While putting together my graduate thesis at Boston University, I initially set out to address two broad questions:

1. What is a sports column, and

2. What was a sports column?

Bob Ryan, a legendary sportswriter for the Boston Globe who does television appearances on ESPN’s Around the Horn, was gracious enough to help me. Unsurprisingly, he gave me more than I knew what to do with. Here are some of his thoughts.

On what draws people to a sports column:

“In the old days, it used to be about information. Old days being from 1920, when these things started to become more prevalent, up to the end to the century and the advent of the internet. The big sports at the turn of the century were baseball, boxing and horse racing, and most columnists were versed in all three of those things. Some columnists would have individual interest in certain things, like golf, that they would add to their repertoire.

As time went on, specialists in each sport began to take shape very dramatically, particularly in the ’80s and ’90s. Papers such as the Globe, in addition to the person covering a beat like football, basketball, baseball or hockey, had this extra person who was a national writer. Nowadays we have Baxter Holmes and Gary Washburn with the Celtics.”

What are some defining qualities of a good sports columnist? How have they changed or remained constant?

“The columnist then could dispense a lot of information and be a source for information. Now he isn’t necessarily expected to provide information. If he can do it, that’s great. But he needs to have an interpretation of an event, to shape it or to pose questions. And, if he or she is good, he or she needs to put things in historical perspective. That’s important.

And then there’s the sheer writing, which was always important. The idea that someone wrote nicely enough, or interestingly enough or beautifully enough, that you would read it just for that. That you would be impressed and dazzled by this prose. That the English professors would be putting it up on the bulletin board as an example of how to handle the mother tongue. A columnist was presumed to be your best writer, and sometimes that was true and sometimes it wasn’t.

Whether the column is written in the paper or online, I don’t think that has changed much in the past several years. The same qualities of knowledge and writing ability are paramount. So many of the excellent writers who are online now are newspaper refugees.”

Who did you read and emulate early in your career?

“Going back to fifty years ago when I was in prep school, the gods were Red Smith and Jim Murray. Murray was making a name for himself at the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s when I was gaining an interest in the business of sportswriting. Frank Deford was another guy, at Sports Illustrated, who I would’ve liked to be.”

Who do you enjoy reading now? For your money, who is the best columnist out there?

“Ten years ago if you asked me this question, I would’ve said Mark Whicker of the Orange County Register. He writes for a paper in an area where people don’t read the paper. Even before the Internet they didn’t read the paper. I always said he was the biggest tree falling in the biggest forest in America.

The guy now that has stepped forward, and I tell this to everybody, who completely understands what a column is and has everything you want – factual knowledge, historical knowledge, natural curiosity, the writing chops, breadth of knowledge across sports and understands how to connect with an audience with the right tone – is Mike Vaccaro of the New York Post. People think the New York Post is all trash journalism and back page headlines, but that’s just so unfair for the guys who write there. Most of all him.”

On writing for a particular group of people:

“When you’re writing for a paper, you’re writing for an audience. And a lot of what you do has to be geared personally to your locale. I always wanted to make sure I wrote nationally and internationally as well, but you presume local knowledge. That governs your style of writing a lot.

I got out of it in time that I didn’t have to worry too much about the large issue of writing to a web audience. Right to the end I did it the way I did it and didn’t worry about anything. I didn’t change that aspect. I think you’re still writing for your local audience. You shouldn’t go about changing anything you’re doing. Write how you write and it’ll get disseminated the way it gets disseminated.”

What sorts of goals do you have before you sit down to write a column?

There’s so many different types of columns. Game columns, issue columns, personality profile columns, historical columns, funny columns, serious columns. In the end, it all comes down to people enjoying it. If there’s a point you’re trying to make, you hope you make it intelligently and in a straightforward manner so people get it.

Some people are very graceful prose stylists, but they aren’t cut out to be columnists. They aren’t opinionated enough and they don’t know how to get to the point. They don’t understand what a column is. You can be halfway through a column and wonder ‘Where is this going?’ If that happens, they have failed. That’s my opinion. You have to make sure very early on that people understand where you’re going with this.

There are people who are great writers but they aren’t good columnists. And there are people who are not so great writers but they know how to martial an argument. They know how to push a button with people. They know what a column is and they know how to attract attention. However, there are many people out there who write just to rouse people and get attention. They take on causes they don’t really believe in to get a rise out of people. They want to be read. I never did that once and never would. And I never will.

Now you can be wrong. And when you find out you’re wrong, that’s great. Now you’ve got another column. If you make mistakes, you’ve got another column to talk about how wrong you were. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Objectivity?

“There is no such thing as objectivity. It’s fairness that we’re talking about. That’s the key.

Try to be fair to people. Don’t vilify people on a personal basis… unless you want to do that! If you’re that angry, and want to do that and deal with the ramifications, and you think those people are that evil, then ok. If you’re going after a player who is playing poorly, and it’s not about his personality or his wife or his kids, you keep it at that level. Unless you have reason to believe he is a bad person. But that’s never the case. Seldom is that the case.

I wrote game stories on the (Boston) Celtics for fourteen years from a point of view. A point of view on how I view basketball and what I think is important. I was able to write on that level for a long time and be appreciated for it.”

And on Bill Simmons and column length:

“I will say there is a growing emphasis on flamboyance at certain entities such as Grantland (a website launched by ESPN; Simmons is its creator and boss).

In a newspaper you are forever bound by a certain restriction, whether it be seven hundred words or ten thousand. On the Internet, space is not an issue. Simmons never could’ve reined himself in. He wanted to be a newspaper columnist when he started at the Boston Herald. He got frustrated with the procedure of working your way up and instead fastened onto the fledgling Internet. He writes at an extraordinary length that would not be permitted in a newspaper. That’s a big difference that changes the way you go about things dramatically.

Simmons changed the landscape. He’s a guy that never covered the team, never went to a locker room, never interviewed coaches. He’s all about seat-of-the-pants fan perspective, and he’s very bright and loves sports. And he’s an excellent writer and he’s got a good historical background and all that. It’s part of the mix. It doesn’t bother me as long as people understand what it is. It is just an opinion, and it’s not always well-grounded.

He’s very emotional and he’s very up front about it. He loves Boston. He loves the Celtics. I took issue with him in 2007 and 2008 when he was ripping Doc (Rivers, then the head coach of the Celtics) all the time from three thousand miles away (in Los Angeles) and with what I thought was an uninformed perspective. I like Doc, so I was bringing that point of view to the table. You might call it bias, I call it point of view.

In 2008 he talked about how there was really no rivalry between the Celtics and Lakers and I pointed out the contrary. That drew some notice, too.

That doesn’t mean I was angry with him or we’re at odds, I just disagreed with him on that particular issue. He was very complimentary of me when he wrote his basketball book (The Book of Basketball, appropriately), and that was after the fact. I appreciated that, and I have respect for him. We coexist. But what he’s doing isn’t something that we do. It’s something else. And there’s room for both.”