Sports Columnist Lowell Cohn III

Listen to the whole thing here.

Lowell: "Do I spend much time thinking about God? No. The concept does not have a lot of resonance in my life, but I am very respectful and sometimes envious of people who have deep faith. I am so secular in the way I lead my life but I am aware of some of my friends who have deep faith and I respect it and I admire them."

Luke: "Why are you a sportswriter?"

Lowell: "I am a sportswriter because when I applied to the San Francisco Chronicle in early 1979, I applied as either a film critic or a sportswriter and they already had a film critic. They asked me if I wanted to be a sports columnist. If they had asked me to be a film critic, I would’ve done that. I would’ve been just as happy. Maybe not. I would’ve been a film critic but I’ve been very happy as a sportswriter. I don’t know what it would’ve been like the other way.

"I knew I wanted to write and I knew I wanted to write in a popular daily medium.

"I felt I had certain advantages in writing about sports in that is at stake is pretty simple so there wouldn’t be concepts I couldn’t understand. It was a world I understood so I could concentrate on my writing.

"I thought I had some talent as a writer and I had read thousands of really good books and I thought I could bring some wisdom and style to writing about sports that maybe others could not."

Luke: "Where have you found meaning writing about sports?"

Lowell: "I find meaning in the act of writing. If I write a column that gets people talking or gets people angry or praising me, that’s really nice, but those are secondary benefits. The benefit is the art of doing it. The meaning for me is the four times a week I get to sit down and plan my first sentence and see where it is going to flow and hear the alliteration in my mind and work my way toward an ending that I hope is a zinger. Then you look at the whole thing and you get exhilirated that you have done this and you have an artifact."

Luke: "Do you actually enjoy writing?"

Lowell: "I love it. And I love to talk about it and I love to teach it. I teach a workshop in non-fiction prose. It’s not journalism. It’s for creative writers who write non-fiction. I love to talk about it — tone, voice, whatever you want to say."

Luke: "Have you ever felt like you were slumming it?"

Lowell: "Yes. That’s a very good question. Meaning, by being a sportswriter?"

Luke: "Yes."

Lowell: "Yes, I have. In general, I don’t. In general, I think it is a very worthwhile thing to do. It’s as worthwhile as most other things to do. Sometimes, when you’re writing about someone who pulled a hamstring or you’re talking to someone who doesn’t give a s— about you and is answering in these rote, bored answers, yeah, I feel I’m slumming it. I feel it was a wasted article and a wasted day. I feel it is my job if I’m good that day, that week, to make it so I don’t feel like I’m slumming it. To do something special. And that would mean in my style."

Luke: "How do you feel about your fellow sportswriters? As far as their commitment to writing?"

Lowell: "That’s another good question. For the most part, sportswriters are journalists, which means they come to the profession from a completely different route than me. I’ve never taken a journalism course and I’ve never taken a writing course. It’s all self-taught. What most sports reporters think about is getting facts, getting a scoop, delivering the news and delivering stuff that is not apparent. Having sources and things like that to give what is going on behind the scenes. Their project is completely different from mine. My project is not like a sportswriter but like a sports columnist. Sports columnist is a small category of sportswriters. Most sportswriters would not be concerned with style and writing. They’d be concerned with reporting, which is a wonderful thing to do and I’m not particularly good at. I’m only comparing myself to the smaller population of sports columnists, which is generally looked at as the best job.

"The best sports columnists are people who can deliver two things, and it is usually one of the other. One is someone with a unique writing style/view on things. The other is someone who is so well-connected that he is always delivering news like a reporter but he can do it in his own voice with his opinion attached to it. I can do that. I don’t think that I am particularly that kind. Tim Kawakami in San Jose can do that. Glenn Dickey can do that. Other kinds of sports columnists are people who are more stylish, like another friend of mine at the Chronicle, Scott Ostler. He’s a humorist and he’s really funny. Like when he wrote a little piece about Singletary when he took his pants down: ‘Were his pants half down or half up?’ It was a clever concept. I tend to be attracted to those kinds of columnists."

