The Press Box - How to Be a Newspaper Sports Columnist With the L.A. Times’ Bill Plaschke

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

Bryan is joined by sportswriter Bill Plaschke to discuss how he got his start as a writer (4:58), the difference between beat writing in Seattle vs. Los Angeles (12:36), his transition to a columnist (14:14), how he came across the Paradise High football team in California that was featured in his book ‘Paradise Found’ (28:13), and more! Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Bill Plaschke Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Listen up all you New York fans. Veteran New York sports talk host, John Dostrompsky gives his unique take on all the big stories in the Big Apple and beyond, including guest conversations, gambling picks, and reactions from you, the listener. Check out New York, New York with John Dostromsky on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Friday. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. Today, we've got another one of our how-to podcasts. You know the drill. we bring on an interesting media person to tell us how they do their job. And today we're going to learn how to be a newspaper sports columnist with Bill Plashke of the LA Times. Bill Plashke has been writing a column for the Times since 1996, so 25 years.

And one of the cool parts for me about living in L.A. is to wake up, open the paper, and in a wonderfully analog way, see what Bill Plashke has to say about sports. Now, the job of the newspaper sports columnist was once THE job in sports writing? For a huge chunk of the 20th century, a newspaper columnist might be one of two or three people in an entire city who got paid to express their opinion about sports. It's changed a lot in the Twitter era, as Bill will talk about. But between his hits on ESPNs around the horn, Bill is still doing what amounts to a local job, writing about the Dodgers, or USC, or something more profound like Kobe Bryant's death.

He's not writing for Twitter, in other words. He's actually writing for Los Angeles. We're going to talk about Bill's column and also his new book, Paradise Found. And just one note, after our interview, Bill announced it his mom, Mary Margaret Plashky, who typed up his stories when he was 13 years old, has died. Our thoughts are with him. Here's how to be a newspaper sports columnist with Bill Plashke. All right, Bill.

Tell me, when did you first want to become a sports writer? Probably when I was in I was in ninth grade and I stuttered I didn't so I didn't I couldn't really communicate very well and so really the only way I could communicate was through writing

and I was also at a new school at a new big public high school so nobody knew me I didn't have any friends I wanted the way to connect to my landscape and I was in ninth grade and I'd go to the varsity basketball games. And at the end of the game, the whole fans, all the fans would start chanting, we want Earl, we want Earl.

And I said, I wonder what that was all about. And the last guy on the bench would get into the game and the place would go crazy. And it was typical, as I later learned, that that's what happens in high school sports, the worst person on the team, everybody cheers for them. So I decided to write a story about Earl. because I thought he was really fascinated me. The worst guy, you know, this guy who's a hero for 10 seconds a night in his life, and the worst guy on the team and why the fans, why he doesn't quit,

why the fans love him and all that stuff. So I wrote a story about it, and I turned it into the school paper. And like when it came out, the next week, I still never forget, it was walking down the hallways, people were like, hey, your story made me laugh or made me cry or it made me think. I mean, thanks for writing it. And I realized I could communicate with people, and I could touch it. And I could make them laugh or cry or think or get mad or get angry just through my words,

something I couldn't do really well vocally. So, and I realized I could do that through sports because sports is like the great metaphor for the human condition. And everybody, you know, everybody can relate to sports in somewhat fashion. You know, it's, as you guys know, it's our, or you folks know, it illustrates our greatest triumphs and our greatest failures all in the public eye and, you know, for everyone to see. So anyway, it was a long story short. It's in ninth grade.

And I realized my writing, I can write about something that people would read and it could touch them. And it was sports. And it was all I could do. So that's how I started. A lot of wannabe writers have a guy or a gal who is their sports writing hero, their lodestar. Who was yours?

Joe Falls. None of you remember. You probably remember him or not. I want to say Detroit, maybe. Detroit, Detroit. But I read him in the sporting news. he wrote in the sporting news. I read him in the sporting news,

and he wrote every week, and I just thought he was the coolest guy ever. And then I would get the Louisville Courier Journal, because I'm from Louisville, Kentucky. And Dave Kindred. So those are my two first idols. And they both, because they made me want to read about sports, not because it was sports,

but because it was about people, and the people who play sports. And all the human, you know, prison through which we view the human race through sports. You went to Southern Illinois University. How did you get your first gig at a newspaper? I, well, I was, so I went to S.I.U. Edwardsville. It was an extension school. I was at, I didn't have any money, didn't have any connections,

lived in a church basement. So I applied my junior year at S.I.U. Edwardsville. This is in Edwardsville, Illinois, a little farm town, about 30 minutes outside St. Louis, commuter school, farm school. I applied for 50 internships, my first, by junior year. I got one response. And that was to the Muskegan Chronicle, Muskegon, Michigan. I went up there and wrote about, and also, at S.I. Everdesville really didn't have any sports. So I was a sports writer at a school that didn't really have any sports.

So I'd write about, you know, 85-year-old marathon riders and, you know, javelin, jabbling throwers who were there on scout, who were there just, who threw javelin for fun. and, you know, homecoming Kings and Homecoming Queens and all that stuff. So anyway, I get this job at Muskegon, Michigan, and I spend the summer recovering drag racing and senior citizen tennis and softball. But I thought it was hot stuff.

