Podcast: S.L. Price on writing “The American Game,” and learning it

Acclaimed writer S.L. Price is the guest on this episode of the "Chasing The Goal" podcast.

On this episode of New England Lacrosse Journal’s “Chasing The Goal” podcast, hosts Kyle Devitte and Owen Hart are joined by accomplished author and former Sports Illustrated writer S.L. Price to talk about his new book “The American Game: History and Hope in the Country of Lacrosse.”

Price, a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated from 1994-2019, has written five books, and this is his first exploration of lacrosse. The New York Times called him “a master of the new journalism developed by Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese and Price’s personal paragon, Pete Hamill. Whenever he writes about sports – or about the craft of writing – he hits it over the fence.”

Along with his 47 cover stories for SI, Price has written for Vanity Fair, the New York Times, TIME and The Oxford American.

Assignments have propelled him all across the U.S. and Canada, as well as to Colombia, Argentina, Liberia, Cuba, Jamaica, Kenya, France, Pakistan, Brazil, Australia, Greece, Japan, Korea, and China.

He has covered 10 Olympic Games, two World Cups and countless Grand Slam tennis championships, interviewed Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and played President Barack Obama one-on-one in an Iowa YMCA.

Watch the full podcast below on YouTube. It’s also available on all major podcast platforms. If you enjoy it, please leave a rating and a review. Watch more episodes on the Chasing the Goal podcast channel.

Here are some excerpts from the pod.

Kyle Devitte: I think one of the things I really liked about the book is that it doesn’t shy away from the negative aspects. The “lax bro” culture — I grew up through that, became a coach during it, and it was not great. This is a podcast where we don’t censor a lot out. We know that there are bad things in lacrosse, and we know that it’s our job as coaches, as media people, to help fix that. It’s the great unifier of lacrosse — the central mission to get it out to as many people as possible. 

S.L. Price: Let me just say something about that, Kyle: Something I thought was really remarkable about the sport is indeed exactly what you’re saying. Look, there are people who just want to grow the game and only talk about the greatness of lacrosse, and we’re selling it and we’re trying to make it bigger and more popular. All good. But what I was struck by was how many people in the game weren’t trying to discourage me from saying things.

I wanted to take a critical look at the game, both the positive and the negative. I wanted to examine the caricature. The cliche about the sport, the “lax bro” — there are elements of it. There’s a reason it’s a cliche in a caricature, and I wanted to explore that and make sure I got it right. That’s why there are a hundred pages of notes in this thing, because I wanted to make sure people knew I had the receipts and the interviews and the sources for it.

Owen Hart:  You mentioned just how much research went into this and I know this might be a tough question, but what was the toughest cut to leave out?  What were some of the things that you wish you could make more room for?

S.L. Price: No, that’s a great question. I mean, originally this book was 225,000 words. It’s now 175,000. But I wrote it all.

There were a couple of things that worked there. I wrote it long knowing it was too long. I wanted to get everything I could on the page. It’s easier to cut than it is to sort of load up later and say, “Oh, we need this.” Luckily, I had a patient editor who was willing to go through it. That doesn’t happen often in publishing these days. But we knew the process, and he and I said, “Look. I wanna make sure I get this down.” What was cut — and it’s a great question — wasn’t much content cut, so much as there were quotes, where I would have three paragraphs.

Because so many people were so eloquent and, frankly, a lot of them said things that they hadn’t said in the lacrosse space before. I learned things that I hadn’t, that I think other lacrosse people didn’t know. I can tell you a couple of those, but they’re definitely in there. Instead of having three paragraphs of quotes, which were great quotes, it ended up being one paragraph or half a paragraph, or maybe I paraphrased it and cut it down.

So it was more the voices I wanted. I wanted to reward the voices. 

@TheKyleDevitte
kyle.devitte@laxjournal.com

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