
Kids, you played three sports, one in the fall, one in the winter, and one in the spring.
(39:47):
Now by the time I'm age eight, like your daughter, you're going to get pigeonholed into soccer
or basketball or tennis or whatever.
And it's unfortunate because there's more pressure for them.
There's constant pressure to be the best at that sport.
Plus, from a developmental perspective, in different sports, you use different muscles.
Some are individual sports, some are team sports, and so you lose some of that camaraderie,
(40:08):
if you will, if you're only doing an individual sport like golf or tennis.
And so I agree with you, the area that I live here, not too far from you, it's very much
that focus of you're going to play lacrosse and that's it, and you're going to Duke, and
then you go to Harvard and get a law degree, and then that's it.
So life's been set for them before they were born.
So I totally agree with you on that.
(40:28):
Let's shift gears here.
We've got about seven or eight minutes left.
Let's focus on you.
Yeah.
Let me just add one thing to the viewpoint, which is that what's often getting lost, it's
not surprising that it's getting lost, is what the actual kid wants to do.
And the college coaches all the time, and I ask them the questions that we're talking
about now, and a lot of them say the number one issue they deal with is a high-level recruit
(40:54):
gets to campus.
By the time they get to campus as a freshman, they are toasted.
They are burnt out.
They have spent 12 to 15 years of their life obsessing about a sport for this exact thing,
to be able to get into this high-level college program, and they think they're at the end
of the journey.
And that is just a terrible situation.
You want to leave opportunity available for the late bloomer, for the person who played
(41:18):
another sport.
I guarantee you, you go into a professional locker room of any sport and you ask them
what their favorite sport was when they were eight, nine, ten years old, very often it's
a different sport altogether because, as you said, they tried different things.
They developed their passion for something.
They played it because they liked it, not because someone said, you've got to do this
now.
(41:39):
That's so unfortunate.
All right, let's have some positive comments here.
Let's talk about your books.
I've seen your first book under two titles, Little Victories, Perfect Rules for Imperfect
Living and Little Victories, A Sportswriter's Notes on Winning at Life.
For anyone interested in buying it, which title should they be looking for and where
can they find it?
(42:03):
Either one is perfectly acceptable to me, either option.
It's simply a hardcover was the original title that you mentioned, Imperfect God.
The sportswriter is the paperback version.
That's not an uncommon thing that they tweak a little bit when they do the paperback of
a book.
That's what happened there.
(42:24):
Nothing more than that.
In there, you wrote, quote, we should probably set aside the goal of total happiness.
There's no such thing, end quote.
It's kind of a shock for a guy known for his humor to write that.
Would you say that you're actually a closet pessimist or just a realist?
A closet...
Pessimist or realist?
(42:44):
Pessimist, is that what you say?
Yeah, or realist.
Or a closet optimist.
I want to be an optimist and I hope that I'm practical, if not realistic.
At the time when I wrote that, I was talking about a period of my life where my father
(43:05):
had just died and I was grappling with a number of things.
I can't exactly inhabit the space, the headspace I was in when I wrote that, but I think it's
fair to think of your happiness and well-being as not existing on some sort of stock market
like track.
(43:26):
It's a rollercoaster.
You should be able to absorb the high highs and the low lows and you definitely need to
be able to brace yourself and not set unrealistic expectations.
Are there particular themes in...
Drive for happiness.
Drive for happiness.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm a big believer in happiness, for sure.
(43:48):
Do what makes you happy.
There you go.
Absolutely.
Are there particular themes in sports or life, like redemption, teamwork, resilience or something
else that resonate deeply with you as a writer?
All of that.
I mean, those are all very sort of human arcs of the comeback, the person who picked themselves
(44:10):
up and overachieved and a late bloomer and all that stuff.
Since the beginning of literature, those are very standard character arcs and to see them
repeat with such regularity in sports, again, it makes the job quite easy and feels like
cheating that you're having it happen.
Any game you go to, there's going to be those kinds of arcs.
(44:33):
I think the hard part is finding things that are a little bit far afield from that, things
that are a little bit different and finding people whose stories have not been told, and
that's what we strive to do.
You have your 2022 book, I Wouldn't Do That If I Were Me.
That's a book of essays.
Do you have a favorite one in that collection?
(44:54):
And if so, would you share it with us?
I definitely like all the stuff about my mother and her crazy cat, because that was something
that involved my family.
I won't spoil it, but we had a cat that jumped out a window at high speed and survived miraculously.
(45:18):
But definitely the essay that I hear the most about is the one about my wife and texting
and unfortunate texts that were mistyped and misinterpreted.
I think people have all had that experience of either receiving a text that was completely
off and puzzled us or shocked us, or sending one accidentally that was completely off base.
(45:41):
So that's the one I hear about the most, for sure.
I'm sure your wife's thrilled about that.
She doesn't mind.
I mean, she's not a big reader.
I think she likes some of my stuff, not all of it.
Fair enough.
Every writer has projects they've always wanted to write about, but have never had the opportunity
to tackle it.
What projects or topics are you looking forward to taking on in the future?
(46:09):
One thing that I'm very interested in doing in 2025 is that the World Cycling Championships,
and people who read me know that I have this weekend for bikes.
They are going to be in sub-Saharan Africa for the first time in Rwanda.
That's a country that I spent some time in about 15 years ago, when it was in a much
(46:32):
more evolutionary period from, obviously, the genocide that happened there.
It's a remarkable place.
It's an incredible cycling country.
The incredible moment is intoxicating.
I can't wait for that opportunity, and I hope I'm able to go.
That's awesome.
(46:52):
Jason, we have just a few minutes left.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to find their own inspiration in storytelling?
Read.
Read, read, read.
Don't flip through your phone.
Don't just scroll through texts, or Twitter, or Instagram reels, or anything like that.
(47:15):
TikTok.
TikTok is wildly entertaining.
I get it.
