Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 9)

Oxford resident and ESPN Magazine senior writer Wright Thompson shares 14 essays (chosen from years of examining the inner lives of sports figures) in his new book The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business.

But Thompson doesn’t just “cover sports.” His is more a literary style that frames the athletes he writes about in a light most have never seen cast on these figures: the struggles, the hopes, the disappointments, and oftentimes the personal failures of men and women who know firsthand the high cost required to make it to the top – and attempt to stay there. Included are the stories of Michael Jordan, Bear Bryant, Ted Williams, and others who know the pain and joy of success in sports at its highest levels. Thompson ends the book with a memoir of his late father and his personal longings to honor his dad’s memory.

The Clarksdale native began writing about sports for his hometown newspaper while in high school, and he went on to the University of Missouri in Columbia to study journalism. Wright would write for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans and The Kansas City Star (where he covered Super Bowls, Final Fours, The Masters and the Kentucky Derby) before joining the ESPN staff in 2006.

Tell me about how you became interested in sports and sports writing, especially “literary” sports writing.

Wright Thompson

I became interested in sports because both my mother, Mary, and my father, Walter, loved sports; they both loved football and my mom is obsessed with basketball. For her last big milestone birthday, I took her to games one through four of the NBA Finals.

I became interested in literature because my mother was an English and creative writing teacher and because I grew up in a house filled with books. We had a room in our house we called the library because it was floor to ceiling bookshelves, and I lived on those shelves. I read Dylan Thomas and Thomas Merton and C.S. Lewis and Willie Morris and on and on and on. My working life started in that front room with the great light through the old glass windows.

The Cost of These Dreams is a compilation of 14 essays you’ve written during your career with ESPN Magazine. Please tell me how the book came about, and why.

The short answer is that I wanted to see how these separate pieces, often separated by years, fit together. The long answer has to do with money and ego. Let’s go with the short answer!

You’ve seen firsthand how fame has affected well-known athletes. What do believe is the biggest challenge they face as their popularity grows?

I would say that whether someone is famous (or not) has basically no bearing on their interior life, on their hopes and dreams, while their fame is the single most important and difficult-to- navigate part of their exterior life. This almost inevitably leads to a growing chasm between how they see themselves and how they are seen, and the real risk then is to avoid, as John Updike said, the mask eating the face.

You make an interesting statement in the book’s preface when you say you are using its platform to make a “public vow. . .  that (you) will learn from the people (you are) writing about.” Please explain why it was important for you to announce that to your readers.

The main thing I wanted the preface to do was explain how these stories fit together, and what the journey of making them felt like from the inside. I get to spend a lot of time up close and personal with the most driven, successful people on the planet, and I see which of their decisions they are content with, and which ones haunt them; there is no excuse if I am not going to school on their successes and failures.

The last story in the book (titled “Holy Ground”) is an homage to your father and your relationship with him. Tell us about this piece.

It’s a story about my late father, Walter Thompson, from Bentonia. The specifics of the story are about our shared love of watching golf and my regrets over not understanding that time is limited and fleeting and slipping through our fingers every day.

I go to Bentonia sometimes, to see the house where he grew up, and visit the White Front; recently I walked the old football field where he used to play, which is now abandoned, and I tried to imagine a young man there, with his family in the stands, and standing on that grass I wondered what of that young man remains in this place and what lives inside me and what is gone forever. That’s what the story is about. That search.

Briefly, tell me about the thought-provoking title of your book.

It’s a lyric from a Drive-By Truckers song I really like, one that has always moved me more than the collection of words suggested it should. I don’t know why it hit me like that. To me, the title is about the shared price everyone who wants something desperately and at the expense of other things in their life will pay for that dream, should they be one of the rare lucky few to actually reach it.

Wright Thompson will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, June 18, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss The Cost of These Dreams.

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