Luke: "Who are the stylists in your profession?"

Lowell: "When I was growing up in New York, there was Jimmy Cannon. The best of my generation on the East Coast was Red Smith. He was like a short story writer in sports columns. The one out here was Jim Murray. He had a unique voice and a lot of people on the West Coast copied him to their detriment. If you are asking for models for my writing, none of them come from newspapers. Never. Those are people I appreciated, but from the time I went to college, I’ve been a voracious reader, and I would have to say that Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Jane Austen, George Elliot, are just better writers than me and the sportswriters I hang around with. I have spent a lot of time reading them because of how unique and individual and brilliant they are."

Luke: "Is there one writer who’s had the most influence on your writing style?"

Lowell: "Bernard Malamud. He was a Brooklyn Jew who wrote one great novel, The Fixer, and four or five great short stories. His sound is such a Brooklyn Jewish sound. And Philip Roth would be the same thing. You ask how Judaism has affected me? Those two voices are in my head a lot when I write. I love Graham Greene but he’s English and it’s a different rhetoric."

Luke: "Where would you place Skip Bayless as a writer?"

Lowell: "I know Skip because he worked at the San Jose Mercury News. We’re friendly. I would place Skip in the category of someone who’s connected. When he was a sportswriter, he was extremely well connected. He always knew that day what was the main issue in sports that day. He also could stir up controversy. Do I think he’s a great stylist? Not particularly. Was he an effective columnist? He was really good."

Luke: "Did you learn how to rip someone in print and then face them again? Did you naturally have that toughness?"

Lowell: "I had it. That was part of being 5′8" in Brooklyn and having to face people who were bigger and tougher than you. When I ripped someone, I understood the code that you had to make yourself available or they would think you were a punk and the anger would never go away. You could never balance the scales and do business again. I was always pretty good when you rip someone to be there and show your face and walk up to them and say, ‘Is there anything you need to say to me?’

"I think athletes and reporters know who does it and know who doesn’t do it and they respect the people who do it. It came naturally to me, but I do want to admit something — when I do it, when I make myself available, it’s not like I do it in joy. I feel nervous. Palms sweaty. My dad used to yell at us sometimes and I always had bad associations with it. I don’t like when people yell at me and yet I know that it has to be done and I know I won’t die, so I face up to it, but I’d rather not."

I define "beat sweetener" for Lowell (overly praising people important for your beat to they will continue to give you information) and ask if he’s done them.

Lowell: "I’ve never had a beat except for my last four months at the Chronicle, they took away my column and I did Stanford sports. It was such a blip in my life I never had a chance to develop beat sweeteners."

"I’m pretty straight forward. I think my persona is that I’m somebody who’s pretty tough, hopefully fair, and I’m not looking for any particular favors."

Luke: "Where are you in the social pecking order of sportswriters?"

Lowell: "I have a certain status in the press box for maybe three reasons. One, I’m usually the oldest one now. It’s a young person’s business. A lot of vitality is required. Also, newspapers seem to be dumping older people because they get higher salaries. A lot of people in the press box are young. Also, I’m a columnist. It’s seen as an elite category. Also, I used to be a columnist at the Chronicle. There’s a certain carryover because I was a big deal at the big paper. To my face, I’m almost always treated with great respect. I generally treat people with respect as well and I’m easy to get along with in a press box because I’m quiet and hard working and convivial. When we have press conferences with sports figures, there’s usually a group of us and it’s generally known that I and Tim Kawakami from San Jose ask the toughest questions and are the ones who persist. Tim and I are respected as people who put ourselves out there and ask the questions that need to be asked."

Luke: "How does the desire to be popular with one’s fellow sportswriters affect sportswriting?"

Lowell: "It doesn’t."

"Most journalists are extremely independent and are just as happy for you to like them as dislike them."

Luke: "Is there a general political orientation of sportswriters?"

Lowell: "Yes. I would say that sportswriters are generally left-liberal."

Luke: "Do you have a theory on why that is?"

