The Press Box - The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins on Column Writing, Her Dad, and Serena Williams

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Bryan is joined by The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins to discuss her career in writing. They touch on her Washington Post sports column, winning the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting lifetime achievement award, and covering Serena Williams’s last U.S. Open. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Sally Jenkins Producer: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mac Jones is ripped. Matt Patricia's calling plays. The Celtics are title favorites. And The Ringer has a new Boston show. I'm Brian Barrett, host of Off the Pike, the show covering all things Boston sports. I'll have shows multiple times a week covering your favorite teams and with your favorite ringer and local guests. Plus, maybe Bill will stop by to rant about the socks. Follow off the pike with me, Brian Barrett, now on Spotify.

Oh, fellow media consumer, welcome to the press box. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Devin Rinald, No, full disclosure. I don't like journalism awards. I don't like them with every fiber of my being. But I make two exceptions. One, if the award is named after the late great sports writer Dan Jenkins, and two, if the award is also given to a sports writer who deserves it.

Little over a week ago, the Dan Jenkins Award for Lifetime Achievement in Sports Writing went two for two, because the winner was Washington Post, columnist Sally Jenkins. Now, there was a book about the Post a few years back called Morning Miracle. I think of Sally's column the same way. We live in a time where a newspaper sports columnist no longer has a virtual monopoly on opinion, but is surrounded by a few million hot takers on social media. We live in an age where newspapers, even the really good ones like the Post have shrunken in stature.

We live in an age where, strangely to me, the most prestigious gig in sports writing is the league insider who tells you what trade is about to happen rather than the columnist who tells you what to think. Here's the thing about Sally's column. She doesn't do that old columnist trick where you write what everybody already thinks in a slightly more beautiful way. She challenges your thinking. Whether the topic is Will Smith's Oscar slap and Richard Williams or the live golf defectors or wide receiver Antonio Brown walking off the field, the biggest compliment I can give Sally. is that when I read her column in the morning, I don't know how she's going to write it

or where she's going to come down, but the how and the where almost always make me jealous. Sally and I talked about column writing, about covering Serena Williams, and about winning a sports writing medal that's named after her dad. Here's Sally Jenkins.

All right, Sally, you were covering Serena Williams as match at the U.S. Open last night. What was the atmosphere like? I've never seen anything like it. I've never, I've been to U.S. Open's probably since around 1980, 1982. I was at Andre Agassiz's retirement, Pete Sampras, Chris Everett, you know, all the greats. And I've never heard this level of noise. Also, you know, they've got attendance records every time she's on the grounds. I mean, it's just really, it sounds like something coming out of the back of a jet engine to tell you the truth.

It's an amazing noise. On TV last night when Annette Kahnivett would win a point, it sounded like it was completely silent in there? Was it like that in person? Oh, yeah. Chris Clary of the New York Times had a great line. He said it sounded like a golf clap. So Serena extending her farewell from singles tennis feels like the latest version of the sports story where the aging athlete has one last great moment. What is the appeal of that story for readers, do you think?

Let me start actually even. The audience connection with tennis players a lot of times begins when they're very, very young. I mean, the fact is we've known Serena as a grand slam champion since she was 17, and a lot of people were familiar with her, you know, long before then through Venus and when she was growing up as a prodigy in Florida. So, you know, we've known her for a long time. For one thing, the great thing about long tennis careers is you really sort of become

pretty well acquainted with them. And athletes tend to be very ephemeral creatures. I mean, you know, LeBron is playing for quite a long time. But Serena's really, you know, we've known her for a quarter century at least now, right? We've watched her grow up. So I think that's part of the emotional reaction to her being able to do this one more time. And then, you know, for women, it's the fact that, you know, any woman who's had a baby in a C-section is like, oh, my God, I can't believe she's doing that.

You know, for black women, it's, you know, look at what she's. had to put up with and look how she's handled it and look how she's endured, not just endured but triumphed. You know, so different constituencies have different connections with her, but I think a lot of them are really grounded in the fact that we've known her for a long time now, not well, but we've known her. We've been familiar with her for a very long time. Serena's match ended somewhere around 9.45 Eastern time last night. What do you like when you're writing a column on deadline? Okay, so for our purposes, our deadline was 1040. So she gets off the court at 940.

She talks to the stadium audience. She didn't come into the press room to talk to the rest of the press until literally, I think, 1030 on the dot. And, you know, deadline was 1040. So it's really stressful. It's just you're trying to think, you're trying to type and you're trying to listen. And you're trying to sort of run from the stadium to the press room and then back to the laptop. It's very hectic and very stressful, is all I can say. But it's also electric, you know.

