Matt Higgins draws inspiration from master storytellers
Matt answered Sports Literate’s five questions about his career, influences and inspirations.
Matt Higgins has written hundreds of stories that appeared in the New York Times. He is a longtime contributor to Outside magazine and a former correspondent for ESPN.com. He has also written two well-received books on sports that are a little out of the mainstream.
Higgins’ latest, “Driven to Ride,” was published in 2022. He co-authored the book with Mike Schultz, a Paralympic gold and two-time silver medalist who rebuilt his career and life after a life-changing leg injury.
Matt’s earlier book, “Bird Dream,” told the stories of men and women who take flight through skydiving, BASE jumping and wingsuit flying. The book was long-listed for the 2015 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.
Can you name your top five sports books of all time? They may have inspired your career or just brought you pleasure as a reader.
This is not a definitive list, and in no particular order:
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” by Hunter S. Thompson. Beneath the social commentary, satire, and drugged-out histrionics is the chronicle of a doomed assignment for Sports Illustrated to write an extended photo caption about the Mint 400, an off-road motorcycle and four-wheel race in the desert outside Las Vegas. Every journalist can relate to an assignment going completely sideways, and being forced to adapt, but precious few would have the talent or temerity to go Gonzo and spin the threads of several madcap days in Sin City into literary gold.
“Seabiscuit,” by Laura Hillenbrand. Hillenbrand is such a crack storyteller that she takes a worn subject and breathes it to new life, a trick she performed with “Unbroken,” too. In terms of craft, Hillenbrand adroitly weaves the stories of the horse, owner, and jockey into a powerful narrative with “Seabiscuit.” On a sentence level, she’s sharp, too.
“Moneyball,” by Michael Lewis. Lewis has a talent for teasing out the stories of iconoclasts and disruptors to tell readers, Here’s why everything you know about baseball [or whatever] is wrong. “Moneyball” is about the traps of conventional wisdom and tradition, and introduces new ways to interpret baseball, but at its heart the book is the story of a failed ballplayer finding himself by helping to change the game.
“Into Thin Air,” by Jon Krakauer. A masterpiece of nonfiction writing on deadline. Krakauer provides a thorough post-mortem on a Mt. Everest disaster that killed eight people. His treatment delivers deeply felt first-person observations with excellent reporting, and a ticking clock, to create a riveting thriller. Without fear or favor, Krakauer delivers a searing indictment of the conditions and characters in the ensemble, calling out the faults, hubris and naivete that contributed to the tragedy.
“Heaven is a Playground,” by Rick Telander. This classic of first-person immersive journalism is just as compelling today as it was when first published five decades ago. Telander embeds for a summer at playground basketball courts in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He hangs around kids who are trying to use the game as a ticket to college and a chance at a better life. You can’t help but root for their success as they seek the favor of a neighborhood street hustler and mentor who’s assisted dozens of others.
One preternaturally talented college player, “Fly” Williams, back in Brooklyn for the summer, serves as a neighborhood icon and a cautionary example of the psychic pull of their impoverished, violent neighborhood. On the cusp of stardom in the pros, Fly struggles to shed predators, grifters, gangs, hoodlums, and his own peccadillos. Ultimately Telander tells a story of longing, and long odds in American inner cities, revealing a ruthless logic of racism and segregation that echoes still in 2023.
When you made the leap from feature articles and game stories to writing books, was there a mentor who guided or encouraged you?
If I had to identify a single person, I would say the one who encouraged me most was Todd Shuster, my literary agent with Aevitas Creative Management. My assignment editors at The New York Times, Bob Goetz and Jason Stallman, provided opportunities for me to write features that appeared on the front page, which got me noticed by Todd, who sent a message, telling me that if I ever wanted to write a book, he’d like to represent me.
