Process

I’ll try to break down the interviewing, transcribing, compiling, and editing phases, but a lot of it felt like banging my head against a wall until the thing yielded. The most common question I’m asked is, “How’d you get access to all these guys?” The answer really is one at a time. There were a lot of iterations of people I wanted to interview for it, and there were certainly a few times when interview requests got ignored, which is no fun.

In the interviews that did happen, I did my research, had a small list of questions and stories from other interviews, and asked, “What do you remember?” Then it was talking and improvising until it ran its course. Man, those were a good time.

The nausea that hit me in the thirty minutes or so leading up to each interview reminded me of how I used to feel going into a wrestling match, so naturally, I copied my old wrestling routine (minus the wrestling). Lots of rap, pacing, and stretching, then about five minutes of stillness and silence, then you go.

Coach Bennett got wind that I wanted to interview him in July 2020, and their Media Relations guy relayed that he respectfully declined and asked that I didn’t publish it, even though they recognized that, legally, nothing says it couldn’t be. I learned they’ve turned down dozens of book and documentary offers since the National Championship (if you’re still waiting on the 30-for-30, stop waiting), and any such offers, along with NBA job offers, receive a quick no.

I didn’t ask and wasn’t given a reason for Coach’s response, but if I had to guess, I’d say two things. First, he’s so locked into his current team that he feels like giving any of his time or attention to something other than his team and his family is a disservice to one or both. Second, I’m betting he misses the days when he had some anonymity, and he doesn’t want any further spotlight or credit because he really is a humble dude aiming for as normal of a life as he can, given his current occupation and success.

I admire that, and I wanted to respect his wishes, but if I could do it without occupying any of his time, not write a word and instead use 100% quotes from his players, managers, and staff, deliver an honest account of how his program developed over a decade, and entertain, enlighten, and embolden those who read it, I could rest easy making it available to the public.

When I explained the book to Ben Buell in our interview, he said, “You’re using our program to help other people,” and that was on point. It’s a longitudinal study on how to build a family out of strangers who become friends and brothers over time. It’s on culture, comebacks, friendship, ambition, patience, adversity, change, mindfulness, wisdom, tenacity, education, mental illness, religion, physical development, emotional development, work, failure, values, and achievement.

What happens when their thoughts translate into other people and places?

I ran all the audio from the interviews through a transcription software that was about 10% correct, but there’s no punctuation, almost every single word isn’t spelled right, and while it generated somewhat of a form and starting point, it was essentially 225,000 blocks of gibberish.

So, you listen to the recordings in 15-second increments and go word-by-word through the transcripts. In conversation, especially when you’re trying to find the right words, there’s a whole lot of, “It’s like… you know, sort of like…” and then the right words come. A lot of my job was streamlining their spoken words. Then comes the voices: where’s the emphasis, what letters are they actually pronouncing, can you mirror their spoken rhythm with the written rhythm, and can you marry traditional English with English as we speak it today?

Once you listen to them a few dozen times, it starts to get more clear, and you attach the speaker’s name to their quotes broken down by paragraph in their individual transcripts. My questions and rambles got eliminated except when needed for context, and then you’re left with 26 transcripts, each between 10-30 pages.

You get all the rosters by year, print out the schedules, and start putting together the chapters for Year 1-10. So, on the lefthand side of the screen, you’ve got a blank document entitled Year 1, then on the righthand side, you go through the transcripts and pull relevant quotes over to Year 1, then delete them from the transcripts (naturally keeping all the original transcripts elsewhere, too).

Once the quotes for the Year chapters get pulled, you can start pulling bits for the smaller, themed chapters, and gradually the individual transcripts get shorter. At some point, there’s nothing else worth using, so the organizing within the individual chapters begins.

Some of it’s easy because you can line up the schedules with the games mentioned chronologically throughout the Year chapters, but there’s a flow you want to achieve, and that part is hard when there’s no set order to follow.

Hopefully, the oral history style contributes to that flow to the point that it sounds like 26 individuals are in a room having a conversation. I always wanted to insert a quip in the beginning like, “The following conversation never happened,” but it felt a little too much like The Prestige or another movie of the like.

Anyway, once the chapters all get thrown into the same Word document, you have a first draft. Let the never-ending editing begin. How do you punctuate thoughts? How many times should I include a bracketed last name with a spoken first name? What about nicknames? How do you consistently write and punctuate the time of day? Have you capitalized the same phrase in the same way the whole time? How do you write numbers consistently, and when is it more beneficial to use the numbers instead of spelling them out? Are the thousand name drops in this thing all spelled right? How many theme and offseason chapters should go between the Year chapters? How the hell do you determine where these theme chapters fit? Did you know Microsoft Word spontaneously determines when to use straight quotes and curly quotes and they look 2% different until they’re 2 inches from your eyeballs? How should the start of chapters be formatted? How should you present speakers? Do you want footnotes, endnotes, references, or a bibliography? Lastly, is any one word spelled wrong?

It’s a little like building a house: you have no idea how many decisions you need to make, but you take it one at a time, and, to borrow a Stephen King line (and metaphor, for that matter), “shave even every door.”

There you have it, in some words. I’ll give an original metaphor to close out here. Currently, I feel a little like Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder’s version, of course). I’ve been holed up in a chocolate factory for a few years while brainstorming with my trusty oompa-loompa-golden-retriever, and now we get to share that work with the world.

In Wonka’s words, “I hope you like it. I think you will.”