I didn't fall asleep until three. Let's put it that way. The adrenaline surge stays with you for a long time after it's over. So you write like 90% of your column and then you're shoveling in a Serena line or two right there at the end? You know, in that case, I did have some paragraphs that I had some material that I knew I was interested in that I thought readers would be interested in, win or lose. And so you try to put those together so that you're not writing, you know, a thousand words and you can't write a thousand words in 30 or 40 minutes. Or you can, but they won't be very good. So I like to try to sort of cut it down to 500 words, a more manageable

length and hopefully have some things that will stand up that you can just sort of insert without having to write them fresh, which means you have to sort of think in advance about, you know, what's liable to still be meaningful no matter what happened. Is it the third set you start tapping away at a Serena's actually going to win this column? Yeah. So in my case last night, I'm sitting at court side and I had my phone and I was writing emails to myself. And so I typed notes into the phone and then I email them to myself so that when I get back to the press room to the laptop, I could call up those emails and take the notes of my impressions

of what was happening straight out of my emails to myself, memos to myself. basically, I guess you'd call them. You think of yourself as a fast writer or a slow writer? I mean, you know, that's a good question. I think of myself now as a professional writer. I feel more adept at it than I used to. I used to feel, you know, it's a performance under pressure. And so I think about that a lot.

And, you know, you try to be as good under pressure as the people you're covering. It's not so much fast or slow. You want to be accurate. You want to be good. And you want to make the deadline. and you want to hold up your end of the responsibility. And so, I mean, I'm not thinking, am I fast? I'm just thinking, you know, in a state of emergency, am I going to get everything right, you know,

and am I going to make this deadline? So, you know, it's a situation that, of course, makes you feel slow under the circumstances. And then you look back on it and you go, gosh, I can't believe I typed 500 legible words in 20 minutes, you know. Watching on TV last night, I could almost hear the sound of dozens and dozens of dozens the sports writers throwing away the column they had ready, the goodbye column to Sarita. They even played that Oprah video where she was saying goodbye. And I was like, no, no, no, she just won a match. She's advancing.

I mean, they all wanted to get it in, right? You know, Gail King wanted to get her interview in and Oprah wanted to get her tribute in. And, you know, everyone was afraid, oh, we won't have a second shot at this. So I thought it was pretty gracious of Serena to tolerate it at that stage of the game because, you know, quite clearly, when you look at how she played last night, you know, she's got some ambitions for this tournament. And, you know, to stand on the court like that for a good 30 to 45 minutes after a very emotional experience was probably the last thing she wanted to do. She probably wanted to get a rub down and go to bed. But so I thought, you know, under the circumstances, I thought it was a bit of an imposition on her, not to mention the opponent.

But I understand why everybody wanted to do it. you know, she means a lot to people. And, you know, the funny thing is, one thing I've observed here is that the tributes feel almost flimsy and artificial compared to the purity of the audience reaction to her. It's been a really, really profound appreciation for her from the audience. I mean, those crowd noises that you hear on television are inside the stadium. I mean, magnify them by 20 times what you're hearing on TV. You know, there's a really, really deep appreciation for her when she walks out on that court. And no tribute really, none of the video tributes have really captured the enormity of that.

As a writer, what were you able to observe court side that you wouldn't have been able to see if you're watching the match on television? The thing that's really, really striking from being sort of close to the court is her poise. and her, she's almost languid out there. It's a different, it's a somewhat slightly different body language than I've seen from her before. It's very, very self-possessed. As I wrote today, in today's piece, she's playing almost with a sense of curiosity. You know, she seems almost as curious as we are about what's going to happen next, which is really interesting to watch because normally she's a little more uptight.

You know, she's a little more tightly wound and a little more tense in other grandkids. in other Grand Slambs. She fights and she plays with a real tenacity and with a real tension and intertension. And there's not quite that much tension. And she said that she's feeling very free and very relaxed about this whole thing, which is, it's just, it's lovely to watch, actually.

You know, she's playing well because she's not real stressed about the whole thing, I think. And I think stress and wanting to win another Grand Slam so badly and hit that number 24, along with Margaret Court. I think that weighed on her, and she said last night, it also,

she felt like she had an X on her back with all the other players. She's enjoying playing a little less pressured, you know. She's enjoying playing with fewer expectations. When did you first start writing about the Williams sisters? My God. I mean,

Venus hadn't even turned pro yet. I mean, I was at the match in Oakland that's portrayed in the movie King Richard. I was at Venus's first match against a professional, another professional player, and actually interviewed the family there. So, you know, about 30 years, I guess. Yeah, 1994 is a match in Oakland.

