You Don't Find Books, Books Find You: An Interview with Joe Drape

As a kid I would sometimes watch ABCs the “Wild World of Sports,” and I especially loved the opening credits when Jim McCay would intone those words “the thrill of victory…and the agony of defeat…the human drama of athletic competition,” while ski jumper Vinko Bogataj’s awful 1970 crash would flash across the screen. But honestly the opening credits were about as dramatic as the ensuing shows often got for me.

Author and New York Times sports reporter Joe Drape actually captures the highs and lows, the drama and melodrama, the beauty and the horror of the sports subjects he writes about.

A Kansas City native, he worked his way up the journalism ladder from the news desk at the Dallas Morning News and later the Atlanta Journal Constitution to the New York Times.

He made the switch to sports in 1993 when, he said, AJC wanted someone with a news background, but an affinity for sports, to be the lead Olympic reporter. He started writing for the New York Times in 1996, and moved to New York City in 1998.

His latest book “Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen,” is currently on the New York Times bestseller list.

The following is a brief interview with Drape.

While writing your newest book “Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen,” you lived in the small Kansas town in which your subject, a high school football team looking for its fifth state championship in a row, is located. Was living in Smith Center part of your plan from the start?

The opportunity to live in Smith Center was key to the book as well as personal growth. I wanted to understand the community, and the best way to do that was become part of it. When you embed yourself somewhere, you can take your time and earn people's trust. You listen rather than ask questions. Selfishly perhaps I also wanted to take some time with my wife and 3-year-old son. I'm a Midwesterner, and I wanted them to see how I grew up.


Was there a hard transition for you and your family going back to NYC after spending time in a small prairie town?

For my son, Jack, none whatsoever. We should all have the resilience of a 4-year-old. For Mary and I, we had to reaccelerate our gears, and get used to the hustle and bustle. We also returned at a time when the economy was stumbling along so we landed in a different New York than we left.


What was it about this high school football team that interested you enough to write a book?

It really was the town and people that made me understand this was a book length story. When Coach Barta told me that none of what he and Smith Center did was about football, instead it was about raising kids, I believed him. I've had famous coaches tell me things like that and I knew it was just a line. I could tell that these folks practiced love, patience and hard work - call them old time values. I wanted to see how it became the foundation for their success in football and life. I also liked the fact they were in the middle of a 54 game winning streak and needed 13 more to set a state record.


What draws you to a subject generally?

There has to be a kernel of intrigue there that makes me so curious I have to know more. I want to learn something, and if I can learn something I can pass that on to the reader. Or at least I hope I can.


In your books you seem to be able to take the potentially limiting beginning point of a sport (horse racing, football, basketball) and open it up to a whole range of deep and universal ideas and emotions. Do you look for stories that have that potential or do you unearth the universalities while writing about a given subject?

I look for stories first that are going to entertain me, that I want to know more about. I discover what all means, or the macro thought, or emotion as I report and write it. I go in with a pretty cursory point of view and let my heart build from there. In Our Boys, it was "here's this out of the way place where people are happy and kind, and they play very good football. Why?"


You’ve had a lifelong interest in horse racing. What is it about this sport that continues to fascinate you?

The actual handicapping and betting of races is a mental exercise not unlike chess or crossword puzzles or even investing. I get lost in it. I turn off my internal dialogue and just be the racing form. The professional side is really simple: There are great stories in the sport and people want to share them. It's the last democratic sport in America. You can't buy a championship. Everyone is bonded by the love of a horse. Red Smith. Joe Palmer. They weren't wrong to spend all their time at the racetrack. I'm one of those people who believes that a bad day at the racetrack is better than a good day anywhere else.


What was the most surprising thing you discovered about Jimmy Winkfield (in a life that seemed full of surprises) while writing "Black Maestro"?

How passive and persevering he was. Jimmy was not a big personality or particularly decisive guy. He rolled with the punches and never gave up. He didn't have choice - over a remarkable life he had Jim Crow laws, the Bolsheviks, the depression, Hitler and civil Rights bearing down on him. He had what Hemingway called "grace under pressure."


Being both a sports writer for the New York Times as well as an author, do you prefer one type of writing over the other?

They complement each other in the sense that you work different muscles. Sports writing is immediate gratification. It could be done in an hour or a couple of weeks or months. But you are limited by space. It helps you identify a story and tell it quickly. Books, however, allow you to shade in the complexities of a story. They let you take your time, and set up a narrative. You get to use more tricks.

What are you working on now?

I've got a screenplay working its way to production, and I'm messing with another one. It's just another form of storytelling, and it's interesting. I'm doing my work at the NYT. As far as a next book, I'm just keeping my antennae clear.

You don't find books. Books find you.