INTERVIEW: sports illustrated's pablo torre

for every 1,000 kids that want to be superstar athletes when they grow up, there's one child who says, "mommy! daddy! i want to be a sportswriter!"

okay, okay, maybe that's an exaggeration - even if rick reilly and bill simmons might want it to be true. but for those of us who fail to translate high school minutes into college and professional-level goals and buckets, there's always sportswriting to fall back on.

well, pablo s. torre is like the michael phelps of harvard sportswriters. just a year out of college, he has covered everything from the coney island hot dog eating contest to the NBA playoffs. and as the summer ramped up, and with the olympics right around the bend, pablo made the jump to TV as well, appearing on everything from CNN Money to EXTRA.

even though he will always be modest, this 22-year-old sets the bar for (former) sportswriters like us here at poop on boozer. read on to find out what the half-journalist, half-entertainer had to say.

POB: Just so we can get this up front, what are your feelings on Carlos Boozer?

I mean, he actually robbed a benevolent blind man. Let's just say that I no longer feel bad about Jason Richardson bouncing the ball off his dome and then draining a three in his face, one of the great in-game punkings of all time. Also one of the great follow-up quotes, from Richardson: "It's not a no-class act. It was streetball, and he should know that. But maybe he doesn't since he's from Alaska." It's funny because it might be true.

POB: You're just one year out of college, but you are writing for Sports Illustrated and are talking sports with some of the biggest names in television. Is this what ESPN was trying to sell when it aired Dream Job?

Cross-branding aside...yes? Believe me, I fully appreciate that I'm doing any of this as my first job right out of college. Then again, this question just prompted me to look up Mike Hall in Wikipedia, which doesn't bode well for my side of this allusion.

But make no mistake: I'm still the youngest staff member at SI and surely the lowest, uh, totem (Native American spirit animal?) on the totem pole. And I love an occupation that pays me to do the things I genuinely enjoy (e.g. write) while forcing me to travel the country, watch television at work/be on television and play mini-ping pong in my office. For what it's worth, my friends also enjoy having reason to call me pretending to be William "The Refrigerator" Perry.

POB: What has been the most fulfilling and/or entertaining story you have covered in the past 12 months?

Hmm. So many great and absurd experiences, from spring training to the NCAA Tournament, but I'd say four things really quickly, if I may.

First: the essay I wrote for the magazine about Division I-AA/FCS football off of the I-AA title game last December in Chattanooga, Tenn., two months after starting at SI. Not even so much the writing, but the reporting, which somehow involved me meeting a girl from Appalachian State on the plane from Atlanta who then invited me to their tailgate, which then led to me drinking moonshine from a generic glass jar in a parking lot.

Second: the week I spent in Las Vegas leading up to the Manny Pacquiao-David Diaz title fight in June. Besides the fact that this was apparently "work," boxers afford you a level of access otherwise unseen in pro sports. When I say that I was in the bathroom with Pacquiao when he took his drug test, that's actually not an exaggeration. (Plus, the Boston Celtics were hanging out in his locker room.)

Third: an SI.com "bonus" I wrote about a high school wrestler and his father. So very much the opposite of any story about fantastically successful and wealthy athletes. It took forever to get it out, and it's certainly not one of those national stories that'll drive web traffic, but it is one of those things where you feel an authentic connection with the subject.

Fourth: working on Gary Smith's forthcoming anthology for SI Books. I was commissioned to write the epilogues for half of the stories in it, which meant tracking down a lot of obscure people that were only known to any of us through those SI articles. Just trading e-mails with Gary and retracing his footsteps was an unbelievable seminar in reporting. Talking to Richie Parker on the phone and dialing number after number to find people who might know Jonathan Takes Enemy, for example, was basically like stepping into a movie. As good as Gary is as a writer--and he's the best, I would say--the due diligence he does is almost unfathomable.

POB: Talk to us about your first time on television. What was that like?

I didn't think about TV at all when I started at SI. It just didn't know it was on the radar of possibility. In July, though, I was asked to be on the Fox Business Network for about a five-minute segment for a "Money in Sports" package we ran that I contributed to. It was live TV--so there's always that fear of totally humiliating yourself in front of, I guess, America/the world--and I had never done TV before (even my little brother was on a public service channel commercial once). So I wound up "studying" in earnest for the first time since graduating from college and calling upon, as humiliating as this is in and of itself, four years of high school debate, which did sort of help.

Since then, our PR department and these news programs have apparently liked me enough to keep sending me out there on an at-times unsettlingly regular basis, especially for the Olympics. It helps that our offices are across the street, literally, from NBC and Fox's studios, and only blocks away from CNN. I like all of it, and the TV and radio producers I've worked with so far haven't yet been totally repelled by my tendency to make awful puns. (Thanks, NPR!)

POB: Who is the coolest celebrity you have met thus far?

For whatever reason, I don't think I really get starstruck. Though I did send in a Gawker Stalker tip about Josh Hartnett once after we watched "There Will Be Blood" in the same movie theater. But I digress.

Does Brian Scalabrine count as a celebrity? I interviewed him after a game during this year's Eastern Conference Finals as he ate pasta from the post-game spread and he was as gracious an athlete as they come. In my adventures on TV--and purely on the This-Is-a-Good-Story scale--I'd say it's a tie between Bill O'Reilly and Russell Simmons, who wound up in the green room with me at one point. Also, Anderson Cooper basically ignored me in an elevator at the CNN building, but I probably would have ignored myself.

Wait, scratch all of that. I randomly met Dikembe Mutombo walking through the cafeteria of our building when I was an intern. "Star-struck" (star-roundhouse-kicked?) does not do that experience justice.

POB: What tips do you have for young journalists trying to follow in your footsteps?

First, it's completely disingenuous for me to give advice to anyone. I am 22 years old and started working at SI 11 months ago, to the point where answering "I'm a journalist" while meeting people at bars only stopped being kind of hilarious a few weeks ago. Last month I was in the kitchen of our office, toasting a bagel, and a person on our copy desk graciously asked if I was still an intern. And for this TV stuff, it's the stuff that's written that really garners attention at our office.

But if I can say one thing, it's that I got into this by way of writing and luck. I'd sent clips from The Crimson to SI when I applied to be an intern in the summer of '06, and after it was done they invited me back, with a sobering warning that is sure to unsettle parents of dutiful Harvard sportswriters everywhere: "I don't care what your grades are, or where you went to school, just whether you can write." (To paraphrase Conan O'Brien's incredible Class Day address: While interviewing Carlos Zambrano, let's just say that my senior thesis on statistical and theoretical approaches to child homicide doesn't come up much.)

I just consume the genre I work in and--by the natural order of things--the folks I work for, which I've read for sheer literary value for years and years. It's just that the job now can also be increasingly multimedia-based, with right-place/right-time opportunities in stuff like TV and radio. Needless to say, upon arrival here I did not foresee fill-in host Laura Ingraham insinuating that I was un-American on The O'Reilly Factor.

POB: Finally, if you had to poop on someone or some team today, who would that be?

As we're still in Olympics mode, I was going to say the Chinese women's gymnastics team. But that's just a terrible idea in every conceivable way.