Sally Jenkins has been a columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post for more than twenty years. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 and in 2021 was named the winner of the Associated Press Red Smith Award for Outstanding Contributions to Sports Journalism. She is the author of twelve books of nonfiction including here latest, The Right Call, an NPR ‘Best Book of the Year.’  Her work for The Washington Post has included coverage of ten Olympic Games. In 2005 she was the first woman to be inducted into the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University in 1982 and resides in New York.

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John: Welcome to another edition of The Impact Podcast. This is a very special edition because we’ve got with us today, Sally Jenkins. She’s not only the sports columnist for the Washington Post, but she’s also a very well-known and bestselling author. She’s written this book, The Right Call, which we’re going to cover today, but I’ve covered her career and followed her career forever, even since I got to meet her dad many years ago. Sally, welcome to the Impact Podcast.

Sally Jenkins: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

John: Hey, Sally, I got to start this way. Your dad, people don’t understand that your dad, in his heyday, was the GOAT. There wasn’t 10 amazing sports broadcasters or writers back then. There was no Dan Patrick or Dan Le Batard or Mike Greenberg or Colin Hart or Stephen A. Smith. There was your dad. He was the GOAT. So, you grew up in Manhattan, because I know that, because I went to high school with your brothers Dan Junior and Marty. But how was it growing up in that kind of household?

Sally: My younger brother had a very funny line. He said, someone said, “What was it like being Dan Jenkins’ son? And he said, they went out every night, and when they came home, they went to Europe. He traveled a lot. I don’t know that people understand how big Sports Illustrated Magazine was at the time. It’s not the top of the profession these days the way it was back then. But it was on a par with the New Yorker, or it was considered a great literary magazine. It was extremely popular. And my dad was probably the most popular writer at the most popular magazine. He also did some television work and he wrote for TV and the movies. So he had a very big career and he traveled quite a lot. The good news was we got to go with him a lot. He would pack us all up in the summers. I mean, I went to my first US Open golf tournament when I was 7. My graduation present was a trip to Wimbledon and the British Open when I left college. So it was a very privileged rare upbringing. I tell people, I got into sports writing the way Austrians learned to ski. I was immersed in it. It’s just was all anybody did around me. It’s how I spent my summers and my vacations. So it came very naturally to move into his profession.

John: And one of my favorite lines about your dad was who can explain the athletic heart? When did you have that aha, I want to be the next storyteller of the athletic heart, I want to explain the athletic heart?

Sally: That’s interesting. I heard him say that in a radio interview. He was doing some radio, and I was listening to the show to listen to him, and I heard him say it to the host. I think it might’ve been Don Imus. I was a teenager. I was in high school, and the question just really struck me. I thought, boy, if you can explain that, you can explain almost everything. And that’s really what The Right Call, the book, tries to do. That story is in the book about hearing my father say that and wanting to explore what he meant by it and what the athletic heart really is.

John: Got it. And then you started your journey. You went to high school in Manhattan, then you ended up at Stanford. Then talk about the journey, doing your reps. Where did you start doing your reps to become, what have you written now? 13 books? 12 or 13 books?

Sally: Two good ones. I think it’s 13. There have been some bestsellers in there, fortunately, but best sellers aren’t written. They’re made by the publishers. They’re positioned well, and you get a lot of help for a bestseller. But I started in college. When I got packed off to Stanford, my dad said, “Look, you know, it’s a big campus, and if you’re looking for something to do to meet other people, the school paper’s not a bad place to go.” And I knew there were a couple of guys on the Stanford Daily who had interned at Sports Illustrated who my dad had met when they were interns. And he said, “Look these guys up. I’ve met them in the office. They interned at Sports Illustrated Magazine.” And so I did that. I went over and met them and I wrote my first stories on Stanford water polo, which was an Olympic caliber sport. One of the great things about Stanford was it was really, really elite level athletics along with academics. So it was actually a great training place to learn to be a sports writer.

John: I mean, the place that produced what, John Elway, Tiger Woods, itt’s not a bad place.

Sally: Yeah, Elway was in school when I was there. Eric Hayden was in graduate school when I was there. I mean, there were amazing athletes all over the place. I mean, a dozen Olympic water polo players and swimmers and divers and tennis players. Tim Mayotte was an undergrad there. He became a great top 10 ranked tennis player. All kinds of people.

John: In 2005, you became the first woman inducted to the National Sports Casters and Sports Writers Hall of Fame. Couple of questions. First of all, what did Dad say? What was Dad’s hold?

Sally: I asked him to induct me. He gave the speech. So that was fun. I shouldn’t have been the first one. There were some people who should have been ahead of me, frankly. Lesley Visser, who’s in there now. Lesley probably should have beat me in there. Lesley was the first woman to really cover the NFL on a day-to-day basis. She was a real pioneer. I was kind of a come lately. I feel like I got cuts in that line because I was Dan Jenkins’ daughter to be quite frank, but.

John: Well, talk a little bit about that. Was that a net positive or net negative to be the GOAT of his time daughter?