I make you a better writer.
I think you got to read.
If it's books, if it's newspapers, if it's columns, if it's collections, if it's magazines,
if it's your own stuff, read, read, read, read, read.
I feel like it's like eating your greens.
I mean that in a positive way.
(47:38):
Reading should not feel like broccoli, right?
It should be incredibly engaging and make you happy, but that's the special sauce.
The more you do it, it has this way of just seeping into your bones and making you better
at it, even if you're not aware of it.
And then the counterpoint to that, I mean, not the counterpoint, but the analog to that
(48:00):
is do write as much as possible.
Don't be selective in terms of what you're going to write, and when you're going to write,
and who you're going to write for.
Take every opportunity that's offered to you.
You don't have to say, like, I'm going to do only this, only this place, and I only
have these three or four places that I want to work for.
Take everything.
(48:21):
I wrote for a lot of places and a lot of subjects that I didn't think that I gave a damn about,
but all of them taught me something along the way.
So I think that you're at a point in your life where you have the opportunity to make
mistakes and trails that you might turn around from, but take advantage of that because the
(48:42):
stakes are lower.
Jason Gay, thank you so much for being with us today.
I'm grateful, and thank you so much for these questions.
It's good to be thinking about some of these things that I haven't thought about ever.
I'm genuinely honored.
I won't tell my producer that.
I'll give him a big head.
Thanks to our listeners.
(49:03):
I'm Chris Meek.
We're out of time.
We'll see you next week.
Same time, same place.
Until then, stay safe and keep taking your next steps forward.
Thanks for tuning in to Next Steps Forward.
Be sure to join Chris Meek for another great show next Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time
and 1 p.m. Eastern Time on the Voice America Empowerment Channel.
(49:27):
This week, make things happen in your life.
See you then.
Bye.
There are few things that make people successful.
(00:08):
Taking a step forward to change their lives is one successful trait, but it takes some
time to get there.
How do you move forward to greet the success that awaits you?
Welcome to Next Steps Forward with host Chris Meek.
Each week, Chris brings on another guest who has successfully taken the next steps forward.
(00:30):
Now here is Chris Meek.
Hello.
You've tuned to this week's episode of Next Steps Forward, and I'm your host, Chris Meek.
As always, it's a pleasure to have you with us.
Our focus is on personal empowerment, commitment to wellbeing, and the motivation to achieve
more than you ever thought possible.
To that end, we have another outstanding guest with us today.
Jason Gay is the Wall Street Journal's sports columnist.
(00:52):
In 2024, Jason's sports column was awarded first place by the National Society of Newspaper
Columnists.
He was named Sports Columnist of the Year by the Society of Professional Journalists
in 2010, 2016, and 2019.
You couldn't get a three-peat in there somewhere?
He's the author of the essay book, I Wouldn't Do That If I Were Me, Modern Blunders and
Modest Triumphs But Mostly Blunders, published in 2022, and his 2015 bestseller, Little Victories,
(01:17):
Rules for Imperfect Living, was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Jason Gay, welcome to Next Steps Forward.
Thank you very much for having me.
My pleasure.
So Jason, I've been in financial services for 25 years.
I hate to admit that because that just means I'm an old man, but yours is always the first
article I read in the journal every day when I open it up, so thank you for the work that
you do.
(01:38):
It just sort of starts my day off with a cup of coffee and the right note, so thank you
for all that.
Well, I appreciate that.
I feel like I'm one of those munchkin donuts before you get to the serious stuff, you know?
Maybe it helps us absorb some of that serious stuff, so I appreciate the work you do.
And again, Jason, so many people know you from your work at The Wall Street Journal,
but let's start at the start.
(01:59):
How'd you decide you wanted to be a writer, and what was the path that led you to your
current job?
And have you been a sports columnist your entire career?
Well, I was not a sports columnist my entire career.
I had an interest in newspapering going back until I was young.
I delivered the newspaper, I grew up in a home where the newspaper was front and center
(02:22):
on the kitchen table every morning.
I had an unsuccessful paper route.
And it's just sort of part of my life, and I grew up in Boston in the late 70s and early
80s, when it was sort of a high watermark, Boston Globe, which was a really tremendous
(02:42):
sports section at the time, still is.
And it was just, you know, much in the same way that I guess people listen to music and
they sort of, you know, unconsciously get influenced in terms of, you know, musical
taste.
I just developed a fascination with sports writing, but I didn't, you know, that was
(03:03):
not the path that I set myself out on initially.
In fact, my first job at newspapers, I was selling advertising.
It was a job that a friend of mine had quit.
And I thought, well, that sounds like a reasonable job for a college graduate to have, selling
advertising at a newspaper.
Fortunate or unfortunate for me, I was rather terrible at being a salesperson.
(03:26):
You know, this was the old days of like, you know, cold calling people and asking if they
wanted to buy advertising, and I was no good at it.
And I think they just said, well, if this donkey can't sell an ad, well, maybe he can
cover high school football.
And really, that's where it started, started covering sports there.
But then after, you know, that initial newspaper migrated into a whole bunch of things, you
(03:49):
know, I covered politics, I covered social issues, covered the drug war, you know, a
whole bunch of things that not in every case was something that I really wanted to do.
But in retrospect, was really about experience in terms of just getting myself out there
and learning.
(04:10):
Running for the Wall Street Journal is a plum job, no offense.
How'd you land there?
You know, the paper was going through an overhaul in the beginning of the prior decade.
So I want to say like 2009, 2010, they were adding a lot of, let's say, like sort of off
(04:32):
core stuff.
So you know, obviously, the great tradition, there's just still a robust tradition of the
Journalist Financial News Coverage.
Well, they wanted to make sure that the journal, you know, had audience beyond that.
And so they were hiring people to cover the arts, hiring people to cover lifestyle, fashion.
Sports was in that category, too.
(04:52):
And so I was part of that initial wave of people who came in to write about sports.
