By Talbert Josselyn

From the September, 1940 issue of Writer's Digest. Extensive research discovered no copyright renewal.

Through forty years, the the first bit of fine sports writing I remember reading continues to come back to me. It was in the Boston Herald, and as a small boy I was poring over the daily doings of my hero baseball team—the Boston Beaneaters, in many ways the greatest ball club of them all.

Said the sports scribe, describing the game that had been played the day before in St. Louis:

"Bobby Yeager hit such a long home run that he had time to stop at third base and talk about the battle of San Juan Hill before continuing on home."

What a gorgeous piece of description! That news writer, instead of stating the mere fact that Yeager, the second-string catcher, hit a home run inside the ball park that went all the way to the flagpole, dipped down into his imagination and brought up a gem. Immediately he gave another dimension to second string Bobby Yeager—made him a man who could not only hit a ball over the centerfielder's head, but who had the showmanship, the grasp on world affairs that enabled him to slow down at third base and chat about the doings in Cuba.

And the anonymous third-baseman of the St. Louis team was lifted to semi-heroic stature right along with him. One can almost seem to hear him adding his two-bit's worth on Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. And then, with the centerfielder having gotten through cuffing the ball around, Bobby Yeager saying, "Well, I've got to be going," and the third-baseman saying, "Glad to have had the chat with you," and Bobby saying, "Sure!" and streaking for home plate.

As the small boy reading that news writer's description, I was vaguely aware that here was something more than ordinary in the telling of a game; something worth while to be on the lookout for; something that made the person told about seem alive.

When, years later, I found to my patent astonishment that I was writing fiction sports stories, and to my further astonishment that at times I was selling them, I discovered that the ones with the readiest market value were those whose characters most nearly approximated that far-away news writer's work. They seemed alive.

I got them to become alive by getting inside their own persons and seeing how they thought and felt. Which meant I had to learn all about them—who they were and why they acted the way they did. And I had to learn all about the particular sort of sport they played. They and their game had to be authentic. 1 got authenticity by reading, hearing, watching.

Reading the sports pages of the daily newspaper, that living mine of material for every fiction sports writer. And then clipping everything of interest that I saw. My shelves are crammed with clippings, as are the shelves of every writer. Some of those clippings are of only two or three lines, with barest details; some are columns long, with vivid description—ball games, horse races— to be put aside and studied to see how the great news writers handled their stuff; studying them as guideposts, with the added resolution that if these men could turn out such work under pressure and lack of time, surely a fiction writer ought to be able to do it with leisure at his disposal.

I might see the name of a promising baseball rookie—one of our California boys, we'll say. I'd clip it. I would follow that player through the year… the years. He might go up to stardom and last long, and then fade and come back to the minors, and in all that time I mightn't have gotten the story I wanted of him. The one incident— perhaps very small—that went to make him complete and ready for writing wouldn't have happened. But if and when it did happen, I had everything I wanted about him, rounding him out, making him alive.

On the other hand, in one small clipping I might find all I needed to give me a story. I'll illustrate.

I saw a comment, by Ed. R. Hughes, dean of the San Francisco sports writers, that three of the one-time greatest players in baseball were now on the same southern minor league team. I studied their names— every baseball fan knew them, holders of the highest baseball records. And I said to myself (and here's where reading and talking and watching the game through the years now came in):

"Those three, now on that small, one-horse team. They, who'd once been on the greatest teams. But how about a fourth man, one who'd never been on any team but this small, one-horse team through all his baseball career? Who'd hoped to go up to the big Leagues and never had. What would his feelings be, when he sat in with them and heard their talk of a glamorous past? He, who'd never been anybody… and yet had hoped."

Well, there was the thing that touched off a whole story. The story of a minor leaguer, at the very end of his minor league career, finally going up to the big leagues. "Pinch Hitter" was its name and it came out in Collier's.

So, the clippings have been made of all sports. Perhaps not one in fifty will go into making a story, but there they are, ready.

Then, there's the talking about sports— the listening to men who've been in them. Ball players, football men, golfers, racehorse trainers… the list is endless. The listening to how they put things in their own words, and then the making of notes and more notes, and putting them away until they're ready.

Until they're ready. Here's an example of how a bit here and a bit there and a bit somewhere else, were added together and simmered until the final plot was done. Here's how the baseball story "The Flipper" was written for Collier's.