Lowell: "I would say that in general journalists are liberal. Doesn’t it seem that universities, intellectuals, tend to be liberals? A lot of them come from that background. They’re middle class and they come out of universities and they’ve been informed by that. It’s rare to meet a sportswriter who I would think was a Republican."

Luke: "Are there any famous sportswriters you could out as Republicans?"

Lowell: "Not that I am aware of. I would never ask anyone his political party. It would never come up. Basically, what sportswriters talk about is sports. Let’s say we’re on the road covering a 49er game in Atlanta. It’s a day game on Sunday. When the game ends, we all go out to a nice restaurant and have some bottles of wine. What we’re talking about is the game that happened and why the coach did what he did. Did you hear the story about the tight-end and what happened to him in the hotel? Ninety percent of the conversation is about that. There’s very little about politics. There may have been this year on the road. I haven’t traveled any this year with the Niners or Raiders because they cut the travel budget at my paper. I would just assume if there were it would be people saying, ‘Obama is great and McCain’s a jerk.’"

Luke: "What percentage of your peers would you regard as intellectuals?"

Lowell: "I would say five percent but I’m not sure I could name the five percent. I would like to consider myself an intellectual. Ray Ratto at the Chronicle knows a lot about history. He thinks about things. Sportswriters generally have a certain mindset which you would not call intellectual. It’s not like the people who are still my friends who I went to Stanford with. A friend of mine just wrote a book saying the world has become morally relativist and he feels that there are moral absolutes which people are not aware of. I’ve read his book. We’ve talked about it. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a press box where people talked about moral absolutes vs. moral relativism."

Luke: "Do you believe there are moral absolutes?"

Lowell: "I have a problem with that. Since I am not sure that I believe in God, I’m not sure where these moral absolutes would come from."

Luke: "What percentage of professional athletes would you describe as intellectuals?"

Lowell: "I rarely would get into those kind of conversations with them, but clearly Steve Young. He’s an out-and-out intellectual in all the best ways."

Luke: "Steve was the only professional athlete to ask me my name during my two-and-a-half years working for KAHI/KHYL radio."

Lowell: "He had a tremendous empathy for other people. I always thought Steve could run for political office because he had those instincts. I don’t know why he hasn’t. I would say Bill Walsh was an intellectual. After that, I run out.
"I’m not putting down sportswriters or professional athletes for not being an intellectual because I’m not sure that being an intellectual is a great virtue. Some of the biggest jerks I’ve met in my life have been intellectuals and that’s one of the reasons I am not in an academic life."

Luke: "Have you been regarded as a freak because you have a PhD in English and you’re a sportswriter?"

Lowell: "I don’t know. People are aware of it but they don’t call me Dr. Lowell and it’s almost never referred to. I was thought of as a freak when I first started at the Chronicle. I’d never had a job before. I was told to my face many times that I did not deserve to be a sports columnist because I had not paid my dues. Meaning I hadn’t started covering high schools sports and worked my way up and there was tremendous resentment. And frankly, when I first started, I wasn’t as good of a sports columnist as I should have been."

Luke: "Tell me about your rise and fall at the Chronicle. When I was reading you in particular was 1985, 1986. You were the man. Then suddenly [Oct. 25] I start reading David Harris’s book the night I emailed you and suddenly I was flooded with memories of my time covering the 49ers and so I jump on to Google to see whatever happened to Lowell Cohn and I see you’re at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and I think, ‘What happened?’ You ruled the roost."

Lowell: "What happened was, after seven or eight years at the Chronicle, I was not getting along with the managing editor. I could see that he was going to diminish me. Also, I probably had some complicity in that. I didn’t like him. I wasn’t very political. I didn’t know how to get along. I was very inexperienced and probably somewhat shmucky. Over a period of years, they brought in other people and they didn’t always put me on the front page and I told Dawn, this is not working out. I’ve got to leave this paper. She said, ‘Boy, that’s tough because my mother is going into senility.’ She had a son from a first marriage. ‘I don’t want to take Brian away from his dad.’ So I stood it for another six or seven years, seeing things fall apart at the Chronicle. And then when they took away my column, the Santa Rosa paper phoned me. They said, ‘We hear you’re unhappy at the Chronicle.’ I thought, yeah. They said, ‘Would you consider working for us?’ At first, I didn’t know what to do because I didn’t know much about the paper. They said, ‘We’re owned by the New York Times. We’re a really good outfit. And you don’t have to move up here. We want you to keep your life intact. We’ll pay you a good salary. Just write for us instead of them.’

