After taking a much needed hiatus during finals week and the return back to Cuse, I’m back! Returning to the Pitoniak interview, I’d like to share my thoughts on the rest of the conversation and wrap up this unreal opportunity with a quick write-up. Essentially translating Scott’s words into takeaways, I can 100% say that I’ve become a better writer (not to brag) throughout this endeavor. His expertise and knowledge on my two favorite subjects, baseball and writing, gave me a framework to derive influence from, and I can’t stress how grateful I am for this interview. For the rest of the month, I’m going to try and balance my newsletter alongside work and summer activities, so there won’t be as many publications and I will most likely revert back to the “edition” style, throwing you folks four pieces at a time rather than standalone works. In the meantime, I hope my fellow Fisher subscribers are enjoying their time home! It’s well deserved after a long and tedious finals week, good stuff Cardinals. As usual, hope ya enjoy.
Note: Some quotes are edited for structure and clarity, but the point is the same. You get it.
Interview with Nationally Honored Sports Columnist and Best-Selling Author
Scott Pitoniak - Part Two
The Seventh Inning Stretch
As a student at the school that hosts the Buffalo Bills for their annual preseason training camp, I’ve heard the agonizing groans when the forbidden phrase “wide right” is daringly uttered. 1991. Eight seconds left. 47 yards. A Super Bowl win all but secured for a city where heartbreak ran rampant for the self proclaimed “Mafia.” Families celebrating across Western NY. First generation fans feeling liberated from the curse. An end to the fanbase of the famed franchise’s plight finally presented itself.
Until it didn’t. The city of Buffalo rejoiced, until hell broke loose at the 47-yard line. The kick went up, and I’ll save Bills fans the heartbreak of retelling the outcome. In short, Scott Norwood was demonized. In 8 seconds, the kicker who connected on 5 game winning field goals eight years earlier became a pariah at the drop of a hat. And oh brother, if anyone could understand the heartbreaking ballad of the infamous kicker, it would be a man who suffered the same fate exactly 40 years earlier.
In the mind of a journalist, one always needs to think outside the colloquial box. That’s why I was enamored when Scott Pitoniak retold the happenings of this event through the eyes of Ralph Branca - the delivery man for Bobby Thomson’s 1951 “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” If I were behind this piece, I would have never considered interviewing the man behind the baseball version of “wide right.” This showcases Pitoniak’s prowess, and the fact that he was able to connect these two separate events shows that journalism has many more layers than merely retelling a sports event. Anyways, history is interconnected - it repeats itself, you just have to do some digging to extract the potential stories hidden in the archives.
When I asked Mr. Pitoniak for some tips to accelerate my writing to the next level, he stressed learning through experience. To quote the sportswriter,
“I would read writers I admire, not to copy their particular style, but to kind of read it asking ‘what was the strategy here? What was he or she trying to do to get me into the story?’”
As an avid reader of SABR’s baseball history publications and the Hall of Fame’s “Memories and Dreams” magazine, some of my favorite authors (Scott being one of them himself) present themselves in my writing, whether I know it or not. Not to pontificate myself as an established writer, but I think these influences shined through, no matter how unpolished some of my works can be. Which brings me to the next point.
I will admit that rewriting is not my strongest tool. Scott made me realize that the most influential writers do the most editing to land on a piece that will create the most impact. Working off of one of Scott’s points, Ernest Hemingway said that the secret to good writing is rewriting. Not vocabulary. Not sentence structure. Not prose. Just merely rewriting. For example, how do we make this piece fit for a certain audience? How can people extract the most meaning out of my writing? There is a barrage of antecedents that go into making people read your writing, and rewriting a piece to fit an audience is the driving force behind impactful delivery of one’s work. Scott Pitoniak is no stranger to this tenet.
“You’ll never have writing licked. You'll get a little bit more comfortable with it as you go on, like anything else, as you practice it. But, you always have to keep working at it. I still work at it. I still struggle with it at times. When you feel that you've nailed the story, it can be a tremendous feeling, but it's also a very neurotic thing. And I would have a thing when I would write, when I was working with the Democrat and Chronicle and also doing some writing for USA Today and other places, I would always say, ‘out of the 200-something columns during the year, if I had six to 10 keepers that stood the test of time, that was a good year, right?’”
