I asked Ron Rapoport for some perspective on his excellent story about Ernie Banks in Chicago Magazine. He reveals another side of the public happy-go-lucky Mr. Cub as an elderly man who often was lonely and even tormented by his demons.

Often, fans don’t like to have anyone tinker with the image of their heroes. And they don’t come any bigger than Banks in Chicago.

Here’s Rapoport:

*******

I did a short piece about Ernie for a web site in Los Angeles when he died and was surprised at how much attention it got.

Thinking things over, I realized there was more to the story and thought people might be interested. I didn’t really stop to think about whether people would not want to see Ernie portrayed this way and as it turned out, the response has been unanimously positive. Nobody has bawled me out for tampering with their memories of Ernie.

I think we’ve entered an age where we understand celebrities in general and athletes in particular are not one-dimensional heroes but rather fallible human beings.

I think it’s possible to know the truth about Ernie and still love him.

EPIX has an interesting documentary that premiere tonight on the other side of drug testing. The film shows how innocent athletes have had their careers derailed because of faulty testing procedures.

The official release from EPIX:

Premium TV network EPIX® announced today that its newest one-hour Original Documentary Doped: The Dirty Side of Sports, which offersa timely and critical look at the history of anti-doping policies in professional sports, will premiere Wednesday, September 30 at 8PM ET/PT, 7C. The film is executive produced by Bobby Valentine (former MLB Manager, current athletic director of Sacred Heart University), produced and directed by Andrew J. Muscato (“Schooled: The Price of College Sports,” Checkmates) and narrated by Nick Kroll (“Kroll Show,” “The League”). Select Participants are available for media interviews.

The documentary features the inspiring first-hand accounts of athletes who claim their professional careers have been unfairly impacted by ineffective drug testing or intrusive testing protocols. Interviewed are record-setting 2015 World Championship bronze medalist and 2016 United States Olympic sprint sensation Tori Bowie, track coach Philippe DeRosier, former boxing champion Paulie Malignaggi and shot put champion Adam Nelson, who claimed his rightfully-earned 2004 Olympics gold medal after a retroactive testing of his Ukrainian competitor confirmed the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Doped: The Dirty Side of Sports presents the many controversies and conflicts surrounding anti-doping policies and implementation along with archival and vérité footage that tell the story of a system that has trouble catching the cheaters. The film also reveals more about what the MLB Commissioner did and did not know about the steroid scandal in baseball through the first-ever public interview with former MLB investigator Ed Dominguez.

“EPIX strives to present relevant and thought-provoking programming that not only entertains but also informs,” said Mark S. Greenberg, EPIX President and CEO. “The topic of doping is a hot-button issue that continues to spark pointed conversation throughout the sports universe. This documentary offers a compelling look at the efforts to create fairness in testing, while shedding light on the surprising personal stories of everyday athletes.”

Doped: The Dirty Side of Sports also includes conversations with current and former representatives of WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) and USADA (U.S. Anti-Doping Agency) as well as Victor Conte (former BALCO CEO), Armond Armstead (former USC Football player), David Epstein (bestselling author, The Sports Gene), David Howman (WADA Director General), Dick Pound (former WADA President), DeMaurice Smith (Executive Director, NFL Players Association), Renee Anne Shirley (former Executive Director, Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission), ESPN’s T.J. Quinn, Vice’s Patrick Hruby, noted boxing writer Thomas Hauser and many others.

“The policies used in sports for the war on performance enhancing drugs overreach and underperform,” said Andrew J. Muscato, Producer and Director of the documentary. “Amazingly clean athletes are not only being harmed by these rules, but they have no say in how to improve what’s clearly a broken system. In order for a global gold standard to truly work, athletes should be a bigger part of the process and that is how we can get to a better and more amicable solution for all. This is a big issue we discuss in the film.”

Clickbait, the often provocative posts/ads at the end of a story, are the standard for the vast majority of Internet sites, from ESPN.com to many newspaper sites.

