Alternate history: 49ers win

Crafting a sports story on a tight deadline

Here’s something most sports fans might not know: the best games, the ones that tilt back and forth, the ones propelled by amazing feats, the ones that come right down to the wire, are not party-times fun to write for the swaths of sports reporters up in the pressbox.

What follows is a two-part story: one, how a lot of a deadline sports writing gets done; and two, something I wrote that went unpublished, the story of the San Francisco 49ers defeating the Seattle Seahawks in the NFC championship game last Sunday (which as many know almost happened).

The reason for some stress in pressboxes is deadlines, which are often severe. If there was even the luxury of an hour after the clock ticked down to the final zeros — which most publications have sometimes — it is a different story. An hour might not seem like a long time to tell a tale of upwards of a thousand words but, with some practice, it actually is. Thing is, that hour, in many cases, does not exist.

I certainly am not seeking sympathy. Writing on deadline is a skill and it’s hardly arduous work. It’s cool, too, to be at the big game, and to write about it. With this little story, I am just pulling back a curtain, showing how the sausage is made, for those who are curious. In my case, I write for The Globe and Mail, a newspaper based in Toronto, Canada, whose coverage is national in Canada, with numerous international bureaus as well. I am a journalist covering sports out the Vancouver office. My bailiwick begins with hockey, the Vancouver Canucks, and includes much else.

Last week, I headed to Seattle for the NFC championship, first reporting and writing this feature — http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/football/power-of-positive-thinking/article16397795/ — and then this game story: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/football/wilson-and-seahawks-defence-leads-seattle-to-super-bowl-with-win-over-49ers/article16403518/.

Deadline for my story was the moment the game ended. It was 6:53 p.m. PT when I hit send, about one minute after Richard Sherman saved Seattle’s season. It seems early for a deadline but consider what I like to call the tyranny of Eastern Time. The Globe’s final primary deadline — recall HQ is in Toronto — is 9:30 p.m. ET, so we stretched it a bit. By 9:30 most of the paper is well on its way to printing. This is the deadline to get a story into all editions across Canada.

We can, of course, push things several hours later, for later editions, elections and such. The NFL didn’t quite qualify for that extension, which is costly in terms dollars to basically delay the printing and distribution of the paper, and/or rejig earlier editions. Remember, too, the 9:30 p.m. ET filing deadline provides time for an editor to handle the story and for it to be laid out on a page or pages (since with this story it appeared on the front of our sports section and turned inside).

Writing for the buzzer is something all sports writers well-versed in (as are journalists in general for various deadlines on different topics). The technique I use (not unlike political writers in elections) is fairly common among sports writers who look to type a story with theme, rather than just a who-scored/what-was-the-score recap. By the midway point of a game, I generally have latched on to something prominent that is playing out, and try to put a “lede” — the first paragraph/first couple “grafs” — in place that can hold, with perhaps a small adjustment, either way, which in this case was a 49ers win or a Seahawks win.

Then I usually have something broadly thematic in mind, which usually can be tilted one way or the other, depending.

In terms of story composition, I approach it the way I do because there are widely distributed quality outlets like Associated Press and Canadian Press that do write fairly detailed rundowns of the games, so it would be a bit foolish to repeat the effort. Also, a lot of people who are interested in the games actually watch them, and they probably don’t need the game to be re-explained to them play-by-play afterwards.

The work happens, helped along by some pre-prep, as the game unfolds. Halftime is not leg-stretching time, even if I did dash to the food table and inhale a hotdog and grab (shamed) my third can of Coca-cola. In the example of the NFC championship, I wrote a lede during the second quarter, and most of a 49ers-wins story at halftime, with a couple updates/changes/additions/subtractions thereafter. After halftime, I began to prepare a Seahawks-wins story, which I pushed harder as the team gained the lead early in the fourth. And all the way along, we’ve all got our eyes on the field. Football, with its stop-start rhythm, is easier to do this than with hockey, for which I am listening to a live broadcast on the radio on my iPod and trying to watch as closely as possible.

Sunday, of course, came down to the very final moment. It was an amazing game, an epic in two distinct parts. Below I include the alternate history, the 49ers win, unpublished and until now existing only on my harddrive. There are, for those who wonder, also a couple of Vancouver Canucks-win stories from the spring of 2012, when the Los Angeles Kings beat the Canucks four games to one in the first round of the playoffs, where each game was closely fought. We’ll leave those to collect dust, unread. I also have, to cite one recent example, great empathy for all the reporters in Boston on May 13 last year, when the Toronto Maple Leafs had an epic meltdown against the Bruins with about 10 minutes to go in the final contest of a seven-game series, turning what would have been a historic victory into a historic defeat. Get me rewrite.

