Why Sports Illustrated's 'Drew Ortiz' is less about bad writing and more about a bad omen

After the beat writers had hustled back to the press box to meet their unforgiving deadlines, I lingered in the Phillies' clubhouse at Citizens Bank Park on a warm June evening in 2011, waiting for the one-on-one interview I wanted.

It's a go-to technique for a feature writer like me. After a player feeds a string of bland platitudes to the deadline writers huddled around them, you slide in hoping to draw them into a conversation that will yield revealing quotes and insights that illuminate the game and the people who play it, even if they don't fit into a daily schedule that demands 600 words by 11 p.m. So I hung around, hoping my patience would earn me a few quality minutes with Carlos Ruiz.

Soon only two writers remained: me and a white guy in his mid-50s, with sandy brown hair, a matching beard, and the most impressive résumé in the business. Gary Smith, that titan of a writer, from Sports Illustrated, that monument of a publication. I had been reading him since grade school, and had studied his work in university. Now I stood alongside him, next to Ruiz' locker. 

I felt a ripple of trepidation.

If sportswriting were an actual sport, SI would be the NBA — everyone else was the G-League. Among sports writers, Gary Smith is a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Skip the five-year waiting period. This 1990 feature on Buster Douglas and his dad is, by itself, good enough to send him straight to Cooperstown for scribes.

Imagine working on your jumpshot in an empty gym, when Michael Jordan appears and starts hoisting his trademark fadeaway toward that same hoop. You'd feel as nervous and starstruck as I did sharing time and space with Gary Smith.

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So how would I