Leigh Montville, 66, was a sports writer and columnist at The Boston Globe for 21 years before serving as a senior writer at Sports Illustrated until 2002. The New Haven, Conn., native has authored several books, including The Big Bam, a biography of Babe Ruth; Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero; At the Altar of Speed: The Fast Life and Tragic Death of Dale Earnhardt; Manute: The Center of Two Worlds, Manute Bol’s biography; Why Not Us?, a book about the 2004 Red Sox; and Dare to Dream: Connecticut Basketball’s Remarkable March to the National Championship with UConn basketball coach Jim Calhoun. I had a chance to chat with Montville last week about his career experiences. Here’s the transcript.

What made you decide to start writing about sports?

“When I was 10 years old, I used to deliver the morning newspaper in New Haven, Connecticut. It was a job that existed back then — paper boy. When I was done work each day, I met another kid who sold newspapers at the corner. We’d have breakfast. I had Crush grape soda and Hostess cupcakes for breakfast, and I’d read the paper. Every day I’d throw away the front page and read this guy, Frank Birmingham, in The New Haven Journal Courier. I noticed he would sometimes be at the World Series, or he’d be at the Kentucky Derby, or he might be at Yale football games, different things. I said, ‘This is the greatest job in the world.’ When I was 10, I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ There are not a lot of people who end up doing the thing they wanted to do when they were 10 years old. The moral of the story is to shoot low with your expectations and you can reach them.”

When did you realize you had gift for writing?

“I don’t know. I went to UConn and got involved with the daily student newspaper. I was the editor of the paper my senior year. Then I got a job in New Haven and I worked there for three years before I came to the Globe. I came to the Globe before I was 25, and I was a columnist before I was 30. I don’t know, it just kind of worked out. I’ve always been kind of an imagination guy. That hurts you in sports because you’ll be playing center field and your mind will be in Yankee Stadium, and you’ll be hearing all the roars and then the ball drops next to you, and you’re back to reality. I was a dreamer kind of kid. It hurts in athletics, but it’s OK in sports writing.”

I’ve heard stories about you sitting at your desk for hours at night, trying to come up with an idea for a column. Then 30 minutes before deadline, you’d just start writing, and it would turn into a great column. What was your process for writing columns?

“I think panic has always been the big motivator. I’d always fear there would be this big hole in the paper. It was OK in the newspaper business because you could come up with your 1,000 words or 800 words and fill that hole. Then when I was at Sports Illustrated, I had to panic like two days before because I was writing these 5,000-word stories. Writing books now, I have to get the panic feeling six months before it needs to be finished.”

How did you land the gig at Sports Illustrated?

“They called me up. Frank Deford left to start the national newspaper, The National. They just called me up and offered me a job. I’d been at the Globe for 21 years. This was a whole different way to handle things and do things.”

What is your least favorite part about sports writing?

“My least favorite part is that the whole job is blowing up. There is no sports writing any more. What I’ve done for my entire work life really seems to be floundering and changing so much. Nobody knows what will happen next. The idea that The Boston Globe should be on the ropes the way it is … Sports Illustrated has cut people. It’s become a tough time for the printed word. It’s amazing to me.”

What do you think will happen?

“I have no idea. I have no idea. I don’t know how they’re going to work out an apparatus where people will pay money. People always say, ‘I’d do what you do for nothing.’ Now they can. And they actually do it for nothing. But they don’t do it the same way because they don’t have access to things, so they’re commenting from afar. A guy at ESPN told me that the way it works now is one person finds out something and everyone else just talks about it. It used to be 20 people would try to find out the same thing. Now there’s just one person trying to find it out. I don’t know how you get back to 20 people trying to find it out.”

How did you come up with your topics for books?

“Varying ways. The first book I wrote was about Manute Bol. I did a story on him — the 7-foot-7 guy from Sudan — for Sports Illustrated. He seemed really interesting to me. His whole life seemed interesting. But the book did nothing. I kind of sat down and said, ‘That’s it for book writing.’ But then Jim Calhoun and UConn won the NCAAs (in 1999). Jim Calhoun asked me to write a book with him. And that did nothing. But the people at Doubleday Publishing liked the way I wrote it. They said, ‘Let’s do another book.’ I gave them a bunch of subjects and one of them was Dale Earnhardt. I’d done a story on him and he seemed like an interesting guy to me. They rejected it real quick. Then there was the Daytona 500, and he crashed on the last turn on the last lap and died in the biggest race. The guy was on the phone with me two days later and said, ‘Let’s do a book on Dale Earnhardt.’ That sold a billion, I mean it sold a lot. And that kind of got me into the book writing.”

I assume you got to know Ted Williams’ family a little bit when you wrote the book about him. Are you sad about what’s going on with his head? Is this the way he would want it to play out?

“Oh, I don’t know. None of us want to die. You know? That’s the big thing. I’m less and less outraged as it goes on. After you’re dead, a million bad things happen to you. They put you in the ground and the worms come. There’s all this bizarre stuff that happens to you after you’re dead. This, for sure, is notably different. You know, I don’t know. I suppose most people wouldn’t want that, but most people would probably say, ‘Who cares what happens to me?’ ”

What’s the most surprising thing you learned about Babe Ruth when you wrote that book?

“I think he was smarter than most people think he was. He grew up without much education. He came out of an orphanage. He had that reputation, and it was well-deserved, of being a late-night guy, a carouser who ate a million hot dogs and all that stuff. But he was very smart in lining up his career. He had the first real business manager of any athlete. The guy took care of him and his money. Babe Ruth had money until he died and lived a good life. He made sound decisions in the people he enlisted to help him. He got a personal trainer back when nobody had personal trainers, when he was starting to fall apart. The personal trainer got him on the road and got him hitting again. He had the knowledge to straighten himself out. A lot of guys don’t have that — Antoine Walker being the latest one. He had more self-control that I think most people give him credit for.”

