MITCH INC.

BY DANTE CHINNI

 

Mitch Albom is typing. He is listening to a conference call, head down, and pecking away at the keyboard. Detroit's hockey team, the Red Wings, are announcing whether sixty-seven-year-old head coach Scotty Bowman will be back for another year behind the bench. He will be. Bowman's contract discussions have become something of an annual ritual in Detroit over the past few years, big news in this sports-happy town.

That's why Mitch Albom is on it. Albom is the lead sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press and really the lead sports columnist for the city of Detroit, maybe the country. Again this year, for the thirteenth time in his fifteen-year Free Press career, the Associated Press sports editors named Albom the nation's top sports columnist. No one else has won the award more than once.

Albom is working, on this day, not in the newsroom or at a desk, but in the back seat of a black Lincoln Town Car, talking into a headset and taking notes on his laptop. After twenty minutes of this, he's done. He leans back and waits for his driver to open his door, then emerges, ready for his lunch date.

This is not exactly typical sportswriter style, as some of his lesser-known colleagues have noted. But Albom is not a typical sportswriter or a typical anything, for that matter. His 1997 book Tuesdays With Morrie, which has been on The New York Times best seller list for nearly four years, put him in a league of his own. He has a novel in the works. He is host of The Mitch Albom Show, a syndicated radio program heard on radio stations five days a week and simulcast on MSNBC. And, of course, he still writes for the Free Press, at a salary that makes him the highest-paid writer at the paper.

It's enough to make one wonder what exactly Mitch Albom is, what category he falls into. "Communicator," he says bluntly. "That's all. I get asked that all the time and for me it's never as hard as the questioners seem to want to make it. If this was dentistry and rodeo riding I could understand. But I'm talking about a lot of things that I'm writing about and I'm writing about a lot of things that I think about. For me it's sort of one job with a lot of tentacles."

Naturally, given such success, he has his critics, including a few in the newsroom. Some of them point out that the primary lesson of Tuesdays, subtitled An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson, is that there is more to life than work, a lesson that is hard to see illustrated in Albom's tightly drawn schedule.

A journalistic star system is associated more with New York or Washington than Detroit, but in Albom it may have its most perfect model. In the age of synergy, Albom is about as multimedia as one can get -- a one-man corporation with footholds in print, radio, television, and the Internet (www.albom.com). "A lot of people like to talk about convergence," says the Free Press's publisher, Heath Meriwether. "Mitch Albom is convergence."
 
Albom's rise through the ranks of journalism was part happenstance, part talent, and more than a little drive. After graduating in 1979 from Brandeis, where he met his now-famous sociology teacher, Morrie Schwartz, Albom wandered in pursuit of a musical career. In his heart a piano player, he drifted across the Atlantic to Greece, where he played jazz and sang some American rock and roll at a resort before returning to America. But in New York City he found a less than receptive audience for his music. He turned to another favorite pursuit, writing, and began cranking out stories for a free weekly, the Queens Tribune, for the princely sum of nothing.

Sportswriting was never a goal. The Tribune experience led Albom to Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in journalism. To help pay for his education Albom picked up a job off the J-school job board at Sport magazine, where he did research and wrote front-of-the-book pieces. At Sport, he suggested a story on a young track star he had competed against in high school in south Jersey named Carl Lewis. Albom interviewed Lewis, the story became a feature, and a sportswriting career was born. Albom's time at Sport landed him four or five good clips, which he tried to use to free-lance on other subjects. But "I would go to an airline magazine and I would send them my clips and they would say, 'Okay, here's a story' and it would be another sports story," Albom says. "And that would be another clip. So here I was with a basket of sports clips."

After school, he answered a blind ad in Editor & Publisher for a job he really wanted, Sunday magazine writer. But the editors at the paper, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, said what they liked about Albom was his sportswriting. They offered him a job as a sports columnist, and Albom headed for Florida.

In 1985, after a few years in Fort Lauderdale and a promotion to lead columnist, the Free Press and The Detroit News came calling. Albom picked the Free Press and settled into the columnist position that opened up when Mike Downey, Free Press star, left for the Los Angeles Times. Albom's style was more terse than his predecessor's and, while he didn't have the same comic touch, his ability to humanize sports, writing about personalities and personal struggles, won him a large following. In three years Albom had surpassed Downey in popularity with readers. A collection of his columns, Live Albom, hit the shelves. "He had an immediate impact," says David Robinson, deputy managing editor for sports at the Free Press. "He just had this knack of putting things in perspective and getting the tale others didn't."

