Tag: Sports Illustrated

Great paragraphs: “Mom let her be who she was”

One skill I’ve learned to appreciate is the crafting of really good paragraphs. Sounds simple, but great writers can craft a paragraph with something that lesser writers would use pages to accomplish. So I’m going to start noting and writing about examples of insanely well-written grafs…

First up, I noted this amazing graf in Gary Smith’s fantastic Sports Illustrated article on Bonnie Richardson, a high school athlete who twice won the Texas state track and field championship… by herself. In this paragraph, Smith is talking about how Richardson’s mother worked hard to help her daughter, but also gave her room to be herself. In about 200 words, we get a rich, narrative glimpse of Bonnie’s growth from toddler to high school phenom:

Yep, lucky Bonnie, because OmniMom let her be who she was: the four-year-old girl shooting a Remington at prickly pear cactus with Dad. The five-year-old climbing on a bucket to mount Snip and trot off with Dad to run the ranch. The seven-year-old scaling bluffs and building forts and diving into Onion Creek till the horn from Dad’s pickup called her to dinner. The eight-year-old rising at 4 a.m. to spend all day separating the cattle for weighing and shipping, and swallowing so much dust that she’d spit brown till tomorrow. The 10-year-old sobbing when the family moved from the 12,000-acre ranch where Dad worked to an 85-acre homestead that the Richardsons could call their own. The 12-year-old praying out loud with Lee when monster hailstones drummed their sports banquet and tornado sirens screamed—”Please, Lord, don’t let them find my dead body in a dress!” The 17-year-old in bulky camouflage shorts, pockets bulging with snacks and energy bars, who’d gone to school with the same six boys for so many years that she’d decided to defer romance till college and focus meanwhile on clamping them in headlocks in the hallways and flattening their right arms on the school’s picnic table during lunchtime arm wrestling.

In that one paragraph, Smith packs eight scenes; a narrative slide-show, rich with evocative details (brown spit; five-year-old Bonnie climbing on a bucket; camouflage shorts loaded with energy bars) that show us a lot about Richardson.

Great stuff. Read the rest here.

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Fine writing in unexpected places

One idea my instructors at Johns Hopkins hammer home is the notion that to be a great writer, you need to “read like a writer.” More and more, I see what they mean. I read newspapers and magazines differently these days, dissecting paragraphs and words as I go, noticing small bits of writing technique and style that work well.

Ty LawsonThis short Sports Illustrated article on the national champion North Carolina Tar Heels is a good example. I printed it out to read after my Tar Heels won the title, and finally got the chance to read it today. Unlike many articles written about the championship game, this piece by Tim Layden looks beyond the score and tells the story of North Carolina’s season and the different challenges faced by some of its key players. Layden crafts some deft bits of writing in this piece, like this:

On the afternoon of the championship game, Lawson was so nervous that he could barely touch his pregame meal of chicken, steak, rice and potatoes. But hours later he went out and devoured Michigan State with a game-high 21 points, eight steals and six assists, with just one turnover

It works well not only because it is witty, but because Layden did his homework to be able to describe, with detail, the meal Lawson couldn’t eat, and contrast it with his stats from the game. Structurally, he builds two lists of four items and runs them parallel to each other.

Layden also does a nice job blending direct observation and reporting with analysis. He shows scenes that lead the reader back to the outcome of the game:

By 11 the next morning Williams and his assistants were huddled in a private room at the team’s hotel, studying video. They cued up Michigan State’s emotional upset of Connecticut, breaking down the Spartans. They did this, as always, with the sound off. A day later they would silence the Spartans more forcefully.

It’s a small thing, but connecting the observation that the UNC coaches studied the game film of the Spartans with the sound down with the way the team silenced the crowd and their opponent the following night is clever. Layden didn’t just report the game like countless other sports writers; he told the story with narrative and metaphor. Just because an article is a sports story doesn’t mean it can’t be good writing. Layden proves that in this piece.

Read the rest here.

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