Jake Lourim

At the end of my first essay of my first course as a Writing minor two years ago, answering the question of “why I write,” I said: “I’m a big believer that those stories are all around us today — and I write to tell them.”

 

That’s still true. It’s funny that when I think about my evolution as a writer over my college career — over hundreds of assignments, thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of words — in one way, I haven’t really changed.

 

I also wrote: “I’m not usually of the belief that one instant or event starts a trend, changes a norm or defines a person, but in this case, with my writing career, I think it’s true. I became a writer on March 5, 2011.” That night I wrote a newspaper column about a high school basketball player who won a league championship as a senior a few months after his mother passed away. He was also a friend with whom I’d grown particularly close in the five years I’d known him. “I had never written a story with so much emotion,” I wrote in my essay freshman year. “No longer were sports about this player’s point total or that runner’s finishing time. These were real stories of victory and defeat, joy and sorrow, failure and redemption. So I started writing them.” Six years later, I’m still not sure there’s a night that has shaped my identification as a writer as much as that one.

 

And those are still the stories I try to tell. That hasn’t changed. The media through which I tell those stories haven’t, either.

 

What’s changed is that I’ve become a much better, more well-rounded, more conscientious human. Four years, thousands of miles and countless experiences in the “real” world (if I’m old enough to call it that yet) have gotten me that much. The goal is the same — telling stories — but I’m flat-out more prepared to do it than I was four years ago. Having seen everything I’ve seen in that time, I can better tell stories now than I could before.

 

I’ve interviewed gay athletes about what it was like to come out to their teammates. I’ve visited substance-abuse recovery shelters to see what makes the difference in their patients’ lives. I’ve talked to a formerly institutionalized baseball fan who comes to the ballpark every day because, as he puts it, “I just don’t like staying at home.” Each of those times has changed me.

 

And, if we’re being honest, there is one more change I’ve undergone.

 

All of the stories I’ve referenced, and most of the ones you’ll hear from me, are at least in some way related to sports. In all likelihood, that will be true of the ones I tell in the future, too. It’s just what I’ve always known. For a long time, I referred to myself as a sports writer. The first few times I requested press credentials, I began my email with “I’m a sports writer for The Michigan Daily …” and when I sent in my first internship application, I called myself a sports writer for The Michigan Daily. Sports writer for The Michigan Daily … sports writer for The Michigan Daily … sports writer for The Michigan Daily …

 

I don’t remember the last time I referred to myself as a sports writer. Now it’s “I’m a reporter for The Michigan Daily.” That’s who I am now.

 

The summer after my junior year of high school, I attended a five-week summer journalism program at Northwestern. My instructor there, Joe Grimm, whom I respect more than almost anyone else in the world, tried — as he would later admit — to steer me away from sports writing and toward another, more significant subject matter. He failed, he acknowledged. All who have tried have done so too. I can’t change who I am. But, Joe said, he did want me to write stories that were well-reported, well-written and accessible enough to appear on the front page of the newspaper, not just the front page of the sports section. It’s a piece of advice I haven’t forgotten, through all of my stories that have run on 1A since then.

 

Perhaps it was then that I began to learn: The sports, in the end, are meaningless. I do not care whether one team scored 67 and one team scored 65. It does not matter which guys made the ball go in the hoop more times than the other guys. It just doesn’t.

 

My task is to find what matters. My task is to tell a story about it. My task is to write something, as a human, that makes other humans feel something. It usually has something to do with sports. But my goal is to tell a story about a human who happens to play, coach or watch sports. That’s where my evolution as a writer has come: I have become a better human. I have become smarter about social issues such as race and gender and human issues such as jubilation and heartbreak.

 

Maybe that’s how I arrived at the idea for my capstone project, on telling stories. The word “story” is so simple yet can do so much. For almost half of my life now, I’ve prioritized telling stories, ones that have become more complex over the years. So, for my capstone project, I asked myself: What’s the best way to tell these stories? What even is the story? How do we decide what gets told? Is there an underlying truth behind everyone, one that helps tell the story of that person? Or is it more complex than that?

 

Over the past several months, I’ve seen several variations of the question, “Do we live in a post-truth society?” and I believe the answer is no. In story, there are several truths. Sometimes they contradict each other, sometimes they feed into each other and sometimes one rises above the rest. Truth is not stagnant, I’ve learned; new stories shape it constantly. And truth is not prohibitive; no one truth rules out the others. No matter how society evolves, no matter how many times we wonder whether we live in a post-truth society, we will always need writers to get at these truths about people. Perhaps as we lament the devaluation of truth, we can remember that stories will always bring us back to the quest for truth. As I’ve practiced telling stories, interacting with people and learning about the human condition, I think I’ve improved at getting at the heart of this truth. In many cases that task is subjective. So it may well be impossible, and yet it is intriguing all the same. Perhaps in some cases we can never tell the full story, and yet there are so many smaller stories to be told: What is this person like at his/her best? What is this person like at his/her worst? What do I want people to know about this person that they don’t know already?