This quote from Scott was fascinating to me, as I usually don’t even want to be in the same room as one of my pieces after I put it out. Thinking that you have it all together after the first draft is a blessing and a curse. The feeling of having a seemingly polished piece is a powerful one, but as Scott said, you never have it licked. The point is, reading your own work is awkward. Sometimes excruciating, even. However, the one thing that separates a good writer from a great one is the ability to rewrite like you’re running out of time (to quote Hamilton). Another major influence that I derived from this conversation was the process of using leads to pull readers into your stories. Quotes from interviewees, uses of a culturally defining moment, or a riveting sentence that pulls readers in is as important as having a good story in general. For example, Scott had the privilege of interviewing a Rochester-adjacent football star that took a wrong turn at the wrong corner and found himself in prison. Scott tells the story better than I can, but this player’s plight ended up becoming a worthy lead-in to a cautionary tale:
“You can use a dramatic scene and anecdote to lead into the story. There was a star football player from the Rochester area. He was a top player in Section Five here. He was an all American at Penn State. Big offensive lineman that went on to play in the NFL, and then he wound up going back to his hometown of Hornell, and he was busted for selling drugs. So this is the fallen hero story, so and so. He was in prison, and I contacted the corrections facility to get a letter to him, like, would he be willing to sit down for an interview? Because it has to be cleared through. So when I got there, it was a maximum security prison in Elmira, and I mean, for real, hardened criminals and drug dealers, whatever. Probably over the top, and he probably shouldn't have been there. And he was moved to another prison not before long. But anyway, I showed up there and they put us in this room, and when he introduced himself to me, he goes, ‘I used to be number 78 and now I'm a prison number.’”
With that, some leads fall right into your lap. Like it’s a quote caused by divine intervention. However, some leads aren’t as straightforward. Interviewers have to work diligently to pull these quotes out of the conversation, and that isn’t always easy. Fortunately, Scott threw me some softball quotes that I’m working to knock out of the park, and the Branca/Norwood parallel is one that I highlighted as extremely beneficial for this write-up. In the world of sports journalism, there are athletes who have lived life ten times over, and it’s up to a good journalist to get them to speak on at least one of those lives.
Part 2 of Part 2 - Talking Ball
One of these tragic “hero” stories (although I wouldn’t necessarily call him a hero) lies in the rise and fall of “Charlie Hustle,” Pete Rose. Scott had the opportunity to interview Rose, and what came out of it was a tale of a man who was too large for life, and simultaneously too large to admit that he had a gambling problem. Rose, the all time hit king boasting a record that may never be broken, lived for ambition. And all of this drive wound up placing him as an outcast in the baseball community. Post-career, the famed hothead was implicated in a gambling scandal that put him on the outskirts of the game, never to see the Cooperstown induction that seemed like a lock to bet on (no pun intended) at the end of his career. During his playing days, Rose played with a passion that would rival a war general, taking every opportunity to bowl over catchers, even in a midsummer classic. This just showcases why he earned the moniker “Charlie Hustle,” a name that rang throughout the baseball community from his playing days to his managerial downfall. While he was known for his hustling on the field, his legacy amounted to the hustling he was involved in off the field. Betting on baseball is considered blasphemy, and while Rose knew this, his gambling addiction and drive to excel at whatever he did landed him in hot water, denying him entry to the Hall. However, Scott’s interview with the man himself resulted in a few takeaways, adding a more human side to baseball’s villain.
In Scott’s words, Charlie Hustle was “his own worst enemy.” He had the talent. He had the drive. However, as I mentioned in my “Kant” piece in Edition 1, too much of a virtue becomes a vice. And Pete Rose was no stranger to vices. The problem that strained his relationship with the baseball higher-ups was not only the fact that he bet on games. The issue was the fact that he showed no contrition for his acts until it was convenient for him - a facade that anybody can see right through. But he also doesn’t understand. After sustaining ridicule from fans and baseball itself, he didn’t come clean that he had a problem. Instead, he set up shop right in Vegas, continuing his oblivion to the damage he did to himself. Still hustling all the way up to his death in 2024. Still the same ambitious figure that collected 4,256 hits, a record that will likely stand for eternity. But, as Scott said, you almost feel sorry for the guy. To put it in his words,
“If I’m an alcoholic, I can’t work as a bartender.”
