STF Q&A: Luke Winn of Sports Illustraded

Every now and then, we love to do Q & A's with some people who know much, much, more about college basketball than we do. Today, we have Luke Winn of SI.com and author of the best NCAA Tournament blog out there. Yeah seriously, a major media site with a funny and insight blog. Enjoy!


Q&A with Luke Winn of SI.com


STF: You're one of only a handful of Q&A participants that we can't find any kind of bio on, kinda making you college basketball's man of mystery. How did you get into college hoops and how did you get to SI?

LW: That shroud of mystery is unintentional, but there may be benefits to it. I could claim to have arrived at SI far more interesting fashion than I actually did. (Say, by going AWOL from USS Winston S. Churchill during Manhattan Fleet Week in 2002, showing up at the Time-Life Building on 50th and 6th, and begging for any kind of job. SI's response was to agree to let me check some facts and go on Arby's runs for Stewart Mandel -- and that was the end of my career as a Naval ensign, and the beginning of my life as a journalist.)

In truth, I took a pretty standard route: While I was a sophomore at Northwestern, I landed an internship with the Web site (then CNNSI.com), and got an offer to come back for a real job a few months after I graduated from Medill in '02. Stew Mandel was actually the one who interviewed me for the internship; he was only three years out of NU at the time, and had scored some kind of free trip back to his old stomping grounds to screen applicants.

I owe a lot of what I'm doing now to Stew: I took his old job as SI.com's college football (and part-time college hoops) editor when he first became a columnist, and worked with him for four seasons, learning a lot of stuff from how he covered the sport. Eventually I got the chance to jump into this college hoops writing role that's very similar to what he does on the football side. I'm not sure if The Wire term "rabbi" -- which isn't used in a religious context on the show, but rather a mentor-type thing -- applies to the situation, but it's something along those lines. And then when I started writing things for the magazine in 2004-05, their hoops duo of Seth Davis and Grant Wahl was immensely helpful in bringing me along, helping with sources, advice, etc. You hear horror stories about younger writers at papers getting held back or brushed off, but nothing like that happened to me.

As for getting into college hoops, this is the sport that I've ALWAYS wanted to write about. My dad played D-III hoops and was a basketball junkie who took me to a lot of Wisconsin games at the old Fieldhouse when I was a kid. That got me hooked on Big Ten hoops. In 1994, when the Badgers made the big dance for the first time since what I think was the peach-basket era, he took me out of J.F. Luther Middle School so we could go to Ogden, Utah, and see the first- and second-round games at Weber State. That may have been the most worthwhile academic absence ever: I fell in love with the NCAA tournament, and even filed a ridiculous, rambling account of the experience for our small-town paper, which was kind enough to print it in some form. I also stole one of those giant white scorer's-table signs (sorry, NCAA!) out of the arena and put it up in the basement of our house. After that I was always the kid running the small-time tourney pools (sorry again, NCAA!) at school.

Someone outside the business asked me last week if I aimed to "move up" to covering the NBA at some point, and I got all exasperated trying to explain how I would consider that a major demotion.


STF: You've got an excellent Q&A feature on your SI blog, interviewing some of the biggest stars in college hoops. Now that you're on the other end of this Q&A thing, what's it like talking to some big names mid-season? Favorite interview?

LW: I got the inspiration for the Q&As by reading all of the old Paris Review discussions with writers, and realizing that a well-edited, thoughtful interview could stand on its own as good piece of journalism. I know that a Q&A with even the most loquacious college player isn't going to come close to what the PR gets out of Saul Bellow, but it's fun at least trying to get these kids to open up. For the most part, they're willing to play along with questions that aren't necessarily all about basketball. Sam Young from Pitt for one, was a great interview who was into the concept. There have also been a couple of times where I chose not to run one of the Q&As if it wasn't good enough. I tried to do one this week, actually, with a certain star freshman who had zero interest in engaging in conversation ... and that one will never see the light of day.


STF: One job that I would never want in life is to be the writer of a major media power poll. Whatever you put down, you are pissing off 95% of fans. What does the inbox look like the day after the Power Rankings are released and what fans are the harshest?