 

For four years, I’ve dealt with those questions at the Daily, by far the most influential part of my writing career. There I found an opportunity to put words on the page in ways I hadn’t before. There I found a space to write and try and fail and try again. There I found people who loved the same things I loved, and there I could be myself. In high school, I worked on my own — I’d drive to see games, I’d gather reporting and I’d write stories, and all the time I was in my own bubble. I loved it — I had the best high school experience I could have imagined — but I was doing my own thing.

 

The first time I stepped into the Daily, I found an entire newsroom full of people working toward the same goals I wanted to achieve. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I came in to hang out and ended up watching the entire NFL Opening Night game on TV and helping to write a teaser headline for that week’s football insert. I didn’t stop smiling for a long time. I haven’t been the same as a writer since then.

 

***

 

I think (and hope) that I’m a better writer this year than I was a year ago, a better writer a year ago than I was two years ago and so on. At the Daily, we’re fond of saying that we look back on the first stories we wrote and laugh, because we just get so much better. And that’s good — I believe you should look back at who you were a year before and see areas in which you could have been better, because those are the areas in which you have gotten better. I look back on myself last summer as an intern at The Baltimore Sun and can pick out ways in which I could have handled pretty much every work day better. I look back on two summers ago as an intern at USA TODAY and wonder why they hired me — that’s how much I’ve improved since then. The day I look back a year and can’t think of anything I’d do differently today, maybe it’s time to go try something else.

 

I do know this about that summer at USA TODAY, though, living in Washington and covering Major League Baseball. That was when I knew this was real. Perhaps before then I was just cruising along, unsure of what paths were open to me. That’s when I realized all of them were. I spent almost all of that summer in MLB clubhouses at Nationals Park and Camden Yards, working alongside journalists I’d only seen on TV or read in the newspaper previously. I took a seat in the front row of a press conference with Matt Williams and realized I belonged there. It’s a wonderful experience, getting to write knowing you belong. And it’s a wonderful experience, getting to write what you want to write, too. I learned that summer that when times are tough, baseball players like to keep perspective and remind themselves, “At the end of the day, we get to play a kid’s game for a living.” Well, I get to cover a kid’s game for a living, and I don’t want that feeling to end. I don’t take that for granted. When I do, maybe that, too, will be a time to try something else. Until then, I’m still here.

 

The next summer brought another lesson: It always helps to write where you’re comfortable. Only a handful of cities in the U.S. have what you’d call major newspapers; only a select number of those offer internships; still a select number of those are situated in the same market as another. I was fortunate enough to earn an internship in the same market for a second summer, heading back to the East Coast to work for The Sun. One of my first few days there, another baseball writer remembered that I had been there the summer before and asked, “So, do you have any family out here or anything?” The answer was no. I’ve lived my whole life in Michigan, where we grow cherries, play euchre and catch fish in fresh water. Yet when I headed back to Baltimore, I felt comfortable. The first time I started my car to drive to the ballpark, I did not need a GPS. In writing, as in life, I believe the importance of that cannot be overstated.

 

The newsroom in Baltimore is cool, but after 12 weeks I drove home for three more months in the coolest newsroom imaginable. This time, it had a different feel to it. As I started my fourth semester as a sports editor, I somehow felt even more a part of it. The Daily was changing Michigan, just like The Sun was changing Baltimore, and in even a small way, I contributed. That’s the most recent piece in a still-growing puzzle — I contributed. Sometimes I played a big role, and sometimes I played a small role. But there was always someone counting on me, and I write best when that’s the case. I walked into the Daily newsroom on Nov. 8, 2016, ready to contribute to a newspaper that we hoped would change the world. The top sports stories that day were Wilton Speight’s improvement as Michigan’s starting quarterback and the football team’s struggles defending the edge rushing game. The top news story was the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes, and watching it unfold was surreal. The edge rushing defense meant almost nothing. The two sports pages I designed made small contributions. But they were something. As trivial as it was, I helped. For the rest of the night, I sat on a couch in the back and watched the newsroom put together news of Donald Trump’s victory, and the feeling of having contributed became the most significant part of writing for me.

 

Perhaps, back when I called myself a sports reporter, that night wouldn’t have appealed to me. Perhaps I would have edited the story about the edge rushing, placed it on the page and gone home. But I’m really happy I didn’t. In that personal essay two years ago, I wrote, “I’ve watched sports — and life — differently, finally realizing the impact on the human condition that they have.” Two years later, after all of the changes I’ve gone through, that statement holds even more truth.

 

Now, I’m still nowhere as experienced in dealing with human experiences as I will hopefully be one day. As a certain football coach I cover likes to say, “Trying to be better today than I was yesterday, better tomorrow than I was today. So simple, it just might work.” I’ll know more tomorrow than I do today, and that will make me a better writer in itself. And, as always, I’ll have a story to tell.