Yeah. When Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars this year, you wrote a column about Richard Williams. How did you find him when you were covering him? When I covered him, I found him interesting, difficult, outrageous, and offensive all at one time. You know, I mean, he would go through all of those things. things while he was talking to you. He was approachable, but then he'd start talking and he really, you know, he didn't mind provoking people. I think a lot of times he was making a point, which is, you know, here's how racism sounds. How do you like it? You know, he was an interesting

guy to talk to you that way. I enjoyed talking to him in some respects. You know, look, as a tennis writer, you have a pretty deep-seated suspicion of tennis fathers, you know, and he obviously did an incredibly good job building durable, healthy champions. And you have to give him a lot of credit for that. But, you know, there were also times where I felt like, you know, like as with any tennis parent who was very, very visible, that, you know, that could also be a weight on the kids. How did you find Serena and Venus when you interviewed them? You know, they were such kids. So it's hard to, you know, it's hard to go back. I mean, my main impression of them then was that they were very, very young. I remember Oracine saying to me kind of shrugging and

saying they're kids, you know. I mean, don't forget. The expression sort of said, don't forget their kids. And so they were, you know, they were adorable. They were reserved, I think, probably a little suspicious of me or of the white tennis press or the white tennis establishment in general, as they should have been. They were, you know, super smart. I mean, clearly even then. I mean, you know, I can remember, I wanted to talk to them each a little bit one-on-one and then together. And I said, you know, I'd like to talk to Venus first and then Serena and then sit with you together. And Serena didn't like that idea. And she said, and she was only like 13 at the time. And she said, this is preposterous. I mean, so like bright, right? Bright, bright kids, self-possessed,

very sure of themselves. And clearly, you know, the main impression was very young and very bright were the two main impressions I took away from them. Let me ask you a little bit about your career. Was writing a sports column the goal when you started out in the business? Never. I wanted to be a feature writer. I didn't care about writing a column. I never thought I would be any good at it.

I wanted to be the world's greatest feature writer. I grew up on Sports Illustrated, obviously, with my father and the great profiles and the long-form journalism in Sports Illustrated. And I love doing long profiles. and that was really my big ambition to do that sort of thing. And also, you know, to cover certain beats. You know, like I started out covering college football and wanted to cover a national championship game,

wanted to cover an Olympics, couldn't wait to cover my first Olympics, those sorts of things. The column thing was truly an accident. It was George Solomon's idea, the great legendary sports editor of the Washington Post. I was between gigs. I had left Sports Illustrated to go to Condy Nass,

to be a magazine writer, and then the magazine I was working on contract four folded, and I was doing a little bit of work for ESPN and a little bit of work for tennis magazine and kind of freelancing. And he called and he said, come down to Washington and talk to me. And I said, about what?

And he said, a job, stupid. So he had this idea. He wanted a woman sports columnist, and he thought that I'd be a good one, and he wanted me to give it a try. So it was an experiment, really. This is in 2000. Yeah, he said, do it for, and I had been at the post.

I'd spent seven years there as a very, I'd gone there at like 24 years old and spent, I'd work there from the age of 24 to 30, and then I left to go into magazines, magazine writing because it really was my aspiration to write long magazine pieces. And so the column thing, he recruited me and he said, you know, we'll try it for a few months and see if it works. I mean, I think I was on like six-month probation or something. And, you know, I took to it right away. No one was more surprised than me that I enjoyed it.

And I don't know. I just kept enjoying it. So Mike Wilbon, Tony Kornheiser, and Tom Boswell are columnists at the Post when you joined back up in 2000. How did you want your column to stand out? You know, the first thing I thought was, you know, look, I knew growing up as Dan Jenkins' daughter, you can't imitate people. You just end up looking silly. I read so many writers who tried to write like my dad that, and I always was like, oh, God, that looks dumb. I knew enough not to be an imitator, and I knew you can't be Kornheiser.

No one knows more than Will Bonner has better sources in the business. Nobody could imitate Tom Boswell with his deep knowledge of particularly of baseball. So, you know, I just didn't even try to compete with those guys. I kind of felt like the quiet little independent film. I just wrote the things that I thought I could write that were unique to me. I was unapologetically female about a lot of the subjects I took on. I have an interest in sort of trying to stitch sports into the larger social issues in the paper. Those sorts of, like, I mean, there was a lot of open field.