So the next year I applied my senior year, I applied for 50 of more internships, 50, all over the country. I got no response, nothing. I got zilch. Nobody knew who the heck I was. I didn't know who I was. So I was going to go work. my dad's printing plan in the back shop, you know, stacking papers.

Then I get home from school one day off to my apartment here in this little farm town. And my two roommates are, it's snowing out, but they're on the balcony. It's the middle of winter. They're in their boxer shorts and they're screaming, Bill, Bill, somebody called, somebody called. I'm dropping out of the bus, out of the commuter bus. I'm like, who called? They're like, we don't know. And somebody called, they were stone.

They were stoned out of their minds. But all they do is somebody called. So I ran upstairs, went to the kitchen by the phone. Written on the Cocoa Puff box was the St. Petersburg Times and a name and a phone number. And somebody had called. And that was my one job. And that's what got me. I had my career going, go to work with a St. Petersburg Times and even independent as an intern,

my senior year. That was my first real job and then that sprung my career. And then a couple of papers in Florida and then I read you went to the Seattle Times to cover the Mariners. And you've said that on your first year on the beat, you got beat six ways to Sunday.

It was unbelievable. I went from covering the University of Miami National Championship football team in 1983. I left in mid-season to go cover the worst team in baseball. I was 26 years old. I know any of what I was doing. My first year, I got beat.

What's the biggest story you can get beat on if you're a beat man, beat guy, beat person, beat reporter. What's the worst, the biggest story you could get beat on is a manager, your manager gets fired. I got beat on it. I had no idea he was even in trouble. I wake up one morning and I work for the Seattle Post Intelligence. I said, I wake up one morning in the Seattle Times has the story. Dale Crandall gets fired. as mariner's manager.

I didn't even know he was in trouble. I was beating so badly on the story. And I worked for the Post Intelligence, we didn't have a Sunday paper that the Seattle Times broke the story on Saturday. So I couldn't even come back for two days. I kid you not, Brian and Lonnie. I went to my,

I walked to my balcony of my house of my apartment in Seattle. Beautiful view of the, you know, Seattle's so beautiful. And I almost jumped. I almost jumped. jumped off the balcony. I was so distraught. I couldn't sleep for three nights. I got to be players. I'd ask players dumb questions. A coach called me a cancer, not because I wrote bad things, because I wrote dumb

things. I said, you have no idea what you're right. You have no idea what you're asking. You have no idea what you're doing. I was beaten. I was beating terribly. But it taught me a lot. I learned a lot. I learned to take a beating. And I learned that, you know, I learned to do their, to report. I learned to develop relationships. I learned how to write. I mean, I learned all that stuff by covering a beat. I think covering a beat is the most important thing you can do. It's the toughest job.

The baseball beat's the toughest job. But it teaches you everything about dealing with deadlines, dealing with sources, dealing with news, dealing with uncertain questions and how to ask a question. I'd ask the dumbest question. I'd ask after the Mariners won a game, I'd say, so what can you do to win tomorrow's game? How does this help you win tomorrow's game?

I'm like, what are you, idiot? Yeah, it was terrible. But I survived it because, and you learn how to travel. You learn all this stuff. It's a beat rider. So I did the worst team in baseball. But they played in the kingdom, the kingdom, the big, the old kingdom. When I first, my first time of the job, there was a key in my mailbox.

So what's this? Boss, it's the key to the kingdom. It was literally the key to the kingdom. I had a key to the, to the big arena where they played. I'd go in there every day and there would be nobody there. Wow. So that's how I learned. This is amazing from a different era of sports writing,

where the sports writer can just let themselves into the stadium anytime they like. Anytime I wanted to, and I get there before batting practice, it'd be dark before they turn the lights on, and I'd hang out, and then not ask a dumb question, and I'd get yelled at. How did you know or realize when you were able to compete with a guy on the other paper? I think when I learned, my next my second spring training i learned the key to spring training stories in journalism in big covering baseball spring training is everything's nice everybody's happy nobody's struck out yet

nobody's dropped the ball yet so find the person who you want to be your source that year and write a nice story about it or her in this case baseball so it's him maybe the baseball write a nice story about and writing a nice story then you a curry his favor b you get phone numbers of all of his family and friends to stock away for the season and see other players see that you can write a nice story so you write nice stories in spring train two or three big nice takeouts of guys and i did that and then and then you have because i think in b writing it's so important the one thing you need more than anything more than reporting, more than writing, more than a good computer, more than a good fast Twitter figures,

is to have somebody in the clubhouse. If you're outside the clubhouse and you hear a fight go down, somebody's got to tell you who punch who. So you need a source. So I get all my sources during the spring. So I was set for the year. So it really, that taught me. And then I took a step further in my later on baseball writing career.

I would go to the Dominican Republic of the Puerto Rico and do stories that guys. at home and get their foreign phone numbers and their parents' phone numbers and those guys, because everybody in the clubhouse looks at you and watches who you talk to and how you talk to them and who accepts you, who doesn't accept you. Baseball clubhouses are so, they're so segregated if you're talked to one Latino player, all the Latino players love you. So, you know, if you talk to the one country boy, all the country boys love you.

