An Interview with Marc Stein: Part II

As promised, herein lies Part Two of our two-part (despite what my friend Lingering Bursitis might have said to the contrary) interview with ESPN's Marc Stein. Part One can be found right here -- or you could just scroll down the page, but that defeats the purpose of hyperlinking, eh?

Again, big thanks to Marc for taking the time to speak with UF!



After the jump, Marc talks about the NBA, blogs and working for ESPN.


Q: One of the interesting contrasts between European football leagues and the NBA is the different systems for player movement from team to team. It seems like each system has its own massive imperfections. In football, you have essentially an unregulated market – no salary caps, with the best players always moving to the best teams for increasingly astronomical sums. In the NBA, the draft and salary caps have done a good job of ensuring parity, but you wind up with lots of purely cap-saving moves (the recent trade involving Marcus Camby being a prime example). Any thoughts about whether the sports can somehow find a happy medium?

STEIN: It's two completely different worlds. So there's realistically no common ground for a happy medium. You can't really compare a 30-team league governed by a commissioner to the comparative confusion of worldwide football and the constant shuttling of players from country to country to country.

I much prefer the salary-cap system, because it levels the playing field to the point that a team in a market like San Antonio can build an NBA powerhouse, which gives hope to fans everywhere. It’s awfully discouraging for clubs like City, Nash’s Tottenham and so many others knowing before a ball is kicked that we’re playing for fifth place at best. But there's little point talking about instituting a salary cap in the Premiership if La Liga, Serie A and the Bundesliga don't have the same. And even if the impossible happened and Premiership chairmen agreed to implement a cap, how could there ever be a cap that applies across numerous leagues of all shapes and sizes worldwide? It's almost impossible to fathom.

I will concede, though, that the NBA's salary-cap system will look plenty flawed itself if teams in Europe start consistently outbidding our teams for players. But we're not even close to there yet, with all due respect to the Childress Movement. All the talk about 50-mil-a-year offers for Kobe and LeBron, furthermore, is WAY premature. There's simply no proof yet that teams abroad can pay that kind of money, before we even get into some of the other obstacles . . . like the fact that Greece is a marketing wasteland for basketball players and can't possibly appeal to LeBron. Until we see hard evidence that there will be offers sufficiently rich and sensible for a LeBron or a Kobe or even a borderline All-Star to leave the NBA in their title-contending primes, keep me in the Believe It When I See It camp. I just can't forget how reluctant some guys have been to play in sensational cities like Toronto and Vancouver. Now they're going to flock to Europe for money we don't really know exists?

Q: Another contrast between the NBA and European football is the playoffs v. promotion/relegation system. I love the NBA, but even I will admit that the playoffs have become interminable and the end of the season rendered meaningless, especially for teams trying to gain a better draft pick. On the other hand, the EPL remains competitive throughout the season and relegation battles often take on just as much importance as matches at the top of the table. The playoffs are obviously the NBA's cash cow, especially in terms of TV coverage, but is there any chance that the NBA could emulate football and try to make the regular season more meaningful?

STEIN: Don't think it's a problem exclusive to the NBA. I imagine baseball seasons feel pretty empty when your team is out of it in July. I naturally love the promotion/relegation concept, but the reality, as you know, is that we're again talking about two completely different worlds. England has 92 professional football clubs operating independently and lots of leagues below the four main divisions. We've got nowhere to relegate our teams and no pool of promotion candidates because of the affiliated minor-league systems in major US team sports. They've got us beat on this one. By a mile.

Q: Greg Lalas recently criticized you for not covering football in addition to basketball. Is covering football something that you've ever considered? What about an EPL power rankings column?

STEIN: I read Greg's piece and your recent interview with him and I appreciate the fact that he went back and acknowledged that I'm not some "mainstream sports guy" who had a soccer epiphany. I covered soccer in the mainstream press before his brother ever pulled on a national-team shirt. I covered the US national team extensively from 1987-91 for The Orange County Register, back when my man Paul Caligiuri's goal in Trinidad put US soccer back on the international map . . . and back when the sport was such in this country that a college kid like me could walk into the newsroom of the second-biggest paper in California and talk his way onto the beat of a World Cup-bound team. I didn't get to go to Italia '90 -- don't know that I would have been sent even if I was out of college -- but I did get to cover the '94 World Cup for the Los Angeles Daily News right after my first few months on the NBA beat.

