For many years I was fortunate to have a job that allowed me to travel the world on someone else’s meal ticket. While sport was a great gig, it was merely a vehicle to explore the nature of things, even if they were hiding under my pillow. I spent an incredible amount of time by myself and began writing for what I consider the best of reasons - just to figure stuff out. Sport and games, in their, truest form, transcends all cultural boundaries. If you can run, kick a ball or throw something high in the air, you speak many languages.
The other thing about sport is that while it’s not a perfect meritocracy, when in the truth of first light competition, there’s a hell of lot less ambiguity than in the world of commerce.
My late dad, Arnold Butki, used to run marathons and exercise daily. I get bored when exercising and if I try bike riding it's inevitable I'll get ideas that I want to write down. So I can't resist asking a question not totally related to the book: What do you think about when exercising for such a length of time? Did you have my problems where your mind starts thinking about things you want to write down but you can't?
Old-skool Palm Pilot - a felt marker on the back of your hand.
Most of the time, I wouldn’t try to think about specific things. Ideas would just come to me and I’d give them some amount of purchase and then go back to unthinking. My new school Palm Pilot for the technophobe is a cheap voice recorder.
Actually, I have a friend who used to run the same loop everyday with a marker in his pocket. When he had some thought he wanted to record he’d write it on the same two or three lampposts set off next to the street. The guy had at least one novel scribed on city property until they painted those poles one Monday while he overslept.
It’s not quite Hemingway leaving his only copy of a completed manuscript in a New York City cab but it’s cool pathos, don’t you think? Who can’t relate to that lost “great idea”? The one that got away.
Can you elaborate on this dedication: "To all the raw and rummaging scribes who pick up a pen because they just don't give a damn.”
I’ve always had notion for the underground brilliance, the voice that is never heard, the performance locked away in his or her own cave. In an increasingly celebritized society, the power of the understated has grown. That’s why the best writers of “Nam lit” were grunts and third tour journalist, guys who got their ass kicked, came home and "unthought" about it. Then wrote some mind-blowing prose where no one, not even them, could tell you what was real and what was imagined. I’ve taught O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” 20 times and still find things that even Tim may not realize he carries. O’Brien, even after great literary success, remains raw and rummaging.
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