1988 you go to the LA Times after the Dodgers won the World Series. What's the biggest difference between beatwriting in L.A. and B-writing in Seattle? The seventh inning. I didn't see one seventh inning in my first year. I was so nerve-wracking to sit at Dodgers Stadium, 50,000 people on deadline. I would run to the bathroom. I would spend every seventh inning in the bathroom at Dodger Stadium. The pressure, the biggest difference is everybody watches the Dodgers.

Everybody reads the Dodgers. And they had in Seattle, we had two beatwriters for the Dodgers in 1989. I started with the Dodgers at the end of 88 with the World Series. It was our full-time beatwriters starting 89. 89 we had eight beat riders covered a team, every little paper in Southern California. And they're all competing against you. So it's seven-on-one. So seven-on-one, 50,000 fans in the bathroom every seventh inning.

You miss all the seventh inning. And they happened to the same thing. I never saw it for a year. So that there was a huge different. And then, Tom of the Sorter. So you're dealing with the most effervescent, energizing, maddening manager in baseball history.

It was, it was absolutely crazy. So seventh inning, because you sent the end of the game's coming and deadlines coming. And then you just, oh, yeah, I just,

I couldn't take it. My bowels couldn't take it, Brian. I had to get, I didn't, I swear I didn't see the seventh inning, the whole season. It was so,

It was so nerve-wracking, so stressful. And now, today I pride myself on being a deadline columnist, but only because I learned doing it that way. How'd you get the column in 1996? I went, well, I wanted to, I had been promoted, and moved move from the Dodgers to cover national football league, the NFL as a national writer. I was writing features and stuff,

but I was feeling kind of bored, and I felt like my stories weren't having as much impact. So I never forget talking to my little brother, Bobby. We're in a gas station in Amsterdam. This is where he lived. And I went on vacation there one year in the 95. And I'm like, I'm not sure what I want to do now. I'm kind of, I'm kind of bored.

And I'm writing. I've done the beat. I've done their feature writing. I'm not sure where to go. And he said, well, ask yourself this. Why did you get in this business in the first place? Why did you go back to Earl in ninth grade? Earl, by the way, his name was Earl Carter.

He came one of my best friends in the world and passed away during COVID, but he was in my best friends in the world. Anyway, he said, go back to ninth grade, go back to Earl, ask yourself, why do you do this? And I said, well, I do it because I want to reach people. I want to touch them. I want to make them laugh, make them cry, make them think, make them feel. I want to use all of the only thing I have. It's all I can do. I can't do anything else. I can't build bridges. I can't argue in front of a judge. I can't, you know, I can't do numbers. I'm not a businessman. All I can do is write. And what's the best way my writing, my fingers and my mind and my how can I change even for 10 seconds 20 seconds a day

change my landscape change how people think make people make the world a better place make them more embracing place for people and they uh and he I said yeah that's what I'm doing he says okay is there a job for that I said I guess yeah I guess as a columnist I never thought about I never thought about any columnist I was 35 years ago I never thought I'd be any columnist today they come out of the womb thinking they're going to be a columnist And I said, he said, yeah. So why don't you think about, why don't you be a columnist? So I went back home, went to sports senator, Bill DeWire.

I want to be a columnist. You'll never be a columnist. Jim Murray's our columnist. My guy's our columnist. You have no shot. I said, all right. Well, I guess that's sad. So, but he said, you know, but then everybody said, just write something that makes him,

make some take notice, makes him show. that you have voice. So I spent in covering the NFL, I know this is a long answer to your question. I'm sorry about this. So in covering the NFL at the time, they had a rule. They just enacted a rule.

Players could not wear bandanas on the field because of gang-related incidences. They would be perceived as gang colors. So no bandanas in the NFL. I thought that's kind of a silly rule. So I called it out of the blue, out of the phone book, I called the coach of Garfield High School,

Jada Gary. Garfield's a school in LA stand and deliver was based on the movie Hamia Scalani. Anyway, I called him and said, this is crazy, right? He said, no, he said, gangs are a way of our life. Gangs dominate our football team and our field and our football lives. I said, you kidding me. He said, no, come down and spend a week with us. Go through a football week with us and I'll show you.

So I did on my own time. And I tell young journalists this, I did this on my own time out of my beat, out of my realm. I drive down to Garfield High every day at 3 o'clock. Stay there until midnight and do a chronicle a week in the life of this football team. Gang members are in the end zone. Players getting caught off the field by their gang leaders. Players leaving to take care of their pregnant girlfriends. Players had to work for their parents on the street and street fending.

It was unbelievable the hassles this team went through just to play a football game. I wrote it. It ran on A1. Got a lot of response. Bill DeWire that takes me to dinner at a O.C. front restaurant slabs me over a piece of paper and envelope said you want to be a columnist I said he said hell yes it's the first time anybody I was you know and again I was I've never been anybody's first choice I was their fifth choice to cover the Dodgers I was a third third

choice to cover NFL I got no at SIU Edwardsville I was 0 for 50 but he see he slid me that envelope and that little offer I'm like hell yes so you got Murray doing one column you got Downey doing one column. Oh, and you had me doing the aging track star from Azusa Pacific. That was my column. So that pushed you in a direction to do, the more featurey here is the story you haven't heard of time? Well, yeah, I was pushing that from the start from back at SIEU Edwardsville. The only sport we had was soccer.