There were simply NO papers in the States back in those pre-MLS days where you could make a living as a full-time soccer guy. (Almost the same held for tennis, which was actually my “first” sport, apart from the New York Times and LA Times.) Some of my closest soccer-writing pals from that era -- like Steve Goff (Washington Post) and Scott French (MLS Magazine and another alumnus from the Cal State Fullerton journalism factory) -- are still going and have my full admiration for putting up with years of snubs from their editors and the countless desk shifts they had to log for the right to occasionally do some soccer to make it to an era where there actually is an MLS beat.

But when I got the chance to cover the Clippers, as a 25-year-old, I could barely contain myself. I think I was the youngest traveling beat writer in the league at the time and it was an absolute dream come true, because the NBA was by far my favorite big-league sport. The NBA, soccer and tennis were my three sporting dreamlands and I was determined from a young age to make it in one of those arenas as a journalist. I was fortunate enough to get an extensive taste of covering the latter two sports while still a student at Fullerton and then got my big break NBA-wise when then-Daily News sports editor Tod Leonard (another soccer sympathizer) did some shuffling and threw me onto the Clips. Some 15 years later, this really feels like what I was born to do. I think I knew it on my very first road trip, too, looking at all the conventioneers in the hotel and thinking: "All these chumps have to sit in some dreadful all-day presentation and I'm going to an NBA game. I am indeed the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."

I initially wanted to be a baseball writer like everyone else in my sports-writing generation (and several generations before that) but quickly found that the NBA was where I belonged. Basketball had the more interesting, revealing and unpredictable characters, all playing a game so athletically tasty that me and my high school buddies taped SportsCenter every night so we never missed the highlights, all of which seemed to be within an arm's length from what were often sensational seats on press row, all in a sport that was global like soccer. (One reasonably why Nash is so popular with footballers around the world is that footballers generally LOVE the NBA.)

Most importantly in my case, I fell harder for the NBA after I started covering it and once I started meeting the people. Turns out that I love talking hoops as much as watching hoops. Not sure why, but sports like baseball and boxing, which I inhaled as a kid, didn't work like that for me as a writer. I was a total Strat-O-Matic baseball seamhead by the age of eight, but my interest in baseball now is reduced to taking my sons to the odd game and buying hats and plastic helmets that I liked in the '70s and '80s. Basketball, by contrast, became even more of a religion after I graduated to beat writer.

However . . .

I can't deny that, like Greg did, I have asked myself once or twice if I should have found a way to do more footy along the way. It’s really not even possible any more in this era of specialization, but it is true that mixing in more soccer somehow -- I think covering the U.S. men's and women's teams at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 for The Dallas Morning News was my last extended exposure to footy on a media basis -- would have been a great way for me to give back to the sport I love so much.

Soccer is still (and might always be) struggling for a foothold in this country and needs more journalists who truly love it to help in the fight for exposure. This is obviously not a problem at ESPN, where we have an army of soccer guys. In general, though, there's still only a small handful of American sportswriters championing the beautiful game's cause. And that’s an issue for the sport to deal with just like the struggle to attract the best athletes.

Q: That said, what's the best and worst thing about being an NBA reporter for ESPN?

STEIN: Best thing? How much time do we have? I don't know that I could aptly describe what those four letters have done for me and countless others who left the newspaper world for Bristol. All the different platforms . . . resources . . . audience size . . . creativity . . . access . . . reach . . . our constantly evolving technology . . . my colleagues on ESPN.com's NBA squad. I could go on and on.

There are only two negatives. 1) Time on the road gets harder and harder when you've got two growing little champs in the house who are looking for Daddy. 2) The NBA calendar is as non-stop as any in sports. We go from Oct. 1 through late June, then it's the draft one week after the Finals . . . and then free agency and summer league starting July 1 might be the busiest time of all. One of my favorite GMs has a great saying that he loves to trot out at summer league when we’re all in a gym in July for hours at a time watching summer hoop that isn't always of the highest standard: “Life’s not bad, boys. We’re on expense accounts watching basketball.” I realize that no one who has to go to those hotel conventions with the overhead projectors wants to hear about our “grind,” but I remember a great line Dan LeBatard had in an interview with The Big Lead where he basically said that sports writing, compared to doing TV or radio, does hurt sometimes. Especially when you’re an obsessive freak-show perfectionist like I am. The writers who are good AND fast – Mark Whicker from my hometown OC Register is probably the first who comes to mind in this category – are my absolute idols. This gig would be even greater if I could be more like Whick and less like the guy who spends 10 months at a clip overthinking comma placement.

