Q&A with New York Times bestselling author Andrew Maraniss
Author of Strong Inside and Games of Deception
Welcome to the Music City Sports Report.
For today’s newsletter, I interviewed Andrew Maraniss, New York Times bestselling author and a Visiting Author at Vanderbilt University. He has written two books - Strong Inside, the untold story of Vanderbilt’s Perry Wallace, the first African-American basketball player in the SEC, and Games of Deception: The True Story of the First U.S. Olympic Basketball Team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany.
“Strong Inside” was the recipient of the 2015 Lillian Smith Book Award and the lone Special Recognition honor at the 2015 RFK Book Awards, while “Games of Deception” received the 2020 Sydney Taylor Book Honor and was named one of Amazon’s Top Books of 2019.
During our conversation, I asked Andrew about the origin story behind each of his books, being from a family of writers, his friendship with journalism titan Fred Russell, writing a book while having a full-time job, the intersection of socio-political issues and sports, his all-time Vanderbilt starting five, and more!
Here is a transcript of our Q&A edited for length and clarity:
Q: You first discovered Perry Wallace’s story while you were a student at Vanderbilt. You wrote papers and stories about him then. When and how did you realize that that story would be suited to a longform format?
A: It took me a long time! I wrote that first paper about Perry in 1989, and it wasn’t until 2006 that I really realized that I wanted to write a book about him. My dad started writing books after I graduated from college, so I could see that example in my family. At some point, I said well I’d like to write a book too. If he can do it, I think I can do it.
One day I was visiting my future in-law’s house, we were about to have dinner, and I just blurted out that I wanted to write a book. My future father-in-law asked what about, a logical question, and I didn’t have the answer. I was kind of stumped. I said I don’t know, I just want to write a book. He said, well what about Perry Wallace, you’re always talking about him. And I was like yes, of course, that should be it. I emailed Perry the next day after Googling that there wasn’t already a book about him, and that was kind of a crime that there wasn’t, but it was an opportunity for me. I had no idea how long it would take. It ended up taking me eight years to write the book - four years of research and almost four years of writing. It was really just that moment in the kitchen. Maybe his story had been too close to me and I couldn’t see it. But, I’m really grateful that my father-in-law prodded me to do it.
Q: You were writing “Strong Inside” when you had a full-time PR job. I’m assuming it was a lot of weekends and a lot of nights writing that book. How did the writing part of your brain handle jumping back and forth between PR writing and journalism writing?
A: That wasn’t always easy. Plus, taking yourself back in time 40 or 50 years when you’re writing. I think when you’re writing a book you really want to immerse yourself in that world with those characters, and it was tough not being able to do that every day, like you said just nights and weekends, and sometimes you get busy with work and family and it might be three weeks before you can get back to working on the book. So I tried little tricks. I would listen to a 1960s radio station in my car every day so I was traveling back into time, at least hearing that music or watching movies from that time period, re-reading all of the transcripts of my interviews constantly to refresh my memory of what I had.
And you’re right, there is a difference between PR writing and journalism writing or the style of writing I wanted in my book. I didn’t see that necessarily as a huge obstacle. I was able to shift my mind that way. The tough part for me was just having the confidence to write a book. I had never written anything that long before and had four years’ worth of material and research that I had done, figuring out how to organize it in a good outline when I typically didn’t like to write outlines. Before, when I wasn’t really writing long stuff, I would sit down and start writing. But I realized it was important to be organized and have a good outline and then trick myself into thinking I wasn’t writing a book, I was just writing a chapter. If I could write one chapter, I could write two, and if I could write two, I could write four, and I figured If I just had the discipline not to quit, eventually I’ll finish this book. And it took many years, but it happened, and breaking it down into small pieces, which I guess is advice people have in a lot of different realms, that really helped me in writing the book.
Q: When did you decide on the topic for your second book, “Games of Deception”?
A: I was in Lawrence, Kansas to speak about “Strong Inside.” They have a museum there called The Dole Institute of Politics. The director of that library is a Vanderbilt graduate, so he was interested in Perry Wallace’s story, and they have a speaker series there, so I went out there to talk about “Strong Inside.” While I was in Lawrence, I had never been to Allen Fieldhouse before, so I really wanted to see where the Jayhawks play just as a college basketball fan.