Sally: Oh, it was a net positive for a hundred reasons. First off, I was raised, got to go to private schools. He could afford Stanford tuition, number one. Number two, traveling with him was a great insight into the business and into the habits of a writer. I learned early on that writing means staying up literally half the night. It’s breaking rocks with a shovel. It’s not inspiration. My dad made it look easier than most writers make it look. But even so, I went to sleep to the sound of his old Royal typewriter. I knew he was writing late at night, trying to get pieces done for the magazine on deadline. I watched him work in press rooms. So I knew the habits, and we talked a lot of books. We talked a lot of craft. I had a lot of great advice. He would say things to me like, you better interest yourself on the page, or you’re not going to interest anybody else, which is a really good tip. I mean, if you’re reading your own work and your eye stops moving across the page because you’re bored by that dense paragraph of statistics you just laid out, well, other people are going to have the same reaction. He said, never let a piece of work out of your hands until it’s as good as you can make it given the time allowed. Writing is an ethic. There’s an ethic to journalism. And my dad made that very clear.

John: But also, athletes have ethics too. They have a discipline and an ethic that in many ways is somewhat akin to that. How about being the first, obviously, like you said, there were some other great woman journalist, Lesley Visser being one in your generation, but how was it being a woman in what was, and maybe even still is, a male dominated profession?

Sally: Well, again, I think I was quite lucky being the daughter of Dan Jenkins because I had a lot of protectors. My dad had a lot of good friends in the business. He commanded even the people who didn’t know him, had tremendous respect for him, and were on the lookout for me. There were a couple of incidents in locker rooms, but they were not horrible. There was some teasing from athletes and the usual stuff. But look, there’s cameras in locker rooms, along with women. It’s a very crowded, packed place. I never felt hassled in a way that made me profoundly uncomfortable. I happen to have a simple rule. Like I don’t talk to naked people. I think it’s rude. I wait for people to put their pants on. So, again, I mean, yeah, I have no complaints. I had a thousand big brothers, and I had a thousand surrogate fathers in this business.

John: You’ve written so many great books. I’ve read the book you did with Lance Armstrong, with Pat Summit, two legends in their own right for many reasons.

Sally: And Dean Smith, I worked with Dean as well.

John: Dean Smith, another legend. Where did the calling come for you for this wonderful book, The Right Call? Because this has so many applications. I’m an entrepreneur. There’s so many applications from sports to business and to life. Where did you have the moment that, Hey, I have this in me. I’m going to get this out?

Sally: Yeah, it’s always sort of tickled me in the back of my mind, this question of what do athletes do, what do coaches do that’s really exportable to the rest of us? I mean, that’s the $64,000 question, right? So we spend $65 billion a year in public money on public athletics, on stadiums and infrastructure and grants to universities and support for state colleges. And someday, archeologists are going to dig up these stadiums, and they’re going to know a lot about our culture from the amount of time and attention and money we devote to these things. Well, why do we do that? Do we do it just because it’s exciting and it’s entertainment, like a circus? Or do we do it because we have some sense that there’s something profound going on underneath the performance? And that was the question my father asked when he said, who can explain the athletic heart? I think the public, I think the paying public and the paying audience understands there is a profound intelligence going on, and they want to know more about it. They love to watch it, and they’d like to understand more about it. So, what I did with the book was try to get at that. I interviewed the broadest possible cross section of athletes and coaches I could find. Steve Kerr coached the Golden State Warriors, Steph Curry, greatest shooter in NBA history, Diana Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Florida, greatest endurance swimmer of all time, Laird Hamilton, greatest big wave surfer of all time, Peyton Manning, Hall of Fame quarterback, arguably the greatest quarterback of all time. I took a bunch of disparate people like this, and I went through their transcripts and I said, what do they all have in common? What do they all talk about? What do they all do that’s the same, whether it’s Michael Phelps or Diana Nyad, whether it’s Laird Hamilton or Peyton Manning? And looking for those commonalities, the book is built on the seven principles that they all talk about, and they all practice.

John: Let’s go through those principles. Walk us through some of those principles.

Sally: Okay. So the principles are conditioning, practice, discipline, candor, culture, intention and resilience to failure. Those are the seven. So they’re really well conditioned. You can’t do anything unless you’re really well conditioned, including making a decision. I mean, one of the fascinating things I found out in this book is that even grandmaster chess players, they burn tons of calories while they’re trying to think at the board. Magnus Carlsen, the greatest chess player in the world right now, he he’ll burn 6,000 calories in a grandmaster chess tournament. 500 cals a day doing the thought work. So, just because you’re sitting at a desk doesn’t mean your body’s not working. Your brain will rob your muscles of the energy to function at a high level. So your cognitive judgment is really directly related to your body. I mean, there’s a saying that what you put into the performance is what will come out. So you don’t really want to be eating a glazed donut and drinking a Coca-Cola if you’re Bob Iger, the chairman of Disney, trying to make rational decisions, right?

John: Plus my understanding from friends that I know that are around him is that he’s an animal in training himself.

Sally: He works out like two and a half, three hours a day. He’s up at 4:00 a.m, doing a VersaClimber, which is the single hardest, I interviewed Igre for the book, it’s the single har hardest exercise machine there is. It’s a mountain climber. So he does this tremendous workout before he ever starts work, at 6:00 a.m. And then he works out again at the end of the day, much lower. He’ll take a bike ride or a long walk. But the man, he’s a physical animal. He’s built like a high level athlete. Look at Richard Branson. Look at Jeff Bezos. There’s very few potbellied cigar smoking CEOs these days. It’s too hard. The world moves too fast, and there’s too many… you get too fatigued.

John: It’s true.

Sally: Yeah. These guys are are real hard bodies, the great deciders.

John: At 62, I’m so much more intentional about how I take care of myself now than I was at 42, that’s for sure.