"I went upstairs to Dawn and said, ‘You won’t believe it but the Santa Rosa Press Democrat called and they would like me to maybe write for them.’ She said, ‘Take the job.’ That’s how it happened. I strictly made the move as a happiness and lifestyle move.

"Of course I was aware as you put it that I had been the man at the Chronicle and even being the man at the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat wouldn’t equal the clout and the notoriety that I had had at the Chronicle. But a couple of things about that. one, I didn’t have it anymore. And two, and this was the profound thing I learned and I am so goddamn glad I learned it, what mattered to me was stability and happiness in my life and peace of mind. To go to sleep at night and not be troubled. Not to worry. Not to be angry. I think that takes years off your life. The idea of being the man, what do you get from it? Food doesn’t taste better, your wife doesn’t kiss you better, it’s not a tangible thing. What was tangible to me was feeling happy. Smiling. Seeing my wife happy that I was happy. Working with editors who appreciated me and encouraged me. I was in my forties when I learned that being the man was not as valuable to me as going to bed with a light heart."

Luke: "I don’t know anything about the dark years at the Chronicle, but did you do anything as a writer and as a journalist that led to that decline?"

Lowell: "Yes. In 1986, the Chronicle and the Examiner were competing. The Chronicle was the morning paper and the Examiner was the afternoon paper. I did not like the management at the Chronicle. I thoguht they were grossly underpaying me. [Lowell earned about $47,000 per annum.] I spoke to the Examiner about working for them. We had discussed almost doubling my salary. It was important to me. And when I discussed it with the Chronicle, ordinarily when you say you’ve had a discussion with this paper, blah, blah, the Chronicle would make an offer to try to keep you. They would’ve for any other paper but they hated the Examiner and saw my talking to them as a betrayal. It may have been. I’m not even arguing with them. I never had the offer from the Examiner in writing. Just as I never had the offer from the Chronicle in writing. It was a handshake. I thought that was how you did business. The Examiner rescinded the offer. I don’t know what went into that. I have suspicions that I’d rather not discuss.

"I was shipwrecked at the Chronicle. After that, they systematically chipped away at what I was doing and brought other people in. It was very frustrating and upsetting. I did have to admit that I had completely misjudged the situation and had tremendous complicity in the downfall. It was a very hard time to live through. Seven years. I came out the other side better. I would not like to be at the Chronicle now. My friends who are there don’t seem to be very happy. It’s a paper that loses incredible amounts of money."

Luke: "How much money were you making at the Chronicle?"

Lowell: "I was the number one sports columnist and I was making forty something. Whenever I’d go in to ask for more money, he’d treat me like, ‘Who are you to ask?’ It used to be burn me up. They were selling a lot of papers based on me. And now I had just gotten married and I had a stepson. And I needed more money. I remember one time the managing editor said to me, ‘When did you become so interested in money?’ I said, ‘If you’re not interested in money, give me your salary.’ He kicked me out of his office.

"I’ve never talked about this publicly."

Luke: "How did the seven dark years affect your writing?"

Lowell: "It did. Even Dawn, who was a real supporter of mine, said my writing became increasingly tentative. I would write a column and all of a sudden the sports editor would call with all kinds of problems with it. This had never happened before. Eventually I would second-guess everything I was writing. By the time they took my column away, I think there was a certain fairness to it. I wasn’t Lowell any more. The minute I went to Santa Rosa, it came back in a day.

"It was a shi— time for me to be a writer and I didn’t love writing in those days.

"One of the nice things about going to Santa Rosa was falling in love again."

Luke: "In what state do you do your best work?"

Lowell: "What do you mean?"

Luke: "I do my best work when I’m feeling angry and isolated."