I took a tour and the guy showing me around showed me a picture of James Naismith with some Japanese basketball players, and it was right next to this display case that had Naismith’s original rules of basketball from 1891, which the Jayhawks have there at Allen Fieldhouse. They out-bid Duke to get those rules in their gym. And he said, “did you realize that Naismith, the inventor of basketball, was able to see his invention make its Olympic debut.” And I said “no, which Olympics was that?” and he said it was the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. I figured, well that could make a really interesting story. I don’t even think most basketball fans know that that’s where basketball got started in the Olympics, and what a controversial Olympics. So I put together a proposal, and that became my next book. This one I only had a year to do, so it was a big difference from “Strong Inside.”
Q: With your new book and “Strong Inside” it seems that stories where socio-political issues and sports intersect are what you’re exploring currently. Is that the area you want to keep exploring moving forward?
A: Yes, it is, that’s correct. I’m someone that loves sports just for the sport’s sake, but I’m also into sports for the bigger stories that it can tell. I do think that sports and social issues or sports and politics are connected, you can have a debate about that, but I think they are, and the Olympics is a great example of that. I just finished a manuscript for what will be book number three that will come out next spring. The book is called “Singled Out” and it’s a biography of Glenn Burke who was the first openly gay Major League Baseball player. He played for the Dodgers and the A’s in the late 70s, and he also invented the high five, he and Dusty Baker, in 1977. And then, Glenn died of AIDS in the mid-90s. That book will be out next March, and then I’ve just put a proposal together and learned that the publisher wants to do it, a book on the first women’s Olympic basketball team, which played at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, just a couple years after Title IX was implemented. The book will come out on the 50th anniversary of Title IX, and it’s a way to explore women in sports.
Q: While writing a book you have to interview dozens and dozens of people. What do you think is the hardest part of the interview process?
A: It’s a balance between being prepared and being open to anything. I think that’s the most important/hardest part of an interview. You want to know a lot about the subject or about the events you want to ask them about so that you can ask detailed questions and really help build scenes. Look for little anecdotes and specific memories that someone has that can illuminate a scene. You only can really do that if you know ahead of time what this person should know about - where they were or maybe something they said back then or an event that they were a part of.
On the other hand, you need to be open to learning anything and not be bound to what you think you’re going to hear. I think, especially for a lot of young journalists, they prepare a list of questions going into an interview, and as the person is answering question one they’re preparing to ask question two on their list and they're not listening to what the person is saying. The downfall of that is you’re not asking good followup questions. You want to be prepared, but you also want to be prepared to go where the interview takes you and you learn so many new things that you weren’t expecting. That is the most important fine line to walk during an interview.
Q: For “Games of Deception” what interview were you most excited about?
A: It was tough because all the players had passed away a long time ago, so it was very different from “Strong Inside” which was based on a lot of interviews. This book was based primarily on archival research and reading old articles. But, I was able to interview a number of the sons and daughters of the Olympians and the son of James Naismith.
The man that I’m most excited to have interviewed, his name is Dr. Al Miller. He is 97 years old. He lives in Cincinnati now, but at the time of the Berlin Olympics, he was a 13-year-old Jewish kid living in Berlin. He was seeing the word and his country change around him in really horrifying ways. He went to the Olympics. He rode his bike and saw Jesse Owens win a gold medal, and he snuck into the Olympic Village and was just looking at all these athletes in their colorful sweatsuits from around the world. He had vivid memories of attending those Olympics and also had vivid memories of escaping Berlin the next year by himself at age 14, not knowing if he’d ever see his parents again. A few years later, they were able to escape and he eventually joined the US Army in World War II and because he spoke German he interrogated Nazi POWs. To this day, he visits with school kids in Cincinnati a couple of times a month, even at age 97, to teach them about the lessons of the Holocaust. Because he had attended the Olympics and because he is still talking about it and sharing lessons learned, he became a character in the book, so I was really excited to find him.
Q: You come from a family of writers. Did you always want to follow them into the business, or did being in a family of writers make you hesitant at first?
A: I think a little bit of both. My grandfather was a newspaper guy on my dad’s side, and his wife was an editor at a university publisher - the University of Wisconsin. Growing up, my dad was a journalist at the Washington Post. Growing up, I wasn’t concerned in a negative way about following in my dad’s footsteps. I always thought that what I wanted to do was become a sportswriter. In high school, I was the sports editor of our high school paper in Austin, Texas. In the summers I would intern at the Austin American-Statesman sports department. I came to Vanderbilt on a sportswriting scholarship - the Fred Russell-Grantland Rice Scholarship - and spent all my time at The Hustler, the student paper at Vandy.