However, a reader noted that the clickbait is highly inappropriate at the end of Julie DiCaro’s column that posted yesterday on SI.com. The Chicago sports radio reporter wrote about and displayed several of the vile tweets she received after making comments about the Patrick Kane situation. One tweet was a threat that forced her to miss work on Friday.

However, at the end of the column, SI.com still is running the clickbait posts, many of which objectify women. The reader sent me a screen shot of the clickbait (above) that was on DiCaro’s column yesterday.

Here is a sample of the clickbait on DiCaro’s column this morning.

Seems inappropriate, right? In its own way, the clickbait with shots of young women in various stages of undress seems to feed into the culture that led to the disgusting tweets directed at DiCaro.  They foster the notion that women aren’t to be taken seriously in sports media and elsewhere.

I’m not going to go off on a soapbox about clickbait. That’s a subject for another day.

However, editors should keep this in mind: At the very least, when a woman writes an important column in which she details the obstacles she faces in the out-of-control, if not insane, world of social media these days, ditch the clickbait at the end.

Julie DiCaro of WSCR, the big sports talk station in Chicago, writes for SI.com a must-read column about the incredible vitriol that filled her Twitter feed after she made comments about the Patrick Kane situation.

It got this bad:

Nine years later, in the midst of the Patrick Kane rape investigation, I found myself working from home Friday, having received a threat on Twitter that hit a little too close to home.

As an anchor for a prominent Chicago sports radio station, I understand my opinions are much more open to commentary now than they were 10 years ago, but this particular tweet contained personal details, and I simply did not feel entirely safe walking to my office. It didn’t help matters that I, like far too many women, am a rape victim, but I wasn’t taking any chances with my safety.

The piece includes actual tweets with vulgar and degrading language. You only can hope the idiots face repercussions. Perhaps, the idiot’s employer will see the tweet and decide the person no longer needs to work there.

DiCaro writes:

While the idea that a certain faction of men resent women’s infiltration into their last bastion of guy-dom seems like something society should have resolved decades ago (along with racism, homophobia, and, perhaps, basic table manners), Andrew Dzurisin, assistant professor of sociology at Middlesex County College, believes Hill and Luther are thinking along the right lines.

“Of all areas of society, I believe men still think of sports as their domain,”​ Dzurisin said. “If you look at American males (especially those with a [high school] education or less), they are falling behind women in many areas. To me, it is ‘This is my turf, not yours.’ If you look at their tweets, most generally articulate they believe in very traditional gender roles. Women working in sports or interested in sports are their worst nightmare. It’s bad enough she is probably outpacing me career-wise, but how dare she try to infiltrate the one area that I believe is exclusively male.”

While it’s tempting to write off the men who send violent and demeaning tweets with a “don’t feed the trolls” mantra, there is something larger at work here. Simply observe hashtags such as #isupport88 and communities like Florida State Twitter any time Jameis Winston’s name comes up, and you’ll see a steady drumbeat of threats, obscene names, and in some cases, a plainly stated desire for rape and retribution. Add in that many accounts used to harass women are either newly created for that express purpose or run by people who systematically delete the tweets after they hit their mark (thus the need to take screenshots to preserve them), and you get a better understanding of the mentalities involved.

Ron Rapoport offers a different perspective of Ernie Banks in a terrific piece in Chicago Magazine.

He reveals another side of the public happy-go-lucky Mr. Cub as an elderly man who often was lonely and even tormented by his demons.

Rapoport writes:

What was it about him? I wondered. Why was Ernie, virtually alone among the great players of his generation, such an idealized, one-dimensional fantasy? Why did he seem to have no existence beyond the baseball diamond? Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron were seen as important civil rights pioneers. Mickey Mantle’s character flaws were so well chronicled they became part of his appeal. Ted Williams’s defiantly cold-blooded grip on Red Sox fans became the stuff of legend and literature. Joe DiMaggio was a cultural phenomenon all to himself. Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, Roberto Clemente, Yogi Berra, Stan Musial—they were all made recognizable out of uniform.

