Trent is one of my best friends and the perfect guest to begin this podcast. In our chat, we talk about working a baseball beat – and why his day is so damn long – why the Cincinnati Post was a great paper to work for even though we knew it was going to die at the end of 2007, and how he handles anonymous criticism from what could be the very vocal minority. Plus, why would he go from working at a national website to a local newspaper?
Here are some of the other topics we discussed.
I’ve been thinking about this idea for awhile. Maybe six months or so. I’ve turned it over in my head. I’ve talked to trusted friends and colleagues. I’ve had to go through airport security with a phallic-looking Snowball microphone in my luggage. I’ve thought about what kind of podcast I’d want to hear every week.
Hopefully, I’m starting one that you’d like to ingest as well – thus, the mighty Mightier Than the Sword podcast has been born.
I’m a sports writer, but this isn’t necessarily going to be a sports writing podcast. In fact, chop off the first part of the phrase. It will be a podcast about writing. And about writers, about their backgrounds and about the charcoal-to-bark, pen-to-paper, digits-to-keyboard, fingers-to-smartphone-screen world in which I love to live.
I didn’t care about creating another podcast that broke down the latest big game or previewed the next one upcoming.
I’m more interested in the type of podcast that involve conversations about why we love to do what we love to do. In my case, that’s writing and journalism. So, let’s discuss the craft of writing – why we put this paragraph here instead of two grafs lower, why we thought that line was more effective as a lede rather than the kicker, why you ask the questions you do.
Let’s pontificate on the state of journalism and how we can all do it better. Let’s showcase the journey a top writer took to get where she is or daydream with the recent college grad about where he wants to go.
A couple things you can expect out of the Mightier Than the Sword podcast.
1) I’m a journalist. The story isn’t usually about me. That’s why I’ll mostly refrain from monologues before I introduce my weekly guest. We’ll fade out the sweet intro sounds of my favorite Athens, Ga., band, Asa Nisi Masa, and go right into the conversation with the guest.
2) We’re going to be as timeless as possible. I don’t want somebody who discovers this podcast two years from now having to wade through analysis of games that are 750-days old. The goal is to talk about topics that will matter in a month. Or a year. Or five years. That, to me, leaves a weighty imprint on this podcast that won’t ever dissolve.
3) I want listeners involved. I want to hear your questions, and I want to hear about your suggestions for interesting guests. This won’t be a democracy, but I promise to be a benevolent king.
So, that’s that. If you want even more of an introduction or to listen to more details about my background and about my goals for the podcast, take a listen. And, in the months ahead, keep listening and listening and listening to those stories behind the storytellers.
This week’s guest (7-24): C. Trent Rosecrans, Cincinnati Enquirer, Reds beat writer
Posted in Podcast
The other day, I was changing Noah’s pull-up (his third poopy diaper in a 90-minute span! (when, oh when, will he be fully potty-trained?)), Bella asked Jonah what he wants to be when he grows up.
He quickly said, “Superman.” (It should be noted he wore a Superman shirt that day)
Then, I asked Stella what she wanted to be when he grows up, and she said quite simply, “A baby.”
So, that’s that.
Really, really glad we’ve got that settled, and apparently, she won’t have to go to college after all.
Posted in Twins blog
(April 15, 2013; 9:12 p.m.): About eight hours ago, the world changed for the worse again. It changed in the way the world changed on 9/11 or during Oklahoma City or during Columbine or during Sandy Hook. The two explosions that occurred more than four hours into the Boston Marathon were world-changers on a planet filled with world-changers. It was a domestic bombing, like 9/11 and Oklahoma City, that has scared and saddened us. The death of a child, like in Columbine and Sandy Hook, has made us weep for the future’s loss and the loss of their future.
Seven hours ago, my 3-year-old children went to bed for their daily nap. I kept the TV off when they were downstairs, but as soon as their bedroom door closed and their turtle night-light flickered to life, I immersed myself in the news coverage. And the anger. And the sadness. And the goddammit-what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-this-world of it all.
I seethed and I teared up and I tweeted, and my children slept, blissfully unaware that the world outside our doors had changed once again.