So if you don't have sport really, we had a basketball team to play in a high school gym. So you don't really have any big sports. You have to cover the offbeat. You have to do the human interest. That's the thing. I never forget, though, it was in 88, the World Series. I just started. And they said, okay, go down and ask Jim Murray what he's writing in the eighth inning.

I said, sure, I guess. And I didn't see him all laughing behind me. And I go down and ask the great Jim Murray. So what are you writing about? He's like, the game. I look back and they're all on the floor laughing, point having. So, yeah. So, yeah, those guys, Jim Murray and Mike Deion,

got the game, I got the bad boy. And I took it. I ran with that sucker. Well, it comes full circle, right? Because you're going and looking for Earl. You're just looking for Earl in Los Angeles. It does. You're right. I'm just, Earl's been in my life and more in real life and in, in, figuratively, my whole 40, 40 year career, absolutely. Looking for Earl. That's, that's a great, that's, you're exactly right. That's your next collection, looking for Earl. That'd be tremendous if I got somebody to print it. When you sit down and write a column, do you think about who you're writing for? Oh, absolutely.

Oh, yeah. And I'm writing for the person who doesn't like sports, but likes people and likes a human to see human struggle and human triumph and who has to put a face on pressure and a face on failure and a face on success. Yes. So in the old days, 30, 20 years ago, it was like the house, I would write for the quote unquote, the housewife and Encino. But now, of course, now of course, you know, there's no, there's no gender relative to sports love.

You know, it's all gender, it's all, it's everything. So I write for anybody who loves people and loves to read about people who happen to play sports. So that's my favorite. People who don't really want numbers. I don't give numbers. I give the final score and that's about it. And even then, if you read my columns, if I have a number of six, I'll say a half dozen. or 12 as a dozen.

I don't even, if I could avoid putting a number in my column, I haven't avoid that. I don't do analytics. I love analytics. They're so important. I don't do them because I don't think the average reader doesn't understand a lot of that. So I try to write about people, what they look like, what they sound like, what it

feels like to be there for the people who don't. And that's my favorite compliments are people who will say, I don't read sports, but I read you. And I'm sure that's the same way. There are many sports writers in this country at the same way. It's funny you mentioned about numbers. because I once heard a story about Jim Murray from an editor at the LA Times, and Murray turned in a column and said,

Babe Ruth hit about 700 home runs and said, you know, Jim, it's kind of an important number. I think we should probably put you the exact one. He actually wrote that. That sounds tremendous. It's a story anyway, but yeah. Yeah, that sounds about like me. I'm not much of a number of it.

I don't even like to, I barely like the final score. I barely get that in there. Now, you said you're a good deadline columnist. How fast are you? Well, Chris Taylor hit the game winning home running at St. Louis Cardinals in the Wild Cardinals in the wildcard game six minutes before deadline. Oh, man. But I had, now I had, I felt people I wrote 1,200 words in six minutes. Of course not. I had a thousand words done.

Of course. You know that, Brian. Sure. But I'm damn fast on those 200 words. I just start. And people, and that's another thing. people, what are the criticisms or the critiques or some people like it, I guess? I write a lot of one word, short paragraphs, paragraph in one sentence paragraph. And I got, we got a letter to the L.A. Times one time that said, dear editor, period, new paragraph.

Bill Plashky, period, new paragraph. It's driving me crazy, period, due paragraph, because period, he writes, period. It was a 12 paragraph letter with one sentence. And there's two things I like I do that because that's the way I talk. I talk fast. I talk in spurts. I think you should write like you talk.

That's how I communicates through my words, through my, you know, through my fingers. So that's what comes out. So that's kind of who I am. If you talk to me, you can see this.

It's also a hell a lot easier on deadline to go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Get the thoughts I would try to hell trying to be eloquent and have clauses and parentheses. and for reference these commas and semicolon, no, just the Dodgers, the Dodgers kick butt, period. Dodgers kick big butt, period.

New graph. Enter, enter. Enter. Yeah, enter. Oh, I kill that energy, baby. We're just eating up column inches here. Oh, we are just eating them up. Yes, that's exactly right.

And after the Chris Taylor home run, so you have a thousand-ish words ready to go. You write quickly 200, and the thousand words held up underneath that, despite that crazy ending? Well, yeah, because it was, I had a win and a lose. I had two, two files. A thousand words if they won, a thousand words if they lose. So I stuck that one in there. Last year, in fact, somebody ran to, who is this?

Somebody, the athletic ran, I think was the athletic. They collected, no, it was the San Francisco Chronicle, I think. They collected all the, when the Dodgers were supposed to lose last year. So many, they had like five elimination games. I had an entire Dodger lost, lost, column written last year, 2020 when he won the championship. I never used it. But it was a hell of a column. And it appeared somewhere. Somebody, I gave it and somebody ran it. But it was there. Dodgers blow it again. Oh my God. Oh, my God. Oh, I just tell you that the greatest team ever is the

dumbest team ever. What a horrible season. I was, it's hard to be passionate. It's hard to be passionate about a winner loss if it hasn't been having a winner loss yet. But you have to be. So I was, oh yeah, I just killed him. I just hammered the hell out of them. This is a good lesson. Pre-emoting before a big guy. Yeah, and you'll see the ones when you have time, it was never had time to write anymore. If I had time, it would be much more patched in the cassette. Part of you holds back because it's so hard to rip them if they haven't been done anything rippable yet, but you can kind of make it up in your head.