There were areas where I wasn't really bumping up against the guys in terms of topics. I tended to naturally choose topics that didn't particularly compete with their topics. I mean, I just sort of fit in. There was a niche there that I felt was a natural one for me, and I think everybody else felt that way too. I read your column now, and I see Serena, I see Live Golf, I see the NIL in college football. Do you think of it as a Washington, D.C. sports column or a national sports column?

I think it's very much a national sports column, but you know, you have the most interesting audience in Washington because, you know, Washington is such a national and international city that. So when you're writing about NIL in Washington, you know Congress is reading you. You know Congress people are reading you. So it's both, really. I mean, that's the beauty of, it's one reason why I really love the Washington Post and being part of it. You know, you know that judges are reading you and soldiers and generals.

And I've gotten the most interesting mail from professional people in D.C., you know, great attorneys, you know, the lobbyists. I mean, it's just a – it's such a fascinating. audience to write for, and it's both local and not, you know. So if you're writing about Dan Snyder and the ownership issues in the NFL, I mean, that's of interest to, you know, a certain House committees, right? So it's local is national in Washington. That's what's so great about it. You once had an interview, sports writers should be careful with the power that can come with being a columnist. How so? Well, it's a big stick, you know, particularly. at a major paper with large, you know, huge circulation. It's just a big weapon. You know, you can

really weaponize a column. And if you're sarcastic like I am, you know, you can take after people pretty good. And I've done that a few times. You know, you try to choose targets that are big and have it coming. You know, you don't want to pick on little people. You don't want to shoot downwards at people who aren't really responsible for what's going on. And, you know, you have to be discerning. I mean, I think Roger Goodell can take it and has earned it. You know, so, you know, he's obviously been someone I've targeted for criticism quite a lot. Live golf can certainly take it.

I mean, but, you know, you don't want to be sarcastic or be a hot take just for the sake of clicks or, you know, that's really dishonest. You know, it's dishonest and it's mean and it's not smart and it shouldn't be interesting, you know. So you have to remind yourself, like, it's the easiest thing in the world to just go off. It's a lot harder to sort of diagnose and distinguish and to try to explain to people like why they feel angry or should feel angry about something as opposed to just like ranting. And so the diagnosis and the distinguishing is to me the interesting part of a column and what a column really should be as opposed to just a hot take. I'm guilty of the hot take sometimes. I mean, I don't like it. I don't like saying it, but I, you know, I'm not always as nuanced and diagnostic and

distinguishing as I should be. One thing that's interesting to me is over the last two decades, the media has changed so much. We've gone from this world where three or four sports columnists in a city had a job where they could have an opinion about sports to a world where everyone can have an opinion about sports on social media. How did that change what you do? I don't think it's changed it at all.

I mean, I hate to sort of sound naive or Pollyanna about it. But, you know, first off, the bloggers are great. I mean, to me, like, when a guy like Will Leach, you know, was starting deadspin, I mean, the whole deadspin movement was great. First off, it was great smart writing. And I didn't see any difference between what they were doing and what, you know, any other really young, sharp sports writer was doing in any other platform or medium.

I've always thought those were some of the best writers in the business who came out of the sports blogging movement. I thought Buzz Bissinger was just really, really wrong about that. So that's number one. And then number two, writing's hard, you know, and it's a skill. And I don't think, I don't feel real threatened by people who haven't worked a long time to perfect the skill. And the reason I always respected the writers at Deadspin and some other places, is because they're very, very skilled. They really work at it and they really care about it.

And you can tell the difference. You know, readers know the difference. And so I've just never felt like there was any great crisis. If you're not careful, you don't want to end up sounding like one of those people who thinks the Bible should still be in Latin, right? I mean, you have to appreciate, you have to appreciate younger, more innovative voices, you know. And as long as they're literate and smart, who cares, right, what the form is. Let me ask you about a few recent columns. What do you make of the live golf defectors?

Well, I think there's spine caving, you know, there's one thing to, you know, there's commerce in the world and there's nothing, you know, to do about that fact. But that doesn't mean you have to directly take blood money from a regime trying to sportswash, you know, murder and terrorism. It's that simple. I mean, how can you directly take money? I'm a Washington Post writer. we lost a journalist who was hideously tortured and murdered. And I don't see how anyone can expect me to feel anything but absolute rage and loathing for the people who are taking money directly from the Saudi murderer who killed my colleague. It's that simple.

