DOHA, Qatar — I like giving thanks.
I’ve tried to make it a habit wherever I’ve gone, one that was instilled in me by my parents at a young age. After every birthday party when we were kids, my parents made us – and I do say made, because we were not willing subjects at the time – write handwritten thank you notes to everyone who came or dropped off a gift or both. To be candid, I didn’t enjoy it then. Didn’t see the point. One day, and I forget which year this was, while writing thank you notes at my kitchen table, I had a grand epiphany: What if I typed a general thank you note and sent it to everyone! Everyone would get a note, and I’d save loads of time by writing only one.
They weren’t having it.
I didn’t get it then.
I get it now.
And as I sit, jetlagged and in that strange space where you are both tired beyond imagination because it’s 2 in the morning in Qatar but also wired due to it being dinner time in Tallahassee, and take inventory of one of the most exhausting, rewarding, exhilarating, fun, and red-eyed years of my life, I feel not an obligation so much as an overwhelming desire to give long overdue thanks to the individuals to whom I owe this life I love.
The first is Lee Feinswog.
If you’re a regular listener of SANDCAST, or a regular reader of my writing, then you are likely familiar with Lee. He is the man who, alongside the late Ed Chan, bought VolleyballMag.com. He is the man who was forwarded a preview I wrote on the 2017 AVP Huntington Beach Open and said he’d like my writing on his site, thank you very much. He was honest and forthright about the “job”: He couldn’t pay much, hardly anything at all, but he seemed to understand me then in a way only writers do.
Writers write.
It’s that simple.
He knew I’d write for him for free – I was already writing those stories for free anyway – so the $50 per story he offered me then may as well have been a million.
While 2024 may be my last year writing regularly for VolleyballMag, for reasons I’ll get to in a bit, the seven-year stretch I worked with and for Lee is the longest I’ve ever worked at a single company.
Even to call it work sounds ludicrous. It was fun, all of it. Lee isn’t like most editors. He isn’t like any editor at all. As I mentioned: He understood me, on a level only one writer can really understand another. I have a unique, dare I say identifiable, writing voice. It’s one that has been developed in 18 years of experimenting and tinkering and trying new things and risk taking at various outlets, from weeklies in Baltimore County to dailies in Florida to magazines, all the way up to Yahoo! Sports and the Washington Post. Some of my previous editors at my early stops — and God bless them for this, for they saved readers from a lot of bad writing — would edit out much of this experimenting. They understood what I was trying, that I was attempting a Gary Smith impression, or a Wright Thompson copycat, or a Mitch Albom this or S.L. Price that, and they understood that it was bad. But over all of that experimenting, taking bits and pieces from different writers and doing poor impressions of them all, my own voice began to develop.
Part of that voice still relies on tinkering with new structures, new techniques, new formatting, new leads, new timetables – new risks.
Lee let me try all of them.
Where some editors would give me a yellow light, cautioning me on waxing a bit too poetic here, a bit grandiose there, Lee just let it fly. He’d make fun of me for it, and rib me in a way only a proper family member could, but he’d still hit publish, knowing it was better for both of our sakes than to argue about it.
I’m a stubborn cuss in a lot of areas in my life. None more so than when it comes my writing.
In my head, I know why I put every comma, every em dash, every period exactly where it is. I know why I chose every word. Most editors at most publications, Lee included, are the editors because they are the best writers in the room. They will see a comma, or a word choice, or an em dash, or a whole paragraph and structure or the lead in some occasions, and think it should be something else. In my experience, they are mostly right in this thinking. It is their job to make those changes when they see them. Many of my previous editors — I cannot, however, say this for my good friends Seth Stringer and Brandon Walker at the Northwest Florida Daily News, who gave me a long and free leash — oftentimes would make these changes without my consent. I’d just see it the next day and fume.
Lee rarely did that.
See, he knew me. Knew I’d fume. Knew I’d push back. And he had the stones to call and, like the young grandfather he has become to me, tell me why he changed it, and to please not argue because he almost never changed anything I wrote, but this is why he did it and it’s better this way, he promised.
I’d want to say something and he knew it. But my respect and genuine love for Lee is why I wouldn’t (most of the time), and after giving the story some time to breathe, I’d read it again and know that Lee had made it better.
These were the pictures Lee would send me
Writing is as natural and necessary to me as breathing. I say that and you might roll your eyes, thinking it hyperbole, and it might even be one of those sentences that Lee would have edited out because it does sound so damn dramatic. But this is SANDCAST, not VolleyballMag, and for better or worse, I have no editor on this site. If anything speaks to the veracity of that statement above, it is the time when this story is being written: 2:26 a.m. currently.
This is what happens to my mind when it’s allowed to wander in the wee hours of the morning. It writes things, and I simply transcribe them.
Lee gets that.
For the foreseeable future, however, my writing will be limited. When I took the assistant coaching job at Florida State, it marked my first step away from writing and freelancing since I was 16 years old, writing for my first newspaper in Baltimore County. I couldn’t commit to covering beach and indoor volleyball for VolleyballMag.com on any consistent basis, and advised Lee and the new owners over there to find someone else who could. Larry Hamel has proven excellent, better in many ways, in substitution.
It was a bummer when we had that conversation. We were on track to smash the yearly page view record, which we had more than quadrupled since I began writing there. Every year became an exercise of not if we’d set a new high-water mark, but by how much. And it was a bummer especially because the work we did there was so pure. It was writing for writing’s sake.
In more than a decade, Lee, to my knowledge, didn’t take a single dime from VolleyballMag.com. Not one, aside from when he sold it to p1440, and then again to the new folks involved. And even when he did sell, he gave me a cut, even when he didn’t have to, even when I didn’t have a single percentage of stake in the company. Yet without taking any money, he covered indoor volleyball on a daily basis with a passion deeper and motivation purer than that of someone with a six-figure salary.
He is old school in so many ways, but none more than that, a man whose work was enough for him.
A true scribe.
One long overdue for a personal thank-you note.
