Sports journalist Kathy Baker about lies, hockey and wedding ratings
the whole world is reeling from World Cup, and sports commentators get attention (and nuts) no less than the players themselves. We talked about the peculiarities of sports perception with journalist Kathy Baker - the regular author of the best American publication about sports Grantland, combining traditional serious sports journalism with pop culture. Kathy Baker has gone an unusual way from the vice presidency of Goldman Sachs to the status of a rising star in sports journalism. In addition to covering sports, Baker has monthly columns in which he conducts a rating of wedding announcements published in The New York Times. She told us about the love of hockey and the Russian national team, about how Americans react to wedding jokes and about what constitutes American sports journalism.
You were known long before a career in sports journalism as a person who has been moderating online chat rooms since the age of twelve during the heyday of their career. What is the general history of your relationship with the Internet?
I was 10 or 11 years old when I got my first computer. Before that, we had a family computer, which was a huge floppy disk. When we bought a new one, it coincided with the advent of the first modems. The Internet just mesmerized me. I loved books and libraries, and on the Internet it was possible to read endlessly. Then there were online chat rooms. There was a room for children, there was also a sport, of course. Gradually, I joined, and since I spent there a huge amount of time, the creators of these chats noticed me and offered money for moderation. I was paid eight dollars an hour. I explained what it means when someone types a colon, followed by a dash and a bracket, scribbling for mate and stuff like that.
In the article on Deadspin, you tell about the history of your Internet youth, including how you composed yourself online to such an extent that the drama came offline. More or less all adolescents did this at one time, didn't they?
I thought about it quite a lot. It was my little strange secret, and it took me quite a lot of time to finally decide to write about it. What surprised me the most, though it shouldn't have been, is the number of people who wrote to me: “Lord, I did the same!” Someone, of course, wrote: "Lord, and yet I just lied to myself, just like that!" It was interesting to watch how a whole generation of people who did not have the Internet and who lived their normal lives, suddenly found themselves online and got the opportunity to endlessly touch anonymously. The most exciting thing at the beginning of the Internet era was how people reacted to it, groping for all sorts of facets and admiring everything he suggested. The article was not really about my experience even, but about the general conspiracy from the Internet.
These are the people who, according to your article, hounded you for lying on the Internet, - they, too, must have done something to themselves about themselves? Why was there such a fiery reaction?
Online communities are like this: people who have their own secrets are often the first to point fingers at others. To divert suspicion from oneself or for the sake of the reaction itself. After this article, I wrote many people who were active at the time, and then disappeared from the Internet. The difference of that time and the present in the sense of presence - a lot of what you do online, one way or another connected with your real "I". And much of it is accepted. Previously, it was not so that all your friends are present on the Internet.
How did you come to sports journalism and to Grantland?
After graduating from Yale University, I worked in the financial sector for about six years, at Goldman Sachs. I was engaged in growth-decline, I observed the collapse of the economy of 2007–2008, I saw how the economic bubble could actually burst. Although I liked my work, at about the same time I realized that I didn’t really want to be on this roller coaster until the end of my life. Since childhood, I loved to write, so I started writing for sites and blogging on Tumblr. Is there a tumblr in Russia?
Yes, this is our main supplier of gifs.
Sometimes it seems to me too that it exists for these purposes. In general, one thing followed another, and I was fortunate enough to meet people who saw my writings - and they liked it. I then lived in New York, and there a high concentration of editors and journalists, we met, became friends. Some of my articles caught the eye of people who later founded Grantland, and they wanted me on the staff. By and large, I was just very lucky, although I worked very, very much to bring writing skills to the level of craft. But still it was a happy coincidence.
The level of writing talent in Grantland is simply phenomenal. Do not you think that this site now, together with ESPN, best of all talks about sports?
I am so happy that I work there. We recently turned three years old, and if you think about it, it’s just insane, how we grew up during this time and how we expanded. And thanks to the readers, editors and people from ESPN, everything turned out well. I had the opportunity to go to Magnitogorsk, to Russia, for two whole weeks, and this is amazing both from the point of view of reporter experience and from the point of view of impressions. There are many sites that are not considered sporty in their nature, but provide a cloud of quality material on a topic, like The New Yorker, for example.
There was an amazing woeful text about Lance Armstrong, written by his many years of fans and fans after Armstrong admitted to doping. I often recall this text when I think of disappointment. That's what makes sports journalism so interesting - there is always drama in it.
I love these stories, especially fascinating to watch them during the Olympic Games. A huge, gigantic room filled with journalists, and everyone is working in their own directions, going back and forth, discussing their texts, and I think: damn, why didn't these thoughts come to my mind? And you can see how hard-working all these people are in the industry, and for some these are the eighteenth Olympic Games, and they are: "Here in the time of Sarajevo ..." - or: - "Back in Lillehammer ..." For me, this is generally the first Olympic Games, but these people have seen so much in their entire careers. The presence there was a real humiliation, in a good way, because you are still a puppy, and there were those whom you read as a child. Speaking of Lance Armstrong. There was Bonnie Ford, an incredible investigative journalist. She was one of the first to say: "Wait a minute. Maybe all the achievements of Armstrong after returning are really not real." Such people and such stories serve as a constant reminder that sport is more than a game and a final score.
