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.

The monkey story seems like a very traditional assignment that any metro desk might have to cover, but you tackled it in a different way.

A couple months ago, there was a story by Emily Nipps, one of our reporters here. And Vernon Yates, this character of a trapper from Seminole, had a quote maybe ¾ of the way down the story. I’m not looking at it, so I’m going from memory—something like, “The monkey’s not necessarily having a good time out there, you know. For him, what this is like is if you were dropped onto a desert island with no other humans.”

I read that quote and thought, “That’s kind of interesting. I wonder if that’s true? Because I would look at the story totally differently if that were true.” And it made some sense—monkeys are like us.

So that’s what started my interest in the monkey. I would bring it up from time to time in our meetings for the enterprise team. “I want to profile the monkey. I want to take it real seriously.” And people would laugh. And I would sort of laugh. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it, but it was something along these lines: “Is the monkey lonely?” How can I get at that? Because obviously, I’m not going to be able to talk to the monkey.

At one point, you talk to a loneliness expert, which was great.

I got to the point where I was feeling good about the monkey, and I needed to know about what loneliness does to people and to primates. I actually tweeted and said I needed a loneliness expert. Pretty quickly I got a tweet back from one of our news researchers here, Shirl Kennedy, saying she had the person. He was this guy John [Cacioppo], from the University of Chicago—he’d written a book called Loneliness. So I scooted over to the local Barnes & Noble and bought their one and only copy and read that. Then I felt like I was ready to have a conversation with him.

The subject line of my email to him was “A story about a monkey.” I’m sure the nation’s leading loneliness expert has never gotten an email with that subject line. But he got back to me immediately and he was totally on board with the idea. There were some things in his book and in our conversation not just about primates but about Rhesus macaques—the effects of social isolation on that particular kind of monkey.

It’s easier to make the case that the monkey is isolated than to make the case that the monkey is lonely. The monkey is not going to go down to the bar and have a drink because he’s lonely. But the monkey is isolated, and the chances are good that he hasn’t seen another monkey of his kind since he’s been on the loose. So he’s definitely isolated, and that definitely has physiological effects on him—the same way it would have effects on us if we were dropped on a desert island or put in solitary confinement.

How long did you take to research and to write the story?

I’d say for two weeks, the monkey was my primary focus as far as reporting is concerned. I went up to a conference in New York then, too, but it was a couple weeks of reporting and reading and talking to people.

One afternoon, I took a few hours and drove the route of the monkey—where he’s been this calendar year. I started from the first address he was spotted at and drove from address to address, just to get a sense. Obviously, I’m driving on roads and the monkey isn’t, but I can kind of envision where he might have gone. That was really helpful. Looking at yards where he was spotted, patterns started to develop. The monkey likes the same kinds of yards, the monkey likes the same kinds of trees. That’s a little speculative, but at least it’s kind of an earned speculation.

The actual act of writing typically isn’t a huge commitment of time relative to the total time spent on a story, at least for me. At some point when I thought I was ready to go, I headed over to a coffee shop with Bill Duryea, my editor, and said, “Here’s what I’ve got, and here’s what I’m thinking.”

We almost never don’t do that. We talk about the story to work out kinks in structure before I ever put anything to the page. It probably took me a day and a half to pull it together. And then Bill, as he always does, came back at it with some wise suggestions and made it better than it was when I sent it to him. I basically wrote it on a Tuesday, and then Wednesday we went over it, and by Thursday it was sitting in the can ready to go.

You’ve done narrative in a lot of forms, not just for the Times, but also your book and feature stories for Charlotte magazine. Does a narrative approach come by habit now, or is there a mindset you have to work to get yourself into?

It’s kind of interesting to me that you wanted to talk about this story, because there are certainly parts of narrative in this story, but I don’t think it’s a “pure narrative”—whatever that is. There’s some essay in there, there’s some science in there.

But I think, to answer your question, anywhere there’s movement, there’s possibility for narrative. I knew I had that to work with—there’s nothing but movement: the monkey is moving from point A to point B to point C. So there were possibilities.

I guess at this point, it’s how I think about stories. I always want to have narrative components in a story, because that means a story is moving. And if a story’s not moving, a reader is probably stopping.

Maybe I’m less wedded to the idea of narrative for the sake of narrative than some people are, but I think it’s the most natural, most obvious way to tell most stories. I’ve done what lots and lots of people have done—read the people who do this the best, go to conferences to hear the people who do this the best, pick the brains of the people who do this the best, and hopefully over time, some of that rubs off.

Your story has some clearly narrative elements but could have run in any of a number of papers around the country. It seemed like a good model for journalists interested in doing this kind of writing but working for papers that may not encourage it.