Sally: Yeah. I mean, look, something as simple, Magnus Carlsen had a habit of drinking orange juice during a chess tournament, and he was getting tired. And he went to the Norwegian Olympic Training Center to have a consultation about his basic fitness, trying to get his cognition peak. And they said, you shouldn’t be drinking orange juice. You’re sugar crashing. Even an OJ is not great for you when you’re sitting at that board trying to make decisions for several hours at a time.

John: Let’s talk a little bit about the seven principles and use some of the great examples you use in the book. So, for instance, athletes born or made. I know where you fall, but I want you to share where…

Sally: Oh, made.

John: Chrissy Evert and Steph Curry, talk about those two as great examples of being made instead of born.

Sally: Okay. Yeah. So Chris Evert is 5’6” and 125 pounds, and she’s got feet about as big as a dolls. I mean, Martina Navratilova told me she would marvel. Martina’s got very large hands, which gives her great racket control. One of the reasons Chrissy had a two-handed backhand was she was petite. So greatest mind I think I’ve ever seen in any sport was Chris Evert’s, other than maybe Jack Nicholas, and now I would add Caitlyn Clark to that list, in terms of ability to rise to a moment and literally change the air in an arena. So really tough-minded, really self-made, had to work for absolutely every point and every match. Tennis players, even Roger Federer only won 54% of the points he ever played. The margin in a tennis match is really, really narrow. We’re all looking for much bigger percentages. We want magic bullets. We want 40%, or at least 20%. These people live on the the 1% to 2%, to 3%, to 4%. Carlos Alcaraz beat Frances Tiafoe at Wimbledon last year, winning 51% of the points they played. So you have to be really, really resilient among other things, and that is not an innate quality. You have to learn resilience. And great athletes have it. They fail as often as we do. It’s how they cope with it that’s different from us.

John: When you talk to coaches, when I’ve asked coaches before that are high performers, how do they get over a month play or a disaster that just happened? They say their always mindset is the next play. Next play.

Sally: Yeah. It has to be.

John: To be able to move on.

Sally: One of the biggest mistakes that… so clinical studies shows that a good, roughly 50% of corporate decisions fail. It’s not just tennis, it’s corporate decision making as well. What separates the good companies from the bad is how they deal with the failure. A, they make a certain amount of failure acceptable and permissible, because they understand that you have to stress a product, or that you have to stress a strategy to discover its failure points, number one. And number two, they create a culture of honesty, and it’s why candor is a big part of the book. Whether it’s an individual athlete being candid with themselves about their weaknesses and their failures, or whether it’s a team or an organization being candid with itself. Candor is a really critical component because you have to be honest about where you’re failing. Otherwise, you have a cover your ass mentality that’s obscuring cause and effect in outcomes. And that doesn’t help anybody make a better decision. You have to be able to make a better decision the next time. That’s the key. Corporate failure, real debacle, are caused by compounding the original mistake. Not by making the original mistake, but by compounding it. So, if you’re Firestone Tires, Bridgestone Tires, and you have a problem with the radials tires, instead of covering it up, you make a better decision to recall the tires. Well, they didn’t do that. They didn’t recall it, and it turned into a billion dollar business debacle. So it’s the compounding of mistakes, it really kills people, whether you’re an athlete or someone in an office.

John: Candor just being a way of saying also, radical self-awareness and just dealing…

Sally: And the other thing that athletes really, really do, which, and they do much better than us, and much more than us, is they explore what’s called their unconscious incompetence. We don’t know where we’re really weak. We can’t see ourselves in a 360 degree view, and we tend to be hypersensitive when someone tells us where we’re weak or where we’re failing. Athletes don’t have the vanity that we do for losing and failing. They accept criticism much, much better. They seek it out, the right kind of criticism. And then they go to work in a very, very, very deliberate way. They practice what’s called deliberate practice. So if you’re Peyton Manning, everybody forgets this about Peyton Manning. His record in the NFL after three years, he was a top draft pick, his record was 32 and 32. He was a 500 quarterback, and he had led the league in interceptions two of his first three years. He was throwing 30 interceptions a year.

John: No one talks about that.

Sally: Nobody talks about it. Nobody ever looks at that. But I talked to Peyton about it, and Peyton told me, he said, “Yeah, at that point in my career, it was like, who am I going to be?” He was very insecure about living up to his big contract and his draft status. He gets lucky. Tony Dungy comes in as his head coach. And he and Dungy sit down and they look at tape on every interception he threw, every single one. And then Manning told me, he said, “We looked at a second more buried tape that a lot of people never get to.” He said, “We looked a tape of all the passes I threw that should have been intercepted, but weren’t because I got a little lucky.”

John: Wow. That’s a genius tape to look at.

Sally: Yeah. Maybe somebody made a great catch, or maybe the defender just blew the assignment, but I really shouldn’t have thrown that ball. And they looked at what was happening on those passes, and one of the things they discovered was that his feet were getting very jack hammery under pressure. His feet started really dancing around when defensive linemen started diving at his legs. And so they designed a drill to then address that weakness, that unconscious incompetency that they had uncovered in the tape. So Dungy and his coaches would hurl heavy sandbags at Peyton’s feet and legs in drills and in practices.

John: I love the story you tell about Tom Brady trying to expose his weaknesses by paying a bounty to the… talk, talk about that.