Lowell: "Oh no, no, no. I write in joy. I don’t write in anger. I usually write in the morning. I usually write with music playing because it insulates me from the world and depending on what I’m writing, I could be listening to Mozart or the Ramones. I clearly write from an emotion and not an idea. My voice is how I feel about something. How I think about it would derive from that."

Luke: "How was writing your book?"

Lowell: "The book on Bill [Walsh]. It was exciting because I got to be inside a football team for a season. He was the head coach and he was great. He and I got to know each other very well. I loved writing it. I’m proud of that book.

"When the book came out, he objected to. He felt I had over-exposed him. He said things about me on TV and to other reporters that got reported which burned me up. We did not speak for two years. He wanted a detente but I’m a New York guy and I was pissed off and I did not want to speak to him. After two years, we gradually made it up and were quite cordial by the time he passed away."

Luke: "What did he say about you?"

Lowell: "He went on the halftime of a football broadcast and they asked him about the book. He said, ‘That book that had been written, I was not a party too.’ He washed his hands of it. What burned me up is that we signed a legal agreement. He got part of the proceeds. He was a millionaire. I wasn’t. To say you weren’t a party to it wasn’t true.

"He didn’t like confrontation, but I went down to Stanford and I told him we had to talk and I think I yelled at him. I was really angry. He wrote me a note apologizing and I think he apologized because I think he was afraid I’d sue him because what he said was a lie, but of course I never did that."

Luke: "Did Walsh’s affair with Kristine Hanson hit the news media when it was going on [mid 1980s]?"

Lowell: "Yes. Everyone knew about it."

Luke: "Was it written up in newspapers?"

Lowell: "No."

Luke: "Why not?"

Lowell: "Because it was not relevant. His private affair had nothing to do with him as a coach. I know players and coaches all the time who are having extra-marital sex and I never write about it. If I were having extra-marital sex, I wouldn’t think it would be anybody’s business but my wife’s. I’m not having extra-marital sex but it’s a personal, private thing and it is not my business to write about it.

"When I wrote my book on Bill, he used to talk to me about Kristine Hanson. I didn’t put it in my book. I didn’t think it was appropriate. What burned me up about Bill was that he felt I had over-exposed him because I had him three or four times in the book saying ‘F—.’ He didn’t like that. He didn’t like being perceived as someone who said ‘F—.’ He was a football coach. He said it all the time. He criticized certain teams, that was in the book, and he didn’t think that was OK. But my God, he told me all about Kristine Hanson on tape and I never put that in. I protected him because I didn’t think it was what an honorable man would do to do that to another man, even if he was stupid enough to say it. If I had put it in my book, I’d probably be a millionaire today because I would’ve broken that news in 1994.

"I haven’t read [David] Harris’s book but I hear he talked to Kristine and it’s in there. Maybe Bill gave him his blessing to do it? But I never wanted to do it because it was not relevant to his going back to Stanford. I just didn’t think it was morally a proper thing to do. So that was a moral absolute."

Luke: "Why haven’t you read Harris’s book?"

Lowell: "I feel like I’ve read and dealt with Bill’s life a lot. I don’t want to go over his life again.

"Harris never involved me in the book. He called a lot of my friends and asked them questions about Bill, but he never called me about it. He didn’t reach out to me, which I thought was odd considering I know more about Bill than any other sportswriter. So I guess maybe that turned me off. Not maybe, that did turn me off."

"I almost never read sports books."

Luke: "What do you think about outing?"

Lowell: "I never have done it… I thought it morally repugnant."

"I have to be able to live with myself and think that I am a good guy. That’s what my father always said, you have to act in ways that are honorable and you have to live with yourself. Even if Bill was stupid enough to tell me about Kristine, I was not going to write about it. Sometimes I think, did he want me to write about it? Was there some sort of weird thing going on whereby he thought he could put it in my book, he could show it to his wife and that would be it. I have no idea. I’m not that complicated. But I wouldn’t touch it. The idea of outing seems like a bottom feeder thing to do."

"If someone is cheating on a marriage, you don’t know the reasons. Why would I get in the middle of that marriage?"