I don’t know the end inch count on this. It’s long-ish for some places, but it’s not overly long. It’s certainly not long for us.

There’s an idea behind this story, and that’s something that is really stressed here in St. Pete. And I feel like I’m really lucky to work in a place where that is encouraged, where the editors I get to work with are always pushing it. Mike Wilson always says, “What’s the big idea?” I guess the big idea here—if it’s not too presumptuous to call it that—is the tradeoffs we all make between wanting to be free and wanting to be part of a greater whole, whether that’s valuable space in a community or a healthy, loving relationship.

You brought up my Charlotte magazine work. There was a story that I did in it last year called “After the Crash.” That story is totally an idea story, to a point that is unique for any story I’ve ever done. I didn’t talk to anybody, not a person—I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a 5,000-word idea story that was reported by reading for months, on and off: NASCAR coverage, NASCAR books, magazine stories about NASCAR, stories about the housing crisis and economic collapse, and American studies. And then going to Daytona for the weekend and just walking around with a notebook, just walking and walking and literally resisting the urge to talk to people. Some people liked it, some people didn’t.

Why did you decide to take that approach?

Because what am I going to ask people? What am I going to ask the man on the street? “Can we have a conversation about the ways in which NASCAR at this current moment is similar to the housing bubble?” How do we even start that conversation? I just had to recalibrate my idea of what reporting is, or was, for that story.

This is something that I’ve been having some internal conversations about recently: the idea of thinking as reporting, which sounds ridiculous when I hear it come out of my mouth. Because of course you think when you report. Sometimes I think the more people I talk to, the better reporting I’m doing. Well, maybe. And for some stories, the more conversations you have, the more you’re learning.

But to really stop and consider the whys and the whats: I felt like I was getting the whats over the weekend and over the course of reading for that story. What I had to do was to start to tying together the ties of the whys. That was something I had to do on my own, in my head, and I had to organize it in a way that worked for that story.

What is your process for tying together the whys?

I brought up the NASCAR story because it is the most extreme example. I think the monkey story is definitely an example, too—it’s just they’re two different stories, two different approaches. In both cases, it was, as it always is, important to learn as much as I can about those different pieces of the story, those dots. For the NASCAR story, those dots are—I’m painting with a broad brush here—NASCAR, the economy, the highs and lows of American real estate. For the monkey story, those dots are rhesus macaques as a species, this rhesus macaque and loneliness.

So whatever it takes to learn as much as you can about those dots, that’s what you do. For the NASCAR story, it wasn’t talking to people, it was reading, reading, reading, and then really observing that weekend, walking in Daytona with a notebook.

For this piece it was also plenty of reading, but it was also visiting the yards where the monkey’s been spotted, talking to experts. Once you have all that, you can start putting some meat on those connections. You have a sense of where those connections might happen, but you can’t support those connections without that learning.

That’s maybe one difference in how I approach stories now versus how I approached stories five or six years ago—now I’m reporting stories as little self-taught, self-put-together seminars. I’m making a syllabus as I go along. And once I feel like I’ve learned the material on that self-inflicted syllabus, I can then make those connections and tie those ties of the whys in the most illuminating, most concise ways.

“What” is everywhere—more than it’s ever been. It’s still our role, but one of our additional roles, perhaps more than before, is making sense of the whys, or the reasons.

What journalists are most inspiring or most interesting to you these days?

I really like reading Michael Lewis, because I feel like he combines some of those things: narrative movement, big ideas, characters, and does it in an enormously readable way. I’m unbelievably lucky to share an area of the newsroom with people like Ben [Montgomery] and Lane [DeGregory] and John Barry. Somebody that I read a lot of and admire who used to work here is Tom Lake, who’s now at Atlanta magazine.

There are so many people, and you start throwing names around, and you don’t want to leave anybody out…

Like the Oscars. You don’t want to forget to thank somebody…

There are so many different kinds of work. I love Gary Smith’s long stuff in Sports Illustrated, and I love Tommy Tomlinson’s short stuff in The Charlotte Observer. They’re almost two different forms, but they end up doing the same thing—they make you think and they make you feel. Charlie Pierce is one of those journalists—I don’t care if he’s writing in Esquire, for The Boston Globe, or on his blog. I don’t care what he’s writing about. I read everything he writes.

There are others, like Elizabeth Gilbert—pre-Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert. Not that I didn’t enjoy and read that, and her last book, Committed, too. I’ll read everything she writes. But some of her work from 10, 12 years ago—magazine work—I just pick that up from time to time and reread it. The people who hide—maybe that’s the wrong word—big ideas and big stuff in unbelievably readable stories, that’s what we’re all trying to do.——

[For more, check out our commentary on Kruse’s monkey story.]

