To Prep or not to Prep?

What George Steinbrenner taught me about interviewing

Today we’re going to venture into the proverbial weeds a bit on a topic that is almost as old as journalism itself. When you are preparing to interview someone for a story, do you read everything you can find on the subject? Or do you go the tabula rasa route, striving to be the blankest possible slate so the interview and direction of your story are not shaped by preconceived notions and/or predetermined judgments?

Proponents of the latter approach believe that paying attention to what has already been written boxes you in and increases the likelihood that you will bring biases into your story rather than just find out for yourself. If you are profiling a CEO who has been publicly assailed for her arrogance and being a bully and mistreating her employees, and you read those clips, is it a reach to think that will color what you ask and how you ask it? I understand the reasoning behind the tabula rasa method, and I agree that knowing what is out there almost has to seep into how you go about the interviewing and writing processes. But I remain a fervent member of the read-everything club. It has worked for me over the years, and here are four reasons why.

1.     It demonstrates your initiative and professionalism. By making the effort to do a deep dive into someone’s background (no, a glance at someone’s LinkedIn profile doesn’t count), you establish from the start that you’ve put in the effort and that you’re a serious journalist who isn’t there to waste your subject’s time. You stand much more likely to get better responses as a result. To commemorate his 30^th anniversary of buying the Yankees for $10 million (including a parking garage), George Steinbrenner agreed to sit down with the Daily News (i.e. me)  in his Tampa office for what would be, I believe, his last extended newspaper interview.  I had to jump through multiple hoops to make this happen, most of which included proving to George’s PR guy, Howard Rubenstein, that I wasn’t some tabloid bottom-feeder looking for a cheap headline. It took weeks, but I made the cut, and then I started reading everything I could find about The Boss. Which could’ve filled a shipping container or two. Of course the New York dailies were a top prioity, but one of the best resources turned out to be the archives of George’s alma mater, Williams College. I found out the name of his favorite professor and that he once did a fine paper on Chaucer. I found out he was the sports editor of the school newspaper, The Williams Record, and once called for a coach’s firing, and regularly taunted the sports teams from archrival Amherst. I read up on his success as a hurdler on the track team. Of more recent vintage, I dug into the dysfunctional details of Billy Martin’s hiring and firing (five times), and articles about his relationships with other baseball executives, from commissioners Bowie Kuhn and Bud Selig to Red Sox president Larry Lucchino. (Keep reading and you will find out exactly what George thought of Larry Lucchino.) Not every bit of research I did came up in the interview - not even close - but it helped the cause nonetheless. When I somehow, organically, brought up Chaucer, George lit up.

“You’ve done your homework,” he said.

2.     It informs and sharpens your questions. The more you know about someone, the more you know what to ask. When I was working on a book about the 1969 Mets, They Said It Couldn’t Be Done, one of the best resources on Gil Hodges was an excellent, eponymous biography by Mort Zachter, who did remarkable research on his book, especially on Hodges’ years living and playing in Brooklyn. Armed with Mort’s insights and anecdotes, I was able to get some quality material from two of the Hodges children, Irene and Gil Jr., about what life was like at home and how their father was away from the ballpark.

3.     It can take your story in entirely new directions. While working on the ’69 Mets book and studying up on Cleon Jones and his childhood in Mobile, Alabama, I came across an account of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to arrive in the United States, in 1860. Slave ships had been banned more than 50 years before, but someone who is inclined to kidnap a boatload of people in Africa and herd them onto a schooner and head to the U.S., where they would provide free labor for rich white people, probably isn’t worried about a little old thing like the law. The Clotilda arrived under the cover of night on the Mobile River. Its human cargo was unloaded and then the ship sailed a little farther upriver, where it was burned and sunk to destroy the evidence. To this day, residents of that part of Mobile can trace their ancestry to the Clotilda, and call the area Africatown. It’s where Cleon Jones grew up and still lives. Visiting with Cleon in Africatown was one of the most compelling parts of that entire journey

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4.      It can help spare you from repeating factual errors. Paul Revere did indeed have a midnight ride, but there is no proof that he said, “The British are coming! The British are coming.” That famous battle cry didn’t appear until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow included it in his poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” in 1860. Clearly, we can’t ask Paul if he ever said this, but so often stories and quotes get handed down and become accepted as something between gospel and urban legend. It’s always good, when possible, to verify with your interview subject if what’s out there is accurate.

Which brings us back to Larry Lucchino, a pioneering baseball lifer who died last month. An hour or so into my conversation with Steinbrenner, he asked if we could go off the record; he had something he wanted to share. I said of course. This happens fairly regularly, and even though you can’t use anything that is designated as “off the record,” it still can be valuable, because you may be able to pursue the matter later, or find a way to confirm it. Well, in this case, there was nothing to confirm. It was just Steinbrenner’s opinion of the former Red Sox president, who is widely credited with launching the retro-ballpark boom with Camden Yards and played a key role in turning the Red Sox into a championship franchise. The Yankee-Red Sox rivalry had reached a new level of intensity at the time of our interview, and that was very apparent because Steinbrenner absolutely went off on Lucchino, calling him duplicitous and phony, among other niceties. He said that once, at an owner’s meeting, it took all the restraint he could summon to not punch Lucchino in the face. After 5 or 10 minutes, we were back on the record. The interview lasted three hours in all. It became the basis of a three-part series. When I thanked George for his time and shook his hand, he said he enjoyed talking with me and wanted to stay in touch. I flew home that night. A day or two later, the Yankees announced they had signed Jose Contreras, a free-agent pitcher from Cuba and a player the Red Sox had coveted also. In an interview with The New York Times, Lucchino called the Yankees “the evil empire.”

 I was transcribing my tape when the phone rang in my office. I picked up.

“Wayne, this is George.”

“Oh, hey, George. What’s going on?”

“Remember all that stuff I said about Larry Lucchino?”

“Yes, course.”

“Well, it’s ON THE RECORD!”

Here is what was now for publication:

"I've learned this about Lucchino: he's baseball's foremost chameleon of all time. He changes colors depending on where's he's standing. He's been at Baltimore and he deserted them there, and then went out to San Diego, and look at what trouble they're in out there. When he was in San Diego, he was a big man for the small markets. Now he's in Boston and he's for the big markets. He's not the kind of guy you want to have in your foxhole. He's running the team behind John Henry's back. I warned John it would happen, told him, `Just be careful.' He talks out of both sides of his mouth. He has trouble talking out of the front of it."