Sally: Yeah, a lot of quarterbacks, a lot of top quarterbacks in the NFL, they practice against the scout team. And the scout team is made up of guys who weren’t quite good enough to get on the 53-man roster. They’re sort of lesser thans. They’re there, you might bring them up if there’s a couple of big injuries. But they’re basically, their role is to hang around and be practice players and imitate the opposition that you’re going to face. A lot of quarterbacks get really kind of irritated and resentful when the scout team intercepts them. Tom Brady would pay them, he’d pay them bonuses if they picked him off in practice, because he knew they had just saved him from a mistake in the game.

John: That’s so smart. That’s so smart.

Sally: Yeah, it’s the sign of a really great leader, you know.

John: I know you were close with Pat Summit, very close, and wow, talk about losing a legend too way too early. But I know you write about the discipline and how she disciplined players and how she had so much success. Can you share a little bit about that?

Sally: Sure. I mean, Pat was a great friend. We wrote three books together. And when you do that, you know, we became really very close friends. Probably my best friend, I would say, while she was alive. It was very tough to lose her. But she taught me as much in getting sick and dying as she ever did in anything. I was very lucky to have her as a friend. My dad told me once, he said, “I had Bear Bryant and Darrell Royal as a young sports writer,” and he said, “And you have Pat Summit.” I mean, Pat kind of finished me. I was a much younger, unfinished person when I met her, and hanging around her, my dad made it clear to me, learn, watch her, and really learn from her. And I did. I like to say that I got to play for Pat without doing the running. I mean, she would literally, like we’d talk on the phone and she’d say, “Have you worked out today? What have you gotten done today?”

John: That’s so awesome.

Sally: Yeah, it’s funny.

John: We all need a friend like that. We all need a friend like that.

Sally: But I really, I got to lift the lid on her program, and she’d let me hang around in the back of the room in film sessions and stuff. So I learned a lot of basketball, a lot of very high level basketball. But mainly, I learned how great coaches really deal with their players. And they’re all slightly different, but one of the things they all do, they’re all great, great teachers. And what makes them great teachers, what I noticed about Pat that was different from a lot of other people who think they can be coaches or who want authority over other people, Pat never issued a correction without issuing the fix in the very next sentence. I mean, she would go off on a kid, she would say, you’re blowing it, you’re killing us with the way you’re running that play, or with your lazy screens, or not getting down the floor. But in the very next breath, she would say, when you do this, we’re great. You’re great and we’re great. It was a really subtle but really critical distinction. Great coaches never offer the criticism without offering the tool to fix it, to fix what’s going wrong.

John: Sally, one thing that came to mind as I read this, this great book, The Right Call, and I recommend everybody, all our listeners and viewers to get this. This has so many applications for whatever type of life you’re leading, just life in general, is what makes the great ones great, whether they’re a coach or a player, is their ability for pattern recognition. It’s the same goal for you because you’ve evolved your career to such a high quality and level that you play on now. This book really is the commonalities, the pattern recognition that you’ve recognized both in coaches and in players. And talk a little bit about that. Like Gladwell talked about 10,000 reps. Most people say that’s not even coming close to what the amount of reps the great ones really go through. You talk about Steph Curry’s hands and some of those other things.

Sally: Yeah, I mean, so there’s this statistic that Malcolm Gladwell sort of popularized in, in his books, they call it, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become world-class. It’s really misinterpreted. It’s not just 10,000 hours of practice. There’s a lot of bad practice in the world. John Wooden used to talk about, you have to practice in the right way. Bad practice is just headbanging, right? If you’re practicing the same mistakes over and over again, that doesn’t get you anywhere. And it’s like Peyton Manning with the sandbags, practice has to have a purpose. And you have to know what to practice and how much time to devote to it. And agood practice is really, really deliberate. It’s based on diagnosis of weaknesses or some sort of strategic plan, and then you go out and you practice really, really specifically in refining skills that are going to give you an advantage.

John: Intention.

Sally: Yeah, exactly. So, one of the great practicers is Steph Curry. Steph Curry shoots 2000 shots a week. He actually shoots probably 500 shots a day, 300 shots on game day. But he shoots all different kinds of shots that he’s going to have to make in a game. About 200 of those are three pointers. But he also does something really, really interesting. Steph Curry, when I interviewed Steph, I said, can I feel your hands? You know, you can ask people really rude questions when you’re a sports writer. So quite obligingly, he held out his hands, and I put my hands on top of his. His hands were really, really rough, and I expected them to be soft because his shot is so soft. His hands felt like a logger’s hands. I mean, they were gnarly, calloused, heavily, heavily callous. Well, it’s because of the leather basketball and how much shooting he does. And also ball handling drills. He will put on vision occluding goggles that also have strobe lights going off, and then he dribbles a basketball with one hand while he is dribbling a tennis ball in his other hand, and occasionally juggles them and tosses the tennis ball back and forth with a guy who’s running him through the drill. Because he’s trying to practice the circumstances he’s actually going to be facing on the court. There are going to be people in his vision, there are going to be people trying to steal the ball from him. And so what he’s trying to do in those drills is really mimic the obstacles and the kind of semi blindness that he’s going to have to be operating in. He’s going to have to dribble by feel. He can’t look probably because he’s got too much other stimulus going on. So he’s trying to mimic the actual. He’s trying to make his mind and body messaging more efficient with those drills. And most of us practice in a way that doesn’t really mimic what we’re going to experience under pressure. We go to the driving range and we beat balls on a perfectly level area into the distance at a very nice flag that’s sitting on flat ground. And then we go on the golf course, and we’re like, why can’t I hit that same shot? Well, there’s no level lies on a golf course. Usually the green is either up or down. You’re on a side hill, there’s wind, there’s sand, there’s drizzle, there’s mud. And so, we really, we do the same thing in our work lives too. I think that people need to think about, okay, I’ve got to give a presentation. You might memorize it, but have you gone through it at speed? Do you know how long it’s going to take? Have you done it in front of other people who start looking at you and are bored, or don’t believe what you’re saying? Laird Hamilton told me, he said, “Look, your body doesn’t know what’s stressing you.” He said, “My body doesn’t know. I feel the exact same way whether a 50 foot wave is coming at me, or my 16-year-old daughter took the car keys and isn’t home yet, or I’m giving a speech in front of a bunch of business executives who have no respect for a surfer.”