Yeah, so I had to do, I had a loss, it literally lost in the wind column. I put the, suck the wind column in there. Great triumph, greatest week, now under the giant. Bring all the giants, blah, blah, blah. Two years ago, Super Bowl was in Miami, and on the day a bunch of us are flying down there, Kobe Bryant dies in a helicopter accident. And one of your colleagues told me that he came in your place

because you didn't want to leave L.A., essentially, after Kobe died. What was your thinking there? No, I didn't come in my place. I got to Miami. I flew to Miami, got up in the morning, February, January 26th, 2020. It was so foggy. I live in the valley. I live in Pasadena area.

I've never seen so much fog. The cab driver could barely find his way out of my neighborhood. I've never seen it. I said, there's no way this point he's taken off. It did. I get to Miami. Get checked in. Lay down in the bed to take a nap.

Phone starts buzzing. Buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. I'm sleeping through it. Finally, I wake up to see all the missed calls. And the business again, it's one of my editors. And all he said was, Now, can I curse on this? Sure.

Yeah. All I said, I heard the phone was, fuck, Kobe's dead. I'm like, what? So I get up, get the news, I sit down, and I just start writing. It just all poured out of me. Everything poured, it just all poured out of me. And I wrote for two and a half hours, turned the column in. It got, you know, it got a minute.

It was. and like the lead is it was a very I think I had like no no no no no in there and no damn it and I had a lot of you know but I was just crying I was crying at a keyboard because Kobe you know not to be sentimental about it but it's true he defined I was with him for my

my column started when he got to LA so he and I literally grew up together as far as I hated him I loved him I screamed at me screamed at me we were together for 20 years. And my whole professional career was off, and was based on whether Kobe was talking to me or not. Anyway, so I wrote that column

and they said, okay, what do you want to do now? I said, I don't know what I want to do, but I sure saw you staying here for this damn dumb football game. So the next day I got up and flew back to L.A. On the next flight back, and then covered it back from L.A. And all the national agreement and everything. Yeah, there was no way I could have had any interest

in any Super Bowl was so small compared to what to what happened to Kobe. You're like as a columnist, I don't belong here writing about Chiefs 49ers. Oh, I couldn't. As a columnist,

I couldn't see, even asking a question to even matter other than what about Kobe? That was the only thing that mattered to anybody in the sports world in the world for a while.

Let me ask you about the book. The campfire out here in California destroyed, nearly destroyed, the Mountain Town of Paradise, November 2018. Fire killed more than 80 people left more than 30,000 people homeless. How did you first get the idea to write about the football team? I got a call from a guy, Gary Pion, who's the then, now he's the athletic director,

Azusa Pacific. And they were having a guest speaker, Rick Prynne's was coming in to speak to them, giving an inspirational talk. And I said, who's seen? He said, you should write a story about him. He's a football coach with no team and no town. I said, what? And then I knew Paradise had been destroyed.

went from 30,000 people to 2,000 people. I knew it, but I didn't know that you're actually going to still try to play football the next year. This was in the spring. I get to call. So I call Rick and he says, yeah, I'm doing a story with you. Come on up here. And I came up there and I ended up at an airplane hanger where they had temporary school. And I walk in and it's a concrete, like a concrete cave with some weights.

and this coach and the old little metal desk. And he said, yes, this is where I work. I said, where do you play football? And he said, he pointed outside of this rock-strewn, gutted upfield, no lines, just an empty, gutted, vacant lot. In their first practice, they go out there in jeans. The players, he had 103 players in a program, not 100 of them lost their homes.

For virtually every player lost their homes. They lost every bit of equipment. Every coach lost their home except Rick. Everybody lost it, lost everything. So you left for the first practice, spring football, and they have one problem. They don't have a football. They lost, and coach said, is anybody here, I realize there, all these kids are out there and their jeans and ready, T-shirts and, you know, and, you know, all hand-me-downs, all charity stuff,

because all their clothes are burned. And he said, yeah, guys, I forgot to ask. Does anybody here have a football? They didn't even have a football. And yet they were going to have a team the following season because the town needed it. The one town, one structure in town in town in the paradise, it's an hour and a half north of Sacramento, the stairfoot hills. The one structure in town that didn't burn was a school in the field, this, you know, 100-year-old field or 80-year-old field. So I said, my God, this is a story.

So I wrote one story and I said, my God, this is a book to follow these kids who have nothing trying to save. them town and save themselves and try to, you know, make, make life matter to people again and bring the town back together again. And also just kind of cling to any sense of normalcy. So kids living in cars, living in, sleeping on floors. And, but they insisted on playing football. So I wrote about the whole how they, they had, nobody would schedule them because they were, they were so, they lost, their, their, their team was down to 20 players, 1002 players. down to 20. And they couldn't find anybody

his schedule them. Then when they found somebody by a schedule them, they'd have to play road games because nobody wanted to come into paradise. I thought it was too dangerous. And when they could play

on away games, they didn't have any bus drivers. Every bus driver had either had lost their home and had quit to quit. So the athletic director is bribing schools to play them.

At the same time, she's getting her bus license to drive the bus. So it's that, basic. So I follow them throughout the season as they went on this incredible, incredible run, Disney-esque run to the championship, to the sectional championship game. Majority of the people in the book are teenagers. How do you talk to teenagers?

