Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 67)

about this because it’s so small. I wrote this for the New York Times Magazine cover piece about my high school baseball coach and I was astonished that the New York Times Magazine was willing to run it. It creates a furor because, apparently what was going on at the Newman School—there’s an epidemic in this country—is happening everywhere. So my publisher, sensing an opportunity, says, let’s bring it in as a book. I felt a little weird about it. They said, it will be fine, it will be fine. Sure enough, they brought it out and they stuck it on the New York Times bestseller list for four or five weeks. But, I’ve had more people who are pissed off because they bought it on Amazon thinking it was a book and it comes in and it’s this little old thing, they feel had. I don’t blame them! This is what happened. I crawfished into sports writing. I have spent the last four and a half years doing a lot of sports writing. I did none before. I did food writing, I did financial writing, I did a lot Father and son at the New Orleans Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, 2000. of political writing but I never did any sports writing. I live in Berkeley, what a novelist would be interested in, the human drama of California. The Oakland A’s are right out my back door and it in the places in America where ambition is fiercest. The I’ve just been curious because baseball is such an odd sport money is just the mechanical rabbit at the greyhound compared to the other two major professional sports racetrack. The rabbit’s not that interesting. The greyhounds because money plays such a role in it. In professional are the things that are interesting. So you use the rabbit to basketball and professional football, all the teams have the write about the hounds. In Wall Street, the rabbit is money same amount of money to spend on players, basically. and in Washington it’s connections or power, in Hollywood There’s salary caps and there’s revenue sharing so that it’s fame, in Silicon Valley it’s kind of the new new thing, there isn’t a rich team and a poor team. In baseball there are it’s technology. But there’s something different and peculiar rich teams and poor teams. So that last year the New York about each of these arenas and ambition. But the object of Yankees spent $200 million on their 25 players and they’re ambition is not what really gets me interested. It’s how the competing in the same division with the Tampa Bay Devil people experience the ambition. Rays who spent $20 million on their players. It just seems Sartisky: You’ve written three books about baseball, one like if people knew who the good baseball players were, it of them really a hard cover version of the New York Times would cease to be an athletic competition and just become a Magazine article. financial one. The ones with the most money would just Lewis: That’s all it was. It wasn’t my idea by the way. I buy the best players and they’d just win all the time. I got apologize. interested, probably because I played baseball but partly Sartisky: It’s OK, because the A’s were in my back yard, and this whole Michael. question of why that wasn’t true. Lewis: Yeah, but I The Oakland A’s, which were when I got into this, the get unlimited grief second or the third lowest payroll in baseball, were winning LEWIS FAMILY COLLECTION Winter 2007-08/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 67

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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