John: Wow. That’s so interesting. That is so interesting. You wrote a beautiful story in your book about Diana Nyad. And just recently, my business partner, Kevin Dillon, was going through an airport about two weekends ago with one of his sons who’s a champion wrestler, 12-year-old champion wrestler, and really loves sports, sports junkie. And they ran into Drew Bledsoe. And Drew Bledsoe was kind enough, of course, to take a photo. And Kevin said, “Can you just give one piece of advice to my son that he could take away from you?” And he said, “Do more. Life is about doing more.” Can you talk about your Diana Nyad story and the opportunity to do more?

Sally: So Diana Nyad swam from Florida to Cuba successfully. It was her fourth attempt. She’d failed three previous times. And she was over 60 years old when she finally did it. And she hated the idea that people were telling her that she was kind of finished at 60. And she told me, she said, “I feel I’m in my prime.” But Diana, one of the ways that Diana would practice, she did a lot of endurance swimming in swimming pools, and then in open water, because obviously a swimming pool is not the ocean. But she would finish a workout and then make herself do five minutes more. Just five. But five minutes more. You’ve done a three hour training swim, and you’re really ready to get outta the water, but she would make herself go five minutes more. It’s not enough to hurt you, but it’s enough to strengthen you mentally.

John: It’s so interesting. That’s interesting.

Sally: It’s a really good habit to practice.

John: Sally, when I read or listen to you, because I enjoy listening to you, because of the podcast world, now I get to listen to you, but also I get to read your books. You’re like a sports junkie. If I said, you could only cover one sport from now on, nothing else, what would be the sport that you cover?
Sally: Oh, you’re going to really laugh at this. Figure skating.

John: What? Now you shocked me. Tell me why.

Sally: No, no. I mean, here’s why. Here’s why. They’re the greatest athletes in the world. They truly are. I mean, if you think about it, if you look at Malinin or you look at Alysa Liu, you look at these skaters, first of all, up close, they’re the greatest physiques in the world. I mean, nobody, not an NBA player is as full neck to toes toned and explosive as these athletes, number one. But number two, think about what they do. They rise in the air. They do whirly birds, like Michael Jordan or LeBron James, and then they land on two butcher knives on ice without falling down.

John: I’m always amazed by just watching it. I’m mesmerized by it, the whole part.

Sally: It’s an unbelievable. And to see it in person, if you ever get a chance to go to, even if it’s an ice skating exhibition, people should go see it. It is phenomenal in person. It is breathtaking, breathtaking.

John: You’ve interviewed so many…

Sally: And you can see the effort. You can see the sweat and the effort. It looks so pretty on TV, but in the arena, you get a real sense of how exertional it is, number one. And how sweaty and tired they are at the end of it, and how stressful it is. I mean, their chest are heaving because they have to generate so much speed around the ice.

John: When I’ve met the parents of figure skaters, the dedication from such a young age of both the parents and the young skaters, I mean, the hours they’ve put in in practice is just unreal to me.

Sally: Yeah. I mean, they have the skills of gymnasts, the balance and explosiveness of basketball players, and then they have this other thing that allows them to land literally on blades a a quarter of an inch wide. I mean, it’s remarkable. It makes the balance beam look tame.

John: I once heard you in a podcast talk about pain, talk about the great ones’ ability to work through pain. And you had a great line, I’m forgetting where it was attributed to, I think it was Elliot, about pain. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sally: Yeah. I mean, so athletes’ relationship to pain is really, really interesting, and my understanding of pain comes from Lance Armstrong. I mean, it really hurts to sit on a bike for six hours. I mean, nevermind performance enhancement, which is a second subject, but literally riding a bike for six to eight hours up an Alp. I mean, bike ride, if you bike ride on a flat ground, it’s painful. Your neck hurts, your butt hurts. If you do it for any amount of time, the lactic acid buildup in your legs makes you hurt. Now do it up an Alp at speed. So bike riding was really painful. And I’d say, “Lance, what’s the pleasure in riding a bike up an Alp for six hours?” And he said, “I don’t understand the question.” And I said, “Well, there’s got to be some pleasure in it. What’s the pleasure in that?” And he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” So I was in Austin interviewing him, and I went home to Fort Worth and I was sitting around with my dad, and I said, “Dad, it’s going well, but I can’t get Lance to answer this one question that I think is really, really important for the book. I asked him, what’s the pleasure in staying on a bike for that long and riding it uphill up a mountain? And he’s not answering the question.” And my father looked at me and he said, “Well, he doesn’t do it for the pleasure, he does it for the pain.” And I said, “Really?” And he said, “Yeah.” He said, “Go back and talk to him about the pain.” So I go back to Austin and I said, “My old man says you don’t do this for the pleasure. You do it for the pain.” And Lance said, “Well, that’s exactly right.” So then I said, “Okay, so let’s talk about pain.” So pain is very clarifying. First of all, you can’t think about anything else while you’re in pain. If the IRS is coming after you, if your kids are messed up, whatever, when you are in physical distress from working out, it’s all you’re thinking about. It’s very cleansing. It’s very clarifying. It’s very focused. So it’s a bit of an escape. Endurance athletes really love that escape. They love the clear mindedness and the focus, because you have to screen everything else out, number one. And number two, it gives you this sensation when it’s over, Lance said, I’m the guy who can take it. I know I can take more pain than other people. I’m the guy who can take it. Diana Nyad felt that way too. She said, there’s a really, really huge gratification from enduring that kind of discomfort. And also she said, from getting to someplace really, really far away under your own power.

