Friday, December 16, 2011
Media Writer We Made Fun of Has Done Pretty Well for Himself
Posted by Steve Haruch on Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 1:56 PM
At the time I was 23 and painfully immature. I was working as a features writer for The Tennessean, young and dumb and unwilling to take advice from everyone. The local alternative weekly, The Nashville Scene, rightly wrote “If there’s one cow-pie in the field, The Tennessean’s Jeff Pearlman will manage to step in it.
For a whiff of what Pearlman was stepping in the year Alanis Morisette's "You Learn" hit the Billboard Hot 100, courtesy of the Scene's Desperately Seeking the News column, let's go to the tape:
A sportswriter (for now), the paper’s enfant terrible found the cow-pie again last week, charging that “private, Christian-run schools are a bad idea” because Christians commit “insensitive” acts at games like praying to Jesus and heckling opponents and referees. As an example, Pearlman described the mother of an Ezell-Harding student who kept shouting at opposing players, “Hey, you A-Head!!! That’s right, you’re an A-Head!!!”Pearlman admitted he had no idea “what exactly an ‘a-head’ is” but implied it must be some obscure, sectarian curse.
On Sunday, Tennessean editor Frank Sutherland apologized for Pearlman’s “prejudice against Christians” and said the reporter’s column “should have been edited” to make its point “without being so offensive.”
Sutherland failed to explain, however, the meaning of “a-head.” Witnesses report that a woman of loud voice and thick drawl was berating the opposing team for running up the score against hapless Ezell-Harding. “Hey, you’re ahead,” she yelled repeatedly. “That’s right, you’re ahead!”
Actually, "a-head" is probably a legit insult at this point (as shorthand for "asshead"), but anyway, Pearlman's post isn't about that. It's about his favorite Christmas card, which he gets every year from Warren Thompson, the widower of Lynn Thompson, who he had written about in The Tennessean:
[One] day, my editor asked whether I’d like to write a piece about a sick woman and her loving husband and their garden. Which I did. Lynn Thompson was marvelous. Wonderful. Strong. Courageous. I knew nothing about life, and she explained it best she could. Dying, she told me, wasn’t as scary as you’d think—it was more the idea of all the events she’d miss. Her children growing up, getting married, having kids. She regretted her inevitable absence and, I think, felt burdened by how it would impact her daughter, Kate, and sons Nick and Brendan. Warren, meanwhile, was the husband I aspired to one day be. When his wife was at her lowest, he was there, caring, supporting, reassuring. He promised to maintain her garden, which led to the headline atop my piece: Lynn’s Garden.
Having been both 23 and painfully immature in my life (simultaneously, if memory serves), and as a writer who has had a regret or two make its way to print, I was really moved by the way Pearlman has carried this family's story with him, and how Warren's Christmas cards have, with their yearly increments of children, spouses and grandchildren, deepened his connection to them.
"There aren’t all that many stories that I regularly look back upon," Pearlman writes, "Lynn’s Garden, however, was different. My father mentioned the piece in his toast at my wedding. ... And while I can’t say the piece changed my career, it certainly impacted it. You don’t experience the likes of Lynn Thompson and go unmoved."
As a national sports columnist with several books to his name, Pearlman has gone on to great things since his time here as the occasional butt of the local alt-rag's snarky jokes. (Henry Walker doesn't have his own Wikipedia page.) His latest book, a New York Times best-seller, is about Walter Payton — the idol of my childhood, much of it spent imitating him by leaping for hours over pillow-defenders into the spring-loaded end zone of my bed, and the only athlete whose passing brought me to involuntary, spontaneous tears. Pearlman's SI feature on Sweetness, his post-career turmoil and the emotional darkness that nearly consumed him before he eventually succumbed to a rare liver disorder, is certainly worth your time.
It ain't no cow-pie, that's for sure.
Comments (5)
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One obvious change in the Scene over 15 years, today the Scene would not be critical of a writer who gratuitously bashes Christians.
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Pearlman has emailed us a few times over the years since he's gone on to fame and (we hope) fortune, and he's been a class act every time.
I got mine back in '09. Seemed decent of him.
http://www.jeffpearlman.com/nicki-pendleto…
I don't remember Pearlman but I'm quite sure he would not have attended a Predators game and heard the crowd chant "WE WANT FROSTIES" to urge the team on to its fourth goal (bringing all ticketholders a free Wendy's Frosty) and think they were shouting for Rob CROSBY, the star player on the opposing team.
Just saying.
Err..Rob Crosby is a country singer. Sidney Crosby is the one who's the greatest hockey player in the world, when healthy. Kinda took the umph out of the story, SB.
