Jason Gay talked to us about taking Dennis Eckersley deep, selling apples from a donkey cart, and what sports mean to fish.
This week, I spoke to Jason Gay, a sports columnist at The Wall Street Journal. In additional to being a columnist at The Journal, he’s also a funny human being, as you’ll see once you keep reading. And you will keep reading.
Anyway, Jason’s column is a clever, hilarious look at whatever’s currently happening in the sports world. It’s not something you’d necessarily expect to see in The Journal, but that just speaks to how sportswriting is evolving. You can checkout Jason’s column archive and follow him on Twitter. If you read this conversation without laughing, you’re probably dead.
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Is there a moment from you childhood that stands out as a “Holy crap! Sports are awesome” moment, a moment that hooked you?
You mean besides my walk-off home run off Dennis Eckersley in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series?
I don’t think there’s any single moment. I don’t think it was even a choice. Everyone I knew was crazy about sports. Everyone played street hockey, whiffle ball, basketball, equestrian polo; everyone collected baseball cards and obsessed about trades and playoff games. Had I not joined in, I would have been forced to go to my room and turn my attention to homework. I would have become a good student, and gone to a better college, become President of the United States, or invented Facebook, and my life would be ruined.
At the end of the day, sports are just sports. We say they’re supposed to be a diversion, but for a lot of us, they’re more than that—even if you’re not covering sports for a living. Do you agree?
Sports are a diversion. I don’t think there’s any shame in admitting that, even if your livelihood is dependent on sports. By and large it is men and women chasing objects around fields or trying to do something faster than anyone else. The moment you stop thinking of sports as a diversion and think of it as something bigger and more transformative that’s the time to turn off the TV and go to sleep, because you’re watching a corny PBS documentary.
With the Internet cutting down barriers, sportswriting has become so much more than just game recaps, trade roundups, rumors, and quotes. There’s just so much more creative, insightful, entertaining, and important stuff being produced each day. Do you agree?
There is something for everyone! You can get detailed analysis, numerical breakdowns, lyrical rapture, rumor-mongering, audio, video and whatever Skip Bayless is. It’s a big wide audience and there’s no one way to do it. It’s fantastic there are so many choices.
At a more traditional place like The Wall Street Journal, your daily column is so unique—and hilarious—in the way you talk about sports. We never would’ve seen something like it at a major national paper in the past, right?
Thank you! But I’m not sure it’s very ground-breaking—a couple generations back, there were plenty of columnists writing five, six sometimes seven days a week. And many people on-line write a lot more than that. I think what’s unusual is that the Journal was interested in trying it—the paper has dramatically expanded its sports coverage in recent years and the editors are pretty bold about experimenting. Without their vision, I’d be selling apples from a donkey cart. Not that there’s anything wrong with selling apples from a donkey cart.
As a man, what have sports meant to you?
As a man, it’s been a constant source of entertainment and amusement. As a fish, it’s been disappointing.
Why do you think sports are such an important part of life for so many men?
This is the old boring answer but it’s a common thread running through a lot of people’s lives—you put five strangers around a grill, and at least four will have an opinion about the NBA Finals. The remaining guy will tell you that hot dog looks overcooked.
I will add that one thing that I’ve come to feel strongly about sports is that there’s still a significant number of people who consider themselves casual fans. They’re leading busy lives and can’t watch much, and what they watch they’re watching out of the corner of one eye because they’re also monitoring their kids or their job or their 401k. They might not want to break down the MLB Draft, but they still care enough to want to see the World Series. I think there’s a big, vast audience of people like that, who like sports, but watch with a bit of bemused attachment, because they have more important stuff to do. I hear from a lot of people like that.
And last, is there one specific moment in your life that really signifies what sports are really all about for you?
You mean besides my walk-off home run off Dennis Eckersley in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series?
One thing that I’ve really enjoyed in recent years is reconnecting with my dad about sports. He’s an old high school tennis coach, who’s been at it for decades, and I spent thousands of hours sitting with him as a kid watching Nastase and Borg and Connors and McEnroe and on and on. And now we talk about Federer and Rafa and Djokovic and it just amplifies the experience and I still learn a ton from listening to him. The fact that he can still beat me at tennis, however, is throughly depressing.
—Photo via TheBaseballChick.com