This is fully true, but Rose denied that he even had a problem. And as we know, the first step to overcoming addiction is admitting that there’s a problem. Then, Scott Pitoniak delivered the most harrowing and hard-hitting quote in the entire interview:
“The fire that warms us is also the fire that can burn us”
True for not only Rose, but for any athlete who went down the path of overambition, this quote has the same energy as virtues turning into vices on a more relatable scale. But this quote not only applies to vices - it also applies to the events that shape us in our lives. When we look at Tiger Woods, for example, he had his childhood taken away from him - his father forcing him to perfect his golf craft in place of a regular social childhood. Look where he ended up - selling your soul for a trophy-case career riddled with scandals and no coping skills. Scott says that when life loses balance, that’s when you run into trouble. That seems to line up with Tiger’s recent events that seem to lead more and more to the downfall of the Michael Jackson of golf.
Two revolutionary baseball figures that took the world by storm in the 80’s ended up suffering the same fate.
If Dwight Eugene Gooden were to stay clean throughout his career, there’s a good chance that the Cy Young award could be renamed as the Doc Gooden Award. His counterpart, Darryl Strawberry, had a sweet swing that my dad recounts as hands down the best he’s seen. Scott had the privilege of watching the uprise of the teams led by these two, but also suffered the heartbreak, like any fan at the time, of their downfall.
“They usually show up at Cooperstown to do signings now, but there was a time where they looked like surefire Hall of Famers,” he says. This brings us back to the ambition point. One major tenet of Black baseball manifests itself in the “play harder” regiment incepted during the time where the major leagues became integrated. Even recently, Black ballplayers have had the unfair proposition that they had to prove themselves by playing harder than their white counterparts. While these two legends in the making played hard on the field, they played even harder off of it. The pressures of the time and playing in New York’s major market (not helped at all by the drug use of the 80’s Mets teams) put Strawberry and Gooden in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the duo took a dark turn and wound up on drugs. The play harder piece was embodied by two careers riddled with drug-related suspensions, along with the addictions which manifest themselves as life-long battles.
Strawberry turned his life around, fortunately, in short. He is a pastor now and involved in using his story as a vessel for worship, supported by his wife who is a recovering alcoholic. Gooden, however, while claiming to be clean, there’s still a level of worry there. We don’t know the full story, but it seems like he doesn’t have the help in his corner that Strawberry was able to utilize in making a full recovery. I have a personal experience related, as Gooden faded an autograph signing session that I attended, claiming that his flight was delayed and subsequently canceled. This wouldn’t be troubling had it not happened to multiple different venues over time, including one with Pitoniak. When Scott interviewed him, he claimed that the once star was fidgeting, nervous, and seemingly off. However, this does not by any means portray that he is not clean. Addictions have lasting effects that attack the brain and body, and as Scott claims, it is a lifelong battle where you can fall off the wagon at any time. In the meantime, Strawberry is on the right path, pulling a full 180, while I’d like to give Gooden the benefit of the doubt.
A player on the same team who suffered a different fate is Lenny “Nails” Dykstra. Like Pete Rose, Dykstra earned the “Nails” moniker for his tough-as-nails play and demeanor on the field. Also like Rose, he played just as hard off of it. Nails wound up in loads of trouble post-career, having been in and out of prison since 2012 for drug charges and related issues. Having met Dykstra once, I was shocked when I looked down as he was signing his hand instead of the 1991 Diamond Kings card I presented to him. I still have the card in the basement, sometimes holding back the concealed laughter that I harbor while feeling bad for the man that can’t conquer himself. Pitoniak has a similar experience, having to cut off his interview early on air because the guy was making no sense. This is a sad story, but embodies Pitoniak’s point that the fire that warms us can also burn us. To this day, Dykstra is still struggling with his addiction, and I can only offer him vicarious sympathy while he struggles to recover.
Each of these players faces skeletons in their closet that make life an everyday battle, which circles back to the point of Scott Norwood and Ralph Branca’s parallels. Along with other players - Lawrence Moten’s infamous extra time out call in the 1995 NCAA tournament, Chris Webber’s same story with the Fab 5, even Cayden Boozer’s blunder in this year’s tournament. What we need to remember is that these people are just that - people. Things happen. We need to give them grace, along with hope for the future. The pressures that face us daily are insurmountable sometimes, all that matters is that you keep chopping. Nobody remembers that Scott Norwood made 5 field goals in 1988. In Branca’s words during Pitoniak’s interview,
“I had good games after 1951 - but I’m labeled. That poor son of a gun (Norwood), what he’s gonna be dealing with.”
That poor son of a gun is right. But that’s just sports. As Scott says, life isn’t fair, and sports certainly aren’t fair either!
Part 3 (Final) coming soon!
