This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

For how small the soccer writing community is here in the United States, there is quite a lot of them. The creation of the Soccer Reporters spelled that out for me crystal clear. Goes to show just how big the United States is. Also goes to show once you start talking to some of them how incredibly few work exclusively on soccer.

Varied careers involving an international sport often creates a unique experience–Hey even Wilbon wants to be one. Now say your other job focusing largely on covering the next biggest international stage after the World Cup. You might have something to say about why sport is special and what we’ve lost along the way.

After speaking with USA Today’s Beau Dure, I found out he is just such a man…

A little biography if you please, starting from the beginning.

I’ve been working on a way to try and say it in concise USA Today style, but I don’t think I have it because as with a lot of people in this business it’s been a long and winding road. I was born in 1970. I grew up in Athens, Georgia, which isn’t exactly a hotbed of soccer. I was on one of the first Athens youth teams to beat an Atlanta team and win a division title. And that was my last season of organized soccer as I foolishly ran cross country and track in high school instead of playing soccer, which is my biggest regret from high school along with not having a girlfriend. So I didn’t have that much exposure to the game growing up. As everyone my age did I watched Soccer made in Germany with Toby Charles. I was enough of a fan that when I was at summer camp I got my mom to clip out the standings of the World Cup everyday and send them to me. its funny to think about how arcane that seems today, where kids have blackberries at summer camp following it in real time, and here I am getting it three days later, keeping track in a little notebook about how West Germany is doing and so forth. That was how I followed the 1982 World Cup.

I never did get to an Atlanta Chiefs game. I knew they were around, but they weren’t around that long, and we just never got to a game.

What did your parents do to have you guys in Athens. I know there is not much industry there besides the school (the University of Georgia).

It was the school. My dad was a bio chemist at UGA for more than 40 years. And my mom met him while she was working in the communications/PR area at the university. I was definitely a university kid, grew up in a college town. So it was a little more diverse than a lot of areas of Georgia. Perhaps that helped my soccer exposure a little bit, but again, not too much.

Then when I went off college at Duke, it was after they had just won a national soccer championship. So I went to a lot of those games, creating my first real fan experience. I followed that team; and the women’s team started while I was there. I wrote about them a little bit. In fact to my embarrassment the only correction attributed to me at the Chronicle during my time there was on a column I wrote ripping the men’s soccer team to shreds after a disappointing loss to Davidson when their direct style just did not work, but I inadvertently transposed the notes off of someone else’s notebook. I misattributed a quote and got something else wrong. It was horrible, really embarrassing. I graduated in 1991, and like a couple people you have interviewed wound up a copy editor.

Did you study journalism or communications at Duke?

Nope; they didn’t have a journalism program. They added some later on, so when I went to grad school in Liberal Studies at Duke, which I did over the course of the 90’s and finished in 2000, I did an independent study on the objectivity in American journalism and a masters thesis—still available on-line—on the changing roles of journalists in new media, working under a great professor named Susan Tifft, who has written a few wonderful newspaper histories.

So I was a philosophy and music major. To this day I don’t believe anybody in the philosophy department knew my name, but I think a few people in the music department are very disappointed I didn’t end up conducting the concert band at Southwest Missouri State or something like that. There were actually some people who thought I would be PDQ Bach, who was sort of the Weird Al Yankovik of classical music. I was famous in one class for writing a Mozart parody.

A piano player then I am guessing?

A little bit. I’m more of a rock n roll guy than a classical guy, which seemed to irritate them slightly in the department. So I tended to noodle around on my guitar a little more than I practiced piano. And also switched to percussion. I gave a senior recital in that, which was fun because the vibraphone broke halfway between one of my songs.

in his sanctuary

So I wound up a copy editor in Wilmington, North Carolina which was just down the coast. I basically weaseled my way into doing some writing. That included covering some high school and college soccer at UNC-Wilmington. I previewed the 1994 World Cup. And I wrote a column about Major League Soccer in 1994. I still have the press kit from 1994, a fascinating historical document.

I can only imagine.

