I’m sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, waiting for a call from a man who doesn’t trust me, hoping he’ll have answers about a man I don’t trust, which may clear the name of a man no one gives a damn about.

That’s how J.R. Moehringer begins “Resurrecting the Champ,” the greatest newspaper story ever written, and if you’re not hooked by the time the period slams that sentence shut, God knows why you’re here.

I’ve read this story at least 100 times since it appeared in the L.A. Times Magazine* in 1997, and my bones still ache with envy. Moehringer has command of all the storyteller’s tools here – rhythm, pacing, metaphor – and I’ve spent many an hour taking the story apart like an old radio.

But what I love about this story the most is a simple thing that shows up in far too few nonfiction narratives:

Mystery.

That lede echoes Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and all those noir movies of the ’40s (Fred MacMurray in “Double Indemnity”: I killed him for money. And for a woman. And I didn’t get the money. And I didn’t get the woman.)

Moehringer gets a tip: A former heavyweight contender named Bob Satterfield – known for jackhammer punches and a tinfoil chin – is walking the streets of Santa Ana, homeless. Moehringer goes looking for him, almost gives up, then sees an old man, toothless and filthy – but with hands so big they hang from his sides like bowling balls. Moehringer approaches him.

“You’re Bob Satterfield, aren’t you?” I said.

“Battlin’ Bob Satterfield!” he said, delighted at being recognized.

And then what happens is…

Well, here’s the problem. I can’t tell you.

Every great mystery has twists and turns. There are at least three places in this story where I still drop the printout (or now, the laptop) in disbelief. To paraphrase that great literary figure Rowdy Roddy Piper, just when you think you’ve got all the answers, the story changes the questions.

To explain the whole thing, I’d need spoiler alerts. When was the last time you read a story that required spoiler alerts?

I’ll tell you this much: To find out just who Bob Satterfield is, and to find out how that man ended up on the Santa Ana streets, Moehringer has to navigate false clues and blind alleys and several people who might or might not be lying to him. There’s a key conversation with Jake LaMotta (the boxer De Niro played in “Raging Bull”). There’s a meeting in that hotel in Columbus. There are things Moehringer wants to see that he doesn’t. There are things he doesn’t want to see that he does.

Moehringer is a main character, right there in the first person, dealing with (among other things) major daddy issues. One thing I’ve wondered over the years is if the story would work without him in it. I’ve decided he has to be in there – above all, this is a detective story, and he’s the gumshoe who bumbles through the story, trying to solve the mystery.

By God, he solves it.

And then – as in the very best mysteries – there’s one more scene. We’re back on the California streets, our two main characters are talking…

And the very last line of the story hits you like a left hook to the gut.

It’s the best last line I know of. Every time I read the story, it stays with me for days.

Journalists often work on different kinds of mysteries. We’re great at doing the forensics on a failed campaign and pinpointing just where it went sour. We’re great at dissecting a game-winning TD and showing exactly how the receiver got open.

But those are mysteries where the reader already knows the ending – we’re just revealing the why and the how. The best mysteries start with a what – or, more to the point, a WHAT!?! – and take readers from there to places they’d never expect.

It’s easier when you can make stuff up – whoever created  “Matlock” owns half of Malibu by now. But to pull it off in nonfiction – to find the story, track it down and write it – that’s jumping off the high dive.

J.R. Moehringer has done all right for himself. He won a Pulitzer. He wrote a well-loved memoir. He collaborated on a best-seller – Andre Agassi’s autobiography.

But in my mind, he’s the guy who chased a tip, found a mystery, and ended up with the greatest newspaper story of all time.

They made a movie out of “Resurrecting the Champ,” starring Josh Hartnett and Samuel L. Jackson. I’ve never watched it. It’s not as good as the newspaper story. It can’t possibly be.

———

*Yeah, maybe it’s technically a magazine story – it does run nearly 12,000 words. But to me, if it comes bundled with the comics and the coupons, it’s a newspaper story.

Tommy Tomlinson (@tommytomlinson) is a storyteller for The Charlotte Observer, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a former Nieman Fellow.

For more from this collaboration with Longreads and Alexis Madrigal, see the previous posts in the series. And stay tuned for a new shot of inspiration and insight every week.

At a Nieman Foundation gathering over the weekend in Cambridge, a decade’s worth of current and former fellows joined with foundation staff to celebrate the tenure of departing Nieman curator Bob Giles. While journalists from around the globe roasted and toasted Giles, someone not in the room was very much on attendees’ minds.

Journalist Dorothy Parvaz, a 2009 Nieman fellow who is an American, Canadian and Iranian citizen, flew into Damascus on April 29 and has not been heard from since. Al Jazeera is reporting that Syria has deported Dorothy to Iran. (During her fellowship year, Dorothy’s Seattle newspaper closed its print side, and in 2010 she began reporting for Al Jazeera English from Doha, Qatar.)

