A Lion Bridge Publishing Interview with Terry Horstman, Author of This Is Where the Fantasy Begins.

How much was nostalgia used as an influence for this book?

I’m a big believer in nostalgia. It’s not always the first feeling I search for when beginning a new project, but it’s very often a north star for me in a lot of my work. In the case of Michael Jordan’s Playground, it’s a film I watched over and over again as a kid and here I am years later still obsessing about it. I think nostalgia can serve as a very helpful tour guide for writers, especially when writing personal essays. I ask myself, “Why am I still thinking about this movie? What makes it so important to me?”

You mention your childhood several times in the book, including watching Michael Jordan’s Playground on repeat and even having a Space Jam-themed birthday party. Given that you still admire Jordan today, what was the most challenging part of writing about one of your childhood idols and how that admiration has evolved over the years?

Michael Jordan has always been an incredibly compelling figure to me. I grew up in the 90s, and my earliest basketball memories are of watching Jordan and the Bulls towards the end of their first three-peat. By the time I could really take in the game of basketball and form my own opinions about it, every piece of basketball content I consumed told me he was the greatest of all time, and it wasn’t even close. Because he was the best and the Bulls always won, there were moments of my childhood where I loved him and other moments where I hated him.

A quick little story didn’t make the book, but probably should have. I got a white Jordan jersey from my parents as a gift at my Space Jam-themed ninth birthday party. When the Bulls beat my beloved Timberwolves later that season, I threw the jersey in the garbage and went to bed. Of course, I desperately fished it out of the garbage the next morning. That sums up my relationship with Jordan. It’s maddening and inspiring at the same time.

In a way that makes it very easy for me to write about him. My curiosity towards Jordan and his legend will never run out. He is modern mythology. Jordan holds the same type of space for me that I imagine Achilles does for a Homeric scholar. When I write about inconsistencies in stories about Jordan, or about his casual relationship with the truth, I’m not just out here trying to call him a liar. I’m merely trying to dissect the story in as many ways as I can, pulling at threads, and following them down whatever rabbit hole they lead me to. I really don’t care that Jordan himself omits the part about him getting to play JV basketball when he “got cut” his sophomore year of high school. Or when the Chicago Bulls team doctor says in a 2002 ESPN documentary that “no poisoned pizza could have caused anything like that” but is then excluded from the ESPN-produced The Last Dance 18 years later so Jordan and all of his closest confidants say he was poisoned unchecked. Jordan is free to spin his story in whatever ways he wishes to, but it’s our job, as curious and responsible consumers of the story, to ask questions.

That’s why the author’s note early in the book is important to me. As a writer I think it’s important to be careful and considerate with things like author’s notes because they can take the reader out of the story, but I felt the need to make it known that I do still love Michael Jordan. I love him as a player, and I love the legends and the myths about the player. I may always have a thousand questions for him that will remain unanswered, but having questions is a love language for me. If you can approach writing about a childhood idol through the lens of unfiltered questions, it’s no challenge at all.

Why was this important for you to write about? This is a very personal and nostalgic subject for you so why did you find it important or why did you want to write about this? Also, if you do find it important, why specifically did you find it important to write about this right now?

I’m always interested in work that can bridge generational gaps. A common theme among sports fans is everyone thinks the game they love was at its best at the exact moment they were coming of age, and they can’t wait to yell at you about why they’re right and you’re wrong. This sentiment is out of control today with the constant access we have to the games we love and the instant reaction tendency of social media. Debating about who is better between Jordan or LeBron James and who would win a hypothetical game if they both somehow got to play each other at the height of their powers is so reductive. The same is true when comparing the style of play between different eras of the game. Social media encourages the user to throw themselves into these debates and yell for the sake of yelling. At the end of the day, no one learns anything new and everybody hates each other. It’s a shame, especially considering sports are forms of art, and art is inherently subjective.

My aim is to never convince a reader from a different generation that I’m right. It’s to shine a light on the way a certain player made me feel at a certain time and how those feelings inform how I move through the world. I give my parents a lot of credit for this. My mom told me so many stories about her going to Milwaukee Braves games growing up and how special it was to revel in the greatness of Hank Aaron, but never in a way that diminished my admiration for Ken Griffey Jr. My dad, whose love of basketball informed my love of basketball, often waxed poetic about the 1970s Milwaukee Bucks with Oscar Robertson, “The Big O,” as the team’s dynamic conductor, but never in a way that diminished my admiration for Allen Iverson. Those stories emphasized a type of thoughtful curiosity that I think is absent from most mainstream and modern sports discussion.