Luckily for me I have an unbeatable method for getting refueled. Last thing I do before NBA training camps open is to sneak over to England for about a week to pretend I live there and go to a mess of games all over the Northwest of England. There’s no sightseeing or socializing or any of that proper travel nonsense. It’s a 100 percent soccer trip. And September is a great time because there's almost a game every single day between the various leagues and cups. I love going to a little place like, say, Crewe on a Tuesday night for a Carling Cup game and seeing all the strange looks when folks get introduced to this crazy Yank who came to their small stadium in the middle of nowhere on his vacation.

Q: We'd be remiss if we didn't ask you about the supposed controversy between the Mainstream Media(tm) and the Blogosphere(tm). It seems to me, at least, that on a good day the two complement each other quite well. Blogs are more interested in amusing coverage but also directing traffic and holding the MSM somewhat accountable, whereas the MSM has the vast resources to do the actual reporting that's impossible for kids working in their parents' basements . . . although, to be fair, most of us at UF have just recently managed to move out of our parents' houses and some of us even have day jobs! So what do you see as fueling this debate?

STEIN: Arguably no one is more sensitive about being criticized than us paid critics in the media. Therein lies some of the tension. Media types are being called out louder than ever for their mistakes and watched very closely. Too closely in some cases, but like you suggested: We’re being held accountable like never before. Yet I think it's also true that there are a handful of bloggers out there who love telling each other in print how much smarter they are than us old-school fossils whose reporting still supplies much of what is dissected in the blogosphere. So heads naturally butt.

Another source of tension: Good bloggers and fan sites can cover their local NBA franchise in ways that the local papers cannot. They generally don't have the insider access for newsgathering that the papers have, but when it comes to pure coverage of a game they have more eyes, no space limitations, no deadline issues and no traditional "rules" to handcuff them. Team blogs and fan sites are also great at finding every printed word and video clip about their teams, which adds another layer to their coverage. So just speaking from an NBA perspective -- since the blogs I read most are NBA-related -- traditional media types have been steadily forced to raise our games to deliver stuff that reader doesn't already know yet. I see that as a good thing and take it as a personal challenge. Some of my peers apparently don't.

I would classify myself as a fairly voracious reader of a small collection of blogs from the NBA, sports media and footy worlds. I like, as much as anything, how they save me time by finding and linking stuff I might not have otherwise seen and send it right to my RSS reader. One of my favorite things about Henry Abbott’s work at TrueHoop is that he somehow tracks down links and passages that might not have made it onto the daily rumors page at HoopsHype.com, which anyone who has anything to do with the NBA reads every morning. That's impressive . . . and incredibly helpful.

My complaints about the blogosphere are the old standbys. It's disappointing when the coverage gets too personal or spreads wild speculation, but that’s something that the people we cover in pro sports have to deal with on a daily basis. No one ever said that the sports media would be immune to the same treatment.

And I know I wish I would have had the blog outlet when I was a newspaper beat writer. It gives you so many more options. Marc Spears in Boston, Brian Windhorst in Cleveland, Jonathan Feigen and Fran Blinebury in Houston, Ira Winderman in Miami, Ken Berger in New York, Paul Coro in Phoenix, Sam Amick and Scott Howard-Cooper in Sacramento, Doug Smith in Toronto, Ross Siler in Utah . . . those are some newspaper guys just off the top of my head who have a fun blog touch and have made good use of the immediacy advantage that blogs have over papers. My old paper in Dallas has a dedicated Mavs blogger (Tim MacMahon) who, in addition to his own commentary, does a great job of finding anything and everything worth reading about the team and putting it in one easy place to find. My old L.A. pal Tim Kawakami, meanwhile, is a full-time general columnist for the San Jose Mercury News who happens to churn out about 25 blog posts a week. Many of them are Warriors-related and any Dubs fan would tell you they're absolutely must-read.