You mentioned congressional subcommittees. Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington commanders, has spent the summer on a yacht, seemingly dodging a subpoena. What do you make of his summer? You know, the NFL, as a source of mine said recently, the NFL has gotten really, really good at absorbing scandal. They've developed a real systematic ability to just kind of, you know, absorb, you know, in their softest underbelly, the worst sorts of scandals and the worst sorts of behaviors. And it's really too bad. And it's what I really fault Roger Goodell's tenure for. You know, other commissioners have had real flaws, but there was at least some sense that, you know, even a Paul Tagliabu wanted genuinely to protect the real integrity, the bedrock integrity of the game.

And I just don't feel that way about Roger Goodell's tenure. I feel like it's just been one cover-up after the other. One, you know, show trial after another for the sake of appearances. Talk about shooting downwards, you know. I mean, the players get all the harshest penalties and they never lay a glove on transgressions by, you know, white men. in administrative or ownership positions. And it's kind of gross to watch, unfortunately. The game at the player level is still a great, great game.

I love the players and I love the coaches. I love dealing with them and talking to them and watching them. But, you know, the apparatus around them is... Speaking of NFL scandals, how do you feel about the 11-game suspension the league landed on with Deshaun Watson? John Watson process was one of the cleaner adjudication processes they've had. At least an outside independent judge

She looked at the situation and wrote a really interesting opinion where she said basically, like, you know, my hands are tied. I kind of have to give this guy six games because that's the precedent that Roger Goodell has been setting on these cases like this. So, you know, 11 games is better than six. The process that led to it is a little bit better than in the past where Goodell was just sort of a hanging judge who, you know, could kind of do whatever he wanted to for the sake of a person. or to just make something go away. The bottom line is it's not a good situation for anybody. People who are unhappy that he won't serve a longer suspension. Well, we'll see how well he plays when he comes back.

I mean, there's no guarantee here that he's going to recover his previous abilities and that he's going to be the quarterback he was after sitting out for a couple of years, number one. And number two, you know, the Haslums have put all this money in him and everyone's upset about the fact that his contract is guaranteed. But the Hasams may be hurt by this in the end, too, if he doesn't live up to that contract. So there still may be some justice, you know, some backhanded or sideways justice to play out here. The fact that the NFL has – the one thing that you mind about it is, you know, everyone does deserve a second chance.

You don't want to ostracize the guy from ever playing again in the league. But until he really has properly recognized what he did. and how the position that he put those women in, I wouldn't let him back on the field. And obviously, Roger Goodell just wants to put it in the rearview mirror. It was just the kabuki theater of his apology and then his non-apology and his unapology was just yet another piece of aging. When you go looking for column ideas, are you attracted to the big, tricky, moral issue columns? Yeah, the harder it is. For instance, you know, one topic I remember really getting interested in, and it didn't make people necessarily all that happy was

the whole Martha Burke effort to kind of try to force Augusta National to accept a woman member. And, you know, that was a really interesting subject because you have dueling priorities there. You have a right to privacy that was at stake. Is it really in our best interest to force private clubs, you know, to start exposing their membership and to start admitting people just for the sake of making the rest of us feel better? And the answer is, you know, I'm not sure that was such a good idea. You wanted it to happen voluntarily. So there were complications there, right, that were really, really interesting.

And I like when that happens. I like it when both sides have an argument and you have to pick a lane. You know, you have to sort of really think hard. I mean, my longtime friend, Mike Lupica, he told me once, you know, your job is not to see both sides of the issue. Your job is to study both sides of the issue and then pick a lane and argue it for all your way. worth. And I think that's a great description of the job. You just won the Dan Jenkins Medal for lifetime achievement and sports writing. What does it feel like to win a medal named after your dad? It feels like taking cuts. It feels like cutting in line. It feels, look, I'm thrilled to have it,

and I will treasure it more than anything I have in my home. But at the same time, I feel very, very strange about accepting it. And I don't know, it's weird. It feels like it just feels strange to accept an award that already has half your name on it, you know? But I'll be delighted. I'll be just delighted to have it. I mean, it's difficult to even talk about how much my dad meant to me. And so from that standpoint, obviously, you know, it means more to me than anything. But I do, I feel very, very self-conscious.