They’re 3, and the world to them is infinitely good. They spend their days playing and learning in preschool and going for walks with mommy and daddy. They love Sesame Street and Toy Story and their baby dolls and looking at the pictures from our recent Disney cruise. They don’t know heartbreak or evil or the goddammit-what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-this-world of life. Their sadness leaks out when a toy is lost. Nothing more and nothing less. I envy them for that.
Four hours ago, after my kids had emerged from their slumber (and the TV had been darkened), my daughter pulled out a pair of my wife’s brown shoes. She traipsed around the kitchen with her oversized footwear, pulled out her orange toy binoculars and declared, “I seeee you, Daddy.” I turned away from the sadness on Twitter and smiled.
Then, I helped her and her brother build a bear circus* out of Lego blocks.
*The other day, we built a caterpillar zoo. Today it was a bear circus. Somehow these things exist in my kids’ minds.
Every parent, I’m sure, ponders their children and the innocence that eventually will disappear forever. The country cries, and soon enough, the kids will cry along with it. But for now, they laugh and they drink their milk and they chase each other around the island in our kitchen.
Two hours ago, a buddy of mine tweeted to me that it was difficult having to explain what had happened in Boston to his 5-year-old son. What was his reaction? I asked. Did he understand?
“He was confused that an explosion could be real,” my buddy wrote.
The world probably changed today for his child, just like it did for all of us. Explosions are real. Evil does exist. A road race can lead to destruction and death.
Ten hours from now, when my kids wake up for a brand new day of sunshine and innocence, they won’t know any better. But they will soon enough, and that’s when our job as parents will change. We will have to be the ones to teach them people are good and that life can be beautiful. And that the loss of innocence can be a blessing. That it teaches us how to survive.
Their world, at some point, will change. Hopefully, we’ll teach them how it can be for the better.
Posted in Twins blog
See Sid Gillman’s name up there?
Either way, nine years after leaving the school for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Roethlisberger was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame on Saturday. Obviously, that’s deservedly so.
Roethlisberger’s* induction, though, reminded me of Sid Gillman, and the reasons it took him until 1991 for the Miami gatekeepers to deem him HOF worthy.
You have to understand that Gillman, to this day, is not well-received by many Miami old-timer alums.
*For the record, I asked Roethlisberger during the run-up to Super Bowl XLV if he knew anything about Gillman for the book I was writing, and he admitted that he couldn’t tell me much.
Gillman was the first in the long-revered Cradle of Coaches, but there are no monuments to him on campus. His likeness will not be made into a statue inside the stadium. There were people who refused to talk to me when I was researching the Sid book because they did not want to discuss the man who left Miami for good after the 1947 season. For the record, that’s 66 (!) years ago.
Sid Gillman made his mark at Miami, but he is also not much more than a blemish on its memories.
“You can have him. [Gillman] owed everybody in Oxford when he left,” Lucy Ewbank, Weeb Ewbank’s widow, said as she attended a Miami football statute ceremony in 2010 (at the time, she was 104 years old, and she lived another 15 months). Her opinions are not atypical at Miami.
The reasons for that are pretty simple. After four seasons of leading the team to a combined record of 31-6-1 record, Sid left Miami to work as an assistant under Red Blaik at Army, and one year later, he returned to southwest Ohio to take the University of Cincinnati head coaching job. Then, he stole many of Miami’s coaches (including head coach George Blackburn) and many of Miami’s best players to join him in Cincinnati.
Miami hired Woody Hayes, who had to rebuild the program that Gillman had raided, and the bitterness remained for many years. Hayes and Gillman eventually fixed their problems, but I can understand Miami’s disgust with Gillman.
And that is why it took Gillman until 1991 to make the Miami Hall of Fame. The Gillman family believes Paul Brown was one of the biggest reasons it took so long for the school to induct Gillman (since Brown played and graduated from Miami and since Brown and Gillman were pro football rivals that never reconciled, it’s not a stretch to believe that theory is true). For god’s sake, Gillman was already a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, so yeah, it was a bit of a stretch that Miami hadn’t seen fit to recognize him.