You hear lots of complaints about how independent blogs don't face the consequences faced by their mainstream counterparts when they're wrong or over the line and how they lack the proper training, contacts and journalistic checks and balances to be treated as an equal. And maybe there are some cases where all that's true. But I don't think it's our place to worry about how the readers classify every blog they encounter. This is a free country and people can start their own website if they have something to say. I’d like to think the audience can generally determine for itself what's what and who's who.

Q: Next to being on the same field with Steve McManaman, Robbie Fowler, Steve Nash and Thierry Henry, was being canonized by the Onion the greatest achievement of your career?

STEIN: I was certainly honored to see ESPN.com's NBA Power Rankings acknowledged by The Onion and more amazed by how many people saw it and e-mailed me about it. This season will be my seventh doing the Power Rankings and the interest in them, knock on wood, only seems to be growing, with John Hollinger’s daily computerized rankings definitely adding to the interest and debate. But with all due respect to the satire press, I can't quite put The Onion in the same sentence as playing with Growler and Macca. Like I said way, way, way too many words ago at the top: I've had far more fun than I deserve over the years, but lining up with legends like that for the Showdown in Chinatown is pretty much in a category unto itself.

Marc Stein writes about the NBA for ESPN.com and also appears on the WWL's television and radio programs. If Man City really do spiral down this season, please think good thoughts about him.

Read more on "An Interview with Marc Stein: Part II"...

An Interview with Marc Stein: Part I

When Lingering Bursitis and I had the honor and the pleasure of attending the Showdown in Chinatown a while back, little did we know the mileage we’d get out of that chance encounter on a warm, summer day. As you may recall, one of those who took part in the game was ESPN’s Marc Stein, by day an NBA reporter, but also a lifelong footy fan. We have to admit that we were a little jealous of Marc, getting the opportunity to run around with Steve Nash, Thierry Henry, Robbie Fowler and the rest. But, it turns out that there couldn’t have been a better representative for us, the fans.



Marc Stein recently took some time out of his hectic schedule covering the NBA to answer some of our questions about football and various other topics as well. A big thanks go his way. Marc is what we, in the business, like to call a real mensch.

Find out why after the jump in Part I of our interview.

Q: You already covered your experience at the Showdown In Chinatown for ESPN.com but how exactly did you get involved in the game. And about how long did it take you to say "yes" to playing?

STEIN: Apologies first of all for the link you've included and foisting so much on the public about this already. But I think anyone who's heard anything about this day of fantasy football can understand why I can't stop talking about it.

How did it happen? Dismayed as I am that one man can be so good at both footy and hoops, I have to give Nash all the credit. It was all his idea (with some encouragement from his trusty Italian sidekick Simone Sandri, no doubt) to let me bring the level down a few (dozen) notches, ensuring that I would be there to chronicle it all but as much because he knew how much it would mean to me to be out there. I've covered Nash at close quarters since he dribbled into Dallas in 1998 and we hit it off largely because of soccer, which is the sport he'd rather talk about 11 times out of 10. He was introduced to Fowler and McManaman years ago, quickly became close friends with them . . . and has since heard ad nauseum from me how those two are two of my absolute, all-time favorites.

Let’s just say that Nash must have realized that he’d lose me forever as his Ahmad Rashad -- when I'm not working as Nowitzki's Ahmad Rashad, of course -- if I wasn't allowed to sneak out there somehow.

Q: Will you be trademarking the term "Plimptonian Power Rankings?" If not, you probably should, even though I'd guess very few readers have any idea what you were talking about.

STEIN: Really? Inhabitants of the modern-day sports blogosphere don't know George Plimpton? A major disappointment, if true.

For the kids out there: Plimpton is the undisputed, legendary father of participatory sports journalism. Please read his Wikipedia page immediately.

[Ed.: I probably should’ve given readers far more credit. As an aside, the first time I heard about George Plimpton was when my Mom told me that he hit on her when she was working at NBC in the 1960s!]

