Our Writing Outlives Us All
Sportswriter Jason Gay discusses his frustration and admiration for Tom Brady, and one of the biggest lessons he learned during the pandemic
As a sports columnist and author of Little Victories, Jason Gay believes in the virtue of occasionally failing at writing: “I think that an important part of being a columnist is failing every once in a while. You write the bad ones so you can write the good ones.”
Gay recently joined Zibby Owens on her podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books to discuss the craft of writing, his column, his book, Tom Brady, and the legacy that his late friend and Journal colleague, Tom Perrotta, leaves behind.
Read an excerpt below and follow the link to listen to the entire interview.
ZO: How did you end up at the Wall Street Journal?
JG: I had kicked around newspapers and magazines for quite a number of years. I had most recently been working at GQ Magazine, where I’d been for a while. I got a call from a friend of mine who said, “Hey, the Wall Street Journal’s looking for a sportswriter. Would you ever do this?” I was like, “What? The Journal? What?” I was not a Wall Street Journal reader. That’ll not shock anyone who reads me.
I don’t really fit the profile of someone who’s financially literate or newspaper-literate in any sort of traditional sense. It was still a cool-sounding job, so I went in there and I talked to them. We did this thing where it was basically a tryout. You write columns but they don’t go in the newspaper. They just want to see if you can put the verbs after the nouns and spell things correctly and you can write on a deadline. I did this audition over a few weeks. Then they said, “Okay, we’ll try this part-time.”
That was about ten years ago. It became full-time a little while after that. I have to say, it’s the best job I’ve ever had by a landslide. I’ve had some nice jobs and great bosses and great publications to work for, but there’s nothing like working for a paper or any kind of publication where the audience is massive.
The Journal goes out to over three million people per day. Whether they like you or they don’t like you, you’re going to hear from readers. I just never had had that kind of feedback and relationship with readers before. It’s something I still treasure, the fact that you’re in people’s lives.
ZO: I feel like I should talk to you about the Super Bowl. I read your column this morning about Tom Brady who you keep writing about, the absurdity of his —
JG: — You can’t avoid him. I can’t shake him, Zibby. He’s in my blood.
ZO: [Laughs] I feel like you have a thing with him. Is it a personal thing or what?
JG: Of course. He’s mocking me [laughs]. He’s forty-three years old. He should’ve been falling asleep at halftime at the Super Bowl yesterday, not playing in it, not winning the Super Bowl MVP.
Yet he’s out there competing still at the pinnacle of the sport. That Super Bowl was his seventh ring. The next closest person has five. He’s in a class all to himself. The fact that he is at forty-three and shows no signs of stopping, is making no indications that this is going to be it for him, said the other day before the game that he’s open to the idea of going past the age of forty-five, that’s real rare air.
Listen, I have Brady fatigue like I think a lot of people do at this point, but I also have a real sense of wonderment for what he’s accomplished because we literally have not seen it in the history of this sport.
ZO: I think the way you feel about Tom Brady this year is how the rest of us women might have felt about J.Lo at the halftime show last year. It’s like, “this is on the table as something that we could be doing?”
JG: As an impossible standard.
ZO: To make this more of a sad conversation, your essay about your friend Tom Perrotta was so sad and beautiful. Maybe you could talk for a second about your relationship with him.
JG: Thank you for asking about him. I love talking about my friend Tom. He shares a name with a very distinguished novelist, Tom Perrotta, but this was a different one. He wrote for the Wall Street Journal for about ten years. I knew him the whole time. He was our tennis writer. He was the guy we sent to Wimbledon and the French Open and had this really wonderful job and was an incredible writer but then was stricken with brain cancer about four years ago. He outlived all the predictions of how long he would go. We lost him in early January.
Before he died, the Journal published this essay by Tom that talked about the last ten months or so of the pandemic and how amid what had been, obviously, an incredibly disruptive and challenging situation for so many people, he found this incredible silver lining of family and the fact that his family had to be home with him.
This was a part of his life that he hadn’t really experienced professionally because he was always traveling around. He was always on a plane somewhere. He had missed things. But he knew he didn’t have a lot of time left. He was getting every maximal moment with his children, his wife, his close circle. It was just a very fascinating perspective.
I’ll be the first to say I feel like the luckiest person around considering the fact that my family has been healthy, and that I’ve been able to work through this. I know many people are facing far greater and severe challenges than I could ever imagine. I felt that what Tom wrote was beautiful. I know from talking to him it was something he really wanted to say.
At some point in life, you encounter people who know they don’t have a lot of time left. There’s this version of it, the movie version, with great clarity that people know what they want to do. But it’s not like that in reality. He was angry. He was mad about things. He just felt he was getting a raw deal. He died at forty-four. That is young.
He knew that he really needed what he was getting in these last few months and he felt he was going to be incredibly valuable to his children, too, as they got older, knowing they had had this time with him. He was a magical guy. We miss him a great deal. He was a huge contributor to the newspaper.
I was really struck by the readers who responded — other writers, people in the tennis community, athletes, players who really liked the guy, who were moved by him. We’re all still processing even though we had time to prepare for this outcome. My thoughts are primarily with his wife and children, of course. I think that people have done right by him. I think that he will be remembered as a true gentleman and a wonderful writer.
There is something magical about the fact that people live on through their writing. If you’ve not read any of his work, it’s not terribly hard to find. Type in his name, Tom Perrotta, Wall Street Journal. You’ll find avalanches of great stuff that he did over the years. I think that that will be a real comfort to his family, but also to many others who knew him and loved him. There is something wonderful about the fact that writing outlives us all.
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