And honestly, it was a wonderful environment to start because, you know, no one was coming
to us.
No one picks up the Wall Street Journal, at least not for sure, fantasy football team,
based upon what these donkeys have to say.
They were really, we had a lot of latitude to try and to fail and to fail again.
(05:17):
And we found ourselves, you know, riding in the wake of really, really talented reporters
doing really serious stuff in finance and politics and beyond.
It's just a very enviable slot, very fortunate for us because we were able to figure out
who we were and just, you know, without the pressure of having to make it work right away.
(05:39):
And that's probably very good timing, given the fact that the financial crisis was just
sort of on the tail end of it there.
And so people were still looking for the journal, to your point, for that deep, robust financial
news.
And so being able to have something to kind of break the ice a little bit as opposed to
the sky is falling was probably a good time for you guys to jumpstart that.
I think that's true.
I mean, look, newspapers, as we both know, are many things, you know, and they can be
(06:05):
a totally separate thing for one reader than they are for the other.
You know, no two readers have this exact same taste and reading habits.
People read back to front.
People read from the middle, you know, print, digital, laptop, phone, you know, that evolution
continues.
But you don't have to be one specific thing always.
(06:28):
And your writing style is known for its humor and relatability, which are often two of the
most difficult things to achieve as a writer.
What are your secrets to pulling off that magic?
Oh, gosh, I mean, I wish I could tell you it's like a conscious act of like trying to
be a certain way.
The truth of the matter is, I just try to be myself and I like to think of myself as
(06:53):
somebody who sees the sillier side of things and sees things through a comedic lens, oftentimes.
You know, humor is not always successful.
I'm perfectly capable of making a terrible joke, as I am a good joke.
But I think that sports has this incredible palette because it's a world full of very
(07:14):
self-important, serious people that's not really actually high stakes and consequential.
You know, at the end of the day, we're talking about shorts and basketballs and footballs
and, you know, like men and women playing games of our youth.
And it is supposed to be fun.
It is supposed to be entertainment.
And I try to lean into that as much as possible.
(07:37):
And how do you, and did you hone your craft, especially your sense of humor?
You know, were you the class clown growing up?
Do you come from a family that valued humor or had members that were just plain funny?
You know, my dad was a very serious person.
So I think maybe, you know, in the great tradition of children rebelling against their parents,
you know, that might have been my excuse for trying to be funny, is that my dad was quite
(08:01):
a serious person.
I don't think my mother, my mother is, you know, lovely, but, you know, I don't think
she's like a joke teller necessarily.
And you know, I was what I was, you know, I was not the world's greatest athlete.
I was not the world's greatest student.
I don't know if I was the class clown always.
(08:21):
I tended to be just the guy who was like scraping by.
That's how I think of myself academically.
The left hand bumper sticker, the guy scraping by?
Yes, exactly.
So obviously you have a huge national and international readership of the journal, and
that's a huge responsibility and not a small amount of pressure for any writer.
(08:43):
How do you balance being entertaining while still delivering meaningful analysis?
I try not to think about the thing that you described, you know, the sort of size of the
audience and, you know, the quote unquote, like responsibility that comes with that.
Obviously I feel a great responsibility to be fair and accurate.
That's the most important thing, you know, for any journalist.
(09:06):
But in terms of like, if I sat around and I worried about pleasing everybody every time
or making everybody laugh, I would just, I wouldn't be able to get out of bed.
It would be too nerve wracking.
So I focus on what makes me entertained, and that's my compass for better and for worse.
If I find it entertaining, if I find it funny, that's the direction that I lean and I keep
(09:29):
my own counsel that way.
You know, obviously I have editors who are incredibly helpful in terms of running ideas
past, saving me from myself, correcting things, fixing my mangled grammar, which is not infrequent.
But, you know, I try not to think of the many people who are reading the paper, because
again, I really freak out.
(09:49):
I mean, when I started at the Journal, I was not a journal reader.
I didn't grow up in a home that got the Wall Street Journal.
I thought of it as a very serious, sober publication.
I think had I known what a big deal it is, it would have paralyzed me.
So I feel grateful actually to have that ignorance.
I just kind of jumped off the cliff.
(10:10):
One of the bigger stories you've written recently, and one of my favorites, was on the Luka Doncic
Anthony Davis trade.
The dust has yet to settle on that.
I mean, I read your article, but, you know, two guys talking here, what are your thoughts?
I mean, it's stunning.
You know, I don't think it's settled in for anybody, including the people who are traded
(10:32):
in it.
Doncic gave his press conference in Los Angeles today, and he said he basically has been like
absorbing this over the last 48 hours, as we all have.
I mean, this went beyond just being surprised.
This was such an incredulous reaction that the first wave of response to it was, oh,
this must be a hack.
(10:52):
This must be some sort of hoax.
There's no way this is actually true.
That goes to show you the level to which people did not believe it.
The NBA has a pretty robust world now of trademongering and discussing the coulda, woulda, shouldas,
(11:14):
and for something to sort of fall into their lap without anyone having any speculation
about it is really unusual.
I remember my son showing me in the morning whatever guy reported it, and I'm like, is
that a reliable source?
He's like, no, he's the guy.
I'm like, okay, that's a big deal.
So I turn the TV on, and there's Stephen A. Smith doing his thing.
So traditional media has been rocked by so many changes in recent years.
(11:37):
How has the role of a sports columnist evolved in the age of social media and instant reactions,
and how has it remained unchanged?
Well, let me deal with the unchanged part of it, which is that the incredible privilege
you get in this job is to be able to build a relationship with an audience.
(11:58):
I think that was true when the first sports columnist came along, to the people who did
it in the sort of peak of the newspaper era, when you had morning papers and afternoon
papers, to what you have today, which is in many ways just as powerful a media ecosystem,
but obviously stratified in many different ways.
You have the ability to connect with people because you're in their lives rather frequently.
