Norman Einstein’s Part 1: with Cian O’Day

Somewhere out there in this giant universe called the Internet, there existed a sports publication that pushed the boundaries of writing and showed a level of creativity and style that few could match.

The Norman Einstein’s Sports & Rocket Science Monthly published twenty-one issues in total. Their roster featured names familiar to anyone with a passing interest in sports writing: Fredorrarci, Graydon Gordian, Patrick Truby, Eric Nusbaum and so many more that I feel bad for not name checking the entire line-up.

The Normanthology Kickstarter campaign launched this week, it’s a project by creator Cian O’Day to collect in a print volume the very best from Norman Einstein’s.

Here’s my best pitch to you: for just ten dollars, you can own a copy of sports writing that you will enjoy. And if not that, it’s going to look real smart on your shelf. Real talk: that’s why I’m buying into this thing. Vanity lives.

Over the next few weeks, I will be featuring interviews and conversations (both the same thing, just sounds grander this way) with the contributors of Norman Einstein’s. The surface level purpose is to help give this project the push that it deserves. Beyond that, I think all of these people deserve your attention and I hope it gives you a greater appreciation for what they do.

Batting lead-off, the creator of it all: Cian O’Day.

Q: First off, what’s with the name?

The name for the magazine came from the Joe Theismann quote, responding to Bill Belichick being tabbed a genius, “Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is guy like Norman Einstein.”

I wanted this sense of aspiration, of genius.

But I have a kind of dry Midwestern humor, I can’t really approach things directly, I can’t really thump my chest. I have to make a joke about what geniuses we all think we are.

So I plunked down for web hosting and the domain name and started teaching myself html.

Q: Take me back to the launch of the website, and give some context with respect to the landscape of sports writing at the time.

The year 2009 was a Wild West for good sports writing.

Play Magazine, the New York Times publication and gold standard for long-form sports writing, folded in 2008.

Most of the best sports bloggers of the first generation — The Mighty MJD, Spencer Hall and Holly Anderson from EDSBS, Bethlehem Shoals from FreeDarko, Michael David Smith and Mike Tanier from Football Outsiders, Large from No Mas, were being snapped up by fancy corporate sites.

The Sporting News, AOL, Yahoo!, and others ceased competing with this weird blogs and started employing them.

At the same time, Deadspin was undergoing a transformation from this wacky, funny sports mash-up into the nastier, gossipy drivel that marks much of the rest of the Gawker empire.

Shortly after A.J. Daulerio took over the site, and they stopped their daily link dumps of oddball content from the sports blogosphere, essentially turning away from the grassroots of sports blogging.

At that time, I was publishing a little football blog called Fuhbaw.

It was cool to see guys like Shoals, who probably more than anyone else opened up my eyes to the possibilities in writing about sports, start to get paid.

But overall I was seeing a loss of the really creative content, really daring stuff, that inspired me to take up writing, at least from the big names in the blogging game.

Simultaneously, a second wave of writers began to emerge, but these voices were scattered about the internet, a kind of no one can hear you scream in space thing.

I was aware of these writers but people I knew who were into sports weren’t. I spent so much time talking about Throwing Into Traffic, Ronald Bellamy’s Underachieving All-Stars and Straight Bangin’ to other people I thought, well, fuck, I should go ahead and create the platform for this work myself.

Q: It’s one thing to recognize talent. An entirely other to convince them of your vision and bring them together, especially because so much of everything is dependent on money. How were you able to pull this group of writers together and get them on board with your project?

I started by begging just about everyone I respected in the sports blogosphere who wasn’t making any money at it.

My thing was, and remains, not to shoehorn talent into a preconceived notion.

I tried to sell writers on the idea that they should feel free to try anything and we could work out a compelling pitch and then a compelling piece together.

I explicitly set no limits on word count (paper isn’t an issue, bandwidth is cheap) I only wanted a piece seen through to completion, it didn’t matter whether it was eight hundred words or six thousand.