If it seems to you that New York is not as crazy as shown in “Sex and the City” and that there really are no such crazy people, then you should be upset - they are
Rumors about the plight of American professional athletes often circulated during the Olympics. Especially popular was the story about the snowboarder, who had to collect money for a trip and equipment on Kickstarter. Is everything really so bad?
I do not want to talk about the American Olympic Committee, otherwise my friends will call me from there and say that I have misquoted all the facts. The structure is such that each sport has its own federation associated with the Olympic Committee, and its budget, and this budget is not necessarily sponsored by the state. Some federations, of course, have more money than others, and they can afford to pay all bills at all. Like hockey, for example - they can send their hockey players to Sochi with a cloud of assistants. Yes, they do not have to ask neighbors to buy cookies in order to collect money. Situations such as the one about which you told, of course, occur, but they are most often about athletes whose history is interesting — they came from nowhere and want to surprise everyone. So they have to collect money for themselves, because no one invests in them. All these are special cases and they depend on the sport.
At Grantland, you are running a column with a rating of wedding announcements that are published in The New York Times. Honestly, for quite a long time I was completely confident that these announcements were nothing more than an invention of the writers of Sex and the City. There Charlotte really wanted to turn these announcements. How did you come up with this idea and why does Grantland not mind?
If it seems to you that New York is not as crazy as shown in Sex and the City, and that there really are no such crazy people, then you should be upset - they are. Wedding announcements in The New York Times - one of the indicators of this madness. Every Sunday stories about newlyweds are published there, and they seem fictional because of their impeccability. And before me, a lot of people bought these Sunday issues just because of wedding announcements - they are loved and hated at the same time. On the Gawker website, there was a girl, Alexis Sverdloff, who came up with a small system for evaluating these announcements, where she gave points by points. For a job - for example, the daughter of a judge or the son of the founder of the railway. Or for a wedding place - you got married in a boat in the middle of the Pacific. Then the column stopped to lead, and I picked it up after a couple of years. When I came to Grantland, I was asked what topic my regular column would be on. I said: "Listen, this is rather strange, but here I have a wedding theme, and it has nothing to do with sports." And we decided to make it more about statistics, that is, to bring it closer to the sport: we expanded the rating system, added new items and called it all NUPTIALS (Names, Universities, Parents, Tropes, Identifiers, Avocations, Locales, and Special Situations). A fairly time consuming system. If your name is Robert Francis Anderson IV, then you get four points. You get extra points if, for example, your father is a descendant of the founders of the United States or your parents have some audacious work. Every month I get nervous that I will have nothing to write about or I will have nothing to say, because I have been writing about this for years, and bam - every month there are so many ridiculous wedding announcements. Sometimes people write to me: "What a cool joke!" - and I say: - "Yes, I just quoted the original."
But someone writes this, the editors of the best newspaper in the world, in fact. Do they even know that you do their work every month?
Once I was anonymously written from the newspaper. They said that their policy has changed and now instead of the word "bridegroom" (literally - "bride's groom"), they say simply "groom" ("groom"). I replied: "Well, thanks for fresh. Is this because of gay marriage?" And the guy said: "Yes, I do not know." He said that they were honoring me, even joked. I have a feeling that there is a category of writers, which deals specifically with these announcements for eternity. They take a pinch of information and make a whole story out of it. I am sure that this is a permanent test for them. But there, of course, there are writers who can never be told whether they are playing a fool or, in fact, about the world and represent themselves in some way. So when I write about weddings, I don’t try to offend couples. I rather make fun of the system itself: some people sent their names and services to the newspaper, while other people rank them according to unknown criteria. This is not an attempt to say "well, stupid ones", "America does not rise from its knees," "society is rotten," but unreal entertainment for me and my friends. I love to write about it, and talk about it, and discuss it.
My favorite joke about the newlyweds was about a couple, in the announcement of which a million times it was repeated that they were both urologists. And you advised them to repeat “Urologist” every time at the table. - “No, YOU'REologist!” - until their children sign the rejection of their parents. You did not receive death threats?
Never. This is an indicator of what people understand - I do not laugh at them specifically, but at the system itself. That is, I have never received a letter in the spirit of "you ruined my life and I cried all weekend." Rather, on the contrary - one couple wrote to me: “Listen, well, we counted here, and we should have got three points more, and then we would be in second place.” They have the right attitude. Another funny story was when two couples found mention of themselves in my column. They studied together, so they found each other, met and sent me a photo where the four of them were sitting in a restaurant. One girl contacted me and asked me to write a fake announcement that I could give to my fiance as a wedding gift. I agreed, we even hired a designer and designed everything in the spirit of a reversal in The New York Times.
Do not you think that this is not about the right attitude, but about the American obsession with ratings? It does not matter to people that this is a comic rating that laughs them, is it just important for them to be in the first place in it?