Yeah, they talked about soccer specific stadiums and the possibility of using bigger goals. It’s interesting stuff. It talks about all the USISL experimentation because at that time everything still seemed up in the air about what they were going to do. People who complained about the shoot-out have no idea what else could have happened. But it was good to have that because I actually just finished and turned into an agent a history of Major League Soccer, so if anyone is interested in publishing it, let me know.

From Wilmington I went to Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1994, again on the copy desk at the News and Record. I didn’t much else with soccer until 1996, when the paper’s website went fulltime and I moved to that staff and took charge of sports production. At the time I was going to as many Carolina Dynamo games as I could. At the time I thought Yari Allnutt was the best soccer player on the planet. Looking back it was probably low-quality soccer. There were some guys who were just thugs. There was Scott Schweitzer who is now the coach of the Railhawks pretending that someone had slugged him and throwing himself down on the ground. It was hysterical stuff. I now laugh when people ask why the Railhawks are not a more offensively-oriented team. I think: look at your coach.

So my soccer duties at that time were updating the Dynamo section of our website and not much else. I did a 1998 World Cup preview.

In 1998 moved up to Northern Virginia without a job because I was engaged. I wrote a freelance piece on Eddie Pope, which was my first time having any interaction with a real life soccer player. I eventually worked for the wire service Knight Ridder/Tribune and essentially was bored and asked if I could start writing a soccer column. I did MLS power rankings, which ran I think only in the Fort Wayne, Indiana, newspaper. I have no idea why. I just wrote a few pieces here and there that were picked up by various papers, so when I came to USA Today in late 1999 to run the chats and message boards, I asked if I could continue to write a soccer column and they said yeah, sure, whatever. I don’t anyone on the staff would have noticed if I had or hadn’t. But I did and got enough of a reputation doing that when Peter Brewington went to Sydney for the Olympics, the paper let me cover MLS in his absence. After the Olympics, because the Olympic online editor was relieved of his duties, I took that job and was in charge of online Olympic and soccer coverage from 2000 to 2004, maybe a little beyond. That is when the Netminder column came about.

Over the last few years I cut back my hours a little bit when my kids were born and now I’m back up to full time. I finally gave up the column because I felt like I ran out of time and had some sense I felt I had exhausted everything I had to say for a weekly column. I figured I could focus more on coming up with features for the paper. Last year I started writing a weekly MLS piece for the paper and this year I’m doing much more, trying to do both print and on-line. We started a blog that doesn’t really look like a blog right now because its in a design that isn’t ideally suited for a reporters blog – that may change soon. That in a sense is the Netminder 2.0. And that’s where I am now. Today I’m in charge of our on-line coverage of soccer, high school sports, boxing, horse racing, action sports, mixed martial arts.

We didn’t talk about it, but Beau’s wife went to UNC. Here he is at Duke with the first-born. poor kid.

How close are the print and online editions of USA Today?

They are getting closer; they’ve gradually converged the staffs, first in name only, and then with actual bodies getting moved around. Bylines from on-line writers are showing up more and more in the print edition. For me, I joke that I have two jobs. I still have a lot of online responsibilities, but I’m also writing more. Today for example (May 21st) I have three items in the paper with my name on them. I also sometimes fix technical issues with the website. I almost went the techy route with my career. And I’m happy I can keep a hand in that without forgetting how to write.

You really are doing more than one job.

That’s one thing that is quite different between print and online. I will choose photos, run them through Photoshop, write stories, help design a webpage. To me it doesn’t seem that strange because when you are at a smaller paper like I was in Wilmington, that is normal to have your hands in different areas.

How well does the website do for USA Today?

The last I heard we were making money. We’re doing fairly well traffic-wise. I don’t think I’m giving anything away here. If you look at the public figures, we generally rank 2nd among on-line newspapers behind the New York Times. Sometimes we go back and forth with the Washington Post for numbers 2 and 3. How that spills over to various sections is hard to say. To be honest I’m disappointed sometimes when I see we have good soccer coverage that doesn’t get picked up. But when we have big stories, particularly with World Cups, our coverage does very well for us. We sort of have the stereotypical ‘big event’ audience on the site.