(12:20):
Most of us are writing one, two, three, if not more times a week.
For better or for worse, people get to know you, and you're not always on your best.
And when you succeed, hopefully they'll let you know that, too.
But you have the ability to connect with people, and optimally what you go for is people are
(12:43):
reading you for you.
Obviously there are some stories, like Luka Tanchic's Getting Traded, that are just so
irresistible people are going to want to read it no matter what.
But hopefully people are coming to you and will ride along with you just because they
have a relationship to your byline, to your sensibility.
In terms of the way the job has changed, there are fewer of us.
(13:04):
You go to a sporting event, the Super Bowl coming up, and I think there are probably
half as many sports columnists at newspapers at the Super Bowl than there were when I went
to my first one 15 or so years ago.
I just think that that attrition is very real.
There's much more of a digital influence, there's much more of a focus on the social
(13:25):
media aspect of it, the audio, the video componentry.
There's less of an economy of people who are focusing on words.
I like to think of it as like making some homemade canoes for a small but discriminating
audience of people who still want old wooden canoes, and there's nothing wrong with that.
(13:48):
I like this idea.
There's always going to be a core audience of people who care about the way sentences
are arranged and the way that words make them feel, and they aren't just looking for the
kind of like quick hit type of news flash that you get on social media.
And I want to give them that as much as I can.
(14:12):
Sports and sports writing aren't always about winning game moments and joyous celebrations.
How do you approach writing about sensitive topics such as scandals or controversies,
or even as the old ABC sports announcer used to describe it, every weekend, the agony of
defeat?
And when you write about those topics, does it negatively affect your relationships with
sources?
I mean, again, if you put a premium on being fair and accurate, I think that you can maintain
(14:38):
almost any relationship.
I think that it's when you sort of go far afield and you are not presenting things accurately
or fairly, that's when you run into trouble.
You have to go back to something I said before about like, you know, sports having a lot
of seriousness, but the stakes being lower.
I mean, that's also true of winning and losing.
You know, somebody's going to win the Super Bowl this weekend.
(14:59):
Someone's going to lose the Super Bowl this weekend.
It's not the end of the...
Do you want me to say that?
I'm sorry.
Is that okay?
Because I know we're going to run.
Okay.
Totally fine.
I mean, you know, someone's going to win this Super Bowl.
Someone's going to lose the Super Bowl.
It's going to be uplifting for whoever wins it.
(15:19):
It's going to be briefly emotionally devastating for the people who lose.
It's not the end of their lives.
It's not the kind of like emotional carnage that true suffering brings.
So like in that, you get to sort of like...
What sports gives you is this kind of like quick hit of jubilation, of sorrow, but not
(15:42):
with the kind of lingering after effects that, you know, and I know there are some fans like
Minnesota Vikings fans would probably disagree with this, but like not with the sort of lingering
generational after effects of, you know, true pain.
Two part question.
If you could interview one living athlete that you haven't yet, who would it be and
why?
And then second, what interview do you wish you could have done with someone who's no
(16:05):
longer alive and why would it be that person?
Oh, that's great.
I would say that I would love to talk to Rafael Nadal, who I have talked to like in casual
arrangements but never sort of done a quick, a substantive one-on-one.
He's one of my favorite athletes that I've covered.
He just retired.
(16:25):
He had this magnificent career.
I don't think we're going to see a tennis player quite like him again.
I'd love to be able to sit and ask him a bunch of questions.
Somebody who I didn't get to, I mean, Bill Russell comes to mind.
He was somebody who I've done a lot of reading of what he's written in his life.
(16:45):
He was a remarkable person as both an athlete and as a character in activism and just led
an astonishing life of success and standing up for things.
I would love to be able to talk to him.
What's your favorite sporting event as a fan or to cover as a professional and why?
(17:09):
Oh, I like the tennis.
I mean, I grew up with it.
My father was a high school tennis coach in Massachusetts.
So I grew up around public tennis courts and just going there and hitting balls for hours
and hours.
My father and I had these traditions of watching breakfast at Wimbledon, 9 o'clock in the morning,
Bud Collins in his crazy Technicolor pants and John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg and all that
(17:32):
sort of glory time of the sport.
And so to be able to walk into these cathedrals like CentreCourt, like Roland Garros in Paris,
it feels like a remarkable privilege.
I mean, just to be that, the first time I did it, I felt almost emotionally overcome
(17:53):
because you kind of can't believe that it exists.
It's something you've viewed through the prism of television your entire life and to finally
get to it and see it in the flesh, and it actually not just lives up to what your expectation
is, but surpasses it.
I mean, a place like CentreCourt, one thing that's really astonishing about it is it seats
about 14,000 people.
(18:14):
It feels like it's about a third the size of an American stadium that seats that many
people.
It is very, very compact and intimate and wonderful in that way.
And then you have this organic surface of green grass that they're playing on that plays
differently hour to hour, weather to weather and day to day.
(18:37):
When you and I first connected last summer, you're like, sorry, Chris, I can't chat.
I'm in Paris covering the Olympics.
And I'm like, yeah, of course you are.
What else are you supposed to be doing right now?
So I was a little envious when you sent that back to me.
And Jason, you're a sports fan at heart.
How do you keep that passion alive while covering sports as a job and does it ever become drudgery
because it is your job?
(18:57):
I like this question because I am happily surprised by this too, that it does not feel
like drudgery to me, that sports is something where the skin shedding happens on such a
frequent basis that it feels different every time.
You know, you go back to an Olympic Games, you go back to a Super Bowl, you go back to
(19:19):
a Wimbledon and you think, well, maybe this is the one where I'm like, enough is enough
with this.
And this is not to say that there are things that I like less than others, I mean, definitely.
But the characters change, the conditions change, the moment in the culture changes.
You know, like, think about something like college sports, the way that we talk and think
and act about college sports in 2025, as opposed to what we thought about it as little as 10
(19:43):
years ago, the professionalization that's happened in college sports.