But Ernie escapes all context. He is nothing but sunshine and smiles. Just as he was defined by his image, so was he imprisoned by it.

The Ernie his family and close friends knew, the man I came to know—first as a Sun-Times sports columnist and later in the scores of talks we had in Chicago and Los Angeles during the last decade of his life—was far different. As the unseemly battle over his estate would indicate, he was not a grinning, happy-talking caricature. He was thoughtful, introspective, and complicated—and difficult and exasperating, too. And toward the end, I came to see that he was one thing more: a fundamentally lonely man who could not countenance being alone.

“I think he was a tortured soul,” one of Ernie’s friends told me. “He just hid it very well.”

Later, Rapoport writes:

After a while, I began to see the calls as part of a pattern. A friend from Chicago, a Cubs fan who works for NPR in Los Angeles, told me that at the party celebrating the opening of their new regional headquarters, she looked across the room and there he was. She hurried over, excited to meet him. Only later did she wonder what he was doing there.

And there was the time I walked into Harry Caray’s around noon and saw him sitting alone at a corner table. We chatted for a while, and then I joined some people I was meeting for lunch. An hour and a half later, he was still there, still alone. I sat with him for another hour before I said goodbye and left him there.

 “Thank you for taking care of Ernie,” the hostess said. Her tone indicated this was a common occurrence. The image of him sitting at that table by himself haunted me for days.

“He would call me five, six, seven, eight, nine times a day,” Regina Rice said when I called her in Chicago recently. “He had a lot of pain, a lot of fear of being alone.”

There’s much more. Highly recommended.

Editor’s note: It is my pleasure to introduce Mark Selig to readers of the Sherman Report. Mark is a journalism graduate student at the University of Missouri. As part of his research, he started a blog, Backstory, that analyzes how writers and editors work a story.

I think Mark does a great job examining the process. I called him and asked if I could share his back stories here. From time to time, Mark’s work will be featured on the Sherman Report. Here’s a piece he wrote on Sports Illustrated’s Greg Bishop.

******

By Mark Selig

After Greg Bishop finishes reporting, and before he starts drafting, the Sports Illustrated football writer does this…

If the notebook looks like the work of a Beautiful Mind, well, it is mathematical in a way. It’s Bishop’s formula for magazine-length features. He calls it “pre-outlining.”

To gather his thoughts to write a story with arc, Bishop goes through a now-trusty process, which includes an entire day spent outlining.

For his most recent magazine piece on Aaron Rodgers, Bishop conducted 30 interviews and accumulated 83 pages of notes and transcriptions. He read through those notes and organized them into themes, which you can see on the notepad

There was a theme on Rodgers’ privacy, one on his training regimen. One on his evolution, and another on the skills that makes him such a good player.

This process helps Bishop connect the dots for a larger picture of an athlete like Rodgers, who’s received plenty of media attention in his career.

“If the page is pretty blank, you’re in trouble,” Bishop said.

Bishop’s, clearly, is plenty full. It doesn’t always work out this way, but the themes on the notepad eventually became sections of his story.

For Bishop, after outlining, the writing process takes half the time it used to for him because he’s so prepared when it comes to actually typing out the story.

After graduating from Syracuse in 2002, Bishop worked at the Seattle Times for five years.

Bishop didn’t outline early in his career. He said he used more flowery language “that covered up some pretty serious deficiencies” in storytelling.

When he took a job at the New York Times, he knew he needed to step up as a writer.

“I can’t believe I actually had like a five-year career where I didn’t outline,” said Bishop, who’s been at Sports Illustrated close to two years. “It sounds almost reckless to me now. I think it’s the most important thing I do; everything else follows it. It becomes more like a mathematical kind of thing, rather than ‘I’m a writer and I’m going to pull my hair out for eight hours.’”

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports media:

Chad Finn of the Boston Globe has the latest on Bill Simmons resuming his podcasts.

