An Indian narrative journalism magazine called The Caravan launched this month. Or perhaps re-launched might be the better term, as publisher Delhi Press traces the magazine’s roots to a journal with the same name founded in 1940 by Vishva Nath. The Caravan bills itself as an Indian Granta or Harper’s, and for the cover of its January issue, offers a straightforward but informative story on how the Indian-American community goes about lobbying Washington. Inside is a meditation on Lyari in Karachi written by Fatima Bhutto that made us want more: “The British worked Karachi to the ground, but never to its death.”

What do you do when you’re an MBA who’s having hard luck finding a job? If you’re Don Gould, and you have three kids you’d like to teach about the importance of a work ethic, you start as a bag boy at Publix. But it’s not so simple. From Michael Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times.

If you had won the world chess championship at the age of 22, you would probably have coasted on it for the rest of your life. But you are not Garry Kasparov. Kasparov went on to dominate the world of chess for two decades, and then took up a career in politics as a burr under the saddle of Vladimir Putin. But that is still not enough to keep Kasparov busy, and so here he writes a book review—well, we think it’s a book review, but it’s more about Kasparov going up against ever-better computers as technology has improved and why the focus on supercomputers may be missing the point. Not an intimate narrative voice, but with an opening line about playing chess against 32 computers at once, who can resist? In The New York Review of Books.

After our focus last week on multimedia projects using poetry in journalism, we were thrilled to hear that gifted author Sherman Alexie had dashed off some nonfiction sports poetry in a matter of hours for ESPN, in an effort to get Allen Iverson not to play in February’s NBA All-Star Game in Dallas. (Thanks to Laura Nathan-Garner for spotting this one.) Alexie has long taken an interest in basketball and protested the Seattle SuperSonics’ departure for Oklahoma City mightily, so we will consider this a sort of poetry op-ed. At any rate, we at Storyboard are in favor of Alexie’s newsroom-style spirit and his ability to deliver on a self-imposed deadline. The poem? Not so much. (But you can see the winter issue of Contrary to take a look at some of his more serious work.)

Happy reading!

How long did you take on the Chauncey Billups story?

I spent a week in Denver and I interviewed Chauncey and his parents. I also talked with his brother, his wife, his head coach, and some people in the Denver Nuggets’ front office. I talked with a high school acquaintance and some teammates. So I talked to maybe a dozen people. I spent a week in Denver, and then took three days to write it.

Transcribing is the most mundane part of the whole thing. But you don’t want to rush it. You want to feed a story. Listening to the interviews of everybody all in a row, the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. You can feel, “Oh, there’s my ending.” But it’s a hassle. It takes forever.

In your mind, were you pitching the language of the piece to someone who already knows Billups, someone who knows basketball, or were you trying to write more broadly than that?

ESPN inherently serves a sports fan audience. If I were writing this piece for a mainstream audience, I would have done it a little differently.

The sports audience got it. I think it reached them because Billups is a mainstream guy who a lot of people thought they knew, but there was another story they didn’t know. Here’s a guy who was considered a prima donna, a surefire star who didn’t pan out, and then he reinvented himself as a hardworking blue-collar player.

That’s why I think it also hit home with people who weren’t hardcore basketball fans. Even non-sports fans were able to see it as a story of how the low man on the totem pole got back on top.

Can you talk a little about how you structured your story?

After I open the piece with a scene of him in the huddle in the present, I basically go chronologically through his life. I bounce back and forth, jazzing it up with subheads that were snapshots of powerful moments. I made little chapters—“His father’s car,” “Kevin Garnett’s basement,” “A team charter”—putting a place and time on each point and bringing the reader inside. No one knew that that Garnett had a room in his basement he called the “Billups Suite.”

Given how many disaster stories exist in professional athletics, Billups as a character is fairly tame. Did you look hard for other material—some kind of counter-narrative—in his personal life?

There wasn’t drama in the sense of death and destruction, but it’s a basketball tragedy. He was the number three pick in the first round and then ended up getting traded as a throw-in to Orlando—they didn’t even try to re-sign him.

Through his upbringing, though, he’d had to deal with all this stuff as a kid. His father battled alcoholism. His Grandma was mad at him for this great play he made as a kid, because they didn’t like him to be fancy. While everyone thought he was a loose cannon, the way he’d been raised, he’d actually learned his lessons. My whole thing was to show that underneath this façade, there was the kid who had been taught to play the right way. He had to go on this journey to find that out.

What went into deciding how to characterize Billups’ father Ray? On the one hand, he worked in the Safeway warehouse for 32 years and fully supported his son. On the other hand, Ray had alcohol issues.

I sat there and listened to the father and the mom talking to me. They brought the drinking up. I didn’t know about it before. We were talking about Chauncey as a child, how he never really drank. “I used to dabble,” Chauncey’s dad said, “I used to do this and that.” I didn’t get the sense he was going to say, “I was an alcoholic.” I was worried that they didn’t understand that when you tell a reporter something, it’s on the record. But I asked them about it over and over.

I didn’t want to overdo the alcohol part. The reason to include it was to show how it affected Chauncey. And it showed how his father was a flawed person as well, and how he pulled himself together. I felt like it was important to show the reader Chauncey had a role model for doing that. His father was a big part of this piece. When Chauncey was winning a championship, his father had to change shifts at Safeway to make the game.

When there’s a celebrity story without a car crash or an arrest, how do you generate tension and keep people reading until the end?

To me the tension in the story isn’t a crash or a tragic event; the tension is a person’s career. A lot of people see Chauncey Billups as a great player, but they don’t know the depths of where he fell to. I’ve written about a shark attack in San Diego. This piece didn’t have that kind of drama. Instead, you see a guy’s basketball career, and you wonder, “Can he keep it?”

Is there anything else you want to say about the story?

Here’s the thing: you don’t write a piece to please the person. You write a piece to be true to that person and to yourself as a writer. But I thought Chauncey had bared his soul to me. I ran into him later, and he liked it. It’s hard to see your life on paper, and so that meant a lot.

But the funny thing is—if you remember that scene where he bumps the ball off the defender’s rear end—he did the same thing in May during the Lakers playoff series. For the first time since high school. And they won the game. He threw a ball off of Kobe Bryant’s rear end.

I had already reminded him of that scene. And my piece had already run. And then he goes and does it again. I had a Nuggets coach come up to me and say, “You helped us win the game.” People noticed it and commented. I do enough stories that are hard on people—it’s nice to have a story where I don’t have to be a bum. Sometimes you can tell a story that’s true, and people like it.

ESPN writer Tom Friend launches his profile of Billups with a tried-and-true approach: starting deep in the action, showing his subject on the court in the playoffs. But Billups isn’t hot-dogging or dunking—he’s “rounding up all the players, all the misfits and flakes, and poking a finger in their chests.” Friend then cuts back to a night 15 years before when, as a high school junior inbounding the ball with nobody open, Billups bounces “the ball off [a] defender’s rear end, catches it… and dunks with two hands.” After which he apologizes to his grandmother.

The story traces an arc between those two moments—the young showoff and the team leader with a championship ring and MVP status who comes home to Denver. Through parallel storylines in which a father gives up alcohol and a son gives up the spotlight, Friend creates a powerful arc of a failed superstar who took a step back, chose the path of hard work, and apprenticed himself to more experienced players.

The account sometimes slows down a step for the basketball illiterate, but Friend has woven everything the reader needs to know into the net of his story. In the process, he also inadvertently influenced sports history: a Nuggets coach gave him partial credit for a May win in the conference final series against the Lakers. Read our interview with Friend to find out why.