One of my most thrilling research discoveries for the Sid book was when, while going through folders at the Miami sports information office, I ran across a stack of letters from 1977 that urged the school’s decision-makers to allow Gillman to enter the Hall.
There had been a reunion for the 1947 Sun Bowl team that year, and Gillman’s former players got to talking about the injustice of their coach not being allowed into the Hall (though it could be argued that the honor is reserved for those who graduated from Miami, and Sid, instead, had a diploma from Ohio State). So, his former players decided to write letters – which I read more than 30 years later – to convince the administration that Gillman should be included.
“There was a very strong flavor for his induction,” Ara Parseghian told me in a phone conversation. “People recognized what they had learned from Sid and didn’t think about the negative things, where he got his ass in a jam.”
The former players penned their thoughts on work stationary ranging from the General Motors Corporation to Century 21 to Stevenson Photo Color Company. There was maybe a dozen of them, and as I fanned them across the desk on which I was working, it was a colorful display that repeated the same thing over and over again: Sid deserves to be in the Miami Hall of Fame. His mark on Miami is obvious for all to see. He needs to be recognized. Do it now.
For a guy who I argue falls through the cracks of NFL history, it’s amazing that old grudges kept Gillman out of the place where the people should have known exactly how much he had meant to the program. But that was Sid. An outstanding coach who had made too many enemies. The wart on the index finger pointing the way forward.
Despite all the success and because of all the drama, the school punished him for many years – deservedly or not.
The best part of the Sun Bowl reunion letters, though, was the immediate response from the administration. John Dolibois, the Miami VP of development and alumni affairs, dashed off a quick note to AD Dick Shrider in which he wrote: “I was literally besieged at the Sun Bowl party about Sid Gillman. I now agree … that his time has come.”
And it did. Just took another 14 years to make it happen.
Posted in Sid Gillman
Tagged Ara Parseghian, Ben Roethlisberger, Cradle of Coaches, Miami University, Sid Gillman
I was a Led Zeppelin fan in middle school all the way through high school. That was probably my dad’s influence. He didn’t have any of Zep’s vinyl LPs in his collection, which I loved thumbing through on occasion (mostly, probably, to see a certain Blind Faith album cover) but he introduced me to Zeppelin through the magic of compact discs.
The first real rock concert I ever attended was Aerosmith at Lakewood Amphitheater in 1994, but the first concert I was supposed to attend was an ill-fated Coverdale-Page show that was cancelled, apparently because of slow ticket sales. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the announcement on 96 Rock that the show would not go on, that I would not see Jimmy Page play with David Coverdale, and I’m sure my wailing that echoed through the two rooms of my parent’s basement could have competed with any of Robert Plant’s bluesy screaming on Led Zeppelin I.
I loved Led Zeppelin in my teenage year, more than I loved Pink Floyd, more than I loved Def Leppard, more than I loved most any other band that had ever existed.
But as many romances do, that infatuation faded after high school. In college, I listened to other genres – harder and faster music. Mike Patton and Ben Harper and the Pietasters and System of a Down and Sevendust. I owned all the Zeppelin albums, but they received less and less play as I got older. In fact, I only recently added the entire Zeppelin catalog to my iPod, and those songs only pop up randomly now and again when I’m on shuffle (curiously, I seem to get more songs from Coda than any other Zeppelin album).
I seem to recall the three surviving members of Zeppelin reuniting for one last show in London in 2007, but I barely put in the effort to find clips from the show on YouTube. I had moved on.
Recently, though, I found myself watching a Zeppelin press conference online to drum up publicity for the band releasing that live performance from ’07 on a DVD/CD called “Celebration Day.”
I sat transfixed for 45 minutes watching Robert Plant and Jimmy Page ignore questions about why they won’t reunite for a proper tour, and after Zeppelin was honored at the Kennedy Center Awards in December, I DVR’d the band’s appearance on the Letterman show.
Then, I was tooling around on YouTube a couple weeks ago, and I found this – probably the best version of Stairway to Heaven I’ve ever heard. Heart’s Ann Wilson wails on that song the way Plant used to sing it (but can’t anymore), Jason Bonham plays with the power and intensity of his late father, and the choir … my god, that choir. It’s brought a tear to my eye every time I watch it (not unlike Plant in the audience that night).