He actually did full-length books on his experiences, but I've done OK for myself with probably more dabbles than I deserve in the Plimptonian realm. Besides the two other cameos I described in the article -- playing for a week with indoor soccer's Dallas Sidekicks and trying to return Roscoe Tanner's serve on three different surfaces -- I've also shared some interesting court time with Elgin Baylor and Pete Sampras . . . and was once paraded on the Maine Road pitch before a night match with a City scarf held over my head like a new signing. That was for an article I was invited to write in the Manchester Evening News.

I know, I know: I've actually had WAY more fun than I deserve.

Q: I thought it was interesting that some NBA players who were rumored to be involved in the Nash/Claudio Reyna match (Nate Robinson, David Lee and you mentioned Joakim Noah) weren't there. Did their teams pull the plug or was it more scheduling conflicts?

STEIN: No idea what happened to Nate and D-Lee. All of a sudden they went from available to unavailable. At least with Noah there's a story. Joakim called Nash when he read about the game on Page Six in the New York Post, told Nash he was dying to play and then called shortly before kickoff, apologizing for missing "yesterday's game." He had the wrong day somehow.

Q: I think everyone who was there agreed that Jason Kidd, among the NBA players, was the biggest revelation on the football pitch. Watching Kidd play, I couldn't help but think that he would've been an amazing professional soccer player, with the same athletic skills, vision and playmaking . . . plus at 6-3 he'd actually have a height advantage. What's your take on the argument that the United States would produce more top soccer players if student-athletes didn't gravitate towards other sports?

STEIN: I had to apologize to J-Kidd because I had it totally wrong in my preview story for ESPN.com. Never knew he had a soccer background and I made it sound like he had never kicked a ball in his life.

As for the bigger issue . . .

I don't know that I have anything profound to say beyond than the obvious. Soccer just doesn't have a big enough profile in this country -- and you have to wonder if it ever will -- to consistently attract the Kidd-level athletes. You'd like to believe that a country this big could hook, say, 50 of the best athletes under any circumstances. Or at least 20. But America is just totally unlike almost every other nation around the world, where soccer is generally the runaway No. 1 sport. What's the ceiling for soccer here with so many sports ahead of it in the queue and so many choices? I honestly don't know that soccer has moved up much in my lifetime.

Q: Changing topics slightly, when did you become interested in football, especially your beloved Manchester City? And how closely do you follow the Premier League during the season?

STEIN: Apologies, again, to anyone who has already been subjected to this sad, geeky, long-winded story.

My brother and I are the first generation in our family born in the States, so footy is the sport my father grew up with in Romania and shared with us. I was first exposed to English football when I was 11. We made frequent trips to Israel to see family in my youth and the only sports publication in English that you could find in the Holy Land in those pre-internet, pre-cable times was SHOOT! For those that don’t know, SHOOT! was a famed kiddie soccer mag that had heavy involvement from all the big England stars of the day and was published mostly on a weekly basis for a good 40 years before meeting its tragic demise in June as yet another victim of the unforgiving world of modern publishing. I will always hold it dear because SHOOT! immediately became my bible to get through the summer. I milked every word out of every issue.

Knowing nothing about the geography or the history of the English game, I was going to have to pick a team some other way from all the names and clubs I was suddenly trying to learn on the fly. On the back cover of my first issue, pictured in stunning sky blue, was City defender Tommy Caton doing a Q&A. City's kit had a strong resemblance to the shirt worn by my AYSO team back in Southern California -- except ours was one of those cheapo light blue mesh shirts with all the little holes and a white v-neck – so that’s the glamorous story of how this City fan was born.

The choice obviously stuck. And in what I consider to be a true sign from above, I made this call without even knowing that City had won the FA Cup in 1969 one day after I was born. Once I eventually discovered that bit of trivia, I realized that me and City were meant to be.