I didn’t care if I agreed with a piece or if it embodied a certain viewpoint, the only question was if a piece was well done.

I really billed Norman Einstein’s as a blank canvas when making my pitch to writers.

I definitely had some interest from people at first, but there was a hesitation (rightfully so) by people to just jump into it.

I cleaved to this idea that it would be a monthly magazine, going against the trend online of things becoming micro, quicker, more granular. A month is an eternity in internet time. I wanted to have some marker, the function following the form in some way, that Einstein’s was attempting a bit more substance.

I set the date for the first issue but had no idea if I would be publishing just my essay alone.

I was actually sitting in my kitchen, the morning of the launch date, editing my essay, resigning myself to a very small first issue and in quick succession Joey Litman from Straight Bangin’ and Jake Lemkowitz from Bread City sent in two great pieces.

Really eleventh hour shit.

But I was ecstatic to have such great writers on board.

Q: Browsing the archives on your site, there’s a sense that this thing started to grow bigger from the first issue on out. How did that come about?

Over the first several issues, we were just trying things, no idea if they would work. I did this huge college football preview with all these different team bloggers and it was just wild and huge and unwieldy.

We did these mixtapes called Long Players that were a lot of fun.

A friend of mine Stephanie Lim started shooting photo essays for Einstein’s and it really came to define us in that first year.

Steph likes sports but she’s no super fan.

She has this great eye for the odd detail and makes this connection with a subject which just pulls him or her right through the camera. It seriously became easier to get folks on board once we were regularly publishing these great photo essays.

From there, some of our best known writers came on board, some even approached me. And things started to happen.

Brian Phillips recommended Fredorrarci to me, who just a real fucking talent and a gentleman.

Jason Clinkscales from A Sports Scribe came on board, Ted Walker and Eric Nusbaum from Pitchers & Poets, Johnny Saward from Ronald Bellamy’s Underachieving All Stars, all these guys who I just loved their work.

And they really set the tone from there on out.

Every issue was just topping the one previous for such a stretch.

Fredorrarci turned me onto the Alex and Ben Birdsall of There Are No Fours. Graydon Gordian from 48 Minutes of Hell tracked me down.

So did Brian Blickenstaff of Touch & Tactics. There came to be this behind-the-scenes, friendly competition.

Every issue someone was raising the bar and most everyone else would get in touch with me and say something like, “That “48 Seconds” piece by Blickenstaff was amazing, but wait till you see what I got planned for next month.”

I was working real hard, but everyone really made my life so very easy by giving me such amazing material every month.

Those last ten issues were, besides being so good, just came together so organically. And I think it really shows through when you read them. The ideas engaged kinda carry over month to month. It was just awesome to watch from where I was sitting, to see it really just come together and run on its own.

Q: With the quality of work, was there ever a consideration to monetize the whole thing?

At the beginning of the magazine, I had this idea to monetize it: sell each issue to one sponsor. The notion was to have their banner displayed tastefully and not have the issue cluttered with a bunch of blinking ads. That never really got off the ground.

And as the content developed the tone and style of the magazine, I started to see the importance in ensuring Einstein’s was this commercial-free zone, ideas developing for the sake of the ideas, undertaking the conversation, the dialectic, because the best and worst in sports compels us to.

There’s an integrity to it that I’m really proud of. Not every single piece worked, I’m guilty of that more than anyone else, but everything aspired to advancing the conversation, the story of sports.

Q: Something I always ask writers, if only because we love talking about writing and writing about writing: can you speak to the importance of long form writing in sports and how you feel about the state of sports writing today?

Long form, to me, is what writing on the internet about sports is all about.

The best long form pieces help you see, help you witness — that most important aspect of sports fandom — in ways you never before have.

Yeah, I like a lot of these humor sites, sure, and making people laugh is one of the most wonderful things in the world. But I think the most positive lasting contribution the internet will offer sports is in long form essay writing.

