NotebookThe Awesome People Series / Entry 2: Rick Stewart
Last week, I started a new feature at brandonsneed.com: The Awesome People Series. My life doesn't happen without the help of a zillion other people. Most of these zillions of other people have taught me things or touched me in ways that I know you radical readers will really like reading about. So, read on!
Entry 1 was about Jeff Pearlman, the amazing, bestselling sports biographer and SI.com columnist who helped me as I worked on my book.
Today, I'm proud to present the second-ever BS.com Awesome Person.
Awesome Person No. 2: Rick Stewart
One of the best things about Rick: he's humble. So humble that I can't find a picture of him on the Internet to post with this entry.
[Photo - Heidi Sneed]UPDATE (10/12/10 @ 10:56 a.m.) My brilliant mother suggested I get a picture of him off Facebook. There you go!
Rick Stewart is an associate professor of journalism at Barton College, my alma mater. He’s also the owner and publisher of the Johnstonian News. Based in Kenly, NC, the JN publishes four weekly community newspapers, and in November 2007, Rick hired me as the sports editor for two of them.
I was just 20 years old. Oh, the insanity.
Rick's always possessed this unparalleled ability to believe in people. I met him when I was a senior in high school, on my tour of Barton College. Within ten minutes of talking, he’d offered me the sports editor job for The Collegiate, Barton's student newspaper.
I didn’t take him up on the offer until my sophomore year. For too many reasons to explain right now, college was in many ways a pretty horrible time for me. It was the kind of horrible that ultimately makes us better people, and I’m grateful for that, but we’ll talk about that some other time.
Fear paralyzed me in a lot of ways. But I could always find refuge in Rick’s classes, and in my work for The Collegiate, because I knew Rick believed in me as much as I wanted to.
Of course, what also made Rick so invaluable was another ability, the one all great editors have. It enabled him to deposit ink on paper in ways that would make Van Gogh jealous. Dude could edit.
And may the dear Lord have mercy on your soul, or at least may He hold back your tears, when you lazily let fiction slip in.
Yes sir, I had my hard times working under Rick, but they were the hard times we must all face if we really want to get better. Rick really, really wanted me to get better. He’s convinced that one day I’ll appear on the back page of Sports Illustrated, that I’ll have a bestselling book, that I’ll become one of the new faces of sports journalism. I’d like that, I think. But I’d never have taken the first few crucial steps that direction without Rick.
It’s easy for us to look at our lives now and think, “Man, if only I’d had this opportunity or that opportunity.” More than once, I’ve wondered how my career would have played out had I done what I thought I’d do after my freshman year of college: quit baseball at Barton, enroll at UNC-Chapel Hill, and tear up their journalism program. Oh, the contacts I would have made, I used to think. The things I would know. The people I would have met. The blah dee blah dee blah blah blah.
Ah, the lunacy of young, arrogant minds. The irony of what we think we want.
The Edge of Legend would have never been written had I left Barton. I have contacts in the industry now that I have because I’ve been working on this book. I really don’t know if I’d found all that had I left Barton.
There’s not a doubt in my mind now that I’m living a dream. Like Ant, it’s not the dream I thought I was chasing. But it’s a dream nonetheless, and I found it because of Rick. When I started out with The Collegiate, I had a propensity for long-windedness, but Rick struck an amazing balance of indulgence and criticism. He didn’t shackle me, but he showed me my wordy wastefulness. That made me confident, and ultimately led to “The Brandon Issue,” the issue after Barton won the national basketball championship in 2007, the issue in which I wrote virtually every story, had my ink covering about every page.
The beautiful, wonderful irony of all that was that those stories were, for the first time in my life, in my mind, about something other than me. I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but honestly, to that point, I’d written because I liked how good I believed I was at it. That issue, however, I worked harder than ever to write well because of how good the story was.
Had Rick not coached me along, helped me find my way, I’d have never become the boy who could write those stories. I doubt I could have become the man who wrote the book that story inspired.
Rick helped me find that my passion wasn't really to write because I was good at writing. He helped me find that I really loved to unearth, explore, and share others’ stories.
Rick helped me find myself.
Reader Comments (1)
Really cool thoughts. Sounds like God used Rick Stewart to change your dream into His dream! Like your comment about "the irony of what we think we want". Wish there were more teachers like Rick out there. This was a very, very rich blog in so many ways. Thanks for sharing the thoughts.