Fatherhood inspires sportswriter to tackle young adult fiction
Mike Lupica has done almost everything a sportswriter can do. He has written a newspaper column for more than 40 years, co-written books with sports legends Reggie Jackson and Bill Parcells, and hosted a television sports show. But kids know Lupica as the author of more than 25 sports books for young readers, including such best-selling titles as "Travel Team," "Heat" and "QB 1."
I talked to Lupica last week before he spoke to a roomful of fans at the Chevy Chase Library in Maryland.
KidsPost: Did you play sports as a kid?
Mike Lupica: I played baseball, basketball, one year of football and ran cross-country. But my best sport was probably golf.
KP: How did you get into sportswriting?
ML: I tell kids my journalism school was that I wrote for three school newspapers when I was at Boston College. I also wrote articles for the Boston Globe and Boston Phoenix (newspapers).
After college, I went to New York, and a week later I was covering the New York Knicks (basketball team).
KP: What did you learn as a kid that helps you as a sportswriter?
ML: All I ever wanted to do was to write. So when I was 10 years old, I was writing mysteries and adventures with me as the main character. In high school, I wrote columns of one-liners that are similar to my "Shooting From the Lip" columns now.
KP: Why did you start writing sports books for kids?
ML: I had no plans to write for kids. Then my son got cut from a basketball travel team. Two days later, I was telling (National Basketball Association) Coach Jeff Van Gundy about my son. He said, "If this was a movie, you would take all the kids who got cut, make your own team, and they would win the big game."
So I took all the kids who had been cut, hired a coach and became the general manager of a rogue travel team.
KP: How did the team do?
ML: They got better. In the last game, they beat a team that had crushed them at the beginning of the season. They had been knocked down, but they got up.
But I couldn't let go of the story of the team. The story became "Travel Team," my first book for kids. It sold 500,000 copies and changed my life as a writer.
KP: Your latest book — "Lone Stars" — is about concussions and brain injuries in football. Why did you write about that?
— The book is my way to get in on the conversation parents and kids are having about football. The book is not preachy; it just lays things out. Clay's mother is an important character. She is a football fan, but she is also a mom.
KP: What do you want kids to get out of your books?
ML: The solid foundations of any childhood: friendship and loyalty. If you are not a good friend and teammate, you are going to have trouble in my books.