I’m going to be completely honest, I don’t have a lot of time these days to read about sports online. The main reason I shuttered Einstein’s as a monthly was to travel across the country.

I sleep in tent half the time. I crash on friends’ couches, I spend a lot of time writing stuff that’s not at all about sports.

I still catch what games and tournaments and teams I really love, but I just don’t have the time or access to sports I did when I was living in Brooklyn and working a shit job and just scraping by.

I have read a bit of The Classical and I do wish them well. I think it’s way too soon to say where it’s going. They have a specific idea of what they want, that’s clear.

If that rigidity helps them develop a strong, lasting voice, that’s awesome.

Of course, Fredorrarci is Fredorrarci, his stuff always smashes. If you’re publishing his work and work at his level, you’re obviously doing something right.

As far as Grantland, I’ve read it even less. Brian Phillips, of course, is a genius and his work there kills.

I’m not big on the Bill Simmons thing, the obsession with bad reality television and mediocre sports movies.

I don’t see sports as just another form of television entertainment like the Food Network only more interesting.

They’ve published some killer stuff there, the Reeves Wiederman piece on listening to Wimbledon on the radio is nearly flawless, but I don’t care what Chuck Klosterman has to say about the Metallica/Lou Reed album, or, more to the point, I don’t know why that’s on a sports site that’s trying to take itself seriously.

The good with the bad, I guess. It’s nice that there are these venues and there’s some money behind both ventures to make it likely that they’ll be around to grow and evolve and push the conversation even further.

Q: Given the rise of the blogosphere, and like you mentioned, an original set of great sports writers followed by a second generation and so on, how did you approach distinguishing Norman Einstein’s from everyone else?

With Einstein’s, I always asked writers to give me something more than a blog post.

It could be more research. It could be going on site somewhere and doing real reportage. It could be whatever. But I just didn’t want someone sitting down with an idea and finish in three hours and have it be done with.

I required a specific pitch from everyone. Oftentimes, the most important work I did editing someone else’s work was done in the pitch phase. I’m a fair writer and I’m not the greatest editor for grammar and rules of style.

But I’m a very good editor in the realm of ideas and how those can be best brought out in someone’s writing style. If I do anything well as an editor, it’s hearing the voice the writer wants to speak in and help to bring that out with clarity and power. I think our process — crafting pitches, editing, rewrites, etc. — helped to define us. That and I got everyone talented I could find to write for me.

Einstein’s really excelled in four areas of essay writing: reportage, personal report, theory, and profile.

You can see it in piece like Brian Blickenstaff’s “48 Seconds” or Ben Birdsall’s “Company Man” or Fredorrarci’s “Target Anxiety” or Graydon Gordian’s “Hard Foul”.

These pieces just smoke, they live and roar and run.

Q: Lastly, what do you hope to achieve with the Normanthology and if you could change one thing about your entire experience with Norman Einstein’s, what would it be?

With the NORMANTHOLOGY we’re hoping to recapture some of the momentum we had in terms of audience and excitement over the course of our last ten or so issues.

We’re looking to use it as a starting point for creating print collections of original essays on sports, most likely centered around specific themes.

I have no doubt that the very best work from the 21 issues of the magazine will remind those out there who care about great sportswriting that the Einsteins can really spin a good story and get to the heart of what matters in sports. 

As far as regrets, I have too many to list in general, but not a whole lot related to Einstein’s.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I made plenty of mistakes.

But the whole point of the project was to try things without fear of failure. I was just lucky that the things we tried worked more often than failed. I only mailed in one piece of the several I wrote and I regret that.

And I always wished Avi Korine of Boxiana would have written for us but he doesn’t write much in general anyway.

I got my biggest regret from my two years of publishing Einstein’s: I always wanted to find someone to write both informatively and literately about Formula One racing because I just don’t get it yet it still holds this romantic appeal for me waiting to be unlocked by a great writer.

No, seriously, no major regrets, which I can’t exactly say for my slow-pitch softball career.

Posted on 13 August, 2012
Source kickstarter.com

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