Todd’s encouragement gave me confidence and a sense of mission, and his assistant at the time, Rachel Sussman, taught me how to write a book proposal for “Bird Dream,” which The Penguin Press published in 2014. While writing the book, I was orphaned twice by editors when they left to take jobs at other publishing houses. When hope was in short supply, Todd’s pep talks gave me the push I needed to keep going. All of which is what a good agent should do for an author. Finally, Penguin threw me a life preserver and assigned my book to Ben Platt, a really talented editor, and he was such a pleasure to work with as he helped me bring the manuscript down the home stretch.
The novelists Haruki Murakami and Joyce Carol Oates have written about how running helps them take on the challenges of writing books. Does your daily running fuel your writing in some way?
I know of Oates’ and Murakami’s writing about running, but haven’t read either of them on the subject. My relationship to running does relate to my writing in a few ways: It tires me out sufficiently so that I’m able to sit at my desk in front of a laptop without feeling restless. The so-called “runner’s high” provides an antidote to the terror of sitting down to confront the enormity of a book-length project. I’m calmer and better able to navigate the vagaries of the Muse and her peregrinations.
The obvious metaphor is that writing a manuscript is like preparing for a marathon. I’ve done both and there are analogs. Every day you must put in your miles for training; and every day you must put in your time to reach your word count.
Running also endows me with a sense of having accomplished something during the day, as a kind of hedge against despair when writing isn’t going well. There are occasions when I may use my time while running to think about character, or plot, or research. Often, though, my mind wanders and discovers something my subconscious is trying to manifest related to whatever I’m writing. You’ve got to be available to receive signals from the subconscious, and I’ve found that running can help reveal them.
What first interested you in the story of Paralympic snowboarding champion Mike Schultz and led you to want to co-author “Driven to Ride”?
I’d known Mike’s story from my time covering the X Games for The New York Times and ESPN, although I’d never written about him. Mike is an inspirational person, and he makes a compelling protagonist.
When he suffered his crash and had his leg amputated, he adapted and resumed his life and career as an athlete. In the process, he developed innovative prostheses that are now used by elite athletes all over the world. I could see that his story had multiple threads – sports meets science, meets business.
Mike’s publicist, Katie Moses Swope, had worked in media relations for the X Games, so we had known each other for years, and she brought the idea of a book to me. Katie knew I’d published before and wanted advice on the process. Mike was looking for a collaborator, and eventually I asked Katie if he would want to partner with me.
At the time, I was on a Knight-Wallace Fellowship in journalism at the University of Michigan. I’d been taking classes in screenwriting at the university and I saw Mike’s story in a cinematic way. It was a chance for me to test some of the narrative screenwriting principles and try to apply them to nonfiction storytelling. Mike and I talked on the phone and I pitched my vision for helping to tell his story, and we hit it off. A few months later, I flew to Minnesota, where he lives, and we began working on the project.
Who would be your dream subject to co-author a book with, if you could choose any living person – and why?
This is a really good question, and I wish I had a better answer, or one that doesn’t seem so contrarian. Maybe it’s a lack of imagination on my part, but no one comes to mind now. Anyone who would be a candidate would necessarily be a non-writer and have some kind of notoriety, which is part of a dispiriting trend in publishing toward favoring deals with celebrities.
Celebrities have a built-in audience and their own marketing and promotion platform, which publishing houses like. Publishers don’t tend to invest much in marketing and promotion anymore, if they ever did.
Let me be clear: I’m not against co-authoring, and I wouldn’t want to close off any future opportunities to collaborate with the right subject. J.R. Moehringer has collaborated on literate and intelligent biographies of Andre Agassi and Phil Knight. I haven’t read his latest, “Spare,” with Prince Harry, which is the No. 1 New York Times best-seller for nonfiction and e-books. Of the top 10, six are by celebrities. Does the world need another celebrity biography? Maybe... But I’m more excited by interstitial stories; not quotidian, but those that haven’t been told, or don’t serve a self-aggrandizing agenda for the subject. I guess you could say I’m still searching for my dream subject to work with as co-author.