Since then, I’ve been on a Zeppelin kick. I downloaded “Celebration Day,” and I discovered it rocks hard enough to knock me back to high school. I’ve watched the Heart version of Stairway probably 10 times. And I thought back to Feb. 28, 1995, when some buddies and I saw Page and Plant play at the Omni in Atlanta when they toured to support their first faux Zeppelin album (John Paul Jones wasn’t involved in this project, leading him to joke later that Page and Plant must have misplaced his phone number).
That concert experience isn’t on my top-10 best list, but there’s one moment at that show that I’ll never forget. In fact, it might be the best song I’ve ever heard performed live.
Page/Plant were 10 songs through their 21-song set list, and up until that point, they sounded like so many of the Zeppelin bootlegs I had heard. Solid, but gritty. Decent, but rough. Powerful, but a little bit fuzzy. If you’ve ever heard the soundtrack to The Song Remains the Same, you’ll know what I mean. Zeppelin sounds kick-ass, but the band doesn’t sound great either. If that makes sense.
On that winter night in 1995, though, the band kicked into “Achilles Last Stand,” and everything changed. The night, which had been mediocre so far, was saved by this 10 minute-piece of music. We were in this 15,000-seat arena, and until that point, it hadn’t felt intimate. But Page started on that slow, meandering guitar lick and Plant started on those vocals, and suddenly, a rock concert morphed into magic. I’d experienced that at a show once before (during “One of These Days” at a 1994 Pink Floyd concert when that bass line and my pounding heart melded into one), and since then, it’s happened maybe one other time (Faith No More playing “Caffeine” at the Masquerade in Atlanta in 1998).
An experience that can never be recreated, but one that never leaves your system. An experience that’s transcendental and ephemeral and utterly unforgettable.
A couple nights ago, I found that moment on YouTube.
You, of course, won’t feel what I experienced that night in Atlanta 17 years ago (if I had to pick the exact second that everything changed, it’s at the 1:57 mark). When I watched the video, I didn’t feel it either*. But I could see the moment was there. I couldn’t feel it the same way I did when I was 16, but I knew it existed in a past life. That has to be good enough for the present.
*Though I’d never seen any video from this show, I did have a bootleg recording of Page-Plant’s performance that night, so I’ve heard this version of the song, maybe, two dozen times. I’ve never had the same reaction that I had that night, though watching the video for the first time was pretty freakin’ awesome.
Now, the question Zeppelin receives in every media session in which they participate is why they won’t get back together and do one last tour. Sometimes, Jimmy Page is elusive and mystical. Sometimes, Robert Plant looks pissed that he’s even being asked the question. Sometimes, it seems like John Paul Jones can’t answer because he’s day-dreaming.
Apparently, it’s Plant that doesn’t want the reunion, and the rest of the band is at his mercy.
You know what? It’s kind of perfect that they’re probably done as Led Zeppelin. It preserves that night in 2007 when Zeppelin, 27 years after it had broken up following the death of John Bonham, returned for two hours of triumph to be rock gods one last time. It preserves that 10 minutes of “Achilles Last Stand” on Feb. 28, 1995. Zeppelin doesn’t need to be The Rolling Stones or The Who and tour on old songs and faded memories into their AARP years.
One perfect YouTube video will have to be good enough for me; it will have to be good enough for all of us.
And it’s comforting to know that I can see that moment whenever I want. When I can think about my dad and I listening to Zeppelin in his Mazda RX7, when Zeppelin was the best band in the world, when I screamed about a cancelled concert, when Plant’s voice sent chills up my back.
Rock gods don’t ever die. But sometimes, they realize that their time together is gone, that there are other aspects of life to explore. Sometimes, rock gods just want to move on while the love and everything you ever felt about them remains forever the same. But only in the past.
Posted in Non-sports, Uncategorized
Tagged Achilles Last Stand, Celebration Day, Jason Bonham, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Led Zeppelin, Omni, Robert Plant
Josh Katzowitz - Sports Writer/Author/Editor 