John: That’s incredible.

Sally: So, again, these people, to me, I mean, I do sound like a junkie when I talk about it, because I think if you talk to them in the right way and you ask ’em the right questions, they have incredibly insightful, profound things to tell us.

John: They do.

Sally: They’re worth every penny they make.

John: No, I 100% don’t doubt that at all. If I had to make you do the Sophie’s choice of being a sports writer, who’s your top three favorite interviews of all time?

Sally: Well, I adore Chris Evert because she’s so surprising. She’s so much funnier and smarter and more insightful than you would’ve thought from her veneer on the court, where she looked like Chris America, kind of just so reserved. And she’s not reserved at all in person. That’s a situational personality. So Chrissy’s great fun to talk to. Andre Agassi, great interview, really charming. Again, whip smart, very insightful about himself and about larger subjects. His book is wonderful. That was a great sports autobiography. Those were two of my favorites. But I mean, it changes. Peyton Manning is really fun to talk to. Very self deprecatingly funny. The entire Manning family has a outrageous sense of humor and has managed to remain really, really regular. Archie, Eli and Peyton are all three just funny, insightful, self-deprecating. And Peyton’s fascinating to talk to because he doesn’t do anything poorly. I mean, he just doesn’t. There’s a reason why the guy has become the most interesting man in sports television, but also the most interesting producer in sports television. And he’s about to become one of the best film producers in films. He’s working up. Omaha Productions is a fascinating company that’s growing by leaps and bounds. And he’s got taste and judgment, and and he doesn’t tolerate lousy products.

John: I’ll tell you what, I mean, my wife and I, we’d much rather watch on Monday night, the Manny cast than just regular broadcast. It’s so much more fun. It’s so much more fun. Have you had the chance to meet Saban or Belichick?

Sally: I mean, I’ve met Belichick. I’ve interviewed Belichick. I’ve been in Saban press conferences, but never really personally met him. Belichick, I enjoyed. Belichick is very courtly away from football. He’s very polite. He’s a lovely guy. He just doesn’t like to do it that much. He guards his time really, really carefully. There’s certain things he just doesn’t want to waste his time on, and media, and social media tends to be one of those. He let David Halberstam in to write a book. He’s real smart. He’s very well read. So I think he picks his people and he picks his spots. And I was lucky that he let me interview him, and I got a lot out of it in a short period of time.

John: Well, that again, is another, as you would call it, an exportable quality that I think in any industry, those who guard their time well tend to do better.

Sally: Well, yeah, one of the things that’s it’s in the book is, I didn’t know this existed, but we’re all prone to something called decisional fatigue. We don’t do a great job all the time of understanding what we need to decide and what we don’t. And Tommy Amaker, the basketball coach at Harvard, he was a great All American player at Duke, and he’s now the head coach at Harvard. Tommy Amaker said, one of the things leaders have to learn to do is decide what is yours to decide, and what don’t you need to decide? And he said, I realized it’s a waste of my time deciding what the team should wear on the airplane. He’s like, let an assistant coach or a manager handle that. He said, you’ve only got so much energy for good decisions in you, and if you’re wearing yourself out deciding a million little things, you really aren’t going to be at your best when it comes time to deciding something really, really critical.

John: So smart. That is so smart. Thank God, your dad got to live to a wonderful ripe age of 90.

Sally: 90.

John: You’re 64, Sally. So you’ve minimally got a lot of years left in you.

Sally: I hope.

John: Yeah. I mean, what gets you out of bed now? Someone who’s obviously so well read in the Washington Post, everyone loves your work there, but also with all the books you’ve done, what really gets you thinking now? What’s next in your journey with regards to writing and your profession?

Sally: Well, with the right call, I felt like I really connected some dots. I began to, I mean, I wrote the book, to go back to your very first question about all this, I wrote the book because I felt like I was gathering this repository of knowledge over 30 years as a sports writer that I really wanted to put all together. I wanted to understand, what do I really know? What do I really know now? And what do these people really have to tell me that is useful for other people, for the larger audience? And so I think I’ll probably write some kind of follow up. I think there’s more to say on this subject.

John: Absolutely.

Sally: Particularly for larger organizations, for locker rooms. Locker rooms are no different than any other business, any other office culture. So that’s number one. Number two, the other thing that gets me out of bed is scaring myself.

John: So, tell me, what’s your version of scaring yourself?