Almost twenty years ago, on a rainy winter's day in our small home town of Carmel, one of the carpenters who'd been putting shakes on our new house stopped in the shelter of the garage to talk baseball. He was a tall, lean man, now middle-aged. He told how he'd once been a kid pitcher down in New Mexico, and how his little town team, with him on the mound, had beaten El Paso. The celebration coming home on the train was so great, as he put it, that "you couldn't hear thunder."

He and his catcher continued on to Los Angeles. There on the street he met Dolly Gray, a pitcher for the Angels, who later went to the Washington Senators. They'd known each other before. "What you doing?" said Dolly. "Nothing now," said the kid, and told what he'd been doing. "The Angels need pitchers," said Dolly. "Come on out to the ball park and I'll introduce you to the manager. You'll get a tryout."

The kid, with visions of his big chance at last, went back to his rooming house with his catcher, got glove and ball and warmed up in a vacant lot. Finally he cut loose with a fast one—and his arm went out at the shoulder.

As he said—he, now the middle-aged carpenter, standing watching the rain: "I never went to the ball park. I never showed up."

Well, there it was, the tragedy of that Pitcher. But it wasn't a story; it was only part of a story. I made notes and put it away. Ten years. Time and again I'd take those notes out and look at them and then say: "There's no story here yet."

Then one day I was talking with Eddie Burns, over in Monterey. Eddie was catcher on the Philadelphia Nationals the year they won their pennant; he caught Alexander. We were talking baseball injuries, and he told how he hurt his shoulder as a high school kid. He was running across a street in San Francisco, tripped, and hit his shoulder against a curb. He was panic stricken to find he couldn't use his arm— and he wanted to be a baseball player. He tried doctors and they did no good. Then someone told him of a drunken old German doctor who used electricity, and he went to him. His shoulder was cured through this treatment, for the injury had been to a nerve instead of a muscle.

Right there I had the makings of the story. A pitcher… a different sort of arm injury… a different cure. I went at it. I skeletonized the plot, went over and over it until the whole thing was articulated, was in proportion, was complete.

I made the young pitcher a kid who'd been a bricklayer, the reason of which you'll see later. He starts from his small town for the big city, as I put it: "Baggaged with youth, a long right arm, and a meat-paper valise." Also carrying a letter from the catcher of the big-league team in the city, telling him to come along for a tryout—the catcher had seen him pitch in the small town the previous fall. And in the letter was a post-script of two lines, which was to alter the kid's whole life: "Be sure the old arm is all O. K. and loose like a slingshot when you show up. The boss is sure death on these lame-arm pitchers."

He arrives in the city, gets a room in a cheap rooming-house near the station, sees kids playing catch in the street, and warms up with them. He'll go out to the ball park in the morning. He never goes out. A child, playing in the street, is in the path of a truck, and he sweeps it aside just in time and falls against the curb and hits his shoulder.

He can't move his arm. He goes to a doctor; goes again and again, and the shoulder is stiff ; he can move the arm sideways, but not overhand. He doesn't report at the ball park to a manager who is death on lame-arm pitchers. Once more he takes up his trade, bricklayer.

But baseball is in his blood. How can he satisfy it?

Well, there's where I had to go to work, plenty. How could he still stay in baseball and not be in baseball? I must have walked a good ten miles on that—some writers do one thing and some another when the going is tough, and I walk—and then it came. And it was back to the newspapers again for the answer.

I remembered late afternoons in San Francisco, when the newsboys would be shrilling: "Box-score final!" And men would buy the papers and fold them to the box-scores and get aboard the street cars studying them—men who, some of them, might have once been baseball players themselves. And there was my bricklayer's chance. At the end of the day's work he would buy a paper with the box-scores, would go to his two-by-four room in the rooming-house, and as on a magic carpet the paper would carry him away. Reading, he replayed the day's game… with himself as the pitcher.

The years sped.

Now, sooner or later one knows that he was going to meet that big-league catcher. He could meet him on the street, but that wouldn't pack any drama. So, I had the man he worked for tell him to go down to the ball park and build a brick bake-room, where the players could sweat out. He didn't want to go… he'd never been in the ball park in all those years… but he had to go or else lose his job.

He went—and the catcher recognized him. Asked him why he'd never reported, years before. Then the tale was told. "Hell!" said the catcher. "Didn't you try electricity?" No, he hadn't. The catcher tells of the old German doctor with his electric battery—if he can be found. Well, he's found… and it proves to have been a nerve injury, and finally the arm is cured.

When he comes to pitch in practice, the old overarm steam is gone. Inactivity has done that. But his powerful sidearm motion, gotten through his bricklayer's trade, is there. He learns to flip 'em in, sidearm, and finally is sent into a decisive game as relief pitcher. The stands demand: "Who t'hell's this new pitcher?" And the line in the story answers: "Who was he? He'd been pitching on this field all these years!"