Luke: "Have you covered any court cases starring athletes?"

Lowell: "I don’t think so. One of the things I like about sports is that if you want, it can be a pretty simplified endeavor."

Luke: "How come you haven’t written more books?"

Lowell: "My dad died in 1988. I wrote a memoir about boxing, my dad and I, but I couldn’t publish it. Then I wrote the Bill Walsh book and for ten years I’ve been writing a novel. It’s a lot of fun to write a novel but it’s hard for me. In addition, I do a lot of writing. I write four columns a week. That takes up a lot of time. Maybe if I weren’t doing that, I might’ve written that but I’m happy to write the columns. I like that kind of work. I like the action."

Luke: "Have you regretted not taking time off to write books?"

Lowell: "No. I couldn’t have because I needed the money. I have a kid now who’s a junior at UCLA. I have to have an income to put him through. I have not felt like I needed to be remembered by posterity or to make a mark like that. Part of what I like about daily journalism is the action. I like the drama, the feedback and the rush. Yes, there’s a rush in it and I get the rush all the time."

"When I was younger, there was an anger that came out [in his writing]. I don’t know the anger came from. It was in a higher percentage of columns that it should’ve been. It embarrasses me a little bit. I think my stuff is more balanced, more mature, now. It expresses more different moods and points of views. I think I’m better now that when I was the man."

Luke: "How much do you not get out there and physically cover things because you’re 63 and not 33?"

Lowell: "I cover more. It’s a smaller paper and they need me to be in more places. For example, yesterday morning, I drove from Oakland to Santa Clara to interview Jed York, the 27-year old co-owner of the Niners. I came home for a few hours and then went down to the Coliseum arena and interviewed Don Nelson before the game. Watched the game. Did stuff after the game. Wrote columns and blogs. Yesterday was like a 13-hour day. I work harder but I seem to be physically fit enough to do it. It concerns me how long I will be able to do it.

"At the Chronicle, I wrote only three columns a week. At the end, when I saw where it was going, it was almost like a sinecure. I didn’t work hard for them. Some mornings, I’d be done with my column by 9:30 a.m., and drive down to Stanford and spend the day with the Stanford football team and work on my book. I was so alienated that I used to think that what I was on was a Chronicle scholarship."

Luke: "You were my hero when I was 19. This is a blast for me."

"Do you believe in IQ?"

Lowell: "God, that’s such an interesting question. I want to tell you why. Every year the writing faculty at the University of San Francisco has to give a reading for the student body. It equals the scale. I’m currently writing an essay, like a memoir, about my mom giving me an IQ test when I was a kid. She was a sixth grade teacher. You got it [the test] in sixth grade. She brought home the IQ test on a Friday.

"Saturday  morning, i finished breakfast. She said, ‘Are you done?’ I said yes. She said, ‘Are you relaxed?’ I said, sure mom. She said, ‘See this here. This is the IQ test you took yesterday. I want you to fill it out exactly as you filled it out yesterday.’

"The enlightened answer would be that I don’t believe in IQ because it’s a numerical number on intelligence, but deeply in my heart I believe in IQ as much as I believe in Judaism because that happened that Saturday morning and always in my house the two questions would be, ‘Is he Jewish? Is he smart?’. I always think about those things.

"Now, whatever creativity I have has nothing to do with my IQ. It’s a different thing. But I am aware that I am a fairly intelligent person and I tie that in to my IQ."

Luke: "Do you think there might be real significant physical differences between different types of races?"

Lowell: "I have no expertise in that field."

Luke: "How do you feel race is covered by sportswriters?"

Lowell: "That’s the hardest question you’ve asked me. I know that African-American athletes feel that they are basically covered by a white press and that there’s some sort of cultural barrier and that we don’t understand them and represent them quite accurately. My feeling is that they are probably right. Because I am a white guy, I don’t understand. I don’t have their point of view, I have my point of view. I do think it is an issue. I think it would be great if there were more African-American sportswriters who weren’t only covering the NBA. They put them on the NBA. That’s a stereotype as well. I wish they were all over the place."