Yeah, I know. It's funny. I used to be pretty good at it about 30 years ago. So you just hang, you let, I learn at my age and I look every bit in my age. So, I'm not fooling anybody. You don't talk to teenagers. You let him talk to you. You just hang out. I just hung out at every practice, every game on the sidelines. I let him come over and talk to you.

A kid would come over after one one of the games. A kid came over to me. I was just standing there. He comes over to me. It looks at me and they just won a big game. And he says, this is something, huh? And I said, yeah, it's like a dream. He said, no, a dream would be able to,

what dream would be me going home right now. you know a kid you know it was yeah so they they said the most compelling things you have to let them talk to you you have to kind of let them come over on the bench during practice the injured kids that sort of thing and then kids then i reverted my old football my old baseball writing days if kids see you talk when kids see you talk to another kid then they trust you then they'll come over and talk to you but you let the kids kind of talk to you and they're pain these kids are suffering pizza TSD. They didn't, you know, they didn't, a lot of one, one kid, his biggest issue was he couldn't

get to practice because he was living. His parents had moved out. They lost everything. They moved down to San Diego. This is one of the star running backs, Tyler Harrison. He lived with his disabled grandmother who had a junker of her car and it broke down every day. He'd wait two hours, but a sign her over for somebody going to pick him up to take into

practice every day. I mean, there was kids living, one, this other star running back live, live with his, with his brother in an apartment. No adult supervision. They just, they would talk about this, talk about eating. They said one of the things they learned, one of the kids told me, one of the things you learn about to play football for Paradise is that you have to really do, you have to really get strong because you lose so much weight because you don't know where your next meal is coming from. You're staying in somebody's floor. You don't know whether they're asking for breakfast or you whether you go to get a breakfast burrito or jack in the box. It was, yeah, it was.

It was really, it was so, yeah, so the kids talk to me. This is a little mountain town. You're from L.A., columnist for the L.A. times. Was there a point where they stopped regarding you as an outsider and started regarding you as a part of the scenery? Yeah, I think they're, because the culture's embrace me right away, what helped initially, and I've learned this in recent years more than than ever, is where I go places outside of L.A.

I want to get his pants around the horn and they watch around the horn. Everybody watches that. So that, they knew me from that. The players, the coaches did. And that kind of got down to the kids. And then I would go, you know, they had, I knew I was accepted when they have a, the school parking lot became their locker room. They don't have a locker room.

And they never did. So they'd get dressed in the parking lot. And then what the fire changed is that when they come after games, they wouldn't get dressed on their flat. beds of their trucks and the trunks of their cars sitting on the trunks of their cars. They just stay there because they had nowhere to go. So these parking lot would be there until midnight. These kids just swapping stories and hanging out because they had nowhere to go.

So I could hang out in the parking lot and they wouldn't necessarily invite me in, but they wouldn't exclude me either. I could just be hanging around the fringes and kind of dart in and out, listen to stories and hear them tell tales. That's one of amazing scenes in the book because the coach Rick Prynne says, I used to worry that after the football game was over, all my players are going to go get drunk and go party and have a great time. And now I worry because they just sit in the parking lot.

All night. All night. Because they had nowhere to go. Yeah. It was, it was amazing. I mean, kids, you know, they were kids, which would come to games and without their uniform. Because they were, the uniform was, they weren't sure which parents' house they left it at or what temporary housing facility they left.

they show up without their uniforms. We're in the same clothes all week because that's the only pair of pants they had. Now, when you're right about kids, these are people who are unformed. They probably haven't talked to too many reporters before other than the reporters they talked to about the fire in paradise. Yes.

Leave things out. Oh, absolutely. Oh, my God, yes. I do that. I'll do that with freshman football college from high school football players. I do that with football players, freshman, you know, young kids. If they're an adult, they're an adult. No, I'll say,

are you sure you want to say that? Absolutely, I do. And I make no apologies for that. I know that breaks the laws of standard journalism. We're talking to a 16-year-old kid who's talking about trying to study by the light of the backseat of his car, and he's worried about flunking the test. And his buddy, but it's okay, he's not to flung this test because his buddy cheated for him, you know, and so he can stay eligible to play. yeah, you tell them, you sure you want to say that. You absolutely do.

I think that's my responsibility. Otherwise, it feels like I'm being a, being predatory. I, I took, yes, I took very good care of those kids and stuff they said. And I just felt that it was, you know, now a lot of stuff ended up in the, you know, if I wasn't using the book, I'd go back and say, can I use this now that you said, you know?

And most in there, they would always say yes. But I was very careful. I was very careful in my stories. So we ran like seven stories for the LA Times. And I was very careful of what they said. Because I just think it's just being responsible. And maybe I have three children, three growing children of my own. But I'll do that even, even again, the first of USC freshman football star.

And I got an interview one-on-one with them. And he says something really stupid. He rips the coach or something. I say, are you sure you want to say that? I'll say it to the 18-year-old. I just think it's a right thing to do. I would think one of the tricky parts about writing this book is if I sent you to L.A. high school, any L.A. high school, you'd go, okay, that guy has an interesting story.

