If you read Playboy, you’ve read Pat Jordan. And though he’s covered a wide variety of subjects, we often tap the master of the profile to give us the goods on the men in uniform. He’s one of the few writers who hasn’t become a fanboy of these so-called heroes. By digging behind their hype he finds that athletes are real people. Jordan, himself, pitched minor league ball before swapping his split-finger for a pen. To him, Bobby Hurley isn’t a failed NBA star- he is an unrelenting competitor. Steve Garvey wasn’t a multiple Gold Glove winner, he was a man with an unhappy trophy wife.
Those stories and more (including one that graced our pages) are in his new compilation, The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan. He talked exalting athletes and writing with us.
PLAYBOY: What do you bring to the table as a former jock?
JORDAN: Certainly not a starry-eyed view of what it means to be an athlete or an actor or whatever else a person does. I don’t equate what people do by what their job is. Some of the obscure people that I’ve written about are much more interesting than the stars that I’ve profiled. Just because Roger Clemens throws 98 miles per hour he is not significant as a person. Carlton Fisk happened to be a great guy who was a great ball player. Bobby Hurley happened to be a great person and was a great college basketball player. When I did Tom Selleck I thought he’d be a good guy. He was a jerk and he’s a very wimpy guy, nothing like his screen persona. I never know who I am going to meet. I am interested in who the person is, not their talent because in many cases their talent is just a gift. With Clemens probably 50% of his talent was a gift and 50% is that he works hard.
JORDAN: He throws his wife under the fucking bus, saying that she took HGH and he didn’t.
PLAYBOY: Even though you are a sports fan and players like Clemens are some of the best we’ve ever seen, you still don’t marvel at his skills?
JORDAN: My attitude is that they should be starstruck when I show up. I was talking with a sportswriter (who moved beyond the beat) recently and he said, “I miss going to opening day and going into the locker room as a fan. Don’t you?” And I said, “No. I was never a fan. I pitched against Hank Aaron. Why would I want to be in a locker room? It is actually a boring place. I was never a fan.”
PLAYBOY: Even when you were a boy?
JORDAN: Never. I loved Whitey Ford as a pitcher and I would watch him to see how he threw his slider and curve ball but I wasn’t a fan who said he was the most wonderful person.
PLAYBOY: Do you have a current favorite pitcher?
JORDAN: Josh Beckett will be a great one. I had an assignment to do him, but he said no that he didn’t want to do it. I don’t blame him.
PLAYBOY: Seriously?
JORDAN: Hell, if I was making millions why would I want a guy hanging around for three or four days? Picture this: I’m at the top of my game and I’ll have a couple of drinks and say that (Red Sox Manager) Terry Francona is an asshole and then I’ll be chased out of Boston. Why would you put yourself in that situation? He just wants to keep his mouth shut and pitch everyday. And I respect that. Most standard magazines nowadays don’t want to run too many of my stories because I’m negative and critical of famous people. They need to give celebrities blowjobs to keep their magazines going. But not Playboy you guys let me tell the truth about these coverboys.
PLAYBOY: Something truly special in your writing would be your attention to detail. In your profile of Steve and Cindy Garvey you spend no less than 2,000 words describing their apartment until we even meet the couple.
JORDAN: I grew up with radio and as a result I’d go to bed at night listening to “The Shadow,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Batman and Robin,” “The Green Hornet” and with radio I had to use my imagination to figure out what they look like. What does The Shadow look like? And so it stimulated my imagination and it made me very conscious of the way things look. To this day I’m very detail oriented, but unlike Tom Wolfe, who lists 48 things that a guy is wearing to supposedly describe him, I say it is not the accumulation of detail, it is right details. If you get the right details, you allow the reader to create the scene himself. It is always about the reader, I want the reader to think he wrote the story and that I didn’t.
PLAYBOY: You mention this in the book’s forward…
JORDAN: You create the ideal story when at the end of it the reader can’t yellow out a paragraph on page three and point to where you told him what the story was about. The reader needs to think that they discovered something in the story that the author didn’t because the author didn’t spell it out. If the writer doesn’t hand it to him the reader to thinks that they are in the process of discovering more of the story than the writer intended to put in. I think of it as a collaborative deal.
PLAYBOY: So you’ve made a living by making people think that you aren’t as smart as you actually are?
JORDAN: Exactly. They don’t think that you are leading them and they don’t know you set it up bit by bit. As far as sentences go, I feel that you should never have a sentence so complex that the reader has to stop and go over it again to get the meaning. The same applies to images. If you use a metaphor you need the reader to not reread the metaphor over again and sit down and think, “What does he mean a cow is like a moon?” If the reader has to unravel a sentence or a metaphor, that’s bad. You want them to read it all through effortlessly so they would be reading the story as if they were looking over your shoulder when you were typing. Some stories come easily. The stories you think came easily you think are genius and it comes out later that they weren’t that good. And the one that was like pulling teeth, that you had to bang on your typewriter like hammering nails into wood, that you hated doing because it was so hard to get right, you find out that that was the good one. In the end you want it to appear that the story is flowing out of you and that it is effortless. These are all the things that you do that nobody knows about.
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I’ve also enjoyed reading Pat Jordan’s true crime articles such as “The Creep, The Cop, His Wife & Her Lover” (which appeared in the March 1992 Playboy and contained this classic description, “Kathy Willets is a Fort Lauderdale blonde. Fake hair, fake tan, fake tits.”); “Versace’s Paradise,” an account of Gianni Versace’s murder (Playboy, December 1997); and “CSC: Crime Scene Cleanup (Playboy, August 2003),” an insightful examination into the burgeoning biohazard recovery industry and featured in the 2004 edition of “Best American Crime Writing.”
(As a side note, I was disappointed that Jordan’s poignant story about former Raiders Pro Bowl center Barrett Robbins (“Down Lineman,” Playboy, November 2005) was only listed and not featured in “The Best American Sports Writing 2006.”)