This extends well beyond stories about sports as well. I’m a sucker for listening to passionate people telling me about their passions. In all likelihood, I’m not going to share that person’s same passion by the end of the conversation, but I will know a hell of a lot more about that person and the ways in which they see the world. That’s a perfect conversation to me, and I wish we, as a society, would make the time and the space for more conversations like that.

Who do you want to read this? Is there any specific person or audience you would like to read this book? Who did you write this book for? Perhaps a younger self or for someone you know or want to know? Who and where is this book meant to be read?

I do think any personal essay I write is directed towards a younger self to an extent. My younger self who fell in love with basketball in second grade, watched the video Michael Jordan’s Playground every day before school in third grade, and had no idea how much heartbreak basketball had in store for me and just how many similarities I would have with Walt, the film’s protagonist who we meet right after he gets cut from his high school basketball team. A few years after that I reached the age when basketball sign-ups turned into basketball tryouts. I still remember the first time I ever got cut from a basketball team like it was yesterday. I wasn’t in high school yet, but that didn’t stop the coach who cut me from letting me know that “Michael Jordan got cut too.”

Much like Walt, I went to my driveway or the gym or the playground and shot around by myself until the sun went down while my friends all went to practice. Unlike Walt, Michael Jordan never showed up to counsel me towards making the team the next year and achieving my own hoop dreams.

That was the first, but far from the last time I got cut. I thankfully didn’t get cut from every team I ever tried out for, and I’m in currently in the middle of a project telling that story, but the mythology of Jordan’s high school basketball career and it’s portrayal in Michael Jordan’s Playground is something that undoubtedly helped me navigate that period of my life. I honestly can’t recall what age I was when I learned there was more to the story than Jordan was letting on, but I also don’t think that detail really matters. We often come to better understand stories by receiving bits of information over time, and while I don’t think it’s fair for every basketball coach to tell kids they’re cutting from a JV team to not worry because Michael Jordan got cut too, I do think there’s inspiration to be had in every version of the story that exists.

I see this book as a love letter to basketball, to the 90s, to the movies, and to curiosity. In creative nonfiction workshops, we spend a lot of time talking about the “essayistic question,” and I’ve always found that term rather ironic because I think every question a human being can ask is worthy of an essay. The father of the essay, Michel De Montaigne, said that the essay was a journey of reflection, that the reader should sense the author working through something. Any reader who is willing to spend time with me working through why I felt the need to watch this Michael Jordan video almost every day for a whole year is who this book is for. Especially my sister, Molly, who had to put up with me shoving Michael Jordan’s Playground into our VCR every chance I could. I think she’ll be glad something positive came out of my obsession that I forced her to interact with on a near daily basis.

What does your research process look like when preparing for a book like this? You’ve written several times about basketball, specific teams, and specific players, so does your bias for players like Michael Jordan help in specifying research or does it make it more difficult to decide what information to include versus what information to exclude?

I absolutely love research. When Jason McCall first approached me about this project and I talked about the idea I had, I wrapped up my pitch with “and I love the idea of assigning myself rewatching The Last Dance for the nth time as homework.”

Knowing when you have enough or when to keep digging is not something I’m very good at. I wrote an article for a local Minneapolis magazine a number of years ago about Lakers Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor and the first two years of his career before the Lakers relocated from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. I spent an entire weekend at the Minnesota Historical Society (huuuuuuge shoutout to the Minnesota Historical Society, by the way. What a gift that place is.) reading every article I could get my hands on from those two shining years where Baylor revolutionized the way the game was played and did so in my hometown, albeit nearly 30 years before I was born.

I ended up with more than 12,000 words worth of notes. The word count limit for the article was 1,500. It really is a heartbreaking process. I learned so much about Elgin Baylor and I wanted to share it all with the world! So many little factoids and tidbits went unpublished, but the beautiful truth I learned in writing that piece is even if some of the information isn’t included directly, the presence of the information still informs and strengthens the final product.

I try to never limit the research element of the process. The great thing about writing about someone like Jordan, and just writing about sports in general, is there’s so much great work to spend time with. There are endless books and documentaries at your fingertips, but there’s no cheat code for knowing what film, documentary, movie, article, poem, song, or whatever will be the most helpful. The trick is to study as widely as you can with as open of a mind as you can. Write down everything that strikes you. You’ll almost certainly end up with too much to chew on, so when that comes down to it, I borrow a videogame term and I ask myself, “story or side quest?” If I can make a compelling argument to myself that a piece of research belongs in the main part of the story, I do my best to include it. If it’s a side quest, then I put it off to the side for another project on another day. You discover very quickly that you’ll never run out of things to write about, which is something that I think is worth celebrating.