That guy has an interesting story. I'm going to kind of make them the main characters here. All of the kids, all of the Paradise Bobcats fled their homes in a horrifying fashion down the mountain. Most of them lost their homes. So how do you narrow it down? The same way I narrow down. I'm sure you're going through this two, Brian and Lonnie. You narrow down, who's the best talker. That's what the best, the best talker gets it. It is. And I tell that when I'm doing stories, really regular comments for the early times, and I want to do a piece on the UCLA football team.

And I want to do a piece on how they're back when they were doing good under a Chip Kelly. And they'll say, okay, well, yes. And I'll go to our beat person and say, okay, who should I talk to? Who's, well, you want to talk to the quarterback. You want to talk to the leading tackler? You want to talk to the leading quarterback? I said, no. Who's the best talker?

Well, this offensive guard is to play sometimes. I won him. Well, this backup kicker, I want him. So absolutely. So I found right away, Lucas Hartley is one of the stars of the book. Tremendous talk. He also happened to be their best running back. But that was pure luck, pure happenstance.

He was just a really good, really good talker. And so you go for the best, yeah, you go for the best talkers every time and everything. You go for talking, you go for access. I had access, unlimited access. that was no problem. But in regular, my regular job, can I get to talk to and are they a good talker? I don't care about your stats.

I don't care about, and I would. If the team had a Hall of Famer on it and a bench warmer. The Benchworm is a better talker as easy to get to, I'll take him. Because that shines more light on the story. And everybody knows the best, the Hall of Famer.

Nobody knows the bencher. But anyway, these kids, if you answer your question, these kids, I would go for the, you can tell right away which kids are willing to talk who emotes the best and who tells the best stories. And then I use them. Would you make it the coach, Rick Prens?

Oh, I love them. He was, he's a former youth pastor. So he's really tough, but he's really caring too. I mean, he's really, you know, he lets the players, when they're on the field and he forget something, they all chant old man, Prinzer, they all, they all chant at it. And they make fun of him. He lets him make fun of him, but he's tough when he has to be. he's just a perfect he has a perfect you know

demeanor to be that kind of coach and he made sure it was important to be he had kids he had kids studying with their books on the bench during practices he had kids on the ground doing essays he made sure they did their school made sure they all graduated and he was really big big on that so yeah he was and he was he's the focal point the book because when it started, he was going to retire. They were headed for the playoffs in 2018. They had a great team that could have won a championship. The fire happened. The next day, the athletic director said, you told the coach, you have a choice. We can still continue our season. We have to play it on the road. I found a field. I can dig up the equipment. I can find

us a football. We can finish our 2018 season. And you looked around. and he, you know, everybody lost their homes. His coach had had no order to leave. His parents had no order to leave. He said, no, he can't do it. So he canceled the season, and he felt bad about that. And then really felt, really felt, really hurt him in his guts. And then a couple, so when he had his first, so he was going to retire to end of this

championship season, the season gets canceled. He's still going to retire, but he holds a preliminary football meeting in a, in a empty shopping mall in Chico, which is about 15, 20 minutes in Paradise. and 12 kids show up in January. And that was his team, started with 12 kids. And they're like, we want to play, coach. This is all we have. We have each other.

We have football. That's all we got. So he decided on this spot not to retire and to keep coaching. And he coached him that year. That was, you know, now he's going to, I believe he could be retiring, you know, soon. But he went ahead and did that year just because he couldn't leave the kids behind. You published a number of books. There's a collection of columns, books you wrote with various coaches and athletic people.

What's the hardest part about writing your first book book? Oh, you nailed it, Brian. This is so different. Everybody said, you've written, my family said, you've written five books. What's so hard about it? Oh, my God. Well, on the Ask Tolto's, you have a lifeline. You have a chronology to follow, and you just write about their live.

the collection of columns that I that I printed, you just give them 100 columns. By the way, that was interesting. I tell people this. I think there was 80 columns in that book, good sports, spoil sports, foul balls and oddballs. And only three of them were former from the Laker great Laker years. Because that's not the kind of stuff that people remember more the human interest one.

You know, the, the junior college basketball player, who has a beeper on the bench because his mom is dying. You know, that's those sorts of stories. So I thought so to tell people, all the great later years I covered, only four or five a minute a column. Anyway, oh, it's so much harder because you create the timeline. You create the story. It all comes to, yeah, oh, my God, you hit nail on the head, right.

It was very, it was really difficult. And it was tired of doing it, juggling that in the column and then the TV show. It was a real challenge. But I love these kids and I love this story. and I really wanted it to get out. But it was, yes, the fact that it's all on you. You can't just rely, okay, 1973, Dick Williams did this, 1984, sort of did this. You don't have, you don't have that.

It's where are you going. You have to fashion the outline the direction, everything yourself. Very difficult. And I tell people this. And also, I'm used to writing columns. Chris Taylor, it's a home run. Six minutes to deadline. I punch it in there.

It's online a half hour later. So I wait a half hour before my story run after I write it till I see it in print. The book's a year. You have to wait a year. That's crazy. It drove me crazy. I don't know how you do it. I don't know how anybody does it.

It writes long form and takes a month or two months to write a story. Oh, my God. This was a year. So I couldn't see the end. It was so hard to see the finish line. It was so hard to get up every day and write going to it wasn't going to be in print. But again, my love for the kids, and then I would call the kids and get into retell some of their stories. And they're, they're so open and so honest and so great about everything that it was, you know, it was, it was such a pleasure doing and such an honor.