Sally: Well, taking on a subject in an area that I’m not familiar with, where I don’t feel comfortable. I did a great story last year on a great bull rider named J.B. Mauney. I know nothing about, even though I’m a Texan, I really don’t know much about rodeo, much less bull riding. But it was a little out there for me. It’s not something I know a great deal about. And learning, the great thing about being a journalist is you get to satisfy your curiosities. And it does keep you younger. It really does.

John: But you’re a great writer. You’re legendary. You’re a Hall of Fame writer.

Sally: Well, I didn’t start out as one. I mean, again, it’s a craft. It’s a learned craft. And one of the things, I learned a lot from these athletes. I mean, my practice, my daily routine as a writer, the way I go about my work has been utterly altered by covering these people. I wanted to write up to them. I wanted my performance to be respectful of theirs. And the minute I decided that, it changed me as a writer. I was like, I was writing a story about Billie Jean King for Sports Illustrated Magazine, and I was choking. I was sitting there, I’d interviewed her, I’d gotten great stuff from her and from people around her. And it was my first big assignment for Sports Illustrated, so I was nervous as hell. I felt a lot of pressure. And I sat there in front of the blank screen, and I thought, here you are writing about one of the great pressure performers, and you’re gagging. You’re really uncomfortable and you’re really feeling pressure. Why wouldn’t you go about your business half as seriously as she has gone about hers?

John: What’s your discipline? Do you get up early? Do you do it like that all night? What’s your routine and ethic that makes you continue to win year after year?

Sally: I go to bed early, when I’m working on a difficult, like a book, I go to bed early. I try to go to bed around 8:30 or 9:00. I’ll read in bed. Hardcover only or print. No screens. Take something if I need to go to sleep. Get a good night’s sleep. Get up around 4:30 or 5:00, which it is the best hours of the day to really write and focus, and also, there’s not a bunch of other things that need doing or that you can even do at those hours. So that’s number one. When I’m covering a big game that’s going to be on deadline, I do a lot of homework in advance. I do a lot of prep, like Peyton Manning. I go back and I read as much as I possibly can, and I have it in a catalog. I have it in a file. Quotes, facts, it’s already there, and I pre-write certain things that I think may be relevant in the game so I can cut and paste. It’s a lot easier to be good when you only have to write 500 words on a 60 minute deadline than when you’re trying to write a thousand words on a 60 minute deadline. So, if you’ve got some material that you’ve already researched that you know you can use or tweak, you’re just a lot more comfortable as a writer on deadline. You’re not quite so pressured. You feel a little more relaxed.

John: Where do you stretch? When you’re on deadline? Is that the moment of truth? Or when you’ve taken on a book, you’ve got publishers hovering over you? Which one is the tougher task for you?

Sally: Deadline’s tougher just because book editors are pretty kind, and that’s running a marathon, and you can sustain a pretty comfortable jog for a lot of weeks at a time. When you’re trying to meet a deadline on a book, the last a week or two can get a little hairy. But I’ll tell you what, covering a Super Bowl, the Super Bowl starts late, the halftime is long. You’re going to be right up against the deadline and you know about 4 million people are going to read it if it’s a really great game. And you just really, really feel a lot of pressure. And it takes them forever to come to the press conferences or to come to the media availability to hear what they have to say. And it’s a big crush. And so, it’s physically hard. You’ve got to get all the way down to the locker room areas and then all the way back up to the press box. And so everything is just feels hard. And so to try to make yourself feel a little bit more at ease so that you can write something that flows a little bit, it’s difficult. You want to put yourself in the best situation that you possibly can. You want to eat right. You don’t want to be tired. You’re going to be tired, because like, the worst feeling in the world on deadline is you get back up to the press box and you look at the clock and it’s 11:30 at night, and your screen is totally blank. And your work, your real work is just starting. It’s brutal. It’s brutal. So if you’ve got some stuff, if you’ve got some stuff, if you’ve really done your homework and you’ve really prepared, you’re in a much better position.

John: When you talk about stretching yourself or making yourself afraid, I’m going to go back to my 10-year-old self, ‘72, and dad writes semi-tough, which hits me into not only a movie, but back then, in their prime, Kris Kristofferson and Burt Reynolds. I think Jill Clayburgh was in it. But one day, do you want to write a screenplay?

Sally: Yeah. Actually, the one thing that I’d really like to try to write, I’d like to try to write a good play. I love theater. And if I was going to try a different medium, I think a play would be fun, a screenplay would be fun. There’s a couple of subjects. I moonlight doing history. I’ve been working for several years on a biography of a historical figure named Charles Sumner, who was the great abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, who was beaten on the floor of the Senate by a southern congressman for an anti-slavery speech that he made. They call it the First Blow of the Civil War. So I’ve been scaring myself with that for several years now. I have a partner on that, which makes it easier.

John: So that might get made into a play one day or something like…

Sally: No, that’s a book that’s going to come out sometime here in the next couple of years. That’s the next book I hope to finish.

John: What’s one sporting event, what’s a notable sporting event that you’ve never been to that you said, that’s on my list, we’re going to go one year?

Sally: Oh, the World Cup, World Cup Soccer. I’ve never done World Cup soccer. I’d love to do that. Male or female, it doesn’t matter. I’d love to see that.

John: And whether you’re covering or not, doesn’t matter?

Sally: Yeah.

John: Got it. Got it.

Sally: I mean, I love buying a ticket and just going to something for fun. I really do. I hardly ever get to do it, but when I do it, I just love it. I love just being another popcorn eater.

John: How did social media change your industry and how you work in terms of texting, cell phones and Instagram and the whole kit and caboodle?

