The B/R Interview: H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger

H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger is among the nation's most honored and distinguished writers. A native of New York City, Buzz is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Livingston Award, the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award, and the National Headliners Award, among others. He also was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of three highly acclaimed nonfiction books: Friday Night Lights, A Prayer for the City, and Three Nights in August.

MT:  Growing up and going to school, what was it that really pushed you toward sportswriting?

HGB:  Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.  I think it started very early in my life when I was 11 or 12.  I grew up in New York City, and at that point in time New York had about seven newspapers and every member of my family had a favorite paper.  My mother loved the Herald Tribune; my father liked the New York Times, and my grandfather like the Daily News.  Every apartment I went to was filled with newspapers and I just fell in love with them and wanted to become a print reporter.

I played this baseball game called Strat-O-Matic Baseball and I would write up stories from the game as if they were being written for the New York Times. I worked at my high school newspaper at Andover, which came out weekly, unusual for a high school paper.  Then my first day at Penn I went right to the Daily Pennsylvanian and pretty much spent most of my college career working both as the sports editor and then editor of the editorial page. 

**Note: The sports blog at the dailypennsylvanian.com is called “The Buzz”

MT:  Have you been influenced by any writers or editors?

HGB:  I was very influenced by a woman named Deborah Howell, my editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, who taught me a tremendous amount about writing narrative, non-fiction even though I was writing for a print newspaper at the time. 

MT:  Any writers?

HGB:  Well there are certain writers that I admired and I guess tried to emulate with books to some degree— Robert Caro, Anthony Lukas, David Halberstam, they’re all great writers. 

I write differently though.  I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.  Frankly I think Friday Night Lights could have used another run-through to get out some of the purple prose.  With each book I’m doing a better job of screening things out myself, but you need an editor.  You need a fresh pair of eyes who can look at it objectively. 

MT:  When you decided to write Friday Night Lights, you uprooted and moved to Odessa, Texas.  What went into that decision?

HGB:  Well I was at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the year was 1988.  I had been lucky enough to have something called the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, which really inspired me to do something different with my career, and I really wanted to write a book, but the hardest thing in many ways was to find the right subject.

High school football just hit me when I took a cross-country trip through the southern route with a friend.  We went through all these little towns, and you would go down Main Street and there was really not much left.  JC Penney’s was gone, Sears was gone, but then you would drive a few blocks out of town and there would be this beautiful, immaculate, well-watered, beautifully painted high school football stadium.  It just struck me in my heart that these simply aren’t stadiums; these are shrines to people’s hopes and dreams on a Friday night.  The idea stayed with me—what would it be like to spend a year in a town like that? 

I went back to the Inquirer and became an editor—that was probably what did it, I hated being an editor.  I figured it’s now or never; either I’m going to go off and write this book or I’m never going to do it and sort of work my way up the traditional track of the paper.  I decided to go for the book and found the town of Odessa, uprooted my then fiancé and twin five-year-old boys, and moved there from August of 1988 to August of 1989. 

MT:  Did you feel that you were taking a chance with your career at that moment?

HGB:  I was taking a chance.  I did have a book contract, though it wasn’t paying nearly as much as I was making at the Inquirer and offered no benefits.  The risk was that the book wouldn’t work out and then what would I do?  Not to mention all the personal circumstances of providing care for my family; so there was a lot of risk involved.

I just passionately wanted to do this book.  It was that one moment in life where you say to yourself, “I’m going to do this no matter what the risk.”  I just felt that there was a great idea there, and I was lucky enough to pick the right town, the right season, and the right year.  Everything just broke right, and I was lucky enough to be there to witness it. 

MT:  What are you working on now?

HGB:  Right now I do stuff for Vanity Fair, but I’m currently working on a different project.  I’m working on a book on my twin boys who are 25 years old and were born three months pre-mature, weighing 1 lb. 14, and 1 lb. 11 ounces.  The two of them are very different.  Jerry turned out to be normal and has a full life.  He just became a teacher, has a full-time girlfriend, and lives on his own.  Zack unfortunately has had brain damage, and his life is very different.  He’ll never live independently; he’ll probably never marry. 

It’s a book about loving these two boys from the perspective of a father, and coming to grips with that.  It’s a very personal story, which is very different from other books that I’ve done, but I welcome the challenge.  I just hope I’m up to it.

MT:  I have no doubt; the sensitivity you exhibited in Three Nights in August, particularly in describing the series of events surrounding the death of Darryl Kile, comes to mind.  How were you able to depict so accurately what went on with the team without over-stepping your boundaries?

HGB:  Well originally the book was going to be an as-told-to, and I was going to write it for Tony [La Russa].  I wasn’t really that comfortable with that and neither was he, but sometimes when you’re on your own as a writer, you do things for money, and I’m not ashamed of that.  But Tony really didn’t want an autobiography, and frankly, I didn’t think his life was worthy of an autobiography. 

At the winter meetings in Nashville Tony just sort of blurted out, not really talking about the book, “You know what would be a really interesting book?  Take a three game series and dissect virtually every pitch.”  The second he said that I said, “Tony, that’s it!  That’s the way to do this thing, but if you really want to do it, you have to give me access.  You have to let me into the clubhouse, let me get as deep as I can to soak up every drop of the St. Louis Cardinals.  In other words, you have to give control of the book to me.”  And he agreed. 

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