The Nieman Foundation has called on Iran to release Dorothy immediately. Please “like” the Free Dorothy Parvaz page on Facebook and follow @FreeDorothy on Twitter to draw global attention to her plight and encourage those detaining her to let her return to her family.

For more by or about Dorothy, read her latest features for Al Jazeera, an Associated Press piece about her detention, a story of a London visit with a Seattle friend, and thoughts on Dorothy from her Nieman classmates, The Irish Times’ Rosita Boland and The Charlotte Observer’s Tommy Tomlinson.

In August, you introduced a storytelling experiment that you’re heading up from your perch at The (Charlotte) Observer. For people who haven’t already seen your column on it, describe what you’re doing.

What I’m going to try to do is three things. The thing that I’ve been doing so far, the main thing, is collaborating with readers with interactive projects, where I will throw out a topic or an idea that’s designed for people to build their own story. For example, I started out with this project – I’m trying to give them names – called “One Good Thing.” I wanted people to say one good thing about some group that they’re normally opposed to.

The idea is to get people to tell stories or to say things that can be gathered together and aggregated into something maybe a little bigger, to get an idea how people react to certain things and see what stories people tell around certain topics, and then to put that together. It makes for an interesting group of little mini narratives. I’m also going to be doing a lot of my regular writing on my blog, some of which may end up looking more like the regular columns that I had been doing for the paper, with some shorter and some longer.

And then down the road a little bit, I want to do some longer feature story-type things with an eye on trying to figure out ways to make those more presentable, especially online. I think we worry that people won’t read longer pieces there. I’m trying to figure out how to make those stories more enticing to readers online and in print.

You’ve launched a few project topics already: “Scars,” “One Good Thing,” “12 to 1.” What’s gotten the biggest response so far?

For “12 to 1,” I’ve gotten somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 responses from school kids all over Charlotte. I think a couple of teachers have assigned it in their classes, but we’ve also gotten a bunch from other folks. I’m now in the process of gathering that stuff together and trying to put a little bit of design to it, to make it flow in an interesting way. We’ll be putting it all online at some point, and we’ll be culling the best of those and putting that in print in some way, too.

The “Scars” stories came right before that, and that was one that I just threw out on a whim, without really thinking much about what people might say. That one turned out to be the most interesting one so far, I think, because of the way people reacted to it, and because there was a dramatic change in it part of the way through. What happened was that people had told fairly straightforward – I wouldn’t say lighthearted, but at least interesting – stories: one woman had been bitten by a rattlesnake, and then someone else had been fighting with her sister. And then about two-thirds of the way through, this person posted at like 1:30 in the morning that she had a mastectomy because of breast cancer. She talked about how she felt untouchable, and that this was something she was going to live with for the rest of her life. The end of the thing was “And that’s my happy, uplifting scar story,” written kind of sarcastically.

What I thought was interesting was that the very next post was from somebody reacting to that one. And that person, I believe it was his stepmother, had had something similar, but it had been years ago, and she had really struggled but she had come to terms with it, and she was living a full life now and was not feeling untouchable. I just thought it was interesting how because of the way we’re doing it, people could not just tell stories but also react to each other’s stories and add something meaningful to make a little narrative out of it.

So you introduce an idea and call for people’s stories. You get a bunch of comments and reactions or mini-narratives. And then you turn it into something larger for the paper. Will that be a more traditional long-form-style piece?

I think they may be the stories that we’ve always told in the newspaper and in the business, though part of it is multimedia — to add video and audio and slide shows and things. We’re doing some of that already. I also want to figure out whether there are ways to break the stories up, ways to make them serials, which we have done in our business some but not to any great extent. I want to experiment with those things, too. Are there ways to get people to follow along with a story for a couple weeks or a month?

I think of a Roy Peter Clark story he did several years ago called “Three Little Words” as a kind of a model, in my mind, for how to do these things. I believe he did it for 30 days in small pieces. We ran it in our paper and got a very good response, I believe. In some ways, when we do these long stories now, they tend to end up in the Sunday paper with a lot of gray type, and people who feel pressed for time or intimidated by those things just don’t pick them up. The bottom line for me is that I want people to pick up my stuff and read it, so it may mean breaking it up in smaller parts, it may mean mixing it in with multimedia components. I’m just trying to think of some ways to do longer stories that we feel will grab a larger audience.

You mentioned Roy Peter Clark. Do you have any other role models for the project, or do you feel like you’re coming up with this from scratch?

No, I’m not inventing it from scratch at all. I’m stealing from lots of people.

Drop names.