Sally: I mean, it hasn’t really changed what I do that much, quite frankly. The challenge with social media is just all the judgment. It’s very judgy. It can get really kind of toxic. I do some social media. I don’t waste a lot of time on it. I think it fragments your concentration as a writer. It fragments your time as a worker. I think it’s mostly a time suck. It’s good for promoting pieces. I think that you have to understand that younger readers are consuming things much, much differently, and so you want to try to reach them where they’re getting their information and their stuff from. But I think that things like TikTok and documentary, short documentary filmmaking is actually much more effective for reaching younger audiences. TikTok and YouTube makes a lot more sense to me than Twitter or the X or whatever you want to call it.

John: Yeah, whatever it’s called.

Sally: Yeah. I’m on Bluesky, but not that much. I think for live events, it’s really fun because you can have some in event analysis for people at home. You can live update. As a live updating feed, those are things are pretty interesting, and it’s kind of useful in the middle of a game because it actually helps you diagnose what’s going on as it’s happening. If you’re looking for things to tell people at home during the action, it’s actually helping your own understanding of what you’re watching.

John: Sally, we’re of the same generation. When we were growing up, the gambling world was either going to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or had a local bookie. What do you make of the ubiquity now of online gambling and athletes and sports, and is this a net positive, a net negative? Where do you fall out on the rise of sports gambling?

Sally: I mean, I think it’s like prohibition. I think it was always out there. It’s probably better to bring it up from above ground so that we really understand what’s going on, how much money is really being wagered, and so you can sort of regulate it in some healthy way, make sure it’s not preying on kids or old people, I mean, stuff like that. Again, I think prohibitions don’t really work, and so I don’t see the sense in trying to eradicate it. I don’t think that would work anyway, frankly.

John: Got it. Got it.

Sally: It’s what people have done since time out of mind. People will do as they have ever done

John: That’s true. Also, when we were growing up, the NCAA was this bashing of rules and regulations and sort of no one tinkered or messed with the NCAA. Talk a little bit about the rise of NIL, and are we in the top of the first inning there, or are we on the bottom of the seventh?

Sally: Yeah, I mean, we’re at the beginning of it, mainly because donors are already getting exhausted. I mean, look, the NIL, all NIL is, is a free market. I mean, it’s basic economics. And the NCAA never had any right. They had a right to their schools’ imprimaturs, but they never had a right to individuals name, images and likenesses. And this is a long time coming. It should have happened a long, long time ago. And again, it’s a classic instance of the NCAA turning a problem into a debacle. They wouldn’t have to have a $3 billion house settlement if they had simply done the right thing the minute someone pointed out this is totally freaking illegal, to hijack someone’s name and image. So, as far as letting the free market operate in that instance, I think it’s going to be just fine. Donors don’t like throwing money down a black hole, which is what NIL money is. They’re not getting much in return. You’re securing the athletes’ allegiance for another year at the university, but you’re not getting tickets, you’re not getting luxury boxes, and you’re not getting a tax write off. Donors would much prefer to give to the university than to NIL collectives. So the market is going to even that out. The NIL collectives from big donors are going to shrink, quite frankly. They just will. I’ve already talked to people who are saying that the size of the checks just aren’t worth it. You don’t get enough in return. That’s number one. Number two, NIL gives real leverage to the schools and the coaches. Everyone was afraid it was going to give too much leverage to the athletes. In fact, look at how much control a coach now has it. If a kid needs to be on the floor to satisfy his NIL stuff, and you’re the head coach and you don’t like how he’s practicing or how she’s behaving in the locker room, you have the bent. The bench has become more powerful than ever, than ever. So look at a couple of coaches in this past NCAA tournament. I mean, look at Rick Pitino benching his star player in the final five minutes of that game.

John: And probably one of the greatest comeback stories in coaching history, by the way.

Sally: Yeah. Right. Wow. But he wasn’t having it. That kid’s going to transfer out of St. John’s, which is probably what Patino decided was best in the first place. And so essentially Patino is going to coach the team his way. If you want to play for Rick Pitino at St. John’s, that’s how it’s going to go. And he’s got the power to do it, and this kid can now go to another school and start all over with NIL. But I think it gives enormous leverage to coaches as disciplinarians, and I think that’s an unforeseen consequence, but it’s one that I thought was going to happen, and I’m glad to see it happen. I think that the really, really good coaches will use it and to good effect.

John: Got it. Sally, the book is The Right Call. I recommend everyone to buy this book. This is just a great read. I can’t wait to read more books that come out by you, Sally. And hopefully I get to meet you in person one day, like, I got to meet your dad, because I’m going to tell you, when I got to meet your dad, that was the cat’s be out for me. Your dad was just larger than life. I think you said, in one of your writings, that when he left this world, it was like 100 men left the room.

Sally: Yes. Yeah, that was a great line of Mike Lupica’s actually. Our great friend Mike Lupica, the sports writer, said that he, it is like 100 guys walked out of the room. He was really fun, and he was as great a father as he was a writer.

John: That’s awesome. Sally, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for all the great writings you’ve done for people like me that have followed your career. And again, thanks for this book. You can buy it on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, or any other, any other great bookstores by you. We’re going to have you sign a bunch of these for some of our leadership team here. And again, Sally, thanks for all you’ve done, and thanks for spending an hour with us today on the Impact Podcast.

Sally: My pleasure.

John: Thank you.

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