But it was pretty tough to follow English football back here in the States, in my experience, until the early 1990s . . . even though my dear Uncle Josef in Israel arranged for me to receive SHOOT! by mail in California through my teens at a ridiculous cost. As a kid, Toby Charles’ unforgettable broadcasts on Soccer Made In Germany and games in Spanish (starting for me with the 1982 World Cup) were the standout international footy programs I remember watching, overshadowing some sporadic coverage from England on similar UHF stations in SoCal. I more clearly remember subscribing to Sports Channel America (which I think is now basically Fox Sports Net) around 1991 or 1992 (for about $10-12 extra monthly on the cable bill) because they had an English footy highlights show every week. Then the Internet arrived and the world amazingly and mercifully started shrinking. Every season it wonderfully gets a little bit smaller, too. Example: Just in the last month I’ve watched both legs of City’s first UEFA Cup qualifying tie against a tiny team from the Faroe Islands and a preseason friendly against AC Milan on internet feeds that come from I don’t know where. I don’t know that you could have done that as recently as two years ago. I love this game!

In adulthood I'm your basic Premiership snob/geek who can't find much time for the MLS, but I also have an equally deep (and disturbing) love for England's lower divisions. I'd rather watch club football than international football any day of the week and I'd rather watch a League Two or Carling Cup match on Setanta than a La Liga game. Don't ask me to rationalize any of this because I know I'm a freak. I guess I just grew up reading so much about English football -- without actually being able to watch what I was reading about -- that even clubs in England's lower leagues have mystical qualities in my twisted world. City also spent three long seasons in England’s second and third tiers in the late '90s before the club started to rebound, which took me to some remote outposts that only cemented my Football League fetish. Sixfields Stadium in Northampton, for example. I've indeed been there to see City in what is now known as League One; it's one of the roughly 40 or so professional football grounds in England that I've been to in the past decade-plus. Like I said . . . total geek.

How closely do I follow the Premiership now? Closer than I want anyone to know. Closer than my family can stand. Let's just say that no one in the United States finds a way to watch more of the three daily helpings of Sky Sports News that we get over here than me.

Q: What do you make about the Thaksin Shinawatra/Sven-Goran Eriksson drama at Man City?

STEIN: It's nothing, sadly, that I didn’t expect back when Frank, as we call him, got the club. I always feared, with all the potential pitfalls attached to Shinawatra’s legal situation, that City could end up worse off than we were before he took over, which was an absolutely excruciating time in the last days of Stuart Pearce's regime. I dearly hope I’m just being my usual paranoid, worst-case-scenario self, but the developments coming out of Eastlands are ominous, to put it charitably. And you get conditioned as a City fan to wonder when the next crisis will hit.

As for Sven specifically, clearly he didn’t deserve to go. The man only had us in the top five for half the season and did the league double over U----d, after City had gone nearly 40 years without beating our neighbors twice in the same season. If I must be honest, I was not a fan of his football, like a lot of City fans, largely because Sven insisted on playing a dour system (only one man up front) even at home. But let's face it: He was absolutely fantastic in his first season, results-wise, getting a team full of new players to gel so quickly. Sven also had an undeniable presence that was even more impressive than the top-10 finish. Not Mourinho-like, obviously, but Sven gave City unmistakable credibility, especially in the area of player recruitment. He could call any player in the world and at least get that player to take his call. Don't know if City has ever had another manager with that kind of juice.

That said, I'm a pretty big admirer of Mark Hughes, in spite of his U----d connections and last week's slip up to whatever the hell that Danish team is called that Danny Califf plays for now. He’s a rare breed (top young British manager) who’s joining the club with the most underrated, on-the-rise youth academy in England (reigning FA Youth Cup champions). So I fall into the camp of City fans who have their fingers crossed that we might have gotten away with one when Frank was able to convince Hughes to come to Eastlands after forcing Sven out prematurely. I think Hughes is good enough to solidify us as a top-six or seven side, but that naturally depends on Shinawatra's troubles going away or someone with money coming in to rescue him.

If the stories are true about Shinawatra wanting or needing to sell the club . . . don't make me think about what happens next. But that’s life as a City fan. It’s a roller coaster that never lets you off. As legendary striker Franny Lee famously said back in the club’s glory days -- and I'm paraphrasing here to Americanize his quote -- City would have an overflowing trophy case if they gave out cups for screw-ups.

Q: Do you think Ronaldinho would have worked out at Man City?

STEIN: Nope. No chance. Ronaldinho surely thinks he’s still too good to go from Barca to City. Factor in the ridiculous money we'd have been risking and it only could have ended in tears.

Part II of our interview with Marc Stein is on its way tomorrow!

Read more on "An Interview with Marc Stein: Part I"...