What got me thinking about this years ago, the first thing I remember seeing that made me think about new ways we could gather information and present it in stories was PostSecret, where people send in postcards telling secrets about their lives. I could read and have read that for hours at a time. It’s amazing to me, the little mini-stories, obviously the size of a postcard – you’re talking many times about no more than 10 or 15 words. But by being well-edited, curated and given a flow, it’s fascinating to me.

More recently, in the last year or two, I’ve been fascinated with this guy Ze Frank and the stuff he’s doing. He does games and video work, but the stuff of his that I’ve really become attached to is little reader projects very much like the one I’m talking about. The one I linked early on my blog as an example is what I think he called the 52to48 project, around the time of the election, where the split in the eletion was 52 to 48. What he asked people to do was if you voted red to say something nice about people who were blue, and if you voted blue, to say something nice about people who were red, with the idea that we really do have more commonalities than differences. It was done through photos. And the photos are great. There’s a couple kissing, and one says on the cheek, “I voted red,” and one says “I voted blue.”

That made me think. People are creative. If you give them an interesting idea and let people riff on it, there’s the possibility of getting some really interesting material out of it. So those were a couple role models for me. And then more things that have been more long-term or are more traditional stories, things like “This American Life” and StoryCorps, which is a really great audio series doing something similar to what I’m doing.

So there are a lot of great things that I’ve been looking at over the last three or so years that coalesced. The only thing I’m doing different is that I’m doing it in the framework of a newspaper. I’m taking from all these good things and trying to do it in a newspaper setting.

How long have you been given to make this work?

Well, I haven’t been given any particular time. I’ve been given plenty of rope to hang myself with. My bosses here at The Observer have been bold and generous in letting me do this. I know full well the difficulty there is in taking a columnist – I’ve been doing this for 13 years, and in that time you build up a following – to take me off the board as a columnist and let me try this new thing. I’m very grateful to them for doing that.

We agreed early on when we talked about it that it’s an experiment. I keep saying “Six months,” but nobody has put a timeline on me at all. What I’ve told everybody is six months down the road, let’s reevaluate. If it’s working real well, we’ll keep going, and if it’s a disaster, we’ll do something else.

I think the other part that’s interesting about all this is that at the paper, when we’ve done something like this in the past, we’ve planned it pretty thoroughly. We’ve done a lot of research and held a lot of meetings about how we want to do it, how we want to design it, and how we want to frame it. We didn’t do that as much with this idea. In sort of a Web way, we’ve thrown it out there. I hope and believe we’ll be enhancing it as we go along, making it a little easier to look at, refining some of the ways we reach out to people. But we didn’t answer all the questions before we started.

That’s sort of terrifying, but it’s also kind of cool, that we’re just going to try something, see if it works, and try to make it better as we go along.

If everything goes really well, what will this look like in a year?

Well, my hope is a couple of things. We talk about communities a lot now, especially on the Web, building a community, a readership that stays with you. We’ve been really good so far on the Web and in print in building communities around news topics. We have a community of people who are interested in crime news, we have a community of people who are interested in politics, and we have a community that’s interested in sports – all of which are subdivided in certain ways. We really have not – I’m talking about the newspaper business in general and maybe the larger media business in general, too – we have not thought about building a community around stories. That is what I think “This American Life,” PostSecret and Ze Frank have done. They’ve shown that you can build a community around good storytelling, stories that people are really interested in, stores that people want to be a part of.

So I guess a year from now, what I’d like to be able to see is a good, solid community that we’ve built here around the storytelling that I’m trying to do, that we’re trying to do. I think it’s out there, and part of what this next year is going to be about is figuring out how to reach those folks and what they respond to – to ring some bells with the larger community out there.

That’s not just from a journalistic standpoint; it’s from a practical standpoint. I need an audience, or it doesn’t make sense to keep doing this. So I want to try to find that audience that responds to those things. I don’t know if it needs to be gigantic, but it’s got to be more than 20 people. I hope you can build a pretty big audience by talking about these things and doing it in a way that brings people back. A year from now, I’d like to see that we have a community.

Back in the 19th century, Dickens wrote these serialized novels, and I’m sure everyone who knows about his books has heard the stories of how people were waiting on the docks for the latest installment to come out. I hope that I can build a community that’s waiting on the docks, so that when we get ready to do something new, there’s a ready-made group of people who are excited about and interested in what comes next.

I caught some grief about that. But I was proud.

It can be harder to write a short story than a long one, and it can be much harder to write with simple words than with complicated ones. Most every good writer knows words that soar on silver wings. But sometimes those words fly off into the clouds and the reader loses track of the story. I like words that work for a living.

