July 19, 2017: Alex Prewitt
Guest: Alex Prewitt
Story: Generation Shaq: Catching up with the kids named after a larger-than-life NBA superstar
Publication: Sports Illustrated
Date: July 5, 2017
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW HERE
SUBSCRIBE HERE: http://tinyurl.com/h75mlf4
There are so many hockey writers out there. Thousands, probably. Sports Illustrated’s Alex Prewitt is pretty low-key (i.e not based in Canada), but he’s certainly one of the most talented writers in the business… and we barely spoke about hockey!
His piece about the kids named after former NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal, though, was too good to pass on. He only really started to cover hockey three years ago when he was reassigned by his Washington Post editors to the coverage of the NHL’s Washington Capitals.
Legendary journalist Michael Farber covered hockey at Sports Illustrated magnificently from 1994 to 2014. “A lot of credit for the job I’m able to do, the opportunity we have [at SI] goes to [Michael] Farber,” says Prewitt. Farber is one of the most respected and humble journalists today. Prewitt describes him as an “‘incredible resource” who’s always willing to get on the phone.
Hockey is changing in the United States. It’s still a fringe sport and the ratings are not incredible, but last year’s number 1 overall pick in the NHL Draft was born in Arizona, proving that the sport is getting more and more popular. Who would’ve thought 20 years ago that a Stanley Cup Final would be played in Tennessee?
Three years ago, Prewitt had never written about hockey. Now, he’s writing about it at a time where the sport has never been more popular.
-Étienne
You can listen to the interview or read some of the best moments below along with some other great long reads.
Here’s an excerpt of Prewitt’s story that was published in Sports Illustrated.
Like Karshena McCain, plenty of parents hoped their progenies would follow in the Original’s oversized footsteps — and not just on the basketball court. After his freshman year in college, Shaquille Odom was contemplating dropping out and taking a high-paying job hosing down oil tankers. So his parents sat him down and said, “Just think about Shaq.” Specifically, think about how O’Neal stayed at LSU for three years before turning pro, but later earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. The desire to pursue education was why the Odoms named their son after him in June 1991 — and why Odom decided not to leave school almost two decades later. “Without Shaq,” he says, “I don’t think I’d be who I am today.”
To read the full story, click here
Here are the best moments from our conversation:
On why he wrote the story:
Got to give all the credit to my editor named Adam Duerson [Assistant Managing Editor, Sports Illustrated]. Phenomenal editor over at SI and he kinda takes the helm on the “where-are-they-now” issues, in terms of planning and obviously some odd story ideas. So he came to me and then asked if it was something I’d be interested in. I guess the somewhat serendipitous part of it is that I went to college at Tufts University, a small school up in Boston, and there I had taken a class where… it was a sociology class.
And one of the units was on baby names and it was just about how baby names are at times reflective of societal trends, popularity or even the reverse. One of the examples actually I remember from that class was the professor talking about, or a book we were reading talking about how the name Shaquille spiked in the early 1990s so I guess that always stuck with me in the back of my mind.
On how people felt about being named Shaquille:
Most common [sentiment] was kinda progression. When they were kids, when you’re in grade school, in elementary school, in middle school, people are mean at times and they give you nicknames. That is a little more of a burden that invariably when the teacher mispronounces it during roll call on the first day of class, and they call it Shaqueele or Shaquilee, then your peers start laughing and you get a little embarrassed.
That was a pretty common experience and then over time, it became more of a positive identifier that wherever they grew up, in their hometown, they were the Shaquille, they were the person who was named after a really cool athlete. And I think a lot of that plays into just the image of who Shaquille O’Neal was. He wasn’t just a dominating athlete, he was a goofball who could joke around and play pranks in commercials. […] He’s buying businesses, he’s an entrepreneur, he got his college degree, he got his masters.
On why how he puts a story together:
I am reporting for two different areas in the magazine; the weekly publication and then online. The bar has to be set higher for the magazine so I can devote part of my week to publishing a couple of stories that are smaller features on lesser known players or weirder stories that aren’t gonna make the magazine. Then the magazine, especially with hockey, you want to do recognizable names, stories that can resonate beyond just the diehards. You’re always looking for that, you’re always looking for stories that are going to appeal on that level. […]
Going from focusing so much on the now that’s what’s the game today, what’s the morning skate, what are the lines, whose injured, what kind of transactions are coming out of the pipe and then you rinse and repeat when you’re on the beat. [Writing for the magazine] is more balancing three or four stories a month or two in advance. While I’m doing these stories, how can I sort of piggyback off of that. You drop into a city for four or five days as opposed to when you’re on a beat, you’re there sometimes for, at times, less than twenty-four hours. You can do a little more deeper reporting; you can talk to more people, you can flesh it out, you can go through drafts, you can really workshop the story through your reporting.
On covering hockey in the United States:
I wasn’t a hockey guy growing up; I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area and I covered other sports. I grew up watching other sports. I just never was exposed to hockey on a level enough to pay attention to it. Then in 2014, I was working for the Washington Post and I was covering college sports and I got reassigned to cover the Capitals. That obviously becomes a totally immersive experience when you’re covering 41 games on the road, 41 games at home in the regular season, and the playoffs.
With the Caps, that’s a lot of hockey to watch, especially for someone who hasn’t watched hockey in the past, which has its ups and downs. I’m obviously not as well-versed in the terminology and some of the systematic, instructional stuff. I can’t quite take the level of someone who’s watched it their whole life obviously, but at times it can give me a fresh perspective into a game that, as you said, does not have a lot of coverage, especially narrative or feature coverage in the US and at times, I think that can play to our benefit because I am coming in from an outsider’s perspective.
Our picks:
-Buzzfeed’s report on singer R. Kelly’s alleged “sex cult” is this week’s must-read.
-After her attorney husband died, Eileene Zimmerman looked into his past and found a lot more than she was expecting.
-The Atlantic obtained letters written by Sylvia Plath in which the writer detailed the physical and mental abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband, Ted Hughes. For Literary Hub, Emily Van Duyne questions why these allegations seem brand new when Plath had been writing about them for years.
-LA Weekly spoke to filmmakers and stunt actors about the sensitivity required to depict rape scenes in film.