Dan Wetzel

Wetzel, who is Yahoo! Sports’ national columnist, covered the January 7 BCS National Championship game, in which Alabama beat Texas 37-21. He turned in a well-written tale of two Texas quarterbacks facing defeat, with a wonderful opening scene.

We talked by phone this morning about his column. While a few hours to turn around a narrative piece is hardly a big window, Wetzel felt that he was fortunate to have more time than print reporters in which to write.

During the interview, Wetzel also shared how he found his lede, offered some unofficial rules of sports writing, and highlighted two things necessary for turning out good stories. Here are excerpts from our talk:

When you covered the BCS National Championship game, you focused on the two Texas quarterbacks—a senior and a freshman—who lost the game. At what point did you know that was your story?

You’re allowed to go down the field for the last seven minutes of the game or so. I was standing on the sideline, and the Texas freshman was making a big comeback. It was down there that that I decided that I would probably go with the quarterbacks. But the game fell apart on him, and Alabama ended up winning by a couple touchdowns.

I was debating with myself, because it’s a risk in sports writing to write about the losing team. It’s not an ironclad rule, but you better have something good if you’re writing about the losers. It was right up until the end of the game that I was making sure that was what I wanted to do.

Can you talk a little about the structure of the piece? It seems like five distinct scenes, yet you fold the whole game in.

I thought they were intertwined—the two of them. McCoy was this huge star, so you have one story with McCoy. Here’s this kid, he’s played four years, and he’s from Texas. His name is Colt McCoy, and he’s from Tuscola, Texas, and all he wants to do is lead Texas to the national championship. So he prepares his whole life for this moment, his whole career, and then he gets hurt. You get this same kind of thing sometimes with the Olympics, because the Olympics are about these singular moments in people’s lives. The disappointment of that moment was one story—I could have written the whole story on Colt McCoy.

Then you have this freshman who they had to throw in there, who’d barely played at all the whole year. And he’s just absolutely awful. That adds this whole human element of “the worst night of your life.” Imagine getting on the biggest stage in college football and being terrible. He’s from Austin, which is where the school is, so his whole life all he wanted to do was lead Texas to the national championship, too. And then he makes this incredible comeback, but it falls apart. So there’s this whole other story on Garrett Gilbert.

So there are two different stories, and then the fact that they’re intertwined came out of the interviews. Obviously, Garrett had looked up to McCoy from the moment he’d gotten to campus. He wanted to be the next Colt McCoy. There was this relationship with the two of them that Garrett explained in the locker room. I had never spoken to Garrett in my life and knew nothing about him before he got put in that game, but there was enough good stuff that I felt like I needed to have them both in there.

Another thing about sports writing is that you always want to write about the star—that’s another general rule. McCoy’s the big name, so even though Garrett’s story is pretty compelling, part of you doesn’t want to hinge a whole column on it.

With the Internet, you’ve got to fight for every reader. It’s not like the paper, where people can pick it up and leaf through it to see what’s interesting. You’ve got to grab them, or else they’ll read not only the other 20 things on your site, they’ll go to some other page. You’re not just competing against other news sources, you’re competing against everything. You can’t get too cute with topic. That was part of the motivation on using McCoy—I had to get McCoy into the story.

Who did you talk to for the piece?

I went out on the field right after the gun fired and watched McCoy—I tried to follow him. He was getting interviewed by the ABC reporter, Lisa Salters. So I had a little bit of that scene. I couldn’t hear what he said, because it was so loud. But I watched him on the field after the game.

Then I followed Gilbert. He went over, and they sang “The Eyes of Texas.” He tried to keep it together then. They had incredible access at this thing—you could walk right off the field with the team, which usually they don’t let you do. Guys were patting him on the back, and then he started to cry. He was emotionally spent.

There were like 30 or 40 minutes in the locker room where both these kids were just incredibly poised. I don’t think Gilbert knew any better. He just stood there and answered every question. McCoy, who is just an incredible kid, and really mature, intelligent and articulate—he answered everything, too. Really without those two being such good talkers, and being open to interview questions, it wouldn’t have worked. You can’t always get football players to talk about when they were crying. I think that’s the whole strength of the story.

Colt McCoy trying to throw the ball to his father is a great image. What made you open with that?

After the game, McCoy was talking for a while. All the reporters kept coming up to him, and particularly for television, they were asking the same basic questions. So it was a very disjointed way to do an interview, but if you stick with it, you can fish out the good stuff.

