Writing Boots

Despite some of my writings lately, I am really not interested in becoming some kind of anti-youth-sports nag, you’ll be relieved to know.

But the conversations about my book Soccer Dad continue—at an upcoming appearance at the Printers Row Literary Festival in Chicago, two more in Ohio, a gathering of parents at a big suburban school district, a book club on Zoom and various long-form podcast interviews. And like it or not, I’m being asked for my philosophy about all youth sports, beyond the intimate one-family story I tell in the book.

I’m being asked by other parents: What are we doing?

An unlikely but maybe important insight came from recently rereading Women With and Without, a 42-year-old novel by my mother Carol Murray, now 36 years dead. I think one page begins to answer a question about why so many parents are willing to spend so much time and money (and sacrifice so many other ways to spend family time together) in support of so many kids whose sports talents are unlikely to get take them anywhere great.

My mother’s main character plays piano—well enough to have had a single performance at Carnegie Hall, which she considered a failure. In the book, she wonders why her parents supported her singleminded pursuit.

Is that it for some of us, travel sports parents? I mean, as much as we enjoy drinking our cocktails out of red plastic cups in the lobbies of Hampton Inns and eating at Panera Bread 100 times a year …

Is it that, while we know our kids probably won’t achieve real sports glory, and that their sporting adventures won’t begin to compensate financially or spiritually for the Total Commitment our families have made to this madness—we also can’t think of anything more exciting, fulfilling or lasting to steer them toward?

We think or we know that they’re going to end up as beauticians—or far worse, as unhappy corporate drones—and we’re so depressed by that thought, that we’re willing to spend tens of thousands on lottery tickets and moments of happy anticipation that our sports numbers might come in.

My family’s numbers did come in, with a Division I scholarship. A vast majority’s numbers don’t. Meanwhile, my wife and I actually did enjoy a lot of the experience of travel soccer, Hampton Inns and Paneras notwithstanding. And had my daughter not played college soccer, I’d still have a lot of happy memories of tournaments. As I wrote in an account of one such tournament, in Soccer Dad, when my daughter was about 13:

It isn’t long before the parents are back in the Radisson lobby, drinking again.

What are we drinking for, beyond relieving the awkwardness of meeting quirky grown-ups for the first time, none of whom will ever divulge the real reason they’re here? (Division I scholarships dance in our heads.)

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink.

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink in hotel lobbies.

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink in hotel lobbies out of Solo cups.

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink in hotel lobbies out of Solo cups with people you know you’ll only ever know casually. (It feels like college, in the dorms.)

And we’re drinking because we are all sad—and we all know we share this deep and deepening grief, though it’s rarely spoken directly—that our little girls aren’t our little girls anymore.

I wonder if we’re also drinking because we worry that, not just for us, but also for our children, growing up at this moment in America: We can’t think of anything better for them to do, or to strive for. It seems to me that some sports parents ought to take a week off the travel soccer circuit to do some more imaginative dreaming, for our kids. And the sooner the better.

Here was the first story in yesterday’s Executive Communication Report—to which you should subscribe because unlike most things in this world it, is both useful and free.

Several readers asked what I think about this. I went back as I usually do to a Fortune piece I wrote three and a half years ago in which I concluded about AI-generated leadership communication: “A leader who understands communication knows that audiences will sense the absence of a living person from the process and turn away in vague disappointment.” How many leaders really care about that? “I’ve wondered that for a long time,” I wrote. “And it looks like we’re all about to find out.”

That’s going to work itself out case by case, over many years—in human writers’ favor, I believe. Or after I am dead, I hope.

But in this particular case, AI isn’t actually the main problem: A guarded author and a lazy editor are. See, Druckenmiller was Scott Bessent’s mentor, apparently, and so he had a potentially human point of view that the WSJ should have wanted and a reader would have appreciated—and that would have been impossible for AI to render properly in any case. Except I’ve read the turgid Druckenmiller piece three times and it’s either a massive missed opportunity or a gross disclosure violation or both: It doesn’t even mention Druckenmiller’s relationship with Bessent, which apparently was close when they both worked for George Soros years ago.

