John U. Bacon, sports and business writer, public speaker, University of Michigan and Northwestern University professor and radio commentator, visited Hillsdale’s sportswriting class last Thursday. Author of New York Times bestseller “Three and Out,” in which he chronicles his unlimited-access experience following U of M players and coaches, humored the class by recounting his six-week Wolverine workout and offered sportswriting advice. A list of his books as well as his blog can be found at JohnUBacon.com.
Why do you think America is the only nation that takes college athletics seriously?
The best athletes in Europe, Asia and Africa don’t play for schools; they play for clubs. Even in Canada, it’s junior hockey; it’s not college hockey. So one of my pleasures has been this journey of trying to figure out why we are the only country on earth that cares about this. How did that come to be? How does this make us unique? What are the good and bad sides? For a place like Hillsdale College, sports are a unifying element. People gather; it’s how you identify yourselves in part, and it makes it more than just a study hall. At a big public university like Michigan or Michigan State, it was essential in the old days to appeal to the taxpayers who used to pay 95 percent of your budget. So now they don’t, it’s like 5 percent. But if you’re a farmer or factory worker in Flint, why do you care about this? The answer usually is the front porch, which is the football stadium. So there’s that argument.
How did your experience of writing “Three and Out” change your view of college football?
I gained a true appreciation for just how hard it is and how different the game looks to the coaches and the players than it does to the fans. Take (junior Wolverine quarterback) Devin Gardner’s great response to the question ‘If you weren’t a Michigan Quarterback, what would you be?’ His answer was: ‘An A student.’ It’s not a silver spoon, man. I can’t speak for how they do it down South or the rest, but these guys go to class, they work hard and they don’t get paid. They get what amounts to a quarter of a million dollars in tuition and that’s not to be taken lightly, but they’re putting 40 hours a week into sports no matter what the NCAA says. I saw their lives up close, and thought being the IM hockey player I was and a history major, I probably had a much better lifestyle than these guys did. From the coaching point of view: those guys get paid a lot of money, but I would not trade. Those guys are working 80 hours a week, and more than that. Sixteen hour days every day; there are no days off, and the pressure is brutal.
What do you think businesses have to learn from sports themes?
What’s great about sports is it’s transparent. You can see if it’s working or not; you can watch people while they do their work, and you can see the results. The biggest thing you learn from sports, of course, is leadership in addition to teamwork, and I’ve spoken about those two things many times. Any organization needs leadership and teamwork and those things are hard to instill for anybody. If you take them for granted and you let them go for two or three years you can lose it. You can have two or three good years and then the same team and what happened? You lose five players, gain five players and the chemistry is all different; that’s every company in America.
How were you able to write six books on such a wide variety of topics?
Some of it was dumb luck. People who liked my work called me up. The Walgreens and the Cirque du Soleil books happened by happenstance. They’re all either business or sports, and those are the same thing. I can’t write about medicine, science or healthcare; I have no idea what I’m doing and I couldn’t fake it. I could be the moron, but I couldn’t get a book out of that.
What is your favorite piece you’ve ever written?
My favorite historical piece was about Jackie Robinson. I wrote seven pieces on that for the anniversary. It was very difficult because everyone was writing that story at that time; I had to get different interviews and frame it differently with different insights. What’s great about historical pieces is getting past the cliches, the image, and finding the real person. Jackie Robinson was an angry man, and he was not a pacifist either. He had to will himself to channel all of his energy, all of the anger he felt, all of the hatred he felt -because he felt it all – all of that through baseball; that’s hard.
What is your favorite sport to write about?
My favorite sport to play is hockey, but to cover is college football; it just brings everyone together. On the coasts it’s not the same. In New York they don’t care about it, in LA they don’t care about it. Here in the cornfields, man, we love it, and it connects us.
Photo Courtesy of John U. Bacon