I was curious about that because I feel like USA Today—what it is known for—reflects to the web very well. I see its print edition as sort of the web-as-print-edition of the newspapers, if that makes any sense. That style just seems to fit with the idea of the web more so than say the old gray lady.

Yeah, it is. It is sort of strange that the New York Times has done so well. I often feel—and this will irritate a lot of people in the journalism world—I feel like we have done more specific online content than the New York Times over the years, especially in sports, where we have had a lot of online only columns, photo galleries, graphics, and that sort of thing. Whereas the Times have been able to do quite a lot relying on its stories, its basic content of the newspaper. But it just shows there is an audience for what the Times does. As someone who grew up loving newspapers I think that is a very good thing.

In some respect it is tough for us because the newspaper is still successful—you can see we are bucking the trend on circulation, and granted that is because of ubiquity. It’s funny, I wonder if the New York Times is hurt because of its circulation is going on-line. You used to have to make an effort to pick up a New York Times, maybe out of your way, to get the newspaper, and now you can just it online. But USA Today, you can barely walk five steps out your hotel door without being hit by one. Which is great. The Times has its audience, which is sort of the intellectual take on what’s going on in the world. The Wall Street Journal has its niche, and they are still doing well circulation wise –we will see what happens with the Murdoch transition of course. And the Washington Post has its niche covering the capital and has distinctive voices in its sports section, and it has always taken soccer very seriously, which is good for them. For us, it’s a bit of a challenge to carve out a space online because in a sense we have to almost compete more with the TV networks because people have sort of always thought of us as TV-in-print, so that means online we could very easily be stacked up with CNN or MSNBC instead of the Times and the Post. And that is difficult because they will always have more access to video than we do. They can plug there website every five minutes on their cable networks and so forth. But I think we have done well by sticking with what the brand is good at, which is a good quick read on the news, which transfers very well to blogs, and it is entertaining, so some things have been very successful. One example is our Life department blogs, such as the Pop Candy blog with Whitney Matheson, which is staggering popular. We also do celebrity breaking news well. I think that is popular because we don’t insult your intelligence with guilty pleasures, and I think there is an audience for that. People make fun of us for that. Certainly there have been many condescending words written about USA Today over the years within journalism circles. So you see those words and then five years later you see a lot of those newspapers doing what we were doing five years ago.

That’s basically what I was thinking about when trying to explain the online-before-there-was-the-web newspaper idea.

Yeah, its funny to see the Washington Post how they sprang ahead of us by turning over a large portion of their print sport section to kind of snarky, 20-something blogger types. They are the ones who turned Dan Steinberg loose on the world, not us, not that that is a bad thing at all. So in a sense for all that we’ve been teased by traditional journalists about our approach to things, the Washington Post is now doing a lot of the things you would have expected USA Today to do instead.

That’s true. Big questions for newspapers heading forward. Its fun to watch. Turning to soccer, your writing is mostly objective, even on the website, so I’m curious to pick your brain on some topical MLS issues. One example, you wrote today about the streamer debate, but didn’t chime in? care to now?

I agree with Ives and Andrea Canales that they are all well and good until they hold up a game for 20, 30 seconds or a minute while a guy tries to pick his way out of a bunch of paper. Its especially funny when Toronto is trailing. They need a goal, it’s the 85th minute and they happily provide that nice one-minute delay. The ref certainly cant bring out the yellow card for a player when he can justifiably say I cant take the corner kick right now. So save them for other times. The corner kick thing is getting old.

What’s the soccer story you have always wanted to write, but haven’t had the opportunity to, for whatever reasons?

I’d like to travel a little bit more. This is embarrassing: I have not been to the Home Depot Center. And I feel that I should.

I’m sorry, you’re still based in Virginia?

Yes, so I’ve been to the stadiums close by. I went to Arrowhead years ago. I’ve been to Gillette and the Meadowlands, but not the Home Depot Center. So I regret that. But at the same time I like that I don’t have to travel with two kids at home, my wife’s a lawyer.

