No Trash, Just Talk
Olympic dad and Sports Illustrated writer Pat Forde on putting fandom in its place.
“You guys don’t have a chance against Herschel Walker. He’s going to destroy you. There’s no way Penn State is going to win.”
As 1982 came to a close, I heard a version of this taunt every day from my 4th-grade classmate Timmy. And every night at dinner, I reported Timmy’s transgressions to my father, who had grown up an hour from Penn State and drove my sister and me from our home in West Virginia to football games in State College every fall.
This was no time to let Timmy’s provocation stand; the Nittany Lions were to play future failed Senate candidate and Heisman Trophy winner Walker and his Georgia Bulldogs for the national championship on New Year’s Day. If they won, Penn State would claim its first title in 96 years of fielding a team.
Night after night, Dad, who had tickets to the game in New Orleans, looked up from his plate of chipped beef on toast or corned beef with cabbage and offered the same strategy for dealing with my 9-year-old classmate.
“Just tell him about No. 25,” he instructed.
No. 25 was Curt Warner: All-American running back for Penn State, West Virginia native, and still my all-time favorite college football player.1
Easy for you to say, I thought.
I had gathered plenty of knowledge through my father’s Football as a Second Language program—a minimum of four hours in front of the television every Saturday and Sunday in the fall, plus Monday nights as necessary. But I was still the kid who refused to come to the phone when classmates called and who blushed like a Sedona sunset when singled out in class.
I didn’t find my groove until I attended a local event honoring Warner sometime after he had outrun and outscored Herschel Walker in the Lions’ win over Georgia. As we waited to meet the newly minted champion, Dad grinned conspiratorially, motioned for a huddle, and called a daring audible.
The next school day, I strode up to Timmy and plunked a small piece of paper on his desk like I was spiking a football in the end zone.
To Timmy: Best Wishes! Curt Warner #25
“You’re welcome,” I said emphatically, my nose upturned. And then I dashed back to my desk, pink all over but newly emboldened. Timmy looked over and nodded in respect. I nodded back.
And a trash-talker was born.
Sort of.
OK, yes: That was mild even for the analog antiquity of 1983. But the incivility that prevails today on air and in social media would have made both Timmy and me blush down to our snow boots.
Now, fans send threatening messages to athletes who don’t cover the spread, storm the Olympic pitch when they disagree with an outcome, and delight in determining who can be the most clever and most offensive person on the internet using the least number of characters. And like so much else in the scream-o-sphere in which we have been living, the vitriol can be exhausting.
For Pat Forde, it comes with the territory of covering the games people play. Sizable collegiate fan bases in the United States believe the Sports Illustrated columnist despises them, their parents, and probably their 2nd-grade teachers because he once published that thing critical of their coach. His inbox is a popular destination for mail from aggrieved readers—perhaps some of them from fans of my alma mater, North Carolina.
But (and please don’t pelt me with popcorn) I think of Forde as a guy who once took time to mentor a journalism student.
In the fall of 1993, I met Forde in the N.C. State basketball office, which was not a place I frequented as a UNC student. He was there to interview the Wolfpack men’s head coach, Les Robinson, for The (Louisville) Courier-Journal. I was there to talk to Robinson, who hailed from my hometown, for my feature writing class.
Obviously, Forde and I were not on the same level. But he did a graceful job of making me feel like we were, handing me his business card and suggesting we exchange our Robinson stories when they were completed. He was the first sportswriter with whom I shared my work, and he penned a note in response encouraging me to pursue a career in writing.
Forde went on to work at ESPN and Yahoo! Sports before landing at SI in 2019. But perhaps his most intriguing—and nerve-wracking—role came in 2021 when he covered his daughter Brooke’s nail-biting quest to make the U.S. Olympic swimming team after she tested positive for COVID. (She earned a spot on the 4 x 200 meter freestyle relay team, which won silver at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.)
In early July, before Forde headed to the Paris Olympics, he spoke about what he’s learned from being the father of an Olympian and a “hanger-on” in his family of elite swimmers, and what we can all learn about civility and sportsmanship from the athletes we love to watch.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Everyone in your family has a history as an elite competitive swimmer.
Well, except me, yes.
Right! Your wife, Tricia, swam at Northwestern, your sons at Missouri and Georgia, and your daughter at Stanford and for the U.S. in the Tokyo games. Did that affect your perspective as a journalist who covers college sports?
I’m probably more empathetic toward college athletes than I once was. Just because you see firsthand the work that goes into it and the struggle that can go with it, the constant attempt at balancing being a serious student with being a serious athlete. I’d probably gotten a little bit jaded, thinking about athletes as jersey numbers. But it opens your eyes when you have kids of your own competing. No. 88 is a person who is probably trying to pass a chemistry class while trying to do well in their sport.
What have you learned from being a spectator or a fan rather than a guy with a deadline?
It was really, really fun watching them compete. It was nerve-wracking at times, especially as the stakes got higher, but it was just such a joy to see your kids perform at a high level and just to go be a part of that as their dad, really.