So there's always this dynamism in sports, which makes it really compelling, a topic
to cover.
And I also feel like, frankly, as a reporter, it's cheating, because the audience is almost
always meeting you halfway, because they have some skin in the game.
It's either a team they like, a sport they like, a sport they don't like, a team they
(20:05):
don't like.
They're really meeting you halfway, and they're engaged at a level that is much harder for
somebody who covers a more esoteric topic.
You know, imagine covering the bond market or something like that.
Obviously, there are some people who care a great deal about bonds, but it's not the
same as covering, like, you know, I don't know, the NBA All-Star Game.
It's a different challenge.
(20:26):
And I think it's much harder for somebody who's doing that than someone who's covering
basketball.
I should have asked this at the beginning of the show, because you mentioned growing
up in Massachusetts.
You mentioned Boston Globe.
You mentioned watching tennis with your dad in Massachusetts as a coach.
Red Sox or Yankees?
Oh, definitely the Red Sox.
(20:47):
And I said, classic.
I'm sorry.
The show's over.
Well, you definitely had the better of us in that era.
I mean, I'm of the vintage of sports fan in Boston, where misery was sort of the job description.
This whole evolution of the Red Sox as a championship-winning franchise, these kids who are growing up,
(21:14):
they have repetitive stress injuries from so many parades where they've been applauding
at.
You know, the winning and winning and winning, that was not the childhood that I knew.
The Celtics won a little bit, but that was really it.
The Patriots were miserable.
The Red Sox broke your heart almost on an hourly basis.
(21:34):
That's character building, you know?
And it definitely makes sense how you can feel, how this can be sort of part of your
emotional connective tissue.
How do you choose your column's topics, and are your decisions mainly driven by the latest
events in the sports world?
It's a combination of things.
(21:54):
I mean, yes, primarily it's dictated by the schedule.
You know, I'm writing about football because it's football season.
Once the football season ends, we're probably going to turn away from that and focus on
other things.
But I try to do things that are a little offbeat on occasion because, you know, you want to
surprise readers.
You don't want people to feel like they're just getting the same old, same old.
(22:14):
You want to diversify yourself from the competition.
You want to feel a little bit different from them, either in subject matter or tone or
approach.
And, you know, I have good editors and colleagues that I can go to and say, like, I'm thinking
about this, this, this.
Which one do you like the best?
Or, you know, I'm up against—that I can't think of anything.
(22:38):
And it's like, there are times like, you know, two o'clock in the afternoon, I have to write
a column that night.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
And then something just happens, and you get really lucky.
And I like that sort of adrenaline, actually.
And how do you prepare for interviews with athletes, coaches, or other sports figures?
And how do you prepare for people who are known to be difficult interview subjects?
Or do you just avoid those people altogether?
(22:59):
I, you know, don't avoid a subject because of that.
I mean, my, you know, regimen is to try to read everything that's ever been written about
somebody that I'm going to go see, you know, for better and for worse.
Everything.
(23:20):
Because I want to get a sense of how they speak, how they speak on certain topics, what
topics they're asked about all the time.
I want to get a sense of when they go on autopilot, and they start giving me an answer they've
given a hundred times, I want to know, because I want to be able to shift the conversation,
make them, you know, think a little differently, and make things that they hadn't said.
(23:41):
And I don't mean that in a negative way, I just mean, like, in a way that, like, for
a reader, they're like, oh, well, Roger Federer's been interviewed a thousand times, like, why
should I read another interview with him?
He's just going to say the same thing he always says.
Obviously, some subjects are better than others in terms of being, you know, real character-worthy.
But you know, it starts with that sort of research of knowing what they are good at
(24:05):
talking about, what they've talked about a lot.
And then also, it sort of helps build a little rapport, because if they have a sense that
you've done your homework going into it, I think there's a certain, you know, base level
respect that starts, which is good.
Who have been your most challenging interviews, and who are the most fun, memorable, or gratifying?
(24:30):
You know, I think that the most gratifying interviews are always people who are not in
the public eye.
And, like, giving them the opportunity to tell their story in a forum like the Wall
Street Journal is the best, because, you know, usually those kinds of stories I'm telling
are stories of people who have done extraordinary things, who have overcome great odds.
(24:51):
You know, I think about a story I wrote last year about a college lacrosse player who was
really the first Division I athlete to ever come back from a heart transplant, which is
just shocking to say out loud, but a lacrosse player playing big time in Division II, college
lacrosse, playing with a transplanted heart.
He had never told his story in that kind of situation, that kind of forum, and, you know,
(25:14):
to see the reaction to that and the outreach that he got after that, that's what this thing
is all about, you know, not, like, sort of varnishing the people who are already famous.
In terms of people who are the most difficult, I mean, you know, I think of difficulty more
along the lines of, like, people who are just giving you kind of bland, vanilla answers
(25:35):
as opposed to being confrontational.
Confrontational's good.
You know, somebody who is, you know, got to be in their bonnet about something and wants
to be agitated at you, I don't mind that one bit, especially if you feel like you're being
fair.
It's the people who are just kind of giving you the blah, bland stuff, and golly, I mean,
that's almost every press conference you go to nowadays, they're so shrewd about staying
(25:59):
on message and not saying things that are going to get them into any kind of trouble,
so that's challenging.
Well, it's like politics, you answer the question you want to answer.
That's a very good piece of advice.
If you could go back and redo one interview, which one would it be, what would you change,
(26:19):
and why?
Oh, I would go back and redo all of them.
I mean, I always see things that I missed, I don't like reading stuff that I do because
I see only the mistakes and the holes and the opportunities lost.
So yeah, that's a 100% for me.
I think that everything, I mean, this goes for writing too, that, you know, it just always
(26:45):
gets better.