Any decent ghostwriter would have urged Druckenmiller to bring humanity and extra authority to the piece by at least acknowledging the personal connection with Bessent. And WSJ editor Paul Gigot was surely ethically and editorially negligent in letting this piece pass without forcing Druckenmiller to disclose their onetime bond. Which would have made the piece more compelling and honest both.

Authors who truly want to communicate for max impact and editors who want to publish the finest and most credible writing they can find for the human readers will do the work themselves, or find human helpers who can. Those who don’t, won’t. (It was always thus.)

P.S. A colleague who works at MIT points out that the editorial operation at their Admissions office apparently holds itself to a higher editorial standard than The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page:

“Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all blogs on the MIT Admissions website are written without the use of generative AI/language models. We view the blogs as a relationship between our bloggers and you, our human readers. The bloggers show our respect for that relationship by writing in their own voice and sharing their own perspective, without being filtered or rearticulated by generative AI, so that you can get to know some MIT students for real, and share a little bit in their subjective and lived experience.”

No, Gigot?

***

UPDATE: In the WSJ, Paul Gigot writes a detailed defense. He says that in the newsroom, “The rule is that everything my colleagues and I write must be original work. No letting AI draft a column or editorial. Our readers need to know we’re not subcontracting our ideas or prose to the amalgamation of a machine.”

But it’s more complicated for guest columnists because they “aren’t professional writers, yet they can provide value for readers owing to their expertise and standing in public life.”

Many contributors, especially prominent politicians or CEOs, employ speechwriters or hire a Beltway writing shop. How different is that from using AI to streamline an essay? 

What matters is the ultimate argument the author makes and stands behind. In the case of Mr. Druckenmiller, his views on the bond market and U.S. fiscal incontinence are worth listening to. The press corps wants me to disavow Mr. Druckenmiller, though his views on financial markets have been formed by decades of experience.

First, Druckenmiller didn’t say he used AI to “streamline” an essay, he said he used it to write the essay. But how different is using a speechwriter to compose an op-ed from using AI? Depends on how you use the speechwriter. If it’s the old “write down my ideas as if I had them” routine—not much different, maybe. If it’s the kind of thoughtful, creative back-and-forth that led John Kennedy to call his speechwriter Ted Sorensen “my intellectual blood bank”—well, then I’d say it’s a lot different. And if it’s in between, it’s in between.

Again: The core problem here wasn’t the AI. The problem was a piece that could have been more compelling and candid if humans had involved themselves—in the writing, and in the editing. Instead, Druckenmiller used AI to crap it out, and it sounds like Gigot ran the crap, straight.

Nobody appreciates some good etymology like my old pal Tony Judge, and when I was recently able to remind him of the original meaning of “offing,” I couldn’t have been more pleased. “Layoffs are in the offing,” the modern phrase goes. The offing originally meant the part of the ocean you can see from land. So that, for the wife of a fisherman long out to sea, it mattered a lot when she learned her husband’s ship was in the offing. (Where, in the old sailing days, it might remain for a day or more, depending on the wind.)

[Alzheimer’s wasn’t a common term when I grew up. When an old person displayed confusion—we had a demented and angry neighbor at our lake house—my dad would say only, “He has hardening of the arteries.” A term we’ve mostly forgotten, because we have hardening of the arteries.]

And the other day in traffic on my motorcycle on the Eisenhower Expressway, I switched lanes one more time than I probably needed to, and scolded myself for being—and everyone who took driver’s ed around the time I did, 50 years ago, knows exactly what I’m about to write—a “jackrabbit lane-changer.”

Boy, that was the worst thing to be. (Aside from one of the mangled corpses in the gory accident photos they showed us enough of that driver’s ed movies started to feel like snuff films.) Nobody liked a jackrabbit lane-changer.

Until at some point, somebody realized that 96 percent of student drivers had never actually seen a jackrabbit, and so wouldn’t understand the reference any more than most of us get the original meanings of a million terms from our agricultural past like “make hay while the sun shines.”

Once my very young daughter got impatient with some instructions I was giving her and she said, “Dad, this isn’t my first rodeo.” And then paused and said, “Wait. What is a rodeo?”

And so on, and so forth.