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Freedom is leaving competitive swimming to pursue another dream. Freedom is free will. Freedom is an unincorporated community of about 200 people straddling the Wyoming-Idaho line.
For a collection of seven articles published last week, the New York Times sports bureau presented writers and editors with an opportunity: search for that word, freedom. Interpret it broadly. Come back with a story idea. Then limit yourself to 900 words.
Jonathan Abrams writes on Dry flood, a center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s, and his fight for control of the team he played with. Charles McNair recounted his short period as coach of a soccer team of Saudi players in the Great South. In this case, freedom was the chance to flee the field.
The staggered package is part of the sports bureau’s periodic efforts to break the relentless pace of the digital news cycle, said Mike Wilson, associate sports editor. Every two weeks, editors, writers, and visual journalists meet to talk about the craft and unleash story ideas. The office had decided that the quieter part of the summer between the Olympics and the NFL season would be a good time to post something different. And a theme seemed to justify itself.
“The more we trained – the pandemic was on people’s minds – our writers were limited in where they could go,” Wilson said. “What is freedom for an athlete? What is freedom for someone who doesn’t have it?
The first person to pitch an idea was Randy Archibold, the sports editor of The Times. Before joining the office as editor, Mr. Archibold was a journalist, working as an office manager in Mexico City and as a national correspondent before that. He said it was important for editors to work as reporters, “to go out into the field with an empty notebook.”
“We have to remember this terror: are you going to understand the story or not? We ask our journalists to go through this all the time, ”he said.
In a sweltering boxing hall on Long Island, Mr. Archibold found Brian Jimenez, a 13-year-old who was learning to take a punch the hard way. There was freedom in there.
David Chen is an investigative journalist whose articles are often two or three times the 900-word limit Mr. Wilson gave to writers and editors on this project. He, like Mr. Archibold, remembered well the parts of his report that he had to cut.
The word count “doesn’t let you bring in a lot of superfluous characters or a lot of backstory,” Wilson said. “It really allows you to focus on the theme. “
In Mr. Chen’s article, freedom is the ability to step away from a sport. He remembered a teenager on the New Jersey swimming circuit, where his daughter competed, who used to break records. Other swimming parents have referred to the young man, Vinny Marciano, as a prodigy destined for the Olympics. But then he stopped the competition.
“It always stuck in my head – where did he go?” Mr. Chen said.
So he found Mr Marciano, now 20, and found someone at peace with his decision. give up swimming to continue bouldering, a form of climbing. Soon, Mr. Chen was on Shawangunk Ridge in New York City, watching Mr. Marciano solve climbing problems on the area’s famous quartz conglomerate walls.
Mr Wilson recalled an idea from another assistant sports editor, Oskar Garcia: There are a lot of places appointed Freedom, you know. Soon Kim Cross, a freelance writer based in Boise, Idaho, who had worked with Mr. Wilson at the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) in Florida, would be a five-hour drive east to Freedom, Wyo. Ms Cross and photographer Ryan Dorgan are planning to meet a family raising three boys on an old ranch and camping in the backyard. They have found freedom in the boys’ creative uses for a soccer ball and are swimming in the cold waters of Jackknife Creek.
In the collection, readers will not find final scores or penalty flags. There are no referees or playoff games. Only people who try to play by their own rules.
“Reading these before they were published, I never thought for a minute this is not a sports story,” Archibold said.
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