This goes straight back to my mom and dad. They grew up in sharecropping families a few miles apart in south Georgia. They picked cotton from the time they could walk. My dad had to quit school in the sixth grade, and my mom in the fourth, because they had to work. But by then they had learned to read and they never quit. My dad, when he was alive, read the Bible after supper. My mom, to this day, reads Harlequin romance novels. She buys them by the sackful at the used book store.

At our house the newspaper was a Christmas present six times a week. It was an afternoon paper, and it came about 4:30. We would listen for the thump in the front yard. I’d run out and get it, strip off the green rubber band – we saved them in a drawer – and we would split up the sections. The Brunswick News was as gray as fireplace ashes. It was all wire copy except for high-school sports, the police blotter, a piece or two on local politics, whose kids got married or made Eagle Scout, and the obits. We read every word.

What my mom and dad listened to was country music. Johnny Cash: Love is a burnin’ thing, and it makes a fiery ring. Hank Williams: Hear that lonesome whippoorwill, he sounds too blue to fly. The songs played with images in the same way a poet does. The words could tear you up, they were so powerful. But they were still simple and easy to understand.

When I started out writing for a living, I wanted to show off. I wrote stories that flashed back and flashed forward and might have flashed sideways. I wrote sentences that twirled like an Olympic figure skater. Sometimes I still do those things if I’m tired, or if I’m trying to write around a lack of reporting, or if I get the big head and start to believe that the world does not have the proper appreciation for my prose.

But one thing I learned from my mom and dad is that people can understand almost anything if you explain it in a simple and clear way. My mom doesn’t know a thing about nuclear physics. But if you sat down with her and explained in simple language what a supercollider does, and why, she would get it.

Our paper, like most, has a lot of readers who aren’t well-educated or well-read. That doesn’t mean they’re not smart. Writing in plain language is not dumbing down your story. It’s creating a map that all your readers can navigate. If your story is in plain language, feel free to let fly with complex ideas and literary devices. Your readers can handle it.

One of my favorite books is the 2001 novel Jim the Boy by Tony Earley. I don’t know to this day if Earley meant the book for kids or adults. It doesn’t matter. He tells the story of a boy growing up in 1930s North Carolina, and he writes it in language just about anybody could understand. It is full of images that work deep down inside you and stay. Here is Jim’s mother, a widow:

Although she was not yet thirty years old, she wore a long, black skirt that had belonged to her mother. The skirt did not make her seem older, but rather made the people in the room around her feel odd, as if they had wandered into an old photograph, and did not know how to behave. On the days Mama wore her mother’s long clothes, Jim didn’t let the screen door slam.

The thing about writing a sentence a fifth-grader can read is that maybe a fifth-grader will read it. Or maybe somebody with a fifth-grade education will. And if that person understands what you’re saying – provided you have something to say – your sentence has made the world better. You have helped another human being make sense of things. That’s what a writer is supposed to do.

Tommy Tomlinson has been a columnist with The Charlotte Observer for more than a decade. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary in 2005, he believes he is the only journalist in history to cover the Super Bowl, the Bassmaster Classic and the National Spelling Bee in the same year.

If you’re going to set out to do a “profile,” this is a good model because it portrays its subject with completeness but does not seek to describe him. It shows him, through entertaining story.

The piece also, indirectly but powerfully, has relevance to public policy. It seems to us an argument for locally owned businesses, for public policy that fosters downtown commerce and community.

We enjoyed her portrayal of O’Neal’s kids, particularly the scene in which Riley first spots his sister from the car. And we admired the section titled “A breeze across the lake,” in which Leland, via O’Neal’s ex-husband, poses the question: What would these kids be doing if they weren’t being driven to dance and karate lessons? She paints a scene of carefree days with the other kids in their neighborhood. But, she writes, in that neighborhood, “There are no children in sight.” They’re also out on the road, being carted around.

We readers may see ourselves in O’Neal, in which case we’re likely to enjoy the glimpse of ourselves—and perhaps see ourselves more clearly. Or if we do not “relate,” we may be appalled—and better informed. Either way the story is an innovative, entertaining and substantive reflection on American life.

“Gaming to the Max” seeks to cover a complicated issue: the effect of video gaming on children. Leland weaves useful background on this topic into the piece. We appreciated especially the description of the effect of gaming on the brain. She returns to the brain in her lovely ending and rounds out one of the themes of the piece, the contrast between the aggressive content of video games and Max’s essentially innocent nature.

Throughout, Leland moves us effectively from scene to scene, over the span of a couple months. She says she visited Max on weekends, five times for a couple of hours each. Following him for longer than a day or two allowed for coverage of small but significant developments in the ongoing drama of his life.

To a greater degree than many newspaper pieces, Leland gets into Max’s world, uncovers his inner life. We would have liked even more of this, including more words from Max about what he likes so much about video games. Still, this is an engaging and useful piece.