I mean, some of the other parents of swimmers would joke about it, that I’ve approached [my kids’] swim meets from an analytical standpoint. I wanted a heat sheet and I wanted to write down everybody’s times, and I would tell everybody, “OK, your kid is in heat five, lane four,” etc. I channeled my nervous energy that way. “Your son just dropped two seconds in that event!” I turned the nerves into stats, facts, and figures. But I sure enjoyed cheering, and I have a loud voice. I was a loud person.
Well, that’s the fun of getting out of the press box.
Yeah, exactly.
I am fascinated by what we all need from sports as fans and where that need comes from. Watching football with my dad—and later, every other sport—gave me a language and confidence to communicate with people outside of my family I didn’t otherwise have. But it was also a way to connect with him. Everything and everyone he liked, I liked also.
No doubt about it. When I was growing up in my family, one of the great bonding agents was the Denver Broncos, watching them and living and dying with them. I grew up in Colorado, so that was the team. And with my own kids, I would cover football games on Saturday and get an early flight home so I could be there in time for us to watch the Broncos together. I, of course, indoctrinated my children into being Broncos fans. They never had a choice.
Sure. As one does.
Right. And my sons and I still pick every NFL game every week. But then, too, we always talked about my kids’ athletics in the car, on the way home from practice, at the dinner table—sometimes too much. My daughter would say, '“We’re not going to talk about swimming tonight at dinner.” Sports are absolutely a framework for connecting in our family.
In our house in the 80s, our teams also became yardsticks for morality.
Yep. Oh, sure.
The Sandusky scandal at Penn State hit me like a death in the family for many reasons—and of course, my alma mater had its academic scandal in the early 2010s, also. Do fans still need to feel good about who their team is? Have you noticed any change in that over the years?
Oh, that’s such a good insight, and I think the answer is yes and no. There’s absolutely a percentage of the fans that still want to believe that their school does things the right way and is full of high character and values and that the other schools probably are not their rivals in character. But I will say, as college athletics has become more and more semi-professional sports, there’s been a degree of cynicism that’s crept in, just that we don’t care anymore. We just want to win. And maybe that’s not as much cynicism as reality. It’s like there are no white knights; there are no ivory towers.
Certainly, your example, Penn State, was one of the most shocking, you know, defrockings of a person and a program in history. It just seemed incomprehensible as the details of abuse were coming out. And somewhere between that scandal and now, when everybody finally acknowledged that everyone was cheating—at least under the old NCAA rules—a harder-earned cynicism came along. It’s very hard to get on your high horse in college sports because there’s probably something going on that you wouldn’t necessarily be proud of. It doesn’t mean you can no longer be a fan of your program when something goes wrong, but you have to factor it through a prism of reality.
And maybe this is where we talk about whether we, myself included, invest too much of ourselves in our sports loyalties.
A hundred percent. My livelihood largely depends on people who invest too much of their time in sports—but there’s no doubt about it: When it becomes everything to you, when it’s no longer just a meaningful distraction, that’s probably not good for your well-being. The interesting dynamic of all this is how much the media becomes a lightning rod. “You hate our team.” No, I don’t care about your team. It’s a little bit of a vanity play by a fan message board: “The national media hates us.”
We take our partisanship with us into everything now. Partisan politics, partisan fandom, and there’s definitely a degree of, “My side is right, and your side is wrong,” that plays into sports. The discourse has gotten more harsh and more aggressive. Social media obviously exacerbates it just like it does politics or any social issue. If you want to read some more about that, I would recommend a recent series of columns in The Washington Post by my friend Jerry Brewer called “Grievance Games.”
How do we return it to a kind of equilibrium, to a “meaningful distraction?”
How much of yourself are you still going to invest while keeping perspective?
The athletes have that perspective, right? You go to something like the Olympic trials in swimming … only the top two make the team in each race. There is genuine empathy from the top two for the person who’s third, who’s fourth, who worked their ass off to get there and didn’t make it. One of the best parts of my job is going to a college campus or the Olympics and interviewing these extraordinary young people. It’s a reminder that these people are very smart, very driven, and also very appreciative of where they are. They have a great understanding and respect for each other and the amount of work it took to get to where they are.
Do the Olympics suffer from the division around us, or do they still have the power to bring us together?
It’s a good question. I do think the Olympics still have the ability to bring our little warring national tribes together to root for the same team. I love the scenes that you see from a sports bar when the United States wins a gold medal or wins a World Cup game, everybody erupting for the same team. And there’s definitely a myopic element sometimes, the idea that the U.S. can do no wrong, that China’s evil and Russia’s cheating and that sort of thing, that probably gets oversimplified. But it is still a time for us to all get on the same team and enjoy this. ♣
NEXT WEEK: The Athletic’s Editor-at-Large Leon Carter on going places no one like you has gone before—and returning to the land that inspired you.
Warner’s post-football life caring for autistic twin sons is so worth your attention.