The Republic of Football Book Blog Tour: Interview with Author Chad S. Conine #LoneStarLit

Author Interview #2: Chad S. Conine

How does your book relate to your spiritual practice?

So many of the interviewees, when they reflected on the stories that they told me, kind of used it as a way to express what was really important to them throughout life. Drew Brees talked about having teammates with integrity and a high moral standard. He said that was important in high school and it’s still important to him as an NFL quarterback.

However, I’m not so naïve as to think that high school football programs create this perfect incubator for producing men with high moral standards. The values that I hold as a Christian, especially the ability to love your neighbor as yourself, are sometimes in line with what I see from the players and coaches I cover, and sometimes they’re not.

One thing I can stand by, though, is that in many of the chapters in The Republic of Football, I got to write about people from different races or who had other differences, working together and bonding over a common goal. When the events in the news get bleak, like they did this summer, I’m thankful that I can look at the stories I’ve been able to tell and believe that things are better than they appear. I get to witness and write about Black and White and Asian and Hispanic and Native American people working together for a common purpose, respecting each other, loving each other, sharing their lives. I’ve used those examples in conversation both with other people and myself over the past few months.

Are you a full-time or part-time writer?  How does that affect your writing?

I’m a full-time writer. I work for a bunch of different outlets. I freelance for the Waco Tribune-Herald, primarily at high school games on Friday nights, but I have a great relationship with those guys, so I’ll write the occasional feature or whatever they need from time to time. I work for a national sports wire service called The Sports Xchange and cover college football and basketball for them. That gig ends up being a lot of different things. Previews in the middle of the week and then full coverage of football games on the weekend or maybe just recaps depending on what’s going on in my coverage area. A lifelong friend and I have a restaurant website in Waco called WacoFork and I’ve been writing restaurant blogs for it for more than five years. I’ve done essays and a little fiction, mostly for fun.

I think doing so many different types of writing, and staying at it all the time, is kind of like going to the gym. There’s an element of muscle confusion when I’m writing different formats, especially ones that I don’t like that much. But through the writing of The Republic of Football, I really found a groove and learned some things along the way that make me look forward to jumping into a similar project in the future.

What do you like to read in your free time?

I like to alternate between nonfiction and fiction, sports and pop culture, classics and newer easy-read type stuff. I really like Chuck Klosterman, Malcolm Gladwell, and Nick Hornby, so whenever any of them come out with something new, I’m on it quick and usually read it within a couple weeks of its release date. I think the fun part of reading is to constantly be looking for that next book or next author that’s going to join your own personal canon.

What projects are you working on at the present?

I’m planning to have 366 Days of Texas Sports out in 2017. It’s a project that University of Texas Press and I came up with together. I had the fun of researching something to write about for every day of the year, featuring Texas sports personalities, teams, venues, whatever I could connect to Texas. It ended up being everything from trapshooting and prize fighting on the Rio Grande to, of course, women’s basketball (our state’s legacy of women’s basketball can’t be overstated) and football.

Do you have any strange writing habits you’d like to share with your readers?

I don’t know if this qualifies as a strange habit, but I only have about 90 minutes to two hours of writing energy per day. Fortunately, I’m an obsessive planner and I work really fast (probably from having a foundation in deadline writing at Friday night football games). Of course, that only applies to actually sitting at the computer and typing. I can drive around and do interviews and research for much longer stretches of time.

Just as your books inspire authors, what authors have inspired you to write?

The authors I mentioned earlier apply here (Klosterman, Gladwell, Hornby). The last thing I wanted to mention, though, was that I read Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger when I was in middle school and it made me want to write a book like that. At the time, loving college basketball as I did and do, I thought I would move to North Carolina and write the definitive book about ACC hoops. But growing up has taught me a lot about access and writing what you know. The Republic of Football is very different from Friday Night Lights, as I see it. One thing I did, though, as a tribute and an effort to stay off well-covered material, was to write the Odessa chapter about Hayden Fry’s Odessa Bronchos rather than about the Permian Panthers.