For those intensely interested, or overly nerdy, it will be quite obvious comparing and contrasting the actually published football story — http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/football/wilson-and-seahawks-defence-leads-seattle-to-super-bowl-with-win-over-49ers/article16403518/#dashboard/follows/ — and the below, to see the methods at work.

Please be generous to acknowledge that anything written in such a swirl will not be the greatest poetry ever penned, or the finest rendering of a game that could be achieved with more time to reflect and review. We do our best. Also, to note, the quotations in the published story were filed later after the game’s end to a web editor as additions. Like other journalists, I descended (rapidly down a stairwell) from the pressbox to the field after hitting send on the main story, and then interviewed people, soaked in the milieu (Twittering images of the scene), and took in parts of the press conferences. (This itself is a lesson in being there, and the goodness that can flower, such as by chance meeting and interviewing the state governor. Journalism is like sex; it’s turns out better the closer you are. That’s another post.)

Headline TK

Ebner/Seattle

Twenty minutes into the game, the sky an ominous grey all day, a city shrouded in fog, the darkness of night approaching, a normally crazed stadium of nearly 70,000 Seattle Seahawks fanatics went mute.

Quarterback Colin Kaepernick and the San Francisco 49ers had silenced the fabled 12th Man, the rabid backers of the Seahawks who in the past have registered their devotion on the Richter scale and on Sunday afternoon were stunned to quiet by a dream beginning to fracture.

In a game that was the expected grindhouse from the first moment, Kaepernick emerged as the hero on a field where he had previously suffered his two worst losses as a professional. Neither team’s defence was yielding a yard without a bloodletting, until Kaepernick went on a tremendous scamper a third of the way into the second quarter, weaving left and right, breaking four tackles, on the way to a 58-yard gain that led to the game’s first touchdown.

It vaulted the 49ers to a 10-0 lead, an early body blow for the home fans. But after a smashmouth first half, the game opened up in the second, as the offences finally found some room to breathe, to run and catch, leading to an extraordinary topsy-turvy half of football. Seattle tied the game at ten in the third quarter and wrenched back the lead in the early fourth, going up 20-17, resurrecting the noise of the crowd, but Kaepernick conjured the final heroics, xxxx

Sixty minutes of incredible football: extraordinary.

So in a stadium where Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson had been 16-1 before Sunday in his two seasons in the National Football League, a dream of a city’s second Super Bowl berth died an unceremonious death, staked in the heart by a football and civic rival to the south. The San Francisco 49ers, having upended the favoured Seahawks, will face the Denver Broncos in two weeks in their own second consecutive Super Bowl appearance, seeking to avenge last year’s 34-31 defeat to the Baltimore Ravens.

The 49ers head to the Super Bowl after an extraordinary three straight victories on the road in the playoffs, first in the Arctic of Green Bay, then the sun of Carolina, and on Sunday the wet cold of Seattle. San Francisco’s coach Jim Harbaugh, in only his third NFL season and newly debuted non-pleated khakis, once again bested long-time coaching rival Pete Carroll of Seattle and is cementing the foundation of a legend.

On the field, the tattooed Kaepernick drove his team against the league’s best defence in a win that was also propelled and underpinned by the 49ers own ferocious defence led by linebackers NaVorro Bowman (badly injured in the fourth quarter) and Aldon Smith, the two harassing Wilson all game, the 49ers booking four sacks in the first half alone.

For the Seahawks, and the city of Seattle, it is a gutting defeat. The Seahawks had been superior to San Francisco through the season, only to falter in recent weeks, while the 49ers coalesced and were in ascendance, undefeated since mid-November. The two cities, these days, are so similar, West Coast, digital, liberal, foodie, but on the fields and in the arenas of sport, Seattle is a poor cousin. Seattle can boast only one championship, so long ago, the SuperSonics in 1979 while San Fran has five Super Bowls and two recent World Series.

The Seahawks, whose offence has been offkilter for weeks now, struggled to scrape its way out of the early hole and by the time it did, its defence at the end could not hold off Kaepernick’s final attacks. Seattle had been down 10-0 three years ago in the playoffs at home during their monumental upset of the New Orelans Saints — when running back Marshawn Lynch inspired fans to set off seismic vibrations — but on Sunday the 49ers, so strong of late, would not cede.

It had begun to go backwards for the home team immediately on Sunday afternoon, in the opening moments when Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson weakly coughed up the football on the game’s first play. Wilson has to date seemed to be preternaturally gifted, a born winner, evoking something of San Francisco’s Joe Montana in an earlier era. But when it counted on Sunday, Wilson failed his team and couldn’t make it back.

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