The more time you have at it, the more cracks at it you take, you know, you don't have the
luxury with a newspaper because you have deadlines, but being able to just sort of endlessly think
about it, or endlessly ask questions of a subject, the story has to come out at a certain
point.
So you don't always have unlimited time, or you don't ever have unlimited time.
(27:06):
But I always see things that I would have done, always, always, always.
And I think that's good.
I think if I was looking at my own work and saying, oh, I never felt that, like, no, I
want to be ruthless with myself.
Fair enough.
How do you strike balance between respecting your interview subjects while still asking
those tough, uncomfortable questions?
(27:34):
I think that, you know, to give that you are not kind of coming for their lunch and like
to give them the opportunity to know where you're coming from with a question, you know,
so say, if it's an uncomfortable question about like, let's say, your personal life
or something like that.
Now, I'm not going to be the first question I'm going to ask, you know, we're hopefully
(27:56):
going to build up a rapport.
They're probably going to have some sense that this question is coming at some point.
Most people do if there's uncomfortable like areas of their personal story.
But people resent more than anything is just sort of being suckered, you know, just being
like, you know, sucker punched with a question.
So I try not to do that.
(28:18):
And again, I don't have the job, you know, I'm a sports columnist, I get to say what
I think.
You know, I don't need, you know, people to tell me what they think in order to put it
out there.
I can have my own opinion about it.
But I want to give them every opportunity to answer and address it for themselves for
sure.
One of my favorite interviews I've done, and my listeners and viewers know I'm a huge,
(28:40):
huge Dallas Cowboys fan, is I had Charles Haley on a couple of years ago.
And as a sports writer, you know, a lot of things are written about Charles in the locker
room during his career, which I was going to touch on a bit.
But then Charles Haley being Charles Haley, after his career came out, they learned he
was bipolar.
So he addressed that.
And then he actually forgot about the interview because he was at AT&T Stadium in Dallas giving
(29:03):
bikes away as part of the charity work for the Cowboys.
And then also an assistant reminded him, he's like, oh, okay, I forgot about this.
Well, we did the interview live while he's having lunch at a pizza restaurant in Dallas.
And so he's like eating a piece of pizza, the guy's napkin over his chest.
And so that was one of my favorite interviews of all time.
I just wanted to share that.
Jason, earlier you talked about college sports and what, right, can you picture that?
That's Charles Haley, right?
(29:24):
Amazing.
So earlier, we're talking briefly, but you touched on college sports and they become
pardon the phrase, a whole new ballgame over the past few years.
What's your perspective on name, image, and likeness and the money and big money in some
cases that college athletes are now receiving and has it changed college athletics for the
better or worse?
Well, I think it was inevitable.
(29:49):
I don't think that, you know, you could have a market economy where college coaches were
getting five, six, seven, eight, now $10 million a year.
Schools were reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of television deals or
a billion dollar contracts for college football playoffs, for basketball playoffs, and cut
(30:11):
off one party from economically benefiting, i.e. the students.
The notion of the scholarship being sufficient compensation was increasingly quaint.
And what surprised me was the acceleration that happened here.
We had a couple of things happening at once.
One, the court, both liberal justices, conservative justices, were very, very dubious on the NCAA's
(30:38):
antitrust protections and the notion that it was somehow a cartel, which really was
what they called it when it went up to the Supreme Court, a cartel.
And that set into motion all this.
The problem with NIL and with Transfer Portal and things like that is, you know, once the
(31:00):
brakes came off, so to speak, the NCAA kind of just threw up its hands and said, like,
all right, well, you know, we're just going to let this roll without sort of thinking
about the best way of deploying it.
And that created this Wild West that we're in now.
And you see the NCAA is trying to roll back with some form of settlement that will attempt
(31:26):
to level the playing field by giving actually direct payments to schools through which they
can pay players.
But I think that that, and that's already been signaled, like that creates a whole new
can of worms in terms of, you know, can you actually start compensating athletes without
collective bargaining?
(31:46):
Is the figure that's being discussed a sort of a static figure across schools?
Is that tantamount to a salary cap?
Is that, you know, an antitrust violation if you don't have any collective bargaining?
You know, is that fair?
The question has become more complex.
And these people who are running athletic departments have never had harder jobs.
(32:08):
College coaches never had a harder job, more complicated job.
However, they started this, like this was, again, they had, there was a fork in the road
moment at one point where they're like, you know, we can continue having college sports
be, you know, scale.
(32:30):
You know, the old days of Bear Bryant, you know, having in his contract that he couldn't
make more than a dollar more than the governor of Alabama or something like that in his contract.
So, you know, it could have gone on that way, but obviously it didn't and he's making
millions of dollars and reaching the point where actually the compensation in college
at times is so bountiful that they're holding off going pro.
(32:56):
No matter what anyone thinks about it, NAL has already changed, you know, great upheaval
as you mentioned and changed every college sport.
Look in your crystal ball and tell us where you see college sports in five or 10 years
from now.
For one, I think there'll be some form of unionization that happens in players, but
(33:16):
I think the thing that'll happen before that is you'll have some sort of super league break
away from the sort of quote unquote power five schools that exist in college sports.
So you know, an SEC and a big 10 like splitting away from the rest and creating their own
sort of super league with big television contracts that they keep for themselves.
(33:40):
I think that is quite likely and what will be interesting from there is that do the schools
that get left behind, do they sort of do a recalibration and kind of decaffeinate like
their prioritization of sports?
What's happened here over the last several decades is that everyone has sort of felt
(34:02):
that they cannot ignore these sports or they're getting left behind.
They're going to be left behind in terms of alumni spending, they're going to be left
behind in terms of student interest, they're going to be left behind in terms of just cultural
minds here and they have to, have to, have to do it.
Well, I disagree with that slightly.
I think that like there is actual way to go about this.
(34:22):
We certainly see the model of division two and division three.