Now, the story could have ended right there, but to me it wasn't complete. I had gotten so well acquainted with this character that I knew how he'd act. As in a dream he rode downtown after the victory… and he felt that something was missing. Then he heard the newsboys calling the papers with the box-scores. That was it! He bought a paper, went to his dingy room, read the game as he'd read countless games before. Read the names… read a new name. His own. And suddenly it came to him. Not somebody else… but himself! And the story concludes with:

"Tears started down the seamed cheeks.

"It's me,' he whispered. 'It's me… it's me.'"

I have dwelt on this story "The Flipper" at some length, so as to show how much body a sports story has to have to make the grade with a slick paper magazine. In the main a sports story for the pulps has one dimension—movement. It skates swiftly over the thin ice of action. The sports story for the slick magazines has to have length and breadth and thickness.

If I had written "The Flipper" back when I was writing mining and sports stories for the pulps, it would have had good moving action and a tight plot. But the man himself wouldn't have come to his complete stature. He could have fitted into any one of the pulp stories. But growing as he did, he finally could fit into only one—his story. He belonged.

And now, there's the third way of getting sports material. Watching. Old-time writers know the following, and beginners have to learn it: In watching any sport a writer has to see things that others miss. If they didn't, everybody would be a writer. You know the way that Kipling puts it, in his poem "The Story of Ung," the prehistoric sculptor who was the teller of tales on bone. Ung's father is talking to him:

And the father of Ung gave answer, that was old and wise in the craft,
Maker of pictures aforetime, and he leaned on his lance and he laughed
"If they could see as thou seest they would do what thou hast done,
"And each man would make him a picture, and—what would become of my son?
"There would be no pelts of the reindeer, flung down at thy cave for a gift;
"Nor dole of the oily timber that comes on the Baltic drift…"

And he (Ung) gloved himself and departed, and he heard his father behind:
"Son that can see so clearly, rejoice that thy tribe is blind!"

So, the writer must be on the lookout for things unseen by other people. And not always the obvious things, but the minor things which at times are not minor, but which go to pack a situation with drama… which go to make a story.

Here's one example. There was the young fellow I saw hunting for golf balls along the shore of the Pebble Beach course during Championship Week. That was nothing in itself—lots of young fellows hunt for golf balls along there—until I discovered that this particular youth was a leading contender in the championship, so desperately hard up that he couldn't afford to buy golf balls…

There are similar incidents, all noted down and stacked away on my shelves.

Lots of work writing a good sports story? You bet! One of the hardest things to write in all fiction… and one of the best. You're writing about the thing that is one of the safety valves of the American people— Sports.

And the marketing of those stories after they've been sweated over and written? That comes right back to the writer himself, if he's sweated enough and has a story. The manner of appearance of the manuscript will help, typed on the best of paper, and cleanly done. That gives the manuscript a shave, a shine, a haircut. It enables it to get inside the office after knocking on the front door. But it's got to have more than appearance from then on; it's got to have plenty inside it, got to have something to tell that stands up under savage crossexamination. And that can be gotten only by writing and keeping on writing.

Specific markets? There's only one answer to that. Read and re-read the stories in the magazine you're aiming at. It is obvious that two magazines of equal caliber will have different editorial policies on the sort of sports stories they want. Again I say, read 'em and find out. And policies will change. Seven years ago, during the hardest of hard times the magazines wanted light, bright stories of young people; now, with things on the upswing, the demand is for stories that are full bodied, with plenty of meat and plot. To get this latter, write your story full and complete, no matter how long it runs… and then go over it and cut out all nonessentials until it's down to five thousand words in length.

A magazine like Collier's, with its tremendous number of feminine readers along with the masculine, will look with more interest on a sports story that manages to include a woman in it—not thrust into it but worked into it—than a story with only men characters. It will take an all-man story, but that story has to have just that much more to make the grade.

Magazines like Elks or Columbia, with a more preponderant masculine public, will be more liable to take an all-man story. But there's no general rule on any of this, except, to make an Irishism, this rule: Write your story so thumpingly well that it's bound to sell somewhere!

Sports story? The biggest sports story of all is that of the writer, getting knocked down time after time, coming up off the rosin of rejections to go after it once more. And don't tell me I don't know! I entirely rewrote one story eight times; worked and reworked another through thirty years.

If you're going to be a writer, dust the rosin off the seat of your pants — and write!