Thoughts on bothering prominent people with silly questions

As I’ve gotten more serious about my journalism career, I’ve grown increasingly interested not just in good stories, but in the backstories about how they come together. For example, I enjoyed Richard Deitsch’s podcast with Lee Jenkins about Jenkins scooping the LeBron homecoming, which surprisingly only about 2,500 other people listened to.

I’m not comparing myself to Jenkins, but I have this new blog and I think in some cases it’ll be fun to offer similar looks at how my articles come together.

Because every once in a while I’ll have a good story— like how I spent three months tracking down a Basketball Hall of Famer trying to ask him questions about Baywatch.

Thursday was a fun day for me, as I had two stories published. At Baseball Prospectus I wrote about Ruben Amaro and the Phillies’ woes, and at The Huffington Post I wrote about Mitch Richmond becoming the first Mitch inducted into any major sports Hall of Fame.

If you read both, you’d probably think the Amaro piece took more work. Actually, I started it about three days before it went live, whereas the Richmond story took three months to pull together.

There are many forms of reporting. The fun stuff includes talking to sources, asking questions, reading old stories, being on the scene, etc. Sometimes, the toughest part is simply tracking people down. That can be fun, like solving a puzzle, or it can be a maddeningly frustrating game of detective.

Chasing down Richmond had moments that felt like both extremes.

When Richmond was voted into the Hall on April 7, I tweeted at him about his place in Mitch history. He responded that he thought that was cool.

I later decided to write about it, so I caught Richmond another day when he was responding to Twitter followers and he agreed to chat. I asked him to email me his contact information, but he didn’t.

Time started ticking away, Richmond went long stretches without tweeting, and I had no way of getting in touch.

I assumed googling him would turn up an agent or publicist, but scouring the internet revealed nothing but a hopelessly outdated celebrity speaker website. I called anyway, to no avail.

I decided to be more proactive, brainstormed anyone else who’d know Richmond, and hoped somebody might do me a favor.

The big roadblock, of course, is that the premise of my story was admittedly… out there. So I asked people for help, qualifying all asks with the acknowledgement that I knew it was a bit strange. I just played up my trump card: Richmond tweeting that he’d do the interview.

I called his youth foundation, Kansas State, the Sacramento Kings and the Hall of Fame, among other places.

When my voicemails were ignored I sent emails and when my emails were ignored I sent follow-up emails.

I’m extremely confident all these organizations can connect with Richmond within 10 minutes if they have an emergency, a reunion or some other reason to say hi.

I won’t call out anybody in particular, but the responses were mixed. I was ignored completely. I was told they don’t have his information. I was transferred to coworkers and supervisors. I was told they’d pass along an email on my behalf, but couldn’t give me his digits. Some people were friendlier than others, but none got me to Richmond.

Meanwhile, I read that his father passed away in June. Not wanting to cross the line between persistent and insensitive, I postponed the chase a few weeks until I saw him tweeting about an autograph show.

Finally I called a friend who works for the NBA, who I hadn’t wanted to bother amid his insane travel schedule during the playoffs. Plus I didn’t know if he could help anyway. But he put me in touch with a coworker, who ran the request to Richmond, who agreed (again) to chat.

After months of hunting, I was given his email address and told he was expecting to hear from me. I reached out immediately— and didn’t hear back. I tried again a week later— still nothing.

I get it. People are busy and the world doesn’t revolve around me. You can’t take it personally when prominent people don’t get right back to you.

One day I stepped away from my phone for 20 minutes, came back and found a 9 second voicemail from a basketball Hall of Famer. We did the interview the next day.

And I needed it. I thought Richmond’s quotes would liven up the story, but they also altered its direction.

One of my first questions was if Richmond knew other Mitches growing up. Oh, only his father, he told me. I had no idea. None of the stories I’d seen about his father passing away mentioned his name.

That became a major part of my piece, that the name has been in his family for generations. And what I thought was a quirky story suddenly needed a more poignant ending about his relationship with his Dad.

Richmond was a great interview subject. We spoke for 11 minutes, but it felt like 20. That doesn’t seem like a ton of time, but felt gracious considering he was willing to give thorough answers about questions as stupid as whether anyone ever called him Mitch the Bitch, and as serious as how it would feel not to have his father with him for induction weekend.

Thankfully, he enjoyed the premise of the story. He laughed about a couple pop culture references, and told me a story about Kevin Hart that didn’t make the piece.

So that’s my long way of saying that I could’ve easily given up, but that getting Richmond on the phone totally made the story.

Now why am I writing this? I’m not 100 percent sure. It’s definitely not to publicly pat myself on the back and say, “Hey, look how much work I did.” I think it’s just a reminder to myself, the next time I feel like I’m hitting a wall. Or to my writer friends, or any other writers reading this. That if you have somebody you need to speak to, keep chasing them down. Because when you eventually get them, the payoff will be worth it.

It doesn’t always work out. This spring I spent two weeks trying to set up on-camera interviews with Matthew Broderick and Thomas Ian Nicholas. I knew tons of people were covering Wrigley Field’s 100th anniversary, but thought I could be the only one scoring interviews with actors from two iconic movies filmed there about their experiences in the park.

Sadly those emails and cold calls led to a dead end, but I’m glad I went for it. If I work like that on five stories, and only one comes together, it’ll still be worth it.

But it’s sure nicer to write about the examples that work out.

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