Tim Cato - The Athletic - Dallas, USA

2020-11-29

We prowl the halls of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team in the capable hands of Tim Cato (@tim_cato), a staff writer with The Athletic. Tim got into sports reporting as a 17-year-old fan, but now he’s seen too much and the fandom has melted away. Still, he loves his job reporting on the huge characters, power dynamics and colorful feature stories the NBA has to provide - even finding what’s interesting about banal sports cliches and taking a trip to Slovenia. Publications featured: SB Nation, Mavs Moneyball, The Ath...

Publications featured: SB Nation, Mavs Moneyball, The Athletic

Countries featured: USA, Slovenia

Tim discusses getting into sports reporting at 17 as a way to go to basketball games (5:44), the strange internet beast that is/was SB Nation (10:19), going from exploited free labor to staffer at SB Nation (16:17), The Athletic making a splash on the national sports scene (23:24), a breakdown of what it’s really like reporting on a basketball team (27:19), cliche sports questions and answers (31:10), losing his sports fandom (40:14), the larger-than-life Mark Cuban (47:56), telling the story of Mavericks star Luka Dončić by going to Slovenia (55:17), and the lightning round (1:01:32).

Here are links to some of the things we talked about:

Mavs Moneyball (yes it still exists) - https://bit.ly/3lecEcw

SB Nation - https://bit.ly/39igQWa

Tim’s story on cliche questions and answers - https://bit.ly/3fCQ9wk

A clip of Mark Cuban on a StairMaster - https://bit.ly/3l6xR7W

Tim’s story from Slovenia - https://bit.ly/364rXQA

D Magazine - https://bit.ly/39fYi8Y

Texas Monthly’s “What if they had an election and everyone came?” - https://bit.ly/3m7yoYH

Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money - https://amzn.to/3682GF7

Baxter Holmes’ stories via Longform.org - https://bit.ly/33gaEKq

Sam Anderson’s book Boom Town - https://amzn.to/33gaOBw

Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast - https://apple.co/3fMKhB7