Flip the table, grip the reader
A quick story on this all-important narrative style, and why Boston sportswriting legend Steve Buckley is so good at it
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Apologies that this post is coming a few days late. I’ve spent the last week out in Lincoln, Nebraska, running programming for a massive football summit put on by my daytime employer Hudl. We had a few presentations on leadership and culture that might interest you if you want to watch any replays (free to register). Deion Sanders tore down the house. So did PJ Fleck, Doug Pederson, Marcus Freeman, Dave Aranda, Zac Taylor, Kevin Mawae and scores of others. There’s also a Q&A in there with Jeff Saturday hosted by Yours Truly that I’m especially proud of :). )
I’ll start this off with a story about the most influential teacher of my adolescence, my 10th grade honors English teacher at Oakmont Regional High School in Ashburnham, Massachusetts.
If you stopped Marc Santos in the street today, he wouldn’t be able to pick me out of a police lineup. It’s been more than 20 years since we last talked. I doubt he even remembers what I looked like. But there was no singular teacher whose lessons shaped my writing more than his. To this day, it’s the hardest “A” I’ve ever earned in my career as a student — college included.
There was a great lesson to be learned every day in that classroom. Especially on “Rage Against the Machine Fridays”, where we’d study the lyrics to a song from the aforementioned band, analyze their wizardry and try to figure out things like what they meant by “Five-Sided Fistagon”.
But the biggest lesson of all might have been the one he gave in the first 10 minutes of the very first day of class. He instructed all of us to close our eyes, and imagine ourselves in a paradise, getting more descriptive by the minute with how idyllic we were to picture this. And then suddenly, he lifted up his desk and slammed it to the floor with a thud that jolted everyone’s eyes open. We were all startled. One classmate even shrieked.
“This is what the best writers in the world do,” he said. “They can take you to a place of unmistakable beauty, and then scare the living crap out of you.”
***
Keep this little anecdote in mind when you check out Steve Buckley’s incredible long-form piece from earlier this month in The Athletic on a former football star named Chris Eitzmann who had a very brief, very anonymous run with the New England Patriots but happened to share living quarters with Matt Chatham, David Nugent and some guy named Tom Brady during the latter’s rookie season when he was still the fourth-string nobody.
Great trivia question, right? Only this story takes unexpected turn that you’ll feel in your bones:
The story was dusted off from time to time as Brady established his bona fides as the best quarterback in NFL history. As recently as September, Tom Curran of NBC Sports Boston interviewed Nugent and Eitzmann about being housemates with Brady, discussing such topics as their fierce “Tecmo Bowl” battles. Eitzmann, wearing a T-shirt and ball cap and speaking via video from home, cited Brady’s video game demeanor as foreshadowing his future as a Super Bowl-winning quarterback.
“If he was losing,” said Eitzmann, “he was going to try to find a way to make sure the game didn’t end.”
Three months after that video was published, on Dec. 29, Eitzmann was found dead in his apartment at The Smith, an upscale building on 89 East Dedham Street in Boston’s South End. He was 44. Later, it was determined he died from issues related to alcohol disorder. On Jan. 8, one day before Brady would play the final regular-season game of his storied NFL career, Nugent and Chatham traveled to Deshler, Neb., a tiny city near the Kansas border, to attend Eitzmann’s funeral.
See what Buck did there?
This is the story of a lifetime. It’s more than a sports story. It’s not just about the life of an ex-Patriot few fans got to know. It’s the story of a shattered American dream.
Now sure, the headline kind of gives away the plot twist. But if you didn’t know the guy, I’m going to assume your first guess for cause of death out of a headline, “From small-town Nebraska to Harvard captain to Tom Brady’s housemate: The life and death of Chris Eitzmann”, wouldn’t be something so dark. It’s a sad story that leaves you wondering how it all led to this conclusion.
And it’s the way he delivers it, with such tragic suddenness after setting a fun scene, that gets a hold of you and takes you along the track with him.