I agree, because the existence of a rating makes the columns so unseemly. This is part of the thing, I kind of say to them: "Hey, I actually have a nameplate, and I actually sit and count your points." Because of the presence of numbers, people instead of anger raise an eyebrow and think: "Wait, I have to be taller."
Previously, the interview had to be in the locker room, where women, of course, were not allowed
What has changed in American sports journalism now? Where is she going?
“Technology has changed the whole industry, and it has both good and bad consequences. The biggest discord is between the so-called old school journalism and mainstream media such as MSN and bloggers. There is no particular difference, but the tension between people who worked in the old format times persists. When there were only three or four in the whole industry, they flew on airplanes with the players, sat with them in the locker room after the games, talked to them face to face, and the next day printed the story that everyone read. There are billions of accredited media now, and some of them work according to the old scheme, while others just sit at press conferences and constantly tweet something. All this led to the fact that people began to think: who in general is worthy of writing about sports? What kind of reader is it? There are still people with an analytical approach who use statistical calculations, and there are people who say "you can not measure the winner." The main questions remain the same - what is the purpose of modern media? Provide fresh information or analysis? It is time for journalists to understand that they are no longer the only people in the room, and that the world has changed, and that it is time for them to adapt. I myself constantly think about it. What do I want to describe - the game or the atmosphere? And often the answer is yes all at once.
I rather meant the emergence of these new media types of BuzzFeed, which change the picture. Here, even the old-fashioned newspaper The Guardian began to get involved in lists in the spirit of the “10 hottest football players of this championship” or quizzes “Guess whose beard it is.” Do you have editorial tricks where editors run around with rabid eyes and say: “we urgently need to attract another million readers through Facebook”?
I can’t say anything about it, because I rarely visit them - I live in San Francisco, and the editors are mainly in Los Angeles. Regarding BuzzFeed, they know what they want and what they do. At the same time, they threaten new levels with serious content. For example, they have a correspondent, Max Seddon, and he has amazing reports from Ukraine, very objective and without general hysteria on the topic. Although we also ask questions about balance, our philosophy stems from the creator of the site, Bill Simmons, who, in general, introduced this slightly carefree approach to sports journalism, mixing it with pop culture. Before that, everything was very serious and very professional. And then this guy appeared and began to write what you and your friends might have thought about.
Do you know that your article was transferred to sports.ru?
This is about the "Magnitogorsk"? I was sent a link to it, I even drove through the Google translation - in my opinion, it is a decent translation. I remember reading it and thinking: it worked out pretty well, even despite two translations. This is one of my favorite articles, and I was very nervous, because I wanted to do everything in the best way. It seems to work out.
Do you like hockey since childhood? I honestly tried to figure it out, but instead of people who sincerely love him, I constantly come across a different type. For example, for those who claim that the victory of the Russian national team at the championship in Belarus is insignificant in the global context. It seems like most of the countries are sending the weakest lineup to these World Championships.
- First, I want to defend Russia. The problem is not that weak players are sent to the World Championships (besides this is not the case). It’s just that the NHL is playing the playoffs at the same time, so many Canadian players are not participating in the World Cup due to injuries and all that. But the US team - we sent really good young players to the world championship, the Russian team had an excellent composition. You can be proud of the team. My hobby began when the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup, I was 10 or 11 years old. After a couple of years, I even started playing hockey myself. It has always been my favorite sport. I spent a cloud of time on the Internet, talking about it with other fans, combined my two main interests, so to speak.
А кто вам больше всего нравится в российском хоккее?
Среди моих любимчиков однозначно Александр Овечкин (сейчас - правый крайний нападающий "Вашингтон Кэпиталз"). В нем всегда столько энтузиазма, и хотя у американского спорта есть тенденция изматывать спортсменов, ему удалось все выдержать. Евгений Малкин отличный. Еще мне очень нравится Виктор Тихонов, даже удалось взять у него интервью, когда я была в Петербурге. Очень люблю Наиля Якупова, который сейчас играет в "Эдмонтон Ойлерз".
По моим ощущениям, в хоккее из женщин разбираются только жительницы Канады и вы. For some reason, it is not as popular as football, for example.
- In general, yes, this can be judged even by the time of the women's hockey teams. This year our team took the second place at the Olympics, the women's hockey team from Russia is also very young. Even when talking to men involved in women's hockey, for them it is also all new.
And men are not surprised by your choice of your favorite sport?
Sometimes, when you meet new people and tell them that you write about sports, they ask: "How did you become interested in sports?" There is nothing like this in this question, it is even quite logical, but no one will ever ask a man about it. Everybody thinks it's cool by default. And women's interest in sports must have some kind of history of origin. Even if we talk about the journalism itself - earlier for the interview one had to be in the locker room, where women, of course, were not allowed. I was lucky - before me there was a whole generation of women who broke most of the barriers, and now I just enjoy the consequences of their struggle.
Photo: 1, 2 via Shutterstock