SL Interview
On the Rebound with Rus Bradburd
by William Meiners
Rus Bradburd is a pretty giving guy. About a decade ago, I traveled with Nick Reading (Sport Literate’s own Nick Reading) to Las Cruces, New Mexico to see our old Purdue buddy Kevin Honold, a guy, like us, then working on his second MFA at New Mexico State. Rus, a writing mentor to Kevin, loaned him his red pickup truck for our weeklong stay.
I got to know him a little more through three books he’s written. A college coach who worked for both Don Haskins (the real man behind “Glory Road”) and Lou Henson, Rus left the hardwood and life on the recruiting trail for his own MFA program and a gym rat’s commitment to the writing craft. Three years ago, Rus judged our essay contest, submitting himself then to an interview about his first book of fiction, Make It, Take It. And in the spirit of renewed March Madness, he recently subjected himself to the interview that follows.
William Meiners: As a former college basketball coach who made the jump to writing, your first three books were about basketball, though all very different. The first, Paddy on the Hardwood, is a memoir, maybe even an example of a traveler’s narrative as you document your time as a semi-pro basketball coach in Ireland. Forty Minutes of Hell is the biography of Nolan Richardson, the somewhat controversial and misunderstood basketball coach. For the latter, it seems you had to turn into an investigative journalist and a historian just to uncover the story. Can you talk about your approaches to each of these examples of creative nonfiction?
Rus Bradburd: The Irish book began as a diary because I feared I was going crazy. “Nobody would believe this stuff back in the States, I’ve got to write this down,” that sort of thing. And although we came in last place, from a literary standpoint that was a very lucky coincidence, and that worked well in the book. In the early drafts of Paddy on the Hardwoodthere was no basketball, nothing on the court. But I had a few writer pals tell me I had to have some basketball. I had to dig up the stats, and in Ireland the records are very spotty. Also, frankly, I cheated on the order of things, meaning I moved the Irish music stuff around, staggered it throughout the book so there’d be a balance, a back and forth, between music and the team.
With Forty Minutes of Hell I began in a very different way than the final results might indicate: I was going to “out” Nolan as a paranoid egotistical racist. Which, in retrospect, is how 99 percent of the media portrayed him when he was fired at Arkansas. But in digging up the history and background and doing dozens of interviews, I slowly came to believe that Nolan was right about nearly everything. Yet I still had to expose his imperfections, his humanity, which he wasn’t happy about. And finally, I had to hide the book from him until it hit the stores. He’s a strong personality and I feared he’d try to influence my very personal take on his life.
WM: With any form of creative nonfiction writers are trying to arrive at a truth. And of course good fiction rings truthful. What were the biggest challenges in arriving at what may seem like discovering something of yourself in Paddy and teasing out the complex life of Richardson in Forty Minutes?
RB: In Ireland I had to come to grips with basketball, the complicated history of how it had dominated my life in an unhealthy way. I think good memoir often exposes the writer as a jerk — or at least as a dope, or imperfect. Of course, this was easy to do in my case. The Nolan Richardson book made me realize the incredible privilege I’d been afforded by being white, even in a black man’s game. I mean, the history of the game points at this, but nobody wants to hear it. For example, John Wooden, the UCLA coach who won all those NCAA titles, got his start in an era where the coaching fraternity was segregated. But so did nearly all the great coaches, from Henry Iba to Bobby Knight to…well, anyone who began before Will Robinson at Illinois State in 1970. And all of us involved in sport like to imagine the games that were never played: who was better, Bill Russell or Kareem, that kind of thing. But as far as coaching is concerned, Americans were cheated out of the best games — they were never played. We never saw Clarence “Big House” Gaines against Dean Smith. And John Wooden never had to face John McLendon.
WM: Were you worried about pissing anyone off with either book? Or do you feel just have to let the writing fly and deal with that later?
RB: The great Chicago journalist John Conroy told me that there is no nonfiction book worth its salt that doesn’t anger some people. With Paddy on the Hardwood, though, it was touchy because there are people I love, and they don’t come off well in the book. Players who were decent guys look bad. I got away with it because I pointed that camera at myself. Nobody looks as foolish in that book as the author. I think with the Nolan Richardson book, well, he’s such a lightening rod for controversy that I knew there’d be no way to make everyone happy on doing his story. And I avoided the star players who I felt like would feed me standard lines. Instead I talked to people who had no voice, or at least weren’t his best players, or the obvious choices but would speak in cliché.
WM: We last spoke (formerly in the SL Q&A sense, anyway) not too long after Make It, Take It, your novel of linked basketball stories came out. At the time, you told me writing fiction seemed more difficult. Is it still tougher a few years later? And what makes it so?
RB: This question looks to me like a banana peel up ahead on the sidewalk that I’m so dumb I’ll still trip over it. Fiction, in my case, involves no research, no facts, no interviews. I imagine that Cormac McCarthy has to get things right if he’s portraying Mexico in 1940, but I don’t have to fret. It’s all in my head. So I think what I’m up to in nonfiction is that I’m collecting all this stuff I found buried, and now I’m deciding what to keep and what to throw away and how to lay it on this big wooden table and make shapely design. And I’m looking for patterns that surprise, or threads I didn’t know existed. So in that way, it feels like more work, that I have so much to sift through and my challenge is not to make it too long of a book. With fiction, I often feel like I need more advice. I don’t know the material well enough, as strange as that sounds. So I lean on Robert Boswell, Antonya Nelson, and a yet-unpublished Chicago writer who has saved me so often named Barry Pearce. And after some back and forth with them, I can finally show my best work to my wife, the poet Connie Voisine.
WM: What does Connie do with it?
RB: As a poet, she has an even tougher language-level take on my manuscripts than the other readers that I’ve leaned on over the years. As my wife, she gives me the thrashing I so deserve, but I’ve learned the hard way to only show her my best work. It’s less traumatic that way.