It still has not been revealed where his writing will be found or whether he will launch another Grantland-style site. But Simmons has dropped some details on Twitter regarding the podcast, and an industry source with knowledge of his plans revealed further information on what’s to come.

The podcast will be called The Bill Simmons Podcast rather than the B.S. Report. It will return Oct. 1 with two podcasts, then two more will be available Oct. 2. After that, three podcasts per week will be produced in the first six months. It will be found in the usual places initially – iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, and so on – and a specific web page will eventually be created as a landing spot.

The content will be familiar to his regular listeners, with the Guess The Lines podcast with Cousin Sal available on Mondays. There will be an NFL picks-focused podcast on Fridays, with Simmons’s friend Joe House, a familiar guest on the ESPN version of the podcast. Media members and celebrity guests will appear on other podcasts.

Paul Sullivan of the Chicago Tribune has an amusing column on how he still hasn’t received his drink from Joe Maddon.

But as designated spokesman for the Chicago baseball media, I do have a bone to pick with Maddon. He still owes us all a drink, or two if you consider a shot and a beer multiple drinks.

Flash back to that November afternoon at the Cubby Bear, where Maddon sat behind a table with President Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer, drinking Guinness out of a can.

After Maddon left the podium to do some TV interviews, I swiped the can to see how much he actually drank. It turned out to be less than a quarter of a tall boy, or as Chicagoans say, “a sip.”

According to my calculations, Maddon’s offer to buy us a round was not the result of being too tipsy, as frequently happens in bars, and it was not a staged piece of Cubbyness for the cameras. It was a legit offer.

But we, the media, were too busy interviewing Maddon, Epstein, Hoyer and agent Alan Nero to partake. Maddon’s kind gesture went nationwide, but the reality is he didn’t buy us any drinks.

How can ESPN streamline costs without losing viewers? Andrew Bucholtz of Awful Announcing.

Scott Van Pelt delivered a lengthy monologue on the lunacy daily fantasy game not being considered gambling. Ben Koo of Awful Announcing.

A New York sports anchors recalls his weekly visits to Yogi Berra. Bob Raissman of the New York Daily News.

The Sports Media Guy writes about Mike Lupica.

Meet the ESPN The Magazine editor who works closely with Wright Thompson. An interview with Mark Selig of Back Story.

The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell is featured in “Still No Cheering in the Press Box” by the Povich Center for Sports Journalism.

An excerpt from my story for Awful Announcing:

*******

I have been to virtually every place on a golf course, including some unfortunate areas only accessible to an erratic 15-handicapper. However, I never had made the trek up to a broadcast TV tower during a tournament.

So I gladly accepted the invitation to spend some time with NBC’s Gary Koch at his 16th hole perch during Friday’s telecast of the BMW Championship on the Golf Channel.

I walked up the two flights of stairs and past the cameraman located on the right side of the tower. When we pulled aside the curtain, Koch said, “Welcome to our office.”

Koch’s office is about the size of a really small elevator that holds only two people. So when Golf Channel PR man Jeff Skzlinski and I squeezed in, the feeling was a bit claustrophobic.

Koch and his scoring assistant, Harrison Root, sit in front of three TV monitors, with one of the monitors split into 9 small screens. That monitor allows Koch and Root to follow the action on their hole assignments.

“Today, I’m responsible for 3, 8, 12 and 16,” Koch said. “I keep producer (Tommy Roy) appraised of what’s happening on those holes.”

A few seconds later, Koch tells Roy, “(Billy) Horschel for birdie on 8.”

Horschel’s successful birdie putt doesn’t air live. About a minute later, Roy goes, “Horschel on 8.”

That’s Koch cue, and he sets up the putt as if it was occurring live and then describes it falling into the hole. Obviously, with so much occurring on the course, especially during the second round of a tournament, many of the shots are on tape. In fact, there was one instance where they showed a great shot by JB Holmes nearly three minutes after it occurred because of a commercial break.

“Oh what a shot,” Koch said on-air, as if witnessing the shot for the first time.