About a year ago I had the opportunity to interview author Will Leitch, writer for New York Magazine, creator of the uber-popular sports blog Deadspin.com, and author of God Save the Fan.
Will, who has a new book coming out in May called Are We Winning, opened up about faith, Michael W. Smith, and being a humor writer for a sometimes crude sports blog.
I hope to interview him when his new book releases (and not just because 1 of the 17 brief anecdotes that lead each chapter is written by me), but in the meantime I thought some of you would enjoy this interview from last year.
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BA: Will, you mentioned once in a Deadspin column that you had spent the first 17 years of your life as a “rather devoted churchgoer”. Did your family attend the same church throughout your youth? what type of church(es) did you grow up in?
WL: When I was very young, the Leitches went to the First Baptist Church of Mattoon, out of obligation and without much passion. I used to sit in the back of the church with my grandfather, where he taught me the “Who’s On First?” routine and he showed off his supercool electric pen. I was about 10 when he died, and we stopped going. I was baptized there, but, again, without much passion. I did, however, read “The Book For Children” — remember “The Book?” — which was smart enough to tell the whole Bible as series of adventure stories. This has helped me ace religion questions on Jeopardy! to this day.
It wasn’t until I was 13 that I started going regularly, on my own, without my family. The neighbors down the road went to Broadway Christian Church, a pseudo mega-church before our suburban landscape was riddled with them. Lori Nottemeyer, our neighbor and friend, would pick me up and drive me to church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night, and I became rather devoted to it.
It served, initially, as a social bridge; I only hung out with the boring smart kids at school at was eager to meet new people. But I caught onto it because it was really fun: We had an outstanding youth minister named Ken Rutledge with whom you could talk sports (sadly, he was a Cub fan; in this matter, I was never going to be converted), music and, sometimes vigorously, politics. Even then, at 13, I didn’t understand some of the church’s rules — I couldn’t quite figure out why the sermon sometimes condemned my gay uncle in Philadelphia, who was a really great guy — but I was very serious about my studies. After a few summer sessions at Lincoln Christian College, I decided I wanted to be a youth minister. I saw a guy there, a young guy, who spoke to us with humor. It didn’t seem uncool to be Christian. I thought that was something I could do. I liked getting in front of people, and I felt like I would have something extremely important to say.
Unfortunately for them our relationships never consisted of anything more than an occasional “hi” and some feeble attempts at a flirty smile. There was no kissing, no hand holding, and to be honest, no real conversations either. Just the unspoken knowledge that we liked each other floating around in the air like a stale fart.
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