WM: After your college coaching career, you told me, you miss being around inner-city kids. What specifically do you miss most about those relationships?
RB: I found the Chicago guys I coached endlessly fascinating and I could relate to them. In retrospect, basketball gave me a window into an interesting culture: black inner-city life. Yet my view and experience with African Americans is mostly limited to the basketball world. And as a college professor now I’ve come to realize that while the coaches are intensely interested in recruiting tall black guys, the rest of the university is apathetic to this portion of the population. Studies show that the racial diversity on many campuses is pretty sad — away from football and basketball. Sport is the leader in racial progress, and it’s often the only place you’ll see it on a college campus.
WM: Of course, one of the players you still talk a lot about is Shawn Harrington. For those who don’t know, Shawn was a random victim of gun violence in his native Chicago. His story is both heartbreaking and inspiring (if that’s possible). In covering up his young daughter in a full-on assault on the wrong car, he saved her but ended up paralyzed. I understand you’re working on a book about his life. Why is Shawn’s story so important?
RB: I think that Shawn’s individual story cuts through all the statistics and political arguments, all the discussion of gun control, education, politics, and race, and enlarges the issues in some unexplainable way. It’s a story of the failure of America. I mean here we have a guy who did everything right: he graduated from college, got a good job, came back to his old neighborhood to try to make a difference, and was a loving and involved father with his two daughters. Now? He’s living on $300 a month. And the odd coincidence and the time of the shooting (7:40 a.m.) point to the fact that we’re all vulnerable. The working title is “All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed,” which is lifted from a Langston Hughes poem. This is another book project that uses basketball as a backdrop, but again there’s not actually much basketball in it.
WM: When I started SL 21 years ago, I figured we’d publish a number of “Field of Dreams” type stories. Those father and son, or daughter, essays that toy with the fine line of sentimentality. My wife caught me watching that movie the other night and I was practically blubbering. I mean it, she nearly went for my son’s nighttime diapers. The writer/editor in me knows what they’re doing — a pull on the heartstrings with all the music and low-key, handsome Kevin Costner about as subtle as a beanball. Still, it always gets me. And that’s sometimes the criticism of any type of writing that’s linked to sports. It’s a game of schmaltz.
This is an absurdly long introduction to a question (complete with a second paragraph), but I think we publish a range of writing about sports — from the near sentimental to things with harder edges. In the end, we just publish what we like. That said, you recently hooked us up with Dave Zirin for an interview. Zirin, I think, is sports journalism with a capital “J.” His job is, even as a true sports fan, as he told Nick, is to tell those “house on fire” stories. With Forty Minutes, you certainly detailed the ongoing racism Richardson endured. Why should writers of sport to take on bigger issues, i.e. racism and corruption?
RB: Although I’m nearly old enough to be Zirin’s father, I’ve learned so much from him, particularly about history. And I think he’s able to connect the dots that only he notices at first. In my case, I was always more interested in the stories of human endurance and courage. I remember being particularly taken as a kid with Dan Gable and his maniacal training routines, although I think Gable wrestled in the last meet I have seen. I think that kind of attraction to other stories away from the actual game, and this window into black culture that I talk about all the time, led me to be interested in the role of sport in social justice causes. And in America, that means racial equality, or less inequality, anyway. So that kind of overlap of courage and race — and then working for Don Haskins for eight years — got me looking at the kind of issues that Zirin seems to be hammering on all the time.
WM: I know you’ve been working on another fictional work about a football team that takes over a university. Though that sounds a bit like nonfiction. Can you talk a bit about that book? What’s your two-line pitch to publishers on why that book matters?
RB: Okay, here goes: “Big Time” is an anti-sports novel that satirizes the lofty place of athletics at American universities. I’ll leave at that for now, but I will add that I used to be anxious about getting it published before college sports were reformed. Sadly, that’s not going to happen anytime soon, or not in any meaningful way. But the good news is that the book may still have hope.
WM: I turned 50 late last year. For the first time ever I started teaching a creative writing course at the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, in January. I find it to be both wonderful and awful at the same time as I chatter on in what seems like some sort of performance art banter in front of my students. Mostly I try to be encouraging. How do you coach up writing?
RB: I find myself relying in class — and in dealing with young people — on what I learned from Lou Henson and Don Haskins, the Hall of Fame coaches I worked for, nearly as much as what I gleaned from Robert Boswell and Antonya Nelson. And I find a lot of similarities between writing and basketball, just in the attitude and practice. I’m pushing students to settle into the right mixture of humility and hubris. Just like in basketball, too much confidence can hurt you as much as too much fear. Also, like in basketball, you go “practice” alone, then join the group for a “pick-up game” that the workshop can be. And there’s something about being a good “team player” that makes the workshop go better for everyone, yet also helps each “player” with her own “game.” Sorry, that’s a lot of sport metaphors.
WM: Given a magic wand, a deal with the devil, or just your best career realized, what would you want the most? To be a Division 1 coach in a powerhouse basketball program? Or a writer on The New York Times bestseller list? Why?
RB: Not even close: I lost the energy for college coaching a year or two before I quit in 2000. I’m content that I did what I did. I was in seven NCAA tournaments by the time I was 31 years old. But the hours spent seem self involved now in ways that I find meaningless. Although that’s an odd accusation that a writer is calling coaches “self-involved.” In retrospect, what interested more about basketball was not the “X and O” strategy stuff, but the stories. I can’t really remember scores or plays, but there are unforgettable stories in my head from my time around basketball. I don’t worry about being a New York Times bestseller, thank goodness. But I’m much happier typing on a day-to-day basis than I ever was coaching.
William Meiners is the editor of Sport Literate.