Buck’s been great at this style for years. It reminds me of maybe the best column he ever wrote during his time at the Boston Herald, the one where he first publicly announced his sexual orientation:
And the truth of the matter is that, as my mother aged, even as she was being treated for cancer, she had become wonderfully anecdotal, using her sharp mind to share stories about her younger days that might otherwise have been lost to the passage of time were it not for these midweek Scatter Rug Adventures.
Just over seven years ago, before Thanksgiving, we were getting into the car outside of a CVS when my mother said, “I think you should go ahead and do that story you’ve been talking about.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” she said. “Just go ahead and do it. And then we’ll have a party.”
She was talking about the story in which I would say that I am gay.
(I guess I’ve kind of buried the lead here, which, I admit, has been a common complaint about my writing over the years. But what the heck: The headline has already given away the story, and, anyway, what happened that day seven years ago is central to why I am writing today.)
My mother and I had already had the gay talk, during which she had told me that nothing had changed, that she loved me, asked if I was seeing anybody, and so on. What she didn’t like was the idea of me coming out publicly; she was of the opinion that it was really nobody’s business, and she worried that prejudice might disrupt my career.
But like an NFL referee, she had overturned the original call. “Do it,” she said. I thanked her. She smiled. And then I made the biggest mistake of my life: With a vacation lined up for the first week of December, I told her I’d get to it when I returned to Boston — just before Christmas.
The vacation came and went. The day after I returned to Boston, I received a call from the Lifeline people telling me my mother was being rushed to Mount Auburn Hospital, where she had undergone radiation therapy during the summer. The family gathered at her side. The next morning, she suffered a heart attack. She died a few days later.
Again, you think you already have an idea of where the story’s going, and then — WHAM! — Buck flips the table and pulls at your heartstrings.
To me, there’s two big reasons why this style hits so well:
It more freely allows for introspection
Since you know how the story’s going to end, you’re not going to waste any energy keeping up with the twists and turns. Instead, you’ll find yourself reading between the lines, looking for the littlest clues that can help explain how the tragedy came to be.
If you’re as big a fan of Better Call Saul as I am, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You already know what’s going to become of Slippin’ Jimmy McGill in the near future. So you’re focusing more on what led him down the path of this iconic criminal lawyer shyster. You’re paying attention to everything else — body language, facial expressions, relationships — because you ultimately know how it all ends so you’re trying to put the pieces together yourself.
Here, Buck does a beautiful job painting a story of a life lived fully and filling in the blanks. How he went from growing up on a remote farm to matriculating at Harvard. How he met his wife. Why he came back to the farm earlier than expected amidst a prosperous finance career. His brain being donated to CTE research. And perhaps most importantly, why so many people who knew him wished they hadn’t lost touch, or wished they asked more questions.
You’ll find yourself following every word at every turn, right to the final scene with the big funeral in the town of 150 attended by 400-plus.
Deep down, readers want to expect the unexpected
It’s human nature. It’s why so many Star Wars sequels/prequels are such critical abominations, but something bizarre and darkly original like Squid Games becomes an overnight worldwide sensation. Your audience won’t admit it, but it doesn’t want to correctly guess what’s coming.
This is a man who seemed like he was putting together such a beautiful life before taking an unexpected turn. Stories like Chris Eitzmann’s are supposed to have happy endings, not tragic ones that leave so many people close to him asking why, and what they could have done to help prevent this. This is heartbreaking on every level.
***
One last little anecdote about Mr. Santos…
I’m telling a slight white lie about that “toughest A ever earned”. It was my final paper for the class. I got a C+ for sentence structure but A for thought development, which averaged out to a B. But I’ll take it — because having good thought development is way more important, no offense to all you grammar totalitarians out there. You can coach up writing.
What’s more important about this grade is what he put in the comments: “Read a newspaper every day”. I think he was trying to get me to understand how to write in a more inviting style. But when I got another comment next semester on one of my papers for my creative writing teacher Mark Nevard urging me to write — “You deserve to be published!” — the ball was too far in motion to stop.
Twenty years and a lifetime of storytelling wisdom later, this is all your fault, Mr. Santos. And I don’t regret a minute of it. All because I think you were just trying to get me to use first-person less in a reflective essay.