Ian O’Connor is a modern-day master of the sports biography, the unauthorized sports biography. Unauthorized is not a dirty word, though the industry needs to rebrand around it. We’ll workshop that …
Unauthorized = true journalism, no editorial input from the central figure, more likely closer to the truth instead of the central figure’s truth. It is not a collaboration.
This is the biography you want to read.
And in the hands of someone like Ian, there’s no better reader experience. Ian handled his latest mammoth figure in Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers (Mariner Books) with utmost fairness and showed the grayness of Rodgers’s character, which makes for a gripping and complicated read.
Ian also is the author of these best-selling biographies:
Arnie & Jack: Palmer, Nicklaus, and Golf’s Greatest Rivalry
Belichick: The Making of the Greatest Football Coach of All Time
The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter
Coach K: The Rise and Reign of Mike Krzyzewski
Ian was a long-time columnist for ESPN.com and the New York Daily News, among others, and given the short runway he had to write Out of the Darkness, it was the first time in his long career that he left his day job to fully commit to a book.
Ian tabled a biography on LeBron James to write the Rodgers bio because Rodgers had recently been traded from the Green Bay Packers to the Ian’s backyard in the New York Jets. Couple that with Rodgers’s Achilles tear four plays into the 2023-24 season and the clock was suddenly ticking and Ian needed to pounce while Rodgers’s — a news cycle unto himself — remained relevant and top of mind.
In this episode, we talk about asking for blurbs, the difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies, and finding the ancillary characters that can really shine light on the central figure, a la Jimmy Breslin’s “Grave Digger” (story by Poynter.)
This episode pairs well with conversations I had with Jeff Pearlman, Howard Bryant, David Maraniss, Glenn Stout, and Madeleine Blais, all brilliant sport biographers themselves.
TL;DL: Finding the Grave Diggers
Brendan: And does the interviewing reveal the narrative more than say the newspaper archive?
Ian: 100% Yeah, I think both help. But certainly the stories you’re getting from the people who are there, and sometimes the printed accounts aren’t entirely accurate and they’re incomplete, but the human beings who were there on the ground witnessing this person’s life as it unfolded, to me, that’s where you’re always getting the best stuff.
Sometimes particularly with very private figures, and those are the figures I’ve really profiled in these books. Say, Belichick, for instance, Tom Brady and another the stars of his program, his team, they’re going to be a little hesitant to talk to me, because a lot of those players and former players still have relationships with either Belichick or the New England Patriots. They might be employed by the Patriots still, and so they have something to lose, and so you might not get cooperation at all from those people, or they might not tell you the full story because they’re concerned about the implications for them when they see it in print.
There are bottom of the roster, middle of the roster, players — and Belichick coached there for more than two decades — that were in the same meetings with Tom Brady, heard the same stories, have witnessed the same events, and they only played one or two years with the Patriots, two or three years in the NFL, then they had to get real jobs in the real world, and they’ve been forgotten by Belichick and everyone else. But they’re out there working in offices, again, in the real world and and not the fantasy world of sports.
So a lot of times, I find that those people are the most valuable because they speak freely. They don’t have a paid gig with the New England Patriots or New York Yankees anymore. So a lot of times, the best material in my books comes from those people who weren’t there. They weren’t stars. They weren’t there for 15 years. It was brief, but they witnessed and heard the same things that Bill Belichick said in those meetings or that Derek Jeter did in the clubhouse in a talk before big game, something to that effect.
So I guess it’s the old story of Jimmy Breslin interviewing the Grave Digger at JFK’s memorial service. It’s always looking for that person, who had a role, a profound one, but was very likely overlooked by everyone else, at least in my profession, that that’s always been in the back of my head when I start a book, is to find those people, and I think that they are just more willing to give you a full picture of what happened.
Parting Shot: The Test of Time, and Dental Woes
As of this parting shot, still waiting, still floating … I’ve secured some photo permissions. Re-read some notes of some details worth folding in, sorta like a souffle where you don’t want to fold in too much otherwise you’ll deflate the whole thing.
I don’t know what else to say that hasn’t already been said, really. My only hope is that my editor reads it and is like, “yes, we’re basically there. It’s good, one more pass and a good line edit and we can make something great, something we can feel proud of, something that could hold up on subsequent reads.”
On an unrelated note, I woke the other morning with gum swelling around one of my implant sites. This is my nightmare scenario. I had pretty significant oral surgery about five years ago that was tens of thousands of dollars. Fortunately I had a benefactor pay for it, and the worry with implants is avoiding infection. They are very vulnerable to infection, and the other day, there was this swelling and I immediately went into a mild panic. I flossed a bit more, used the Water Pik, rinsed with salt water. The swelling has subsided somewhat. When I flossed last night, there was a little blood. Blood is never good. More salt water. This morning, on flossing, no blood, swelling hasn’t returned in full, but it’s still a little bit there. If it persists I’ll have to go to the dentist and odds are they’ll say “yeah, looks like the implant site is starting to fail and there’s nothing we can do until the bone weakens around the implant, then we’ll remove it and your bridge will be toast.”
All this is to say, make sure you’re flossing, people. Your mouth is a haven for bacteria and it doesn’t take much for that shit to cause an infection that might cost you more ways than one.
You didn’t think you’d hear about Brendan’s dental woes, did you? Stay wild CNFers, and if you can’t do, interview, see ya!