Is there a version of division one sports that can be kind of a little more chillaxed
to use a terrible term and then you kind of have your super league above professional.
And the other thing that's really important here is that private equity is already circling
(34:46):
college sports and you're already seeing investments happen in the athletic department.
And once that's happening, you know, you're talking about, you know, money that is very
interested in more money and that is just going to put an inordinate pressure upon creating
these kinds of splits because, you know, it's very easy for someone who's been a lifelong
(35:07):
fan of the SEC to say like, oh yeah, we definitely should have Vanderbilt in here.
Vanderbilt's like traditionally been a great, you know, partner of the SEC.
The private equity is going to look at this and be like, what, why, why do we have these
teams?
Like, why don't we just have the good teams?
What are we doing here?
You know, all those collisions are coming.
You know, and I was just going to touch on that a few days after the recent college football
(35:30):
national championship, one of your colleagues wrote an article about if a college football
team were a franchise, like a pro NFL team, what they would be worth.
And obviously with Ohio state just running, they were ranked at, I think 1.8 billion.
Michigan was right behind it, like 1.6, 1.7.
Some familiar names, some shocking names, I was surprised to see Texas A&M in there.
But again, to the point, the concept of private equity investing in an athletic departments
(35:55):
is mind boggling because to your point, that's gobs and gobs of money and that could change
the sport forever.
And then you touched on, you know, if there's a breakaway super conference, to me that sounds
exactly like live golf.
The winners win and the losers lose.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't disagree with any of that.
I do feel like the potential upside, however, is allowing the sort of, I don't want to say
(36:23):
also rants because that's unfair to schools, because actually we're seeing more competitiveness
within college sports.
You know, the transfer portal has allowed schools that aren't traditional powers to
actually, you know, get better quickly, faster, quickly, however, schools that aren't typical
powers athletically to maybe make some hard choices about, you know, focusing on the academic
(36:50):
life and focusing on, you know, returning to a more sane and sober environment of college
sports.
Let's go down another level here.
Little league baseball players aren't getting paid yet.
I got in touch with you last year with my concerns about how one tremendous player who
lives in a town near me ended up playing for another team that just happened to be the
(37:12):
defending state champions.
Some people were calling that arrangement a symbol of quote, the free agency era in
youth sports.
I saw it as the ideals of little league baseball, teamwork, sportsmanship, and integrity being
compromised by placing winning above all else.
Do you expect attitudes and rules about kids' sports to change because of the seismic changes
we're seeing in college sports?
Oh, it's already happening.
(37:34):
It's already happening.
It's here.
In some ways it's beyond what college is because it's truly without any kind of guardrails
You know, you're speaking to the father of an eight-year-old who a couple of years ago
had three different soccer teams recruiting her and not by any doing of mine, I was like,
what is going on here?
(37:55):
She's like an eight-year-old.
She'd be happy chasing squirrels.
She doesn't care about this stuff.
I mean, you know, it's cuckoo.
And I think what's happened with youth sports, unfortunately, has become like elitist and
predatory.
Elitist in the sense that a lot of these things are quite expensive, you know, you're putting
(38:17):
your child into these programs, these travel teams, things like that.
You're talking about expenditures, sometimes in the thousands of dollars, which for many
families is just an unreasonable expectation.
The second thing is you are basically winnowing the pool.
You are like basically saying to people, you have to get good at the age of seven, at the
(38:39):
age of eight, at the age of 12, otherwise you don't have value as an athlete.
You can fall behind fast.
And they really prey upon the parent fears that, oh, I'm not doing right by my child
if they're not an X program or having this kind of success at this level.
It's madness.
And a lot of it is based around the idea of how college has become increasingly financially
(39:04):
inaccessible to people.
There's a lot of folks who think, well, if Johnny or Sarah can get themselves a partial
scholarship to do a certain sport or a certain school, you're going to take some financial
pressure off the family.
That's a very rare exceptional case.
And candidly, if you want your child to get a leg up getting into school and even getting
(39:25):
financial aid in school, there are a whole other bunch of ways, extracurricular activities
that are much more bang for your buck than getting good at a sport.
And it's unfortunate, you talk about the elitism, and when you and I grew up, we're about the
same age.
Kids, you played three sports, one in the fall, one in the winter, and one in the spring.
(39:47):
Now by the time I'm age eight, like your daughter, you're going to get pigeonholed into soccer
or basketball or tennis or whatever.
And it's unfortunate because there's more pressure for them.
There's constant pressure to be the best at that sport.
Plus, from a developmental perspective, in different sports, you use different muscles.
Some are individual sports, some are team sports, and so you lose some of that camaraderie,
(40:08):
if you will, if you're only doing an individual sport like golf or tennis.
And so I agree with you, the area that I live here, not too far from you, it's very much
that focus of you're going to play lacrosse and that's it, and you're going to Duke, and
then you go to Harvard and get a law degree, and then that's it.
So life's been set for them before they were born.
So I totally agree with you on that.
(40:28):
Let's shift gears here.
We've got about seven or eight minutes left.
Let's focus on you.
Yeah.
Let me just add one thing to the viewpoint, which is that what's often getting lost, it's
not surprising that it's getting lost, is what the actual kid wants to do.
And the college coaches all the time, and I ask them the questions that we're talking
about now, and a lot of them say the number one issue they deal with is a high-level recruit
(40:54):
gets to campus.
By the time they get to campus as a freshman, they are toasted.
They are burnt out.
They have spent 12 to 15 years of their life obsessing about a sport for this exact thing,
to be able to get into this high-level college program, and they think they're at the end
of the journey.
And that is just a terrible situation.
You want to leave opportunity available for the late bloomer, for the person who played
(41:18):
another sport.
I guarantee you, you go into a professional locker room of any sport and you ask them
what their favorite sport was when they were eight, nine, ten years old, very often it's
a different sport altogether because, as you said, they tried different things.
They developed their passion for something.