So if you wanted to go to HDC, and had an angle on a story, would USA Today send you? Goff is the obvious one who does have a travel budget, but I know lots of newspapers have basically no travel budgets anymore, especially for soccer.

Yeah, that’s pretty much true for us. That’s just the state of the industry now. Goff is in a very very lucky position to be first of all in a city that has… all three newspapers that have Washington in the title take soccer very seriously. You have John Hayden at the times Craig Stouffer over at the Examiner who both cover DC United in depth. And Goff has worked for two sports editors who of their own volition—I think George Solomon respected soccer and Emilio Garcia-Ruiz obviously loves the game, and so he is in a unique position. I don’t know who else has that kind of travel budget. You have I suppose the two of the deans of soccer writing, Michael Lewis and Grahame Jones have certainly traveled some in their day but I don’t think they go out on the road as much as Goff does to cover an MLS game.

I am going to the Olympics. I will be there the whole and should be covering some soccer. I’ not sure if it will all men’s and some women’s or a little bit of both; I don’t know if I’ll go to all the games of just a few. I do know I will be in the media center doing some of what I did in Torino which was sitting in front of a bank of televisions and logging. Which I love that in the sense that it was my idea to do that, perhaps the best contribution I had as the Olympics editor. I went to Salt Lake and sat and sent instant messages and stuff to people back in Tyson Corner, Virginia, telling them what was going on. It occurred to me that we really should have this out on the site, so in Athens we did that, even though I didn’t go to Athens because my kid had just been born. It did very well there and in Torino. Its like live blogging, but its really modeled after what the BBC or the Guardian would do. Probably not as esoterically witty as the Guardian would be but—in fact I actually did get a little bit of a smack down in the office during the World Cup linking too often tot he Guardian. People said ‘you know our readers don’t really care what an English newspaper has to say about this.’ I said, but its so funny. I would love to get comments like that to. You end up with people making reference to Franco-Prussian conflicts or something like that that you just aren’t going to get on our website. We’re more likely to get a comment that says: ‘I don’t think Beckham’s wife can sing.’ But that’s ok and it is still fun to do that job.

You know the Olympics is other event that I love. While I like the duties I have now, it’s a little sad that I don’t have as much responsibility with the Olympics as I used to. I love international sports. One of the great things about being in Torino is that we watched all of these things on Eurosport, seeing all the eclectic things they focused on. For some reason they are obsessed with Ski Jumping, but they also showed Biathlon and Eurosport’s Biathlon coverage is just out of this world. And I remember when the Italian ice dancers whose names I wont get right were skating very well toward the end of their second dance I believe and he dropped her. At the end of the program they finished up with smiles and then she whirled around and just looked at him. For about 30-45 seconds she just stared daggers at him. It was a fascinating moment as it was, but the Eurosport commentators I thought were going to freak out and start breaking things. There is no way I could possibly recreate it, but it was just absolutely wonderful television.

So I love the Olympics. I’ve soured a little bit on sports that are confined to America. I’m still an NFL fan but the international aspect of the Olympics is just wonderful. I can kind of no longer buy the mythology that surrounds a lot of American sports.

The NFL for me was the first to go. I can’t really watch NFL games on TV. Its just too slow, all the commercials. Even my hometown Falcons games which I used to religiously watch can barely hold me (enter Falcons being shitty joke here).

I grew up watching the Atlanta Braves probably on TV all the time.

The Superstation baby! (oh that’s right. screw them.)

Yeah, just like a lot of southern families did. I grew up listening to Skip Carey, who was a guest at the dinner table just about every night. But I’ve really soured on baseball because in part because the mythology around it about how they invented Abner Doubleday to sort of obscure the fact that they were essentially boring a couple of old English games. And how it has really become shrouded in what I would call patriotic propaganda almost.

I love the Braves more than any sports team and watch nearly every game. But the patriotism, especially the up tick following 9/11 drives me crazy. It’s so wrong on so many levels.

You can use all of this by the way; its nothing I haven’t said in public before. I wrote a column a couple of years ago saying that baseball should keep its hands off of RFK and of course what has happened instead is Washington has spent an awful lot of money on a baseball stadium because Major League Baseball kept threatening: “hey maybe we wont bring them there after all.” And now all of a sudden they seem to be having trouble coming up with the infrastructure for a soccer stadium.