I wanted to know the moment he knew he couldn’t play. He goes, “Yeah, we were in here.” And he described throwing the ball. And then I said, “Who’d you throw it to?” And then he said it was his dad—his dad was this huge figure in his life, his high school coach.

I asked, “How many times have you thrown to your dad?” And he said it was millions. I knew that was the moment. With stories like this you want to get people who don’t care about the game to buy in. This is a scene that I think everyone would understand. Every single person understands that dads and sons pass the ball back and forth, that these two guys had thrown a million passes to each other. Now here he was trying to throw one more to his dad, and he couldn’t do it. And so he couldn’t play in the biggest game.

There’s such a human element to that. Again, it came out of McCoy wanting to tell that stuff, but once the dad got involved, there was no way that couldn’t be the big scene. Instead of going with a timeline, I think about when I get home at night—or the next day when someone calls me—what’s the first thing I’m going to tell them? That’s the most important part of the story.

What time did you hand in your story? Who edited it?

I don’t know how long it took to write—maybe an hour. Generally we try to get our stories in an hour and a half after the game. That was kind of a longer process. Football’s a little tougher—you have to get around and back out of these big stadiums. It was probably an hour after I got back. And then we actually had an editor on site—Gerry Ahern, our college editor. He edited it and I’m sure it went to our desk in Santa Monica, and somebody read it there.

What’s your background—where did you get your start covering sports?

I covered sports at a college paper, at UMass Amherst, and then I did some news and city reporting in Indianapolis and Chicago for a little bit. And then I went back to writing sports at a kind of small basketball magazine … Basketball Times. Just about everything from hard news to magazine writing. I’ve worked online since the late ’90s, and I’ve been at Yahoo! since 2003.

You’ve clearly had some success writing in different formats. There’s a lot of discussion in journalism about how longer narratives do or don’t work online. What do you think makes for good online storytelling?

Topic, I think. If it’s interesting, people will read endless pages online. Sometimes you’ll see an Esquire thing or New Yorker thing that will go viral, because it’s about the right topic. I’m a big topic guy. Obviously you’ve got to keep things rolling. I didn’t look at this as a feature story exactly, but it is longer than I would normally write a game column. If you’ve got enough to make it long, go ahead and do it. If you’ve got a lot of freedom, write the story the best way you can.

The two most important things to me in writing are time and space. I have space. No one’s going to cut out the last five inches of my story just because there’s a tire ad in the way. And I had time. I didn’t have days to write the story, but I had time to talk with Colt McCoy. I wasn’t trying to get out of there so I could get back and write. I was on deadline but not really—if I had worked at a newspaper that night, I would have been scrambling to file something. So I had time to talk both of those guys without feeling panicked. If it had taken me an hour and a half or 45 minutes to write, it didn’t matter.

But with sports writing and newspapers, the deadline is extreme. When I’ve done it, it’s the hardest writing you can possibly do. The outcome of the event can change three minutes before you have to file, and everyone’s seen what you’re writing about. People were writing during the game that Texas got blown out, then all of the sudden, they were making a comeback—what would have been the greatest comeback of the title game. But then he ended up blowing it.

There’s extreme pressure on those guys who have to file immediately. But anybody with the time and the space I had would have gotten that story.

Anything else you’d like to say about the story—anything interesting we wouldn’t know from reading it?

I wanted to find the dad, but I couldn’t find him. I looked everywhere for him. That would have made it a lot better, so that was frustrating. I got one guy who wasn’t supposed to talk to the media to confirm that [McCoy] was throwing a ball, because you never know. I didn’t think Colt McCoy was lying, but recreating a scene based on one person’s account is a little dicey. It would have been a very unusual thing for McCoy to make up, but you still want to check.

But I really wish I could have found the dad, because his emotion—any parent would feel worse about that event than the child. If the dad had gotten in there, Garrett Gilbert would have been out of the story.

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.

The first was forwarded to us by a reader of a post on Gigaom.com that looks at memory and story, with a focus on a career applications. In this first part of a BBC video from 2006, Andi Bell, a world record-holder for memory, uses a story to recall the exact placement of each card in six full decks in 20 minutes.

The second clip was passed along by Tommy Tomlinson of The Charlotte Observer (we’ll be hearing more from Tommy later this month). In it, we see Lucas G., a scriptwriter for the French company Canal+, use a story for what would probably not qualify as narrative nonfiction.

The takeaway for journalism? Storytelling can make your readers hold on to important information about the world that they might not remember from other kinds of reporting. And even at the most difficult times, a well-told story can entertain and distract.