The Penn Stater Magazine

A Conversation with Tom Verducci

January 26, 2011 at 2:18 pm Tina Hay 1 comment

I remember Sports Illustrated‘s Tom Verducci ’82 from back in the late 1970s/early 1980s, when I was covering Penn State football for State College radio station WRSC and he was a sports reporter for the Collegian. What I most remember was his willingness to ask Joe Paterno tough questions at the news conferences after football games. I think Joe found it a little irritating (but then, Joe finds most members of the news media irritating at one time or another), but I remember that they were smart questions and I was impressed with Tom for asking them.

Here we are 30 years later and Tom is one of the most respected sportswriters in America. A senior writer at SI, he has covered baseball—especially the Yankees—for years, and wrote the SI piece that blew open the steroids scandal in 2002. He’s also the co-author of Joe Torre’s book The Yankee Years, and in 2009 SI published a book called Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci.

Last night he spoke in the HUB as part of a series sponsored by the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism. And one of the things he mentioned was the invaluable experience he got covering Penn State football as an undergraduate: His classroom experiences were great, he said, but “I couldn’t imagine a better experience” than covering “a big-time football program with a coach as accommodating as Coach Paterno.”

Here are some other cool nuggets from last night’s conversation, which was hosted by faculty member (and former sportswriter himself) Malcolm Moran:

Covering the Yankees when Billy Martin was manager: “I never thought I’d spend so much time in bars. You’d file your game story and then head to the hotel bar. If you weren’t there listening [to Martin's antics and rants], you were at a competitive disadvantage.”

His interviewing style: “I try to talk to people more than interview them. I keep the notebook closed a lot. Sometimes I just ask them about their family, what they did on their day off. Now we’re connecting as people.”

Career advice to students: “Don’t have any specific road map in mind. It’s like driving in the fog. Just concentrate on what’s immediately in front of you.”

Covering high school sports: “There’s nothing like having parents as your fact-checkers.”

The Internet criticism of Chicago Bears QB Jay Cutler last weekend (Cutler left the NFC championship game with a knee injury and was pilloried on Twitter): “That was ‘Character Assassination by Twitter’ in real time.”

The heightened pressure that the Internet puts on reporters to get scoops: “For me personally, it’s more important to be right than to be first. Too many others want to be first and are willing to live with the consequences of being wrong.” Verducci still heeds the advice of one of his Penn State professors, who said, “When in doubt, leave it out.”

Advice to would-be sportswriters on making their stories stand out: “You can outwork people. Make opportunities for yourself rather than waiting for them. And pay attention to the craft of writing. What makes good writing is not so much to turn a phrase, but to uncover details, facts. Facts are what makes a story memorable. To be a good writer, you have to be a good reporter.”

His 1999 profile of the reclusive Sandy Koufax: There are stories you do, Verducci said, because your editor assigns them to you—and then there are the ones that come from your own curiosity. “I chased that [Koufax] story with a lot of passion because I was so fascinated by him.”

On Bryce Harper, the teenage baseball phenom called “Baseball’s LeBron“: “I think he’ll be in the big leagues next year, at the age of 19. And I think he’s going to be a star. Not right away, but he’ll be a star.”

Whether players who used steroids should be in the Hall of Fame: “You did something that you knew was wrong—so wrong that you won’t talk about it to this day. You can still have all your home run records or pitching records, but [I won't vote you into the Hall of Fame].”

Whether his appearance on the cover of SI in 2005 made him fall victim to the famous “Sports Illustrated Jinx”: “Yeah, I had writer’s block for a week.”

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: Campus events, College of Communications, Famous Penn Staters, Penn State alumni, Penn Staters in the news media. Tags: Baseball's Lebron, Billy Martin, Bryce Harper, Jay Cutler, Malcolm Moran, New York Yankees, Sandy Koufax, Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated jinx, Tom Verducci.