Episode 504: Seth Wickersham and the Macbethian Tragedy of the American Quarterback

"You're constantly asking lean, open, neutral questions that start broad and then narrow, and you're asking more lean, open, neutral questions based on their answers. When you do that, it tells the subjects that you're actually listening to them very intensely, and you're asking questions based on the things that they say. And that accelerates trust and intimacy, I think, in a better way than kind of betting on your personality," says Seth Wickersham, the bestselling author of American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback and an ESPN.com senior writer.

Seth Wickersham is back. He is an ESPN.com senior writer, investigative reporter, the NYT best-selling author of It’s Better to Be Feared and, most recently, his best selling American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback, it’s published by Hyperion.

We had a tight window to get this interview done. It was 30 minutes and after the edit it was closer to 25. He was gassed. I think he did this as a favor since I’d been on his ass since July about this book. Well, mainly on his publicists’ asses, then I had to go over their heads. Sidebar: sometimes I think tight interviews are GREAT. Tony the Tiger level great. You can’t cover quite as much ground and get into the granularity of certain things, but there’s still so many great takeaways from this episode even though it’s half as long as the usual. Seth talks about:

• Getting to the heart of the matter
• Interviewing vs. conversations, and how he bristles at the “conversation” angle
• Establishing trust
• Writing out questions, but being OK with deviating
• How doing all this book promotion is just pennies in the bank
• His relationship to quarterbacking
• How he vetted the main quarterbacks he featured in American Kings
• And how the quarterback is a vector for American ambition

Seth is one of the good guys. You can’t say that about everyone. He’s a heavy hitter, he’s steady in the pocket, and his eyes are always downfield.

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Show notes: brendanomeara.com