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Friday, March 29, 2024
<p>Gary Smith has covered topics from Muhammad Ali to segregation in football.&nbsp;</p>

Gary Smith has covered topics from Muhammad Ali to segregation in football. 

I’m pretty sure I’ve written some variation of this column every semester for as long as I’ve been writing columns at the Alligator, but it’s a topic that really touched me this weekend.

I spent Friday driving to Charleston, South Carolina, to speak with former Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith. If you’ve never heard of Smith, he worked at SI for about 30 years and wrote the kinds of stories that would make good movies — about an experienced freediver whose hubris led to his wife’s death, about a black basketball coach changing ideas about race and racism in America’s Amish community, about a man with a mental disability spending his life as an adopted member of a high school football team. The latter was actually turned into the movie “Radio.”

Point being, Smith wrote long, detailed, probing stories that never judged, never lambasted and always conveyed some deeper meaning than a normal, surface-level story.

I met with him because, as someone who strives to do the same thing (with considerably less success, obviously), I wanted to try and understand how he seems to be writing from a desk inside his subject’s mind.

The main thing I gathered is that he was so successful because he conjured questions that nobody else asked. He’d spend weeks talking with his subjects, zeroing in on important, formative moments that in some way are universal. For Smith, there are no binaries like good and bad — only decisions that, even if you would have chosen differently under the same circumstances, are familiar to everyone.

Yet despite how illuminating his stories can be, I think it’s reasonable to assume that if Smith were starting out as a sports writer now, he’d have little — if any — opportunity to produce those kinds of narratives, because depth is not what sells.

Social media and media organizations value engagement over almost everything, and nuanced, thorough stories don’t generally lead to attention-grabbing headlines. That’s certainly not true all the time, but even when longform reads do go viral, the amount of resources it takes to produce them is hard to justify against spending the same resources on five easier, audience-friendly stories that put up the same numbers.

As a sports writer, this can be infuriating. For example, I spent over a month interviewing sources for a double profile on UF’s men's basketball managers turned walk-ons, and the 10,500 words I ended up writing took about 12 hours combined. Thankfully, the story did fairly well.

But that weekend, I was running late to the Alligator staff meeting when one of my co-workers texted me saying I had made the list of top-three most read stories of the week.

“Great,” I thought. That rarely happens for sports writers, and it felt triumphant to know a story I worked so hard on was being read that much. Or so I thought.

My optimism was swiftly shattered when I arrived and learned the story with those views was a football piece that, if I’m being honest, I wrote in about 20 minutes because we needed something about football in the paper.

It wasn’t interesting, it wasn’t enlightening and it was hardly informative. But it had a catchy headline, so click, click, click.

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I want to be clear that I, too, often engage with inflammatory nonsense on social media, but I’ve been consciously trying to eliminate that tendency. Meeting Smith encouraged that mission further, and I encourage you to join in as well.

After that basketball story debuted, one of the sources in it texted me saying he was surprised how thorough it was. He’s not the first person to express that sentiment to me, and others have been more overt with their frustration over the epidemic of shallowness of sports reporting.

As I’ve written before, I agree.

So if you’re one of those people who does care about depth and does care about wanting to learn something beyond which player recorded the most tackles in Saturday’s game, seek out that content.

Because certainly there are times when a “three things you may have missed” story can be fun and informative and provide the catharsis that only sports can, but sometimes, the most cathartic sports experience can be locking yourself in the bathroom while Gary Smith transports you beyond the court and into the mind of Jim Valvano as he battles cancer, providing insight that no competition by itself can.

Ethan Bauer is a sports writer. Follow him on Twitter @ebaueri and contact him at ebauer@alligator.org.

Gary Smith has covered topics from Muhammad Ali to segregation in football. 

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