And oh by the way nobody goes to National games.

Right. Right. So perhaps it is not my place to comment on D.C. politics; I’m not a D.C. tax payer because I live out in the suburbs but you drive by Nationals Park on the way out to RFK and that can be a tough thing to swallow.

Thoughts on the coaching hot seats? I think soccer coaches have it tougher than any sport, what with the complexities of meshing a team that is turned over pretty frequently so far in MLS.

I waited outside the Houston locker room last year when they were 2-5-1, and they were very frustrated and nothing was going right for them and they didn’t have the excuse DC United has this year of not being able to gel, because they kept the same core of players. DC United on the other hand is still sort of introducing themselves. Its still too early to tell. I’ll go on record saying this: I think the idea of firing Tom Soehn at this stage is ridiculous. He’s got essentially a new team and given him essentially 8 games in which at times the play beautiful soccer but haven’t gotten results and then fire him. I think that would be premature to say the least.

And the rumor mongering has Arena as the replacement. He didn’t get very long in New York. I don’t think the sensitive time it takes to build a soccer team is given enough credit.

I think Dan Loney pointed it out, looking at the MLS season so far, and I think it’s a good point. Which coaches have their teams playing the best right now? There is Sigi Schmid and Fernando Clavijo. Two guys who have spent the last several years in some cases under the radar—if they had been in higher pressure media markets—Sigi would not have had that much time in New York. Or Fernando in LA. But they gave them all that time and all of a sudden now Columbus has put together a pretty decent team, in part because they are finally healthy, and Colorado has been building up through its reserve team and now those teams look pretty competitive.

On a league-wide scale, are you feeling the trust them/sit and wait and see kind of guy with the present structure and laws and rules in MLS or is there a change you would like to see come ASAP?

Well the new collective bargaining agreement is going to be interesting. I think the only threat to MLS’s long-term stability right now would be if there is a labor stoppage. That is one thing all parties desperately need to avoid. I think the way things are going right now I think the players will be in a position to make a few demands and all the players I’ve talked to seem less concerned with how much money people are making at the high end and more concerned with the low end. They want to see the developmental salaries raised of course, and the low end of the senior salaries. There should be plenty of room in the budget to do that I would think. They also want to have more of an ability to test the free market but that might be trickier. That’s the big event looming on the horizon.

Lastly, you’ve gotten to write about a host of sports. What are your favorite stories?

The international sports. People’s backgrounds are always so interesting. I talked to someone who used to be a cross-country skier who had taken up the biathlon who was, like you, a geologist by training, and I actually found her thesis title online and asked her if that helped her prepare for biathlon and things like that. They are all fascinating people. In the sports world we tend to focus so much on the negative—this is gonna be a good way to end this interview because it will be a nice uplifting…

Tie it all together for me!

That’s right, as Turkey scores again which is depressing (the Turkey v USA U23 game was on Beau’s TV in the background) but we focus on the negative, we focus on the drug scandals, on the gambling scandals, on people who just don’t behave and are carrying guns and so forth, really within the big sports themselves there’s so much more interesting stuff to cover but when you broaden the look at the sports world, which is really not a new thing—if you look back at Wide World of Sports in the seventies, and what Sports Illustrated used to cover, there is such a wide world out there. There are so many interesting stories, so many interesting people, so many interesting ways of competing, and really so much out there from a cultural standpoint, that there is so much you can learn by watching and paying attention to sports from all over. There is a quote that I actually have on my Facebook page about how you can judge a civilization by the book of its deeds, the book of its words, and the book of its art. And all three are important but if you had to pick just one, you would pick the art because it’s the most honest expression of what is there. and I think music is art—obviously that is what I majored in. I still write a blog that is mostly about music. And I think sports is art, and so it is a great window into culture and that’s what excites me about it.
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banner photo of Tommie Smith winning the 200m at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. You might recognize him better from this photo, one of my all-time favorites in news photography. Photos from Spartacus Educational.