By Thomas Holton, Contributing Writer

 

AK: You obviously have a passion for sports. Were you into sports when you were growing up? If so, which ones?
AR: I was a gymnast from the time I was about two. And I think I started in gymnastics because I had way too much energy, so my parents needed something to get the energy out of me. Then I played softball; I was a shortstop and catcher all through high school. I also ran track, and ran the third leg of the 4x100 relay, the 100, and 200. I also played soccer here and there. In college, I was on the cheerleading team at the University of Florida.


AK: How has this participation in sports helped you in your writing?
AR: That’s a good question. I’m really into the psychology of sports. It’s one of the things that really attracted me to writing about athletes, and I think that if you haven’t been an athlete, it’s tough to be able to get into the head of one. If you played a sport like baseball, you know a little more about a player’s motivation, know why a coach did something, why a player did something. If you were an athlete you know what it means to be the first one to get there and the last one to leave and to have a competitive drive that someone who has never played sports doesn’t understand. So I think that if you’ve played sports, it helps you to just talk to an athlete. For example, if you’re interviewing someone and you don’t have a sports background, it’s hard to really have a good conversation with them and to find common ground. My sports background helps with that, especially in action sports and gymnastics; it helps me understand the way that gymnasts are flipping and spinning in the air and the way that they think of tricks. And I always think it’s very helpful to play sports and coach a sport. So when I was in college, I took coaching soccer, coaching basketball, coaching football, sports that I didn’t play, so that I could understand the way a team moves together on the floor in basketball or the way that you would put together a defense depending on what offense you saw in football. These experiences really helped me understand the games I was covering a lot more.


AK: You knew you wanted to be a writer at a very young age. What steps did you take to help you achieve this goal?
AR: Anyone who wants to be a writer the most important thing you should be doing is reading a ton. You can’t be a great writer without reading. When I was young, I would always love looking for places to write. Looking back, I knew I always wanted to be a writer, but I don’t think as a kid I totally knew that. I, of course, thought I was going to write fiction. I thought I was going to write children’s books. At a certain point I realized I wanted to write biographies and discovered that writing was what I really wanted to do. I remember when I was in 10th grade I read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. It was not a happy book, but for some reason when I read that book, it just connected with me. I realized that you could write really beautiful well-written stories about things that had happened in real life. So, it kind of changed the way I looked at writing. I wasn’t going to write about triple murders, but I knew that I could write like that about nonfiction. So, I started taking writing in high school and took every AP English class. Then I was one of those unique people in college that majored in journalism. I took any internship I could find; it didn’t matter if it paid me or if I paid them. I would write for anyone that would let me. And by the end of college I had tons of experience and tons of clips, and that kind of gave me a leg-up on people.


AK: Who has been a mentor in your career, and how did that happen?
AR: I’ve had a few. I think my first one was my magazine teacher in my junior year of college. Our assignments never had anything to do about sports. But about a third of the way through the year he pulled me aside and said that even though the assignments aren’t supposed to be about sports that I somehow inevitably found a way to write about sports. So, he told me that someone will pay you to do this; that you can make a career out of writing about sports, and I kind of had that light bulb moment. He really mentored me for my last couple of years in college; he convinced me to move to New York and give it a shot. I then had a mentor in my first editor at ESPN The Magazine, and he’s still kind of my mentor. He taught me a lot of things. He’s a tough, tough editor. I still hear him in my ear when I’m on a reporting trip. If I come back from a trip and he asks me a question I can’t answer, I get down on myself. He taught me how to edit my own stuff, too, that most stories can be ten percent shorter. Sometimes you have so much stuff written that it’s hard to decide what to put in the story, and he taught me the reader doesn’t know what he didn’t read, and that’s a really good point. As long as what’s there for the reader is great, then the reader won’t wonder about what wasn’t there. So he’s been a really good mentor. He’s sat me down and asked me questions like: Where do you want to be in five years? Do you like what you’re writing about? What do you want to write about? It was cool to have someone like that.