LW: The mail isn't pretty, because the angriest people are always the ones most motivated to write. Ideally you'd like it to be a bunch of fans/students suggesting nuggets or links for future Power Rankings blurbs, or sending in a thoughtful comment. Those are my favorite folks, the kindred spirits. The reality, though, is that they represent only about three percent of the overall letters.

The rest of the people are just plain pissed. Some don't grasp that the content is intentionally esoteric as a result of my boredom with what's in normal game stories. There will be dudes who, for example, find it unconscionable that an entire section would be devoted to discussion of Barack Obama t-shirts rather than analysis of a recent big victory. Most of the others are just upset about their team being excluded. I tend to spend so much time searching for nuggets that I inevitably slight some school in the "cusp" section ... and I always get bombarded for it. I guess the tradeoff is acceptable: In order to have this job that you truly enjoy, you have to weather daily blows to your self-esteem that come from the mailbag.


STF: Favorite fashion statement in the Style Archive (An idea I'm completly jealous of) this season?

LW: I am partial to three entries. The mustache UC-Santa Barbara's Nedim Pajevic was sporting earlier this season was truly amazing, but I've received reports that he shaved it (it's hard to catch a UCSB game on TV these days).


I applaud the audacity of UCLA's Russell Westbrook to rock the flaming mohawk while playing under a Ben Howland regime. And Bob Huggins one-upped every coach in the country with that golden, pimp-style suit he wore against Cincinnati. When I sit around and envision my dream wedding -- and really, what unmarried 27-year-old male doesn't spend a lot of time dwelling on that topic? -- I am always wearing a suit just like that one.


STF: You've been to just about every major college basketball arena in the country. Can you just give us some of your favorite destinations in college basketball?


LW: The famed Fieldhouses -- Allen, at Kansas, and Hinkle, at Butler -- are the two buildings that really feel like basketball cathedrals when you step inside. Hinkle is probably my favorite gym in the country, and not just because of the Hoosiers connection. It's so untainted by modernism that there's nothing else like it, nothing quite as beautiful anywhere else in the country. I've only been there once, for the Butler-Southern Illinois game last year, and I spent about 30 minutes just pacing around the upper track earlier in the day, soaking it all in. I'm not compelled to do that at most places.

I've only been doing this for three years now, but in terms of atmosphere, the crowd at Illinois' Assembly Hall during the Illini's '04-05 run was amazing in terms of both spirit and decibel level. I'm not sure if I've seen anything to equal that over the past few years. But I've yet to cover a Duke-UNC game at Cameron ... and someone told me those can get rather loud.

STF: We loved the Tourney Blog last season. But even as much as we would love to cover as much college basketball as possible, I imagine there must be some drawbacks to the non-stop blogging over the month of March. What are the pros and cons of blogging for basically a month straight while traveling the country? Also, will we see Tourney blog again this season?


LW: The Tourney Blog, thankfully, got green-lighted for a third season. I obviously didn't invent the concept of sports blogging -- I'm not going to act like Al Gore with the Internet here -- but I'm pretty sure that, when it began, it was the first instance of a mainstream media outlet exclusively committing a traveling reporter to blogging the NCAA tournament. The editors at SI.com -- Paul Fichtenbaum and Adam Levine at the start, and now B.J. Schecter and Bobby Clay as well -- have been cool enough to let it happen, and I think it's been worthwhile. I love writing it, and last year we had something like 2.4 million readers on the blog alone, which was a big jump from '05-06. And the Blog Pool, in which I have consistently embarrassed myself, keeps growing as well.

Writing it for a month straight is taxing -- on your health, on your nerves, on your relationship. I don't know what you can do about the sleep-deprivation part. The best you can hope for on the relationship front is that your significant other will be understanding, and my girlfriend has been particularly good about that. While I'm on the road, she bides her time by heckling me about how she's out-picking my bracket, and then when the thing is finally over in April, we take a good vacation.

I guess I look at the prolonged bout of work as a necessary thing. I mean, if you're going to cover hoops, you have to bring it in March, right?


Check out Luke and the Tourney Blog at SI.com.