They played it because they liked it, not because someone said, you've got to do this
now.
(41:39):
That's so unfortunate.
All right, let's have some positive comments here.
Let's talk about your books.
I've seen your first book under two titles, Little Victories, Perfect Rules for Imperfect
Living and Little Victories, A Sportswriter's Notes on Winning at Life.
For anyone interested in buying it, which title should they be looking for and where
can they find it?
(42:03):
Either one is perfectly acceptable to me, either option.
It's simply a hardcover was the original title that you mentioned, Imperfect God.
The sportswriter is the paperback version.
That's not an uncommon thing that they tweak a little bit when they do the paperback of
a book.
That's what happened there.
(42:24):
Nothing more than that.
In there, you wrote, quote, we should probably set aside the goal of total happiness.
There's no such thing, end quote.
It's kind of a shock for a guy known for his humor to write that.
Would you say that you're actually a closet pessimist or just a realist?
A closet...
Pessimist or realist?
(42:44):
Pessimist, is that what you say?
Yeah, or realist.
Or a closet optimist.
I want to be an optimist and I hope that I'm practical, if not realistic.
At the time when I wrote that, I was talking about a period of my life where my father
(43:05):
had just died and I was grappling with a number of things.
I can't exactly inhabit the space, the headspace I was in when I wrote that, but I think it's
fair to think of your happiness and well-being as not existing on some sort of stock market
like track.
(43:26):
It's a rollercoaster.
You should be able to absorb the high highs and the low lows and you definitely need to
be able to brace yourself and not set unrealistic expectations.
Are there particular themes in...
Drive for happiness.
Drive for happiness.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm a big believer in happiness, for sure.
(43:48):
Do what makes you happy.
There you go.
Absolutely.
Are there particular themes in sports or life, like redemption, teamwork, resilience or something
else that resonate deeply with you as a writer?
All of that.
I mean, those are all very sort of human arcs of the comeback, the person who picked themselves
(44:10):
up and overachieved and a late bloomer and all that stuff.
Since the beginning of literature, those are very standard character arcs and to see them
repeat with such regularity in sports, again, it makes the job quite easy and feels like
cheating that you're having it happen.
Any game you go to, there's going to be those kinds of arcs.
(44:33):
I think the hard part is finding things that are a little bit far afield from that, things
that are a little bit different and finding people whose stories have not been told, and
that's what we strive to do.
You have your 2022 book, I Wouldn't Do That If I Were Me.
That's a book of essays.
Do you have a favorite one in that collection?
(44:54):
And if so, would you share it with us?
I definitely like all the stuff about my mother and her crazy cat, because that was something
that involved my family.
I won't spoil it, but we had a cat that jumped out a window at high speed and survived miraculously.
(45:18):
But definitely the essay that I hear the most about is the one about my wife and texting
and unfortunate texts that were mistyped and misinterpreted.
I think people have all had that experience of either receiving a text that was completely
off and puzzled us or shocked us, or sending one accidentally that was completely off base.
(45:41):
So that's the one I hear about the most, for sure.
I'm sure your wife's thrilled about that.
She doesn't mind.
I mean, she's not a big reader.
I think she likes some of my stuff, not all of it.
Fair enough.
Every writer has projects they've always wanted to write about, but have never had the opportunity
to tackle it.
What projects or topics are you looking forward to taking on in the future?
(46:09):
One thing that I'm very interested in doing in 2025 is that the World Cycling Championships,
and people who read me know that I have this weekend for bikes.
They are going to be in sub-Saharan Africa for the first time in Rwanda.
That's a country that I spent some time in about 15 years ago, when it was in a much
(46:32):
more evolutionary period from, obviously, the genocide that happened there.
It's a remarkable place.
It's an incredible cycling country.
The incredible moment is intoxicating.
I can't wait for that opportunity, and I hope I'm able to go.
That's awesome.
(46:52):
Jason, we have just a few minutes left.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to find their own inspiration in storytelling?
Read.
Read, read, read.
Don't flip through your phone.
Don't just scroll through texts, or Twitter, or Instagram reels, or anything like that.
(47:15):
TikTok.
TikTok is wildly entertaining.
I get it.
I make you a better writer.
I think you got to read.
If it's books, if it's newspapers, if it's columns, if it's collections, if it's magazines,
if it's your own stuff, read, read, read, read, read.
I feel like it's like eating your greens.
I mean that in a positive way.
(47:38):
Reading should not feel like broccoli, right?
It should be incredibly engaging and make you happy, but that's the special sauce.
The more you do it, it has this way of just seeping into your bones and making you better
at it, even if you're not aware of it.
And then the counterpoint to that, I mean, not the counterpoint, but the analog to that
(48:00):
is do write as much as possible.
Don't be selective in terms of what you're going to write, and when you're going to write,
and who you're going to write for.
Take every opportunity that's offered to you.
You don't have to say, like, I'm going to do only this, only this place, and I only
have these three or four places that I want to work for.
Take everything.
(48:21):
I wrote for a lot of places and a lot of subjects that I didn't think that I gave a damn about,
but all of them taught me something along the way.
So I think that you're at a point in your life where you have the opportunity to make
mistakes and trails that you might turn around from, but take advantage of that because the
(48:42):
stakes are lower.
Jason Gay, thank you so much for being with us today.
I'm grateful, and thank you so much for these questions.
It's good to be thinking about some of these things that I haven't thought about ever.
I'm genuinely honored.
I won't tell my producer that.
I'll give him a big head.
Thanks to our listeners.
(49:03):
I'm Chris Meek.
We're out of time.
We'll see you next week.
Same time, same place.
Until then, stay safe and keep taking your next steps forward.
Thanks for tuning in to Next Steps Forward.
Be sure to join Chris Meek for another great show next Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time
and 1 p.m. Eastern Time on the Voice America Empowerment Channel.
(49:27):
This week, make things happen in your life.
See you then.
Bye.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.