And it makes me... Your dad, both in print and in person, had a way of making sports writing seem like the most fun job in the world and the only job of writing. thinking person should ever want to do. Did that idea come across to you as a kid? Oh my God, yeah. I mean, that's why I did it. I was just like, oh, I see if you're a sports writer, you get to go to Europe and

golf tournaments and tennis tournaments and, you know, you travel the world and, you know, everyone's happy to see you and you cover games for a living. And, you know, it looked like paradise. It looked like absolute paradise. And it is. I was looking through his memoir last night and I was reminded that after he publishes his novel semi-tuff in 1972, so you're like 11 or 12. The book is such a big hit that he buys a 16th floor penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, which has four terraces and six bedrooms. So that must have been

a pretty good picture of sports writerdom right there. I got to tell you, that place was an old wreck. I mean, they bought it. My mom found it, and they bought it. A woman had lived there. She had passed away, but she had lived till deep into her 90s. The place hadn't had a fresh coat of pain, in I don't know how many decades. And it was a wreck when we bought it. The only reason they could afford it was because it really, it needed a lot of work. And my folks worked on it slowly but surely over the years. And it had buried magnificence in it.

But, I mean, there were rooms. We didn't even furnish all the rooms for a while, you know. My brothers and I can remember we would play plastic. We'd play hockey in the living room. There was no furniture in it. And it was just a big old waxed floor. And so we'd go in there and play games in there. So it was a great old place.

It's beautiful. Dan was not a shy person. Did he offer opinions about your work? He did, but you know what? He was a great coach. His way of offering opinions was to, you know, like when I was in high school and college, he would leave things on my bedside table. You know, I'd go into my room and he would have dropped some Nora Ephron on the bedside table

or something he thought I should read. he'd say, you have to read this story. This is a great piece. And we would sit around, and he had a book that he just loved called The Treasury of Great Reporting. And we would sit there and read aloud from it. We'd read great old stories. We'd read Ernie Pyle pieces from World War II.

And we'd talk about what made him good. We'd talk about, you know, sort of how to do things, you know, from a technical standpoint. I would call him up and I'd say I'm stuck, you know, and he'd say you're trying too hard. just relax a little bit and entertain yourself because if you don't entertain yourself, you're not going to entertain anybody else. Things like that. He was very, very, he gave me help when I asked for it, and he would very subtly offer

things that he thought were good, but he was not sort of a taskmaster. He just would say very simple things like, you know, you don't let a piece of writing out of your hands until it's absolutely as good as you can make it, you know, until it's due. You know, you don't finish early just to get done and turn in any old thing. You make it absolutely as good as you can, the time that's allowed, you know. And he would say, if you're going to do this, learn your craft. You know, you should go to newspapers first and write every single day. Things like that.

You know, he was a great teacher and a great, he's a great father. But he, the fact that he loved his profession and he really cared about it. and he transferred that. You know, he viewed journalism as an ethic, and he taught it to me as an ethic. He wrote in his memoir, Sally's been the best writer in the whole family for a while now. Did he tell you that at some point?

He would say that to other people. You know, I heard him say to other people. He may have said it directly to me, but I mean, I think he did say at one point, I think he made some remark like that. He said, you're a better writer than me. He said, I'm a better, what was it, thinker maybe?

I don't remember the discussion exactly, but that's wrong, first of all. You know, writers are like fingerprints. There's no, you know, if you're a good, true writer, you're just, it's just your fingerprints, you know, and my dad's fingerprints that were inimitable. And he had an ease and a jauntiness and a nonchalance in his writing. He made it look, he made it read so easy. And of course, it's so hard to do that. Last question for you, Sally.

Your dad died in 2019. When do you find yourself thinking about him? When do I find myself thinking about him? I mean, daily. I think about him all the time. I talk to him in my head about pieces. And, you know, I try to remember one of the most important things he ever told me that I try to repeat to younger journalists is, you know, always, you know, whatever the prevailing wisdom on an issue is, always look at the other side and ask yourself if it isn't smarter. if there isn't something over there that isn't smarter, you know.

And it's a great piece of advice and a great exercise for any journalist, no matter what you're trying to do in the business, is to always look at the other side and ask yourself, is there something smart over there? And we don't do it enough anymore. I mean, that's pretty discouraging. I feel like little of that's gotten lost lately. Sally Jenkins, thank you for coming on the press box.

My pleasure, always. All right, full journalistic disclosure, there are two versions of the Dan Jenkins Medal that are given out every year. I'm on the committee that picks one of the winners, though not on the committee that gave the award to Sally, just in case you wanted to know. Huge thanks again to Sally Jenkins. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Devin, Rinaldo, David Shoemaker, and I are off Monday for Labor Day, but then back Tuesday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then.