Because they, you know, and they have something now. They've, they've, they, they, they, they, they, they, they lost all their, their house, their clothes. They lost all their trophies. They lost their footballs. They lost their uniforms. They lost every memorabilia that they'd had that they ever played sports. This book, that's right, I was going to show it to you, but we're on a podcast, not Zoom. This book will be their memorabilia, and that means a lot to me.

You're talking about challenges, not only doing the column in TV, but you had COVID last summer. I want to quote a couple sentences from the column you wrote, I would fall asleep in a chair and wake up terrified from a hallucinatory dream where I was chased through a playground by old women with giant heads. During phone calls, I would get confused and just stopped talking. I'd begin crying for no reason. Did you feel you were going to get better for sure? Did you entertain dark thoughts?

Well, I didn't get better. I didn't get better right away. It was, yeah, that column I wrote it, the reason I wrote it, if I got COVID today, I probably wouldn't write it because COVID is such a, it seems like everybody's got it. But back when I got it in July of 2020, nobody nobody I knew

had it had gotten it and so it was terrifying to me knowing I suffer from long-haul

stuff after that fatigue a lot of you know my voice my smell my taste

it took a long time to come back but yes I was scared death because that's the thing about

COVID that's what I wrote that seemed to be what people fascinated on is that

even today if you get it you don't know there is no cure and that's I call my doctor i remember if you could call my doctor it's just remember it's still new in the COVID cycle so

people were really scared i called my doctor and said well what you know i got chills i'm going through five shirts a night t-shirts a night i haven't had hallucinations what can i take he said nothing said well he said no no you just got to you know write it out or go to the hospital if you're that sick so that's not knowing to have any cure is what made it so scary so yeah so the people in the book were really I had to push the deadline back a little bit because I couldn't I couldn't travel up there and I couldn't you know I couldn't move for two three weeks so they were they're very understanding and I think it that helped me in writing a book in the ultimately because I really was attuned to their struggles and attuned to their to what they were you know never never in my million years what I can see I can relate to losing everything in a in your you know in a fire and But I can relate to being scared out of your mind. And these kids were scared to death. They spent the whole year scared to death.

Last one for you, Bill. You've been writing the column the LA Times now for 25 years. What's the biggest thing that's changed about being a newspaper sports column is during that span? You asked great questions, Brian. Of course, I knew you did because your stories are so great. And I'm not just sucking up to you. Probably the emphasis now, and I fight against this,

is as much about. conversions. Well, it's as obvious. Conversions and clicks instead of leads and narrative. You know, if you rarely get a compliment from anybody in your paper, if ever, that says good story, good lead, good kicker. I like the way that story flowed. Great quotes. It's, oh, my God, that story did so good.

It got this many conversions, this many clicks. That's the biggest thing is that we have become, we've gone from being an art to a business. and maybe we should have been a business in the first place. If we tried to make some bold, we could still have both. I don't sense that we have both anymore. I sense it's a lot of this business. So I struggle. So now, in the old days, the stories I would write, the long stories, the human interest stories I would write, those would be to reach readers.

And those are people would call them cure jerkers. they would say that demeaningly, but I think if you cry and write you read a story, that's pretty good. So I never shot from that. Today, those stories are called pro bono stories because you do them because you know you're not going to get the readership that you get if I went out and wrote Russell Westbrook sucks. Or don't sign clicking Kirshall.

You're not going to get the clicks. You're not going to get to conversions. But it's the right thing to do. So those are now, those used to be the right thing to do used to be the common thing to do. Now it's a pro bono story. it's almost like an extra story. So I need to, you know,

I need to, and in my career, I need to do more. I get caught up with these Dodgers and Lakers and all this stuff going on you. How it's like I got here, Brian and Lottie. So it's,

I need to do more. That's what I made my career on, was doing the stories in the shadows. People, nobody notices, stories, nobody sees, stories about,

that are not about sports or the athlete, but they're about us. I need to do more of those. Like I, and, and those are still my favorite stories to do. But the business is changing that those are considered extra stories now. The main stuff is the hot takes and that sort of thing.

The red meat. Pro bono stories. I like that. I've never heard that term. Yeah. That's what we do because you do it. I tell them, I'm going to do the story about this high school kid. And my editors are great.

They're encouraging. Do it. No, this never comes from the editors. It just comes from the atmosphere. You can just tell. It's everything everybody says during the week. The editors never specifically say we'd rather have a good conversion or click story than a good written story.

But it just comes from the atmosphere. But the editors are all embracing. But I'll just say, I'm doing this story. Nobody's going to read it, but I'm doing it for the kid, for the community and for me, pro bono. Bill Plashke, thanks for coming on the press box. I'm honored and thrilled you guys would have me. Thanks a lot.

This is a great show. Production Magic by Erica Servantes and Lonnie Rinaldo, who you might have heard Bill referred to, there a few times. Before we go, I want to put one thing on your calendar. We have got a new media movies podcast coming out. It's about Oliver Stone's 1986 movie Salvador, where James Woods plays a war correspondent in Central America. Oliver Stone and I recorded a podcast, something I'm not sure I thought I'd ever say. I think you're going to find it really interesting, even if you haven't seen the movie, but add Salvador to your cue if you want to watch it first. David Schumacher

on our aback Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a great weekend.