AK: How did you get the ESPN magazine gig?
AR: I won it in a candy bar wrapper . . . just kidding. After I moved to New York I worked for a magazine for a little while and also started freelancing, I just started beating down doors and going to every networking event and finally got some names at ESPN and sent them my resume and kind of harassing them, and I finally got invited in for an interview as a copy editor. A copy editor is like the last line of defense; they’re the grammar and spelling police. They make sure that if there’s a picture of Brett Favre, than it says ‘Brett Favre’ and not 'Terrell Owens' underneath the picture. So, I got hired as a copy editor, though I didn’t want to be a copy editor, then immediately, every day I’d go in and meet everyone, I was this annoying twenty four year old . . . ‘Hi! I’m Alyssa!!’ So I kept pitching and pitching and finally they let me write something and I started climbing up the totem pole. My first story for ESPN The Magazine is still to this day the most famous story I’ve ever written . . . I made up ‘The Madden Curse’, from the Madden football video game. My one claim to fame! If someone has a season in the NFL that warrants being put on the cover of the Madden game, chances are, they're not going to have two of those in a row because they tend to get hurt because their bodies are broken down. So, it really is just kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.


AK: You chose to write about Travis Pastrana for your first book. Why?
AR: If you meet that guy, you can't even ask the question. He'd always intrigued me. I did a story on him at his place up in Maryland. I was totally blown away by how deep he was. He was only twenty one at the time, but I remember thinking that this kid gets things about life that people spend their whole lives trying to figure out. It was really shocking. So I came up with the idea for the book and put together a proposal to ESPN books and they liked it but said there's no way he will do it . . . he's turned down so many book offers. But I was certain he was going to say yes. So I pitched it to him and he said, 'I don't know why I'm going to do this, but yes, lets do it!'


AK: What are the funniest and more rewarding aspects of being a sports writer?
AR: The most rewarding? Knowing that someone woke up in the morning to read something you wrote to find out what happened. It’s really cool. There are a lot of funny things. There's a good bit of humor that comes with being a female in this world. I have to kind of laugh about a lot of it. There's nothing like being in a Laker's locker room at five foot two and trying to get a microphone anywhere near Lamar Odom's mouth. I was at a Denver Bronco's training camp a few years back and it was about a hundred degrees outside. I was dressed pretty nice: skirt, sleeveless blouse, nice shoes. Well, a PR person comes over to me and said 'Excuse me little lady, we cover ourselves here in Denver.' What? I had no idea what he meant. Then he pointed at my arms and said 'You are dressed inappropriately. We can't let you on the field unless you find some way to cover your arms'. Well, luckily I had bought some new t shirts earlier in the day and one of them had sleeves. It was pink, with a picture of two little kids standing on the earth with a caption 'Love makes the world go 'round.' So I went to my car, put it on, and spent the rest of the day covering Bronco's training camp in it.


AK: What advice would you give kids who want to grow up to be sports writers?
AR: Read, read, read. Not just the sports page. Read novels . . . good writing, good books. And write as much as you can. Keep a journal. Write about your basketball game… Anything. And ask people for feedback on your writing. It's hard to write in a vacuum and not know what you could get better at, so ask your teachers, friends, anyone. Also, there are ways that you can get published, even at an early age, and nothing is more motivating then seeing your name in print. I still remember the very first time I saw my name in print. Even now, if I'm at an airport and see a magazine with one of my cover stories on it, I'm taking photos of it. It still trips me out . . . the coolest thing ever. It's a fun motivator.


AK: If you weren't a sports writer, what would you have liked to be?
AR: (Laughter) I think any of my friends who know me would say circus performer, only half joking. There is a part of me that would love to be in Cirque du Soleil. For fun I've gone out to play on the trapeze at the Santa Monica pier. Another part of me would have liked to have been an athlete, a pro athlete. But realistically, I guess if I wasn't a sports writer, I'd still be a writer of some kind. A different writer and a trapeze artist!


AK: If you could pick a sports figure that is a good role model for kids, who would it be, and why?
AR: I'd have to say Travis is one of them, though I have my reservations about that. He's a great role model as a person, but I'm still worried that kids would go out and try back flipping their lawn mower because they watched him do it. I guess I'd have to say any Olympian because of what they go through just to get to the Olympics. Even with gold medalists, only about ninety percent of them make any money off of it. That's a really amazing lesson. It has to be about the process, and about the lessons you're learning on the way to the top, and not about what someone gives you once you get there.

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