What was your favorite topic for columns?

“Boxing was always easy because it’s right there in front of you. Marvin Hagler was a lot of fun going out to all those fights with him. Watching him come from fighting in a TV studio at Channel 7 at Hynes Auditorium to being the middleweight champion of the world. The Winter Olympics in 1980 were great because of those Boston kids and the Miracle on Ice and that whole deal at Lake Placid. The Celtics … all of it was a lot of fun. The people were more approachable in those days. Their lives were more like your life and my life than Clark Gable’s life or George Clooney’s life. They lived with the constant thought about mortgage payments and that stuff. They’ve moved to a new economic sphere and left the rest of us behind.”

Jim Calhoun had a tough year last year with the contract controversy and his alleged recruiting violations. What did you make of that after working with him on a book?

“He’s been there a long time. He’s had some health issues. I think if you’ve been anywhere a long time in college sports, things are going to happen to you. That’s simply because there are so many rules and so much stuff to pay attention to. Everybody is skating right up to the border on every issue, you know? I think he’s had a wonderful run there. He’s an outspoken and controversial guy. As far as his contract, it’s America. It’s capitalism. You get paid for making money. He just doesn’t have a real public relations way of saying things sometimes. That’s the way it goes in our society. If you make money, you make money, you know? The recruiting stuff is always happening everywhere. If you looked into Harvard long enough, you’d probably find recruiting stuff, especially in hockey.”

That 2004 Red Sox book seems like it was fun to write. Was it your favorite?

“That was just a fast book. After I stopped writing columns, people always asked, ‘Do you ever feel like you have something to say?’ I’d say, ‘No, I don’t have anything to say.’ Then the Red Sox won the whole thing. I’d been a Red Sox fan my whole life. I said, ‘Maybe I do have something to say.’ My agent wrangled a real small book deal. I did the book in four weeks. I just started calling people — Red Sox fans — and writing. The big problem was that Stephen King and Steward O’Nan wrote the book at the same time. That book was all set to go right when the season ended. They’d been doing it in installments. So that book came roaring out of the presses. My book came out around Christmas, and to get to my book, you had to climb over these mountains of books with Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan. A bunch of other books came out after that. They all kind of beat each other to death. But it was a lot of fun to do that book. I’d just call up a bunch of people and hear their different stories.”

Did you befriend many athletes?

“I treated it as a business thing, pretty much. I’d be friendly but I wouldn’t befriend. That was my kind of thinking. Other guys do it differently, but that was my kind of thinking. I covered the Patriots for a while before I became a columnist. I always seemed to have an affinity for the Patriots. It’s funny, now after it’s all over, a lot of those guys I’m pretty friendly with. If I see them somewhere, it’s like we have shared experiences and memories. It’s pretty cool.”

Did you ever have any run-ins with athletes? Who were the toughest guys to work with?

“I didn’t have too many run-ins. Wade Boggs went off on me one time. Mean Joe Greene of the Pittsburgh Steelers got mad at me. I used to do football predictions. I’d pick football games, but I wasn’t any good at picking the games, so I’d just pick out of a hat. I used to write funny explanations. I wrote some funny explanation that Joe Greene didn’t like. For me, it was the humor that would get me in trouble. The thing with Wade Boggs, it was about what he’d be like as a hitter when he’s 60 years old. I don’t know, but he didn’t get the joke. But I didn’t have many big run-ins. Not many at all.”

Are you strictly writing books now?

“Yeah, I’m just doing the books.”

Why did you leave Sports Illustrated?

“I did that book on Dale Earnhardt. I took a three-month leave to do that book. Like I said, it did pretty well. It was a New York Times best-seller. I said to my agent, ‘Can I do this again?’ She said, ‘Oh, yeah, you can do better than this.’ She might have overstated the case. To me, Sports Illustrated was evolving into a different thing. The longer stories were getting short and disappearing. It was becoming a little factoid thing. If you look at it now, the feature stories don’t even start until after the staple in the middle of the magazine. I always had another problem there. All of their stories are edited by four different people. I’d tell a joke, but who can make four people laugh? You can make three, but the fourth person will take it out. It really bothered me. I figured writing books would be a different way of doing things.”

If you landed a job at the Globe before you turned 25, and you became a columnist by 30, you must have received other job offers. Did you turn down many offers?

“I had a few, like in Detroit and Chicago, but it was never spectacular money. I’m a Boston/New England kind of guy anyway. Whenever I heard about Chicago or Detroit, I was always kind of like, ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

Are you still living in the Boston area?

“Yeah, I live in Winthrop.”

Who do you like to read these days?

“Oh, I don’t know. Dan [Shaughnessy] and Bob [Ryan], for sure. Jackie MacMullan. My friends that are still around.”

What are you working on now?

“I’m working on a book on Evel Knievel.”

When do you expect to publish it?

“I’m hoping for a year from now.”

You always hear sports writers say they become jaded by covering the teams. Do you still love sports?

“In a way, it’s better now that I’m just watching sports. I don’t know the people involved anymore. I don’t know anyone on the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins or Patriots. I know Tom Brady a little bit. I did a couple of things with him. But not knowing the people, I can kind of root like a fan again. I can put whatever virtues or vices to them without having knowledge of who they are. I won’t have an opinion change by whether a guy blows me off or is really nice to me. It’s like being a brand new fan again.”

10 Comments for “Q&A with Leigh Montville”

1. Favre Superfan 4! Says:
   November 3rd, 2009 at 8:51 am

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