And then I graduated and really couldn’t find a job in journalism. So instead, the closest thing I could find was working in the SID office at Vanderbilt. That’s what sort of introduced me to the PR field. I did that for five years, worked with the (Tampa Bay) Rays for a year, worked at a PR firm in Nashville for almost 20 years, and in my mind, convinced myself that this is good. I’m not doing the exact same thing that my father had done, but I really missed the sports world and writing about sports, so the chance to write the book about Perry Wallace was a chance for me to get back to what I really loved in the first place. Since that experience, I’ve really devoted even more time to more books and coming back to Vanderbilt athletics, where it all began, as my job. I’ve gone through, to answer your question in a long-winded way, feeling different ways about it over the course of my life, but have come back to what I’ve always loved from the beginning.
Q: You developed a friendship with Mr. Russell when you were in school. What was the most valuable piece of journalism advice that he gave you?
A: Getting to know Mr. Russell was one of the most special experiences of my life. I was intimidated and nervous to meet him the first time, but he gave me quite a bit of confidence in saying that he believed in me and liked what I was writing and to keep at it. I remember the great stories he would tell. He would take all the scholarship winners out to lunch every year and just tell us stories about the old days of baseball - Shoeless Joe Jackson or Babe Ruth or Muhammed Ali or Red Grange or Bobby Jones at The Masters - all the greatest figures of 20th Century sports.
I don’t know that he specifically said this, but just being around him and reading his writing, he never became overly cynical about sports. I think you see a lot of people who get into sports and eventually sort of hate it. Or they become jaded by it and overly cynical and they lose the joy that attracts most of us to sports in the first place. He was always into the personalities and the people and the colorful characters. For me, that was a lesson in trying to be mindful of that. Not glossing over problems because it’s important to write about the tough truths of sports, but to not lose sight of the fun that sports brings us.
Q: Alright, I have a couple of fun questions for you. You are obviously very familiar with Vanderbilt athletics. Who’s your all-time Vanderbilt men’s basketball starting five?
A: Shan Foster, Derrick Byars, Perry Wallace, Frank Seckar, and Barry Goheen.
Q: What was your favorite Vanderbilt sports moment of the past decade?
A: When they won the first baseball national championship. I remember when John Norwood hit that home run it got a little misty. That was pretty cool to see.
Links
Nashville SC could be back on the training pitch as a team soon as June 1st. MLS commissioner Don Garber laid out his “cautiously optimistic” plan for re-opening the league in an Instagram Live Q&A.
The Grizzlies could also be close to stepping back on the hardwood as the talks surrounding the NBA’s return took a positive step forward this week. Both the MLS and NBA are looking at Orlando as a league bubble option for if/when play resumes.
Logan Ryan says the Titans rejected his offer to sign a one-year deal at his salary from last season. Again, I think letting Ryan walk is a mistake.
The Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame handed out their yearly awards: Derrick Henry was named the Pro Athlete of the Year, the Titans were the Pro Team of the Year, Kumar Rocker and Trey Smith were the Co-Male Amateur Athletes of the Year, Maria Bulanova was the Female Amateur Athlete of the Year, Tennessee Swimming and Diving was named the Female Amateur Team of the Year, and Vanderbilt Baseball was named the Male Amateur Team of the Year.
Vanderbilt’s John Augenstein was named the SEC Men’s Golf Player of the Year.
Evansville transfer DeAndre Williams committed to Memphis. Williams was one of the most talented mid-major players in the country last season.
The Athletic Nashville profiled each of the Titans draft picks this week.
Vanderbilt outfielder/third baseman Austin Martin was ranked second overall in MLB.com’s top-200 draft prospect rankings.
The Undefeated profiled Celtics rookie and former Vol Grant Williams and his virtual youth mentoring program he has started during the pandemic.
Cameron Wake (41), Andre Johnson (49), Kevin Byard (93), Jonathan Joseph (94), and Jurell Casey (96) were the current and former Titans listed among Pro Football Focus’ top-100 NFL players of the decade. Other local connections on the list included Peyton Manning (18), Casey Hayward (24), Jalen Ramsey (98), and Eric Berry (101).
Lipscomb’s 2020 volleyball recruiting class was named to the highest level of honorable mention by PrepVolleyball.com.
In non-sports news, Nashville songwriter extraordinaire Jason Isbell and his band the 400 Unit released a great new album on Friday called Reunions. There were several great interviews with and profiles of Isbell posted in the past week.