He also had drive, usually producing four or five columns a week. In 1988, when the Los Angeles Lakers met the Detroit Pistons in the National Basketball Association championship, the Los Angeles Times and the Free Press worked together; each ran the lead sports columns of both papers. "It was Mitch versus Downey and everyone was going to compare them," Robinson says. On the first night, "Downey filed his column first, and it was hilarious. I mean it was great and we were all reading it. A half-hour later Mitch filed and he says, 'Has Mike filed yet?' And I tell him, 'Yeah, it was pretty funny.' I read him the whole column, and there was silence. I mean he didn't react at all. And then at the end he says, 'I think I'm going to change mine for the next edition."

Albom steadily became busier and bigger -- winning AP awards, writing books about the local sports scene, appearing on radio and television. But his life really changed when the Detroit newspaper strike began in 1995. Albom stayed out of the paper for a few months, but his relatively quick return was condemned by the strikers, some of whom wound up picketing his house. The column Albom wrote upon his return did little to smooth ruffled feathers. "Enough," he wrote. "Newspapers are fire stations, they are police stations, and they should not be shut down." Strikers thought Albom was acting holier than thou. And relations between Albom and the union remain testy. While he recently paid back dues he owed through May, Albom fell behind again in the summer.

Whatever pains the strike caused Albom, it also produced one massive opportunity. It was in the early days of the strike that Albom began spending Tuesdays with Morrie Schwartz, who was dying from ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. The visits became the substance of Tuesdays With Morrie, a book originally planned to sell to help pay the ailing professor's medical bills. Tuesdays has sold more than three million copies worldwide. Schwartz died in late 1995.

The book is basically a conversation between the two, with Schwartz imparting important life lessons to his former student. "Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness," Morrie says in one chapter. "I can tell you, as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have." Tuesdays made Albom something akin to the Kahlil Gibran of disease and spirituality, quoted all over the Internet as a source of inspiration. He now gives about thirty speeches a year, some for charity, many for about $30,000 a pop, according to one speaker's bureau. The book lifted him into the ranks of celebrity writer. After Tuesdays Dave Barry invited Albom to join the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band that counts Amy Tan and Stephen King among its players. And the book has allowed him to finally move beyond sports and into mainstream, popular writing.

Tuesdays includes more than a few passages in which Albom bemoans the state of his life. "I had developed my own culture. Work," he writes. "Over the years, I had taken labor as my companion and that moved everything else to the side." Of course, Tuesdays launched Albom into a whole new level of work.
"It's hard having your behavior judged by Morrie," Albom says over lunch, his hands moving in measured gestures. "Sometimes I'll say something on the radio or I'll say something in the newspaper or I'll be critical of something or I'll be funny, which is the way I've always been, and people say, 'Morrie wouldn't approve of that.'"
 
Mitch Albom is a compact man -- short, but well-built -- with a boyish face and a mop of black hair. He also has one of the prerequisites for TV success, a large, newsanchor-sized head. And though he shuffles around in a relaxed manner he is still a presence. When he speaks to you, you tend to nod your head in agreement. There is a sort of common-sense certainty to his cadence, as if he's simply affirming something you already know. His head bobs on accented words and his face is constantly twisting into some expressive pose. He punctuates his sentences with "dis's" and "dat's," and he's full of folksy, ready-made quotes. "It's good to bite the hand that educated you every once in a while," or, "The only difference between cities is traffic patterns."

His speech mirrors his writing style, particularly his columns. The prototypical Albom column usually has a refrain, a thought or line that he keeps going back to. He also relies on sentence fragments for effect, so much so that Albom's columns sometime feel like the work of David Mamet, Journalist. Here, for example, from Albom's column about newspapers from May 6 on the Free Press's 170th birthday:
 
Sure. They have changed names. Changed owners. Changed technology. (You can now get a newspaper 'delivered' in cyberspace, a concept that still throws me.) But essentially, the product remains the same. Something happens. Someone writes it down. Someone prints it. And you read it. Not tricky. Not complex.
 
Albom employs this style not only on sports but on whatever he pleases, and with great success. His general-interest column is syndicated and more popular than his sports copy, which tends to be more Detroit-specific. Beyond the columns Albom writes an annual "dreams deferred" series for the Free Press -- much longer, in-depth pieces about shattered lives in the Detroit area. The pieces are heavily reported and full of scene, but Albom's distinctive style carries through. So, too, with the radio show, which began in 1996 on Detroit station WJR and went national in 1999.

Most of it is Mitch talking about the issues of the day and Mitch doing interviews, with the TV version adding pictures of Web sites and video clips. Unlike MSNBC's other TV/radio show, Imus in the Morning, which largely thrives on Don Imus's bad-boy humor and interviews with big guests, Albom is more of a voice for the common man's outrage. The general tone is "What's wrong with the court system?" or "What's wrong with the government?" or "What's wrong with politics?" In fact on one particular Thursday in June, he managed to touch on all those issues, before interviewing the Wayans brothers about their new film Scary Movie 2.

Sometimes the common-man tone stretches the bounds of credibility. On that same show Albom interviewed the Philadelphia 76ers' president, Pat Croce, and complimented him on his apparel (Croce is known to be the hippest management guy in sports). When Croce thanked Mitch and credited Versace for his wardrobe, Albom said, "That's what it is, Versace. I knew I hadn't seen shirts like that and that's why. I can't afford it." But Albom could surely buy a closet full.

This year, Albom wrote a television pilot for CBS that was to be an hour-long drama exploring the "battles between newspapers and television as they fight for stories and audience." CBS wound up passing, but if it had accepted, Albom technically would have been in the employ of all three major networks, since his radio show airs on ABC radio networks and is simulcast on NBC's twenty-four-hour news channel.

As if all this weren't enough, Albom recently signed a deal with Hyperion for two books, a novel and a non-fiction work, that is in the $5 million range.
"You know, I'm not that old a guy," Albom says. "A lot of people misread Tuesdays and think the point is to quit all your jobs and move to an ashram and chant. That's not Morrie and that's not me. The point is to have perspective on what you're doing and be wise about how you spend your time, but not just, you know, contemplate your belly button all day long."

As might be expected, Albom's commitment to the Free Press is not what it once was. He usually produces two sports columns a week, along with the syndicated general column on Sunday. In many ways he's now bigger than the paper that built him up. "I don't know if they'd agree with that," he says smiling. "To the newspaper people, I'm always the guy they hired to be their columnist."

Meriwether, the Free Press's publisher, acknowledges Albom has grown larger than the paper. "That's almost without a doubt at this point. It's impossible to calculate what it means to have the world's greatest sports columnist. I don't even try to calculate what he means to the paper."

Those kinds of words don't go over all that well in the newsroom, where competitiveness reigns, and where some view Albom as a prima donna. In fact, it was difficult to find co-workers who would go on the record about Albom. One writer not only refused to talk, but also refused to suggest anyone else to talk to. Most simply refused to reply to e-mails and phone calls. Another simply said, "Mitch's success has been great. It's a shame that he has no one in the newsroom to share it with." One former colleague recalls that his first meeting with Albom was at a game where fans lined up to get Mitch's autograph. "His number one priority is being Mitch," he said. "He's a TV guy trapped in a writer's body."

And then there is MitchWatch, an anonymous weekly e-mail that began in January as a sort of anti-Mitch information clearinghouse started by somebody out in cyberspace. The missives, which ended in May, basically trafficked in nasty gossip about Albom and were all anonymous and often inane -- Mitch slighted a waitress, Mitch was rude, and so forth. One section, MitchCount, dealt specifically with the charge that Albom doesn't write enough for the Free Press anymore. It kept track of the number of columns he's written, and presented them as a percentage of the number of days in the year.

Albom seems unsettled by MitchWatch: "I think that's a pretty sick person who has to spend his time doing something like that. And that's all I have to say about that." But he continues, "Ask the Free Press what my obligation is and if I'm fulfilling it. As far as resentment -- is the newsroom a jealous place? Absolutely. Newsrooms are jealous places if your story's on the front page. So you can imagine if people perceive me to be successful in other fields, there's a lot of 'Who does he think he is?' 'What's he trying to do?' I stay in newspapers because I love what I do and then I get all this criticism. I don't have to stay at the newspaper. I do it because I like it."

Robinson, the Free Press deputy managing editor for sports, says the paper does largely get what it wants from Albom. "Sometimes we don't get it right away," Robinson says. "If it comes up at the end of the day and he's got his radio show the piece might wait for the next edition. But if it's an important issue we're generally going to get it." And publisher Meriwether says Albom gives the paper what they've agreed upon and more. "In a perfect world would he be in the paper more? Yes. But given who Mitch is, we're happy to have him as much as we do. We're comfortable as the place Mitch began and the place where he still has a role."

Meriwether admits Albom's success and special relationship with the paper sometimes cause problems in the newsroom. That's to be expected, he says, in any place "full of egomaniacs. We try to treat everyone equally, but do special talents get special treatment sometimes? Of course they do. But does everyone want to be Mitch? I think everyone here knows what that would mean. It's beyond the scope of mere mortals."

Albom says he realizes that the success he had with Tuesdays can create some hard feelings. And he says he knows it was almost certainly a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

He expects to write more books, but not exclusively. "I have a lot of friends who are full-time authors. They work for two years. They're working and then it's waiting. Waiting waiting waiting. And then the book comes out and in two weeks they know if it's good or not and then they go back in their hole for two more years. That's not for me," he says. "I like to see it in the paper the next day." *
